For the first few weeks of her self-imposed isolation, Kelsey primarily focused on getting comfortable with her new skills. She found her new Creation of the Magus skill incredibly tough to learn. It was almost trivial to create something if she had an object and material to reference. Trying to do it from memory or instinct however was almost completely futile at first.

In the beginning it was sometimes days between successful creations if she didn’t have a material to reference. Eventually, she improved, and steadily she became more and more comfortable with creating new materials. She found that creating something for the first time was always the most challenging, but with her skills assistance, every time after the first was considerably easier. Creating brand new materials that she had never encountered before was even possible.

While she was experimenting, she accidentally created a steel-like material that was also flexible. It was similar to a steel cable that would be used for a tension bridge, but it was made from a singular structure instead of twisted cables. Kelsey didn’t know what something like that could be used for, but it was a fascinating discovery, nonetheless.

She found some of the easiest things to create were things she had physical references for. She was pretty easily able to make as much gold, silver, or copper as she wanted due to having them in front of her. She also quickly learned to make both leather and various textiles which allowed her to create a full wardrobe of clothing that she designed herself. While it would be nice to have an infinite supply of clothes, she mainly did this for the practice. Creating armor, or a set of clothing required her to do things like stitching and material composition with her magic. It taught her an incredible amount about how her creation worked.

Some of the easier things to create were what she considered the basic elements. She could create fire, water, earth, and air almost instinctively after acquiring the creation skill, with the help of Thadius' books that is. She could create these elements in such large quantities that she wasn’t able to actually manipulate all of it.

More complex elements, like lightning, wood, light, and shadow took her much longer to learn and were much more difficult to create consistently. Shadow specifically, was something she took several weeks to figure out. To her scientific mind from Earth, shadows didn’t really exist in the traditional sense, it was more the subtraction of light that allowed shadows to form. That was true, but with magic, it wasn't the whole story. She had seen shadow magic from the deer on the plains, and she knew that their shadows were very physical, not at all a simple subtraction of light.

Getting past that mental roadblock and coming to understand how shadow magic worked conceptually was the difficult part. But, once she did, she was able to create and manipulate shadows just as well as her other elements.

After mastering the basic elements that she had seen creatures or people use, she started trying to test the limitations of her creation skill.

There was only one she was certain of, but it was critical. She was unable to create anything living. She could create the wood for a tree, the sap, and every other component that made a tree what it was, but no matter what she did she couldn’t make that tree live. Honestly, I’m kind of glad I can’t create life. That would just be too much responsibility.

Once she confirmed that discovery through a few days of testing, she moved on to practicing her Manipulation skill.

Kelsey found her Manipulation of the Magus skill to be much more intuitive when working with physical objects. She found that there were two main things she could use her skill for. The first was to change the shape, density, or structure of whatever material she was manipulating. The second was that she could use the skill to control the object by changing its position or orientation relative to a different reference point. This was how she had first made the telekinetic spear float. She manipulated the spear by changing its position. This caused the spear to move upwards. She could also freeze and lock the object in place in the air as long as her mana was still being channeled to counteract the planet’s gravity or other external forces. Functionally speaking, it didn’t change the things she was able to accomplish, it just changed the ease with which she was able to accomplish them. It was now much easier to launch an object in any direction she chose as she didn’t need to create telekinetic wires to manipulate the object, she could just manipulate the object itself.

When it came to fluids, like air, or water, her manipulation skill was much less intuitive. With an object it was clear to Kelsey what she would be manipulating, and it made sense to her immediately. For fluids, she needed to make a mental change. She wasn't manipulating the entirety of whatever fluid she was working with; she was only manipulating a small section of the fluid.

For her mind, that had grown so accustomed to grabbing an object whole, this was a habit that took her several days to break.

During the time when Kelsey was practicing with her creation and manipulation skills, she also moved locations. She had originally been living in Thadius’ log cabin, but she felt like she wanted to leave it untouched, as something of a keepsake or memento to remember how it all began.

With her new skills firmly under her control, she decided to make her own cabin. She had been scouting out good locations during her time practicing, and she felt like she knew the perfect place. On the side of the Mageblood mountains, right where the river began, she used her Manipulation of the Magus skill to carve out a large area, ensuring that the river would be unaffected. She then used her Creation of the Magus skill to create all the necessary materials for a massive wooden mansion. She created two types of wood, the first was a recreation of the Mageblood trees themselves dark, and strong that she was planning on using for the walls and floors. The second was a recreation of the much lighter tone oak trees, also native to the forest, that she would be using for decorating inside. Then she created the glass, metal, leather, and textiles she would need for things like chairs, beds, bedding, carpets, rugs, and windows.

Once all the materials were created, she moved on to using her Manipulation to actually make the cabin from the materials required. Since her only constraint was space, she continued creating and manipulating for days until she had used up all the available space and created a cabin of monstrous size. It had seven full bedrooms, each with its own closet, bathroom, and balcony. It was three stories with two living rooms, a games room, and a kitchen. Inside the games room she created a darts board, a pool table, and plenty of places to lounge. For the bathrooms and kitchen, she quickly teleported to Neim and purchased some monster core machines for things like the showers, toilets, and refrigerators.

The room she spent the most time and effort on however, was her office. It was the largest room in the house, taking up the entirety of the third floor. Its walls were lined with currently empty bookshelves. She made a large 3-meter-long desk that rested against a giant window that overlooked the Mageblood forest. She made a few tables and chairs, as well as a long sofa with a coffee table in front of it that she planned to use for reading. The room currently had a lot of empty space, but she was sure that she would fill it up eventually.

Over a week after starting the project, her cabin was completed. It had been great practice with both her creation and manipulation skills, and she learned a lot during the process. During the building process, she learned that she could weld two materials together magically, mixing their atomic structure with one another to make them whole.

Floating in the sky looking at the cabin, she was proud. She wasn’t an architect like her brother, and she didn’t love everything about the layout or design of the building, but it was hers. She had made it with her own two skills, if not her own two hands.

She would love to invite Thadius and his family to live with her, or maybe have a family of her own one day. Do they have adoption in this world? A family may not be in the cards for me now that I’m thinking about it... Shrugging at the thought, she then got to work creating a set of stairs that lead from the cabin down to the forest floor below. If she were planning on having people live here someday, they would need a way down. That wasn't 'have Kelsey fly them down every day'.

After she finished her cabin and stairs project, she moved on to the last few pieces of testing with her skills that she needed to do before moving on to general magical theory. First, she needed to find out the limitations on her Manipulation of the Magus skill. The first thing she tried was something she had noticed in the skill’s description when she first acquired it. It said that she would not be able to manipulate anything that was already being manipulated. To test this, she went and found one of her old friends, a Thorn Wolf and annoyed it until it started using earth magic against her.

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The first thing the wolf tried to do was to shoot stone bullets at her. As the wolf began creating the stone bullets, she tried to manipulate the stone, but found that there was some sort of barrier stopping her from interacting with the magic. She was simply unable to grasp it. Nothing she tried worked. No matter how much mana, or force she put behind her manipulation, she just couldn’t affect the wolf’s magic in the slightest way. That all changed the moment the wolf finished its creation and launched the stone bullets at her. As soon as the wolf released its control, Kelsey was able to grasp the stone in her magic and manipulate the bullets freely. She simply waved her hand and sent the stone flying into the distant trees.

After this test was a success, she waited for the wolf to start creating stone walls. She found that just like the bullets, she was completely unable to interfere with the wolf’s magic directly. To her magic, it almost felt like privacy enchantments did to her domain. She was able to see something was there but was completely unable to interact with it.

After a few long minutes of trying everything she could think of, she gave up and stopped her manipulation attempts.

“Thanks for the help, buddy.” she said as she activated her teleport and appeared back at her cabin.

Upon arriving back at her cabin, she flew down to the riverbank below and started testing Greater Enhancement. She had the skill active the entire time since she had acquired it and had already noticed that the enhancement felt significantly more innate than the telekinetic version before had. But she still hadn’t done any empirical testing to determine the real difference. She certainly felt more powerful, but she didn’t have any benchmarks from before her advancement to compare herself to. She decided that she would make sure she wouldn’t have that problem again and had an idea how to test two separate things at once.

To test her strength, she began creating rods made from various materials with consistent mana usages. She created steel, wood, stone, ice, telekinetic, and other elemental rods and then tried to break them with, and without her Greater Enhancement active. Doing this, she found two things. The first was that her enhancement increased her strength, and she assumed dexterity, by roughly 500%. The second thing she learned was that the denser the material was naturally, the stronger it would be when she created it, scaling with mana used. This was obvious, but it was good to find officially. She learned that while air was great for pushing and slicing, it wasn’t as good for making a solid shield or a weapon. Even though having a weapon literally made from air was awesome, which she absolutely did try.

[Saber of Wind - Unique]

A blade made of condensed wind mana.

Can be infused with mana to repair.

A Unique rarity? Hmm, I guess I haven’t identified many of my creations since my telekinetic saber and clothing I made back when I first acquired the skill...

After identifying the blade, she unraveled it, letting it dissipate back into mana. A blade of wind just wasn’t durable enough to survive being swung by someone with her strength.

The final skill she needed to test was her new Armory skill. She had already noticed that the way the skill worked had fundamentally changed. What used to be a thin telekinetic barrier that floated millimeters off her skin was now a stable plane of raw mana that was completely invisible to the naked eye. To her domain, which now included Magesight, Identify, and her domain itself, the Armory skill looked to be a single solid sheet of blue metal. In order to test her Armory skill, she enlisted the help of her new creation and manipulation skills. She created small telekinetic spears, and then launched them at the mountain, before creating the same spears and launching them at herself with exactly the same mana used for both tests. She slowly ramped up her mana usage until the first spear broke through her armor and pierced her chest. Then she moved on to a sword strike and started the test from the beginning until she once again broke her armor. She did the same test half a dozen more times until she had a pretty firm idea of the kind of force required to break her armor. What she found was very promising. Based on some rough guesswork, she felt that her new armor was two and a half to three times more durable than her Telekinetic Armory had been.

Upon completion of her final test of her Armory, Kelsey was finally ready to start delving into her journey to understand the fundamentals of magic, and the world at large. It had been two months since she reached level 100, nearly as long as she had been on Anoura in total. She was already feeling lonely and was craving some human contact. But she knew that this needed to be done. She knew that her friends and family would be waiting for her when she returned, and she didn’t want to go back to them empty handed.

As she activated her Flight and was preparing to move back up to her cabin to begin studying, Kelsey noticed that a Thorn Wolf had broken through the tree line and was eyeing Kelsey with an expression she had never seen on a monster before, curiosity. She didn’t really know what to do. She had been avoiding killing any of the Thorn Wolves or other monsters in the area because they didn’t provide her any experience, but she had been around them many times in the past few weeks. She had never seen one of the wolves show anything but mindless aggression.

She quickly identified the monster.

[Thorn Wolf - lvl 62]

Level 62? I don’t think I’ve ever seen one past level 40...

Deciding it was worth a quick investigation, Kelsey began walking towards the wolf. As she did, the wolf lowered its head and growled softly at her. It was a growl unlike the ones she had heard from the other wolves, it was almost… pleading. As if it was asking her to not come any closer, rather than proclaiming it was ready to attack.

Knowing that the wolf wasn’t a threat, she continued towards it with her hands outstretched non-threateningly. As she inched closer and closer, the wolf’s growls became more and more threatening until she was less than a meter from the wolf and it finally snapped its jaws at her, its teeth grinding uselessly against her Armory. This continued for a few seconds until, slowly, the wolf stopped its attack and looked at Kelsey questioningly.

“Hey, do you understand me? I’m not going to hurt you.” Kelsey said soothingly.

The wolf did seem to understand as it sat down on its hind legs and stared at Kelsey directly in the eyes. Kelsey eyed the wolf carefully, watching for any sign of aggression. After a few long seconds, it blinked and looked at her quizzically.

What is this thing? Is this like a boss version of a Thorn Wolf or something? It doesn't look any different... Still a weird viney wolf.

“Are you hungry?” she asked as she pulled out a deer carcass that she had stored a few days prior and threw it on the ground next to the wolf.

Upon seeing this, the wolf immediately dove into the body of the deer and began feasting. Kelsey laughed softly. “Glad you like it. Well, you enjoy, I’ve got some studying to do.” she said as she started to turn away.

As she did, the sound of the eating animal stopped abruptly. She turned around to see the wolf eyeing her again.

“What?” she asked as the wolf continued to stare at her.

The Thorn Wolf walked around the deer and up to Kelsey’s leg where it brushed its nose gently against her leg a few times and looked up at her as if it was trying to tell her something.

“You wanna come with me or something?” she asked as she knelt down to get closer to eye level with the monster.

As if in agreement, the wolf let out a short yelp.

This wolf seems super smart. No one has even mentioned a monster acting like this before, and the last intelligent monsters I fought were all in Gold rank. Is it possible that one of these wolves gained intelligence somehow?

Kelsey watched as the wolf continued to stare at her, its eyes unblinking.

I guess it wouldn’t be so bad to have a pet... Although, I will admit my ideal pet wouldn’t be made of vines and blighted flowers.

Kelsey sighed deeply. “Alright, fine, you can follow me. You’re going to have to do all your hunting yourself though, I won't be around all the time, so you’ll have to fend for yourself.” She said as she stood up and started walking towards the cabin.

“When you’re finished with your food, you can come up to the cabin. I’ll make a door for you to come through.” she before activating Flight and flying up towards the cabin.

She studied her domain as the wolf watched her leave, and then turned around to continue its meal. As she arrived at the cabin, she quickly used her skills to make something like a doggy door for her new lupine vine friend. Lu-vine friend? Nah...

Half an hour later the wolf pushed through the doggy door and entered Kelsey's cabin.

“Welcome to my home, Bud. That’s your new name, by the way. You alright with that?” Kelsey asked.

The wolf gave her a quick bark of confirmation as its vine tail began wagging excitedly.

Well, this may be the weirdest thing that’s happened since coming to this world.