The weeks flew by with Zoe splitting her time between helping Emma acquire the Time skill, and spending time in her workshop fiddling with new combinations. She’d found quite a few that were fun and interesting, but none that screamed across the depths of space, calling to her like a beacon.
She didn’t expect to find anything that would, none of her skills interacted with her like that, none made points that she could feel and chase after. Gathering was close, and if she managed to squeeze enough mana into it she could even make it pulsate as it got closer to the planet’s atmosphere. But even just a few kilometers away, the enchantment seemed to have no effect. Let alone from another planet, or so far away t hat Zoe couldn’t even see Abyllan anymore.
Cosmic Familiar was an annoying skill, Zoe found. She could sense where the familiar was, when it was alive. But it didn’t last nearly as long as Nature’s Assistance did, and as an enchantment the portion that told her where it was didn’t seem to be included at all. And Nature’s Assistance had no sense of direction to it whatsoever.
For a while, Zoe wondered if perhaps that was because Cosmic Familiar had a space aspect, and if she found some way to attune to nature as well as she was the cosmos she could feel it through the trees. But if it was possible, it would require yet another class with a Nature’s Vision effect and Zoe had no way of knowing how close she was to her next class. Maybe it was just around the corner, maybe it was decades away at the rate she was levelling now.
She could sacrifice one of her other classes for it instead, and hope that it worked. But then she’d be exploring the vastness of space without her enchantments, which were only second in important to her Cosmic Mystic abilities when it came to exploring the unknown. Travelling through space without her most powerful tools at her side? Idiotic would be far too kind a description.
So she turned her attention to toys, instead. Balls of fabric Zoe bought from a store in Foizo and enchanted with a variety of skills. At first, she tried making toys for Sally. Things she might enjoy, mana fluctuations and gusts of wind that pressed at her. But the girl had too little mana of her own to power the enchantments, and was much more interested in playing with Idu than with any toys.
Which meant Zoe got to make toys for Idu instead, and Sally loved them. Her most successful was one enchanted with Enchanting, Meditation, Space, Gales and Restoration, enhanced with her Everlasting Enchantments skill, which she replaced her Enchantment Bestowal with while she was still in Foizo.
Though, getting a powerful enchanting class with more skill slots had skyrocketed on her priority list after she’d seen how potent Everlasting Enchantments was in practice. She had thought it to be little more than a replacement for Meditation and Enchanting as enchantments, working to hold the enchantment together while the mana was ripped out of it.
But it was so much more, she found. The mana she filled her enchantments with through Everlasting Enchantments wound through the object and reinforced the structure, keeping it from falling apart even as it was starved for mana. The days of her objects needing to be re-enchanted if they ever ran out of mana entirely were gone, as long as she had the skill.
And with the combination of Restoration fitting into them as well? As long as whatever she enchanted was still somewhat in tact, a little push of mana would bring it right back to how it was when she enchanted it. Cracks and tears repaired in moments, damaged toilets a thing of the past.
Though, Zoe found herself often wondering why toilets were even a thing in this world. Gross as it may be, most of her waste was considered dirt and grime to the system and cleared away in a moment with a brief pulse of mana to her cleaning skill.
If it weren’t for how disgusting the idea was to her, Zoe wouldn’t even bother finding a dark corner to do the deed in. But was that a carryover from the prudes of her world, or was it just human nature to find human waste offputting?
And why did the system not find it to be dirt and grime while it was still inside her? If the system could just clean her out before she had to excuse herself, life would be so much easier.
Zoe teleported down to the kitchen and Emma showed up a few minutes later, sitting down in her chair as though she were already standing next to it, her body ripping through the fabric of space as she did.
“I’m still so envious of that.” Zoe laughed.
Emma grinned and reached to her side, grabbing a glass of water that was on the counter across the room. “Envious of what?”
“You know what. Your stupid space existence garbage.” Zoe said.
Emma laughed. “Yeah whatever, miss able to teleport across the entire city in an instant, several times a second, while carrying people with her.”
“You have the Teleportation skill too, though. You could probably teleport farther if you tried it out.” Zoe said.
“I know, but it’s not really worth taking, and I tried. I can’t bring people with me.” Emma said. “But whatever. More time time!”
Zoe laughed and pushed mana into her Time skill to warp the time around Emma. She looked around and waved her hands, one of them moving a little quicker than the other as it passed through a slower zone Zoe created.
They had been practicing for a while at it, and Emma was insistent that she wouldn’t need to take a time class before she got the skill. Space Archmage was good enough, she could figure it out with her Spell Creation skill, in time.
Zoe found it amusing, but struggled to truly understand what resetting a class was like to somebody without Patient Decider. With the feat, it was no big deal. Take a new class, get your level back up to where it was and you’re good to go.
But for others, if they wanted to keep their skill levels high then it wasn’t enough to take another class and just go run through an easy dungeon for a while until their class level caught up. They also needed to dedicate months, if not years to just getting all of their skills back up.
Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.
The problem had become a lot more visible for Zoe as she got up in level. Flester’s Might was a simple dungeon to run through, with high level monsters that gave her an abundance of experience. But so little of that went to the skills she wasn’t using. Even at almost level three hundred, so few of her skills had made it to level two hundred.
And that’s with Patient Decider giving her experience bonuses, and removing the penalty she faced every time she swapped her classes. Emma’s skills were in a much worse state, her highest only just reaching one fifty as her class level got into the two hundreds.
It was hard to empathize sometimes, with a perspective she’d never seen. But if every time she reset she lost all of the years of work she dedicated to levelling her elemental skills, her enchanting, and meditation? Would she have been so eager to do so? Probably not.
Spending time trying to master a skill she already had would have seemed like a much more practical option. In theory, the skill should be capable of helping her get a variety of general skills, just as Mana Manipulation was. And in practice, understanding the skill better would help her in a great number of ways even if she didn’t succeed in getting the Time skill.
The hours passed as Emma watched Zoe’s time twist around her and tried to push mana into her skill to mimic the effects. She was getting quite close, in Zoe’s opinion. The first time Emma had caused any time fluctuations was months earlier, but lately it seemed like every day or two Emma would manage to twist Zoe’s time magic around with a brief pulse of mana.
Soon, she’d have it, Zoe thought. Once she could interrupt Zoe’s time magic on demand, she could start refining it to do what she needed and with Zoe’s help, manage to replicate the effect even without being able to see the mana twist through time.
“Aaaaaaaah!" Emma shouted as she leaned back on the chair, the wooden legs balancing on their edges as she pushed off the heavy wooden table with her foot. ”This is so frustrating! I feel like I’m just throwing mana around and hoping something sticks. I can’t see anything that’s happening.“
“You’re getting closer, I promise.” Zoe said.
“I know that. I know that! I can even sometimes feel it now. I can feel my hand speeding up as it passes through your weirdness because my magic stopped yours. I just can’t see whatever you’re seeing and it’s so frustrating!” Emma said.
“You’ll get it. Maybe another few months, and you’ll have it.” Zoe said.
“I don’t know how you do it. I really don’t. You have how many of them now? Like ten or something?" Emma asked.
Zoe looked through her skill list and counted them. “Thirteen I think?”
“Thirteen! And you only got two of them from killing elementals, too. Or one? When did you get Fire?” Emma asked.
“I can’t remember. I think I got it before Flester’s fall, but I might not have. It’s been too long now. Maybe I just had Cinders before then and never felt the need to get Fire itself. I dunno. Space came from going to space with you though, so I guess it’s ten that I’ve got myself.” Zoe answered.
“I knew it. You’re insane. I don’t know how you have the patience for this by yourself. I’m barely holding on and I have you to complain to.” Emma shook her head.
“I dunno, it’s just fun for me. I get to shape the world how I want it, and they end up being really useful too. I can fly thanks to all the work I put in.” Zoe laughed. “You should really get a solid element you can use to prop yourself up. And more mana, to sustain it.”
“Yeah, yeah. I’ll think about it after I get time done. Not that it’ll help me combine it into Cosmos anyway. You still haven’t managed it?” Emma asked.
Zoe shook her head. She’d tried a number of times to get the two skills to combine, but nothing seemed to click for her. When she got the Flora skill, she tried to mimic the effects of the skill with the base components. But doing the same thing with space and time didn’t do anything.
Did that mean that she had to do something else with them to get them to combine, or that she just didn’t understand what cosmos really was? Did her skills combine into Flora because she used them together, or because she displayed an understanding of what plants were?
Would she have to understand what the spacetime continuum was to have the skills combine? Plants were simple. Zoe understood how they turned the energy into the sun into nutrients, how they stored those nutrients as carbs to draw on over droughts. How their seeds contained the nutrients and instructions required to form a new plant somewhere else. How oak trees outsmarted squirrels to expand their forests.
But the cosmos? Zoe didn’t understand it. She could see it, she could interact with it. But what was the cosmos? How did it work with everything else? Or was everything else just a small part of the cosmos, a piece of the whole that Zoe needed to understand?
Maybe Emma would have an easier time with it, considering how naturally she travelled through space. What would it be like? Would it feel squished and small, with the world crushing in on you? Or would it feel even larger than Zoe could imagine?
Or was that just a naïve outlook, and the reality was something Zoe couldn’t even fathom. The concepts of distance and size losing their meaning as space folded in on itself, becoming something more than her feeble mind could imagine.
“It’s annoying. I know they combine. The stupid book told us as much. I mean, maybe the book lied. But everything else has checked out so far, why would it lie about this? And my class doesn’t seem to have anything else it can do, just space and time. Everything says that these two skills make up Cosmos. But I can’t do it. It just doesn’t work.” Zoe sighed.
“I mean, you’ve got access to the manipulation skill, maybe you can just try copying that again?” Emma suggested. “Doesn’t help me much though, but maybe once I have the two I can follow your lead, if you figure it out?”
“Maybe, I’ll give it a try again someday. I’m just a little fed up with how pointless it all is right now, I guess. It feels so stagnant. I can get to space, but I can’t explore it. I can travel around the planet and be anywhere I want. Maybe I just go see everything the world has to offer for a while, get my mind off it all.” Zoe said.
“Sounds like it’d be fun, you should totally do it. I’ve got enough to try and work my way through getting the time skill on my own anyway.” Emma said.
Zoe leaned down over the edge of her chair to pick up Fennel who walked up next to her and put him on the table. He meowed and flopped on his side, rolling over an staring at Emma.
“No, I’ll help you get it first at least. But then I think I’m going to take a few years and just explore Abyllan. I’ve gotta do something to get my mind off the promise of space travel. It’s just right there, you know? I could do it! But I’d never get back home. And that’s so frustrating.” Zoe said.
Emma laughed. “You’ll get there. And when you do, you’re bringing me along with you. I’d love to see another planet."