Zoe settled into life in Foizo for a few years, relaxing at home and making toys for the cats. Kenzie and Sue both took a trip to the moon a few weeks after Zoe got back with Lauren tagging along. Lauren tried to convince Peter to come along as well, but he did not have much desire to leave the planet for longer than a couple minutes at most.

Emma and Zoe went up to the moon again after a year to check on the track they’d found from whatever beast left it, and saw it was in a near identical state to when they first saw it, with the only difference being a small hole dug into it from another tiny piece of space rock that impacted the moon.

Most of her time was spent chatting with her friends, or working on some simple enchantments as she tried to forget the experience with the wanderer. Maybe it wasn’t something she’d ever truly forget, and maybe it wasn’t something she ever should forget. In time, the fear of it had begun to wane and the draw to someday meet more of them — when she was much, much stronger, came back. As terrifying as they were, something about them fascinated her.

A community of beings that lived in the darkness and communicated through mental magic? It tickled every curious bone in her body, but the thought of seeing more of them now shook them with fear. Maybe after she got her sixth class she’d try her hand at it again. With more preparations, maybe she’d try and get a powerful light spell first in case they showed some hostility again.

The Frost that was stored in her bracelet had remained there, poking at the back of her mind every time she thought of maybe venturing out again and exploring some new area. Every time she thought of going back to Kliggig to try her hand at it again, or back to the Springs of Gir to force her way into those tunnels beneath the surface. Losing it terrified her more than she ever thought it would.

Losing her storage items was something that she’d never even thought of, not as much as she should have. She’d been offered Storage skills before, but wrote them off because why would she spend a skill slot on something that was so readily available to her in enchantments?

Zoe chuckled as she sat at her table in the wide cavern behind her home. Because she can’t lose her skill like she can lose an item. Or she could, she supposed, if she entered a challenge dungeon that restricted her to a lower level. What would happen if she had several bags of storage in her higher level classes that were removed because she entered a challenge dungeon?

What made the most sense was that she’d just not have access to them until she left the dungeon again — similar to her enchanting class, though she couldn’t ignore the possibility that the system would shunt all of her belongings out on the entrance of the dungeon, either.

That would be quite a funny sight, she thought. Vanishing into a challenge dungeon and leaving behind the essence of Frost to maybe even destroy the dungeon entrance. Would she be able to get back if it destroyed it? Were there other elemental rocks like Frost, maybe some Earth or Wood objects sitting in some cavern or forest somewhere, waiting to be discovered? Or maybe they were more common than Zoe expected, and powerful enchanters used them all the time to empower their enchantments.

She looked around at the cavern she was in one last time — empty, with thick walls separating her from any of the neighbouring rooms. The floor was flattened and the walls were brought back in, making the cavern much smaller but also providing more insulation from the rest of the home. If the cavern was just going to be empty, then it may as well be reinforced to be used as a second enchanting room for more dangerous experiments. One day she’d make something even further away, but Zoe doubted she’d ever get into making enchantments that were quite that terrifying.

Zoe took a deep breath and turned her attention to her storage bracelet, and the Frost within it. She couldn’t even remember how long it had sat in her bracelet, taking up an entire bag on its own. An inconvenience more than once, and it was long since due that she tried to understand it better.

An almost imperceptible chunk of mana was ripped from her as she summoned the Frost to her hand, and she smiled. The memory of that day always seemed so intense, the cold creeping up her body and freezing her solid. A massive cost to just storing it in her bracelet, let alone doing anything with it.

But how much mana did she have back then? Five thousand? Ten thousand at most? She had almost seven hundred thousand mana now, even if it took her entire pool back then, that would barely be a blip in her pool and with her mana regeneration now.

And the cold creeping through her body, threatening to freeze her entire form if she didn’t do something immediately? Zoe tossed the Frost up in the air and caught it in her other hand, feeling a slight chill trying to force its way into her hand through her resistances and Restoration.

She laughed. All these years, she’d been storing this dangerous, powerful object in her bracelet. But that was only relative to how powerful she was herself back then, and compared to herself now she may as well have been a powerless bug grasping at the slightest hint of magic.

Zoe closed her eyes and pushed mana into the jagged ball of ice, feeling the inner structure of the object. It was cold. Incredibly cold, and she wasn’t sure how she even knew that, but she did. Everything else she pushed her mana into just felt normal, she wasn’t even sure how to explain it. There was no sensation of temperature, of pain. Just a feeling of her mana filling the object, of how much space there was and maybe if she really focused she could feel some obstructions within the inner structure of the object.

But this was cold, in a way she’d never felt cold before. As though her very soul was being touched by the object through the connection with her mana. Pushing her mana into it felt sluggish, not as though it was spacious — it was, though not as spacious as some of the dedicated mana storage items Zoe had experienced before. But rather that her mana seemed to slow down as it entered the ball, so much that it became an obstruction itself.

She had to push her mana in, and then coax it further through the jagged ball of ice, pressing it into every corner she could. The amount of mana it took to be saturated was far more than a normal ball of ice, though not exceptional in its own right. And yet filling it still took almost ten minutes, with an enormous amount of her mana wasted just to help coax the rest of her mana into the ball.

Zoe thought for a moment about what to enchant it with and decided on a mixture of Frost, Meditation and Enchantment. If anything was going to benefit from being enchanted with Frost, it would be a jagged ball that showed as [Frost] to her identify.

She turned her attention inwards and found her skills, then mixed their forms together and pushed it into the ball. An instant later, the temperature around her plummeted. Even just having the Frost near her at all was a noticeable chill, but after enchanting it with Frost, it went from a slight discomfort to being quite painful in an instant, and showed no signs of slowing.

Bits of ice began to build up on every surface nearby — the table and floor, every strand of hair that Zoe had. Her vision was almost blocked by the buildup of ice hanging from her eyelashes, and her eyes began to sting as she felt hear tears dripping freezing as they scraped along her eyes.

Zoe pushed more mana into the enchantment to try and rip it apart, but her mana was even more sluggish than it was before. A green light cast out from Zoe as she cast her Nature’s Clearing skill, reaching about seven feet away from her and filling her with more regeneration and dampening the chill that was draining her health.

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Each minute that passed dropped the temperature even further, and with it came even more of a struggle to manipulate her mana within the object. By the time four minutes had passed, her health was draining even with her Nature’s Clearing and she had to start pumping mana into her Restoration while maintaining her Nature’s Clearing and trying to tear apart the enchantment.

Another six minutes passed before Zoe was able to finally interrupt the enchantment, her health just starting to drop even with her Restoration running with as much mana as it would accept. The temperature had gotten so low that even the air began to condense, bits of liquid oxygen and whatever other gasses were created by her Wind skill dripping to the ground out of the air, forming small puddles.

With the enchantment ripped apart, Zoe pushed mana into her Cinders skill to create glowing embers that floated through the room and drifted down to the ground. All of the heat was ripped out of them as soon as they were created, the dim glow she expected visible for just a brief moment before all she had was cold ash.

Bringing the room up to temperature took far longer than it did to drop the temperature, and brought a couple of different problems. The first were the puddles of oxygen covering the floor. She had needed to continue creating warm air to breath the entire time she was trying to break the enchantment, since the gasses didn’t last long in the incredibly cold room before they liquefied.

Which meant that as she brought the room back up to temperature, all of those puddles evaporated back into their gasses, and there was far too much of them to fit into the small, airtight cavern Zoe had created. After a few minutes of warming the room again, she felt her ears popping from the gasses pressurizing the room, and she had to carve the walls out further before she could continue so the gasses would have somewhere to expand towards.

The second problem was how painful warming herself up from whatever temperature she was brought down to was. She could heal through it, but every hair follicle that was frozen and warmed up teared at her skin, her lips and nose cracked and bled as she warmed herself up again. The pain was intense, and she wasn’t even sure if there was a way to try and avoid it.

She tried to slow down the warming process, but that just meant she had to deal with the painful cold for longer, and her skin still ripped apart as she warmed anyway. Zoe gritted her teeth through the pain and hoped she’d at least get some pain resistance levels from it.

It was almost a half hour before the room was brought up to a comfortable temperature again, maybe ten or twenty degrees below zero if Zoe had to take a guess. With all of her resistances, it was at least warm enough to not be taking damage from her very body freezing.

Zoe looked at the jagged ball of blue ice resting on the table, so innocent looking and chuckled to herself. Maybe it was good that she waited as long as she had, on its own it wasn’t anywhere near as dangerous as she once thought. But enchanted with her Frost skill? She’d have needed to store it away again and who knows how long it would have been before she was willing to bring it out after that.

She Cosmic Stepped out into the kitchen where Emma was making some dinner. Oliver was laying down at her feet, while Fennel sat on the table screaming something that must be terribly important despite Emma not paying attention to it.

“Hey Fennel.” Zoe said, petting Fennel behind the ears. He leaned into her hand when she touched him and walked over to her side of the table to meow at her some more instead. “Yeah, you’re such a smart boy! So much to say!”

“He never shuts up.” Emma laughed.

“He’s got a lot of very important things to say!" Zoe said.

“Probably something like ‘mommy why aren’t you feeding me? I haven’t been fed in two minutes. You’re starving me! Mommy!’ I bet.” Emma laughed.

“That’s very important, you know?” Zoe said.

“Yeah, sure.” Emma agreed.

Zoe took a whiff of the scent filling the kitchen. Some hearty, savoury scent coming from a pot of soup bubbling away on the stone stove embedded into the wall.

“Whatcha making?" Zoe asked.

“Soup. Just harvested some of the veggies from the garden and thought some soup would be nice.” Emma said.

“Smells good.” Zoe said.

Emma nodded. “Hopefully. I’ve been slaving away at it for the last few hours. What were you up to?”

Zoe stepped away from Fennel and flashed her Frost in and out of her storage bracelet. “Playing with this.”

“Oh! You can handle it now?" Emma asked.

“Yeah, I mean I almost could before and I’m way stronger than I was. Kinda silly to have been worried about it this long.” Zoe said.

Emma nodded. “That makes sense, I’ve never seen it before. Can I touch it?"

“Uh, maybe another time. Not right now, it’s been through a bit and is a little extra cold right now.” Zoe said.

“Oh? What’d you do?" Emma asked.

“I enchanted it.” Zoe answered.

“With what?" Emma asked.

“Frost.” Zoe answered.

“You enchanted a ball of ice literally called Frost with the Frost skill?" Emma laughed. ”How’d that work out?"

“Really well, actually. If you define well as being almost freezing me to death again.” Zoe laughed.

Emma shook her head. “Well let me know when it’s warmed up, I wanna touch it.”

Zoe nodded. “I will. I think I’m gonna go try and find Eliza and see if she knows anything about this. I’m starting to think it’s not as big a deal as I thought it was, to be honest.”

“Alright, have fun. Say hi for me.” Emma said.

“Save some soup for me, I’ll be back in a bit.” Zoe said before she Cosmic Stepped out of Foizo.