I paced through the reserve and towards the aquatic habitats – not to pick up a spell, but to pick up a spell.

I paused as I realized how ridiculous that train of thought was, then shook my head and sighed.

I was still working my way through the pros and cons of each spell on my list, so I wasn’t picking up anything from that. I was, however, picking up a spell that I’d spotted on my very first tour: Starfish Regeneration.

I didn’t have all of my energy tied up in a gemstone in the center of my being, but I did have an energy rich tattoo that was somewhat like a beast core. I also had an urgent need for regeneration magic. I might never be a healer like Kene was, but if I’d had even a simple regeneration spell on the Beastgate Trial Trail, I could have healed my feet, and might have been able to reduce some of the pain and swelling from the damage that the revenant had inflicted.

The starfish specifically used a blend of life, death, abnegation, time, solar, telluric, and creation to regenerate by isolating and sectioning off damaged parts of the body, breaking down what couldn’t be repaired, then using the flow of power used to rejuvenate what could be restored while drawing from my mana… energy… blend to rebuild the missing parts back stronger.

There were two problems with it.

First, while it could do some repairs to bone, it wasn’t a guided spell, nor was I versed enough in the use of healing to make use of a guided healing spell. For healing a cut, hairline fracture, a sprain, or really taking care of most damage that the body was able to handle alone, it would be excellent. But it wasn’t a miracle worker – bone could heal wrong, it couldn’t take care of internal bleeding, that sort of thing. I’d still need a real healer for serious damage.

But if I got stabbed in the guts by an assassin with a dagger, I’d rather have spell that could repair some of the damage and keep me alive until Kene could treat me than nothing at all.

The second problem wasn’t my spells fault. It was mine.

My mana wasn’t just mana, it was energy and mana blended together. Even in my beastgate, it was a blend of mana and energy all into an approximation of Edgar’s Hudau mana and energy.

But I still had pure energy flowing through my body, and my Magister’s Body still called on that energy when I was spellcasting. They were blended, but there was still some separation.

I bit my lip as I thought. For simplicity’s sake, I should probably just refer to what was in my spirit as mana, and the excess that was hanging around in my body as energy. It wasn’t entirely accurate, but I needed some way to break it down. “Excess, currently unconverted free floating energy within my body” and “energy-mana blend produced by the combination of my spirit and body working together” was just a hassle to think about.

With that decided – it was incredibly important, after all, completely critical for my future development and not at all a derailed train of thought – I went back to the starfish spell.

I didn’t have the condensed core that they did, nor did I have the full-gate spell that they seemed to have, or the first gate spells that served to further structure and empower the healing, so I definitely wouldn’t be regrowing a limb like they could. Did I still want the spell?

Yes.

Like I’d thought earlier, it was better to have an okay patch-job than to die without one at all. I didn’t need to be regrowing limbs – hopefully.

If I did, I had bigger fish to fry. Though, fried fish was terrible and objectively the worst way to eat fish.

I shook my head. I was getting distracted a lot today. I should probably get my medicine re-checked, but getting it while in another country was already hard enough, I didn’t want to try and think of the pain that I’d need to go through if I wanted to get its dosage increased.

I studied the starfish with my mana senses until I was certain I could write down the array, then whistled. It was a pretty large spell. Not as big as the Analyze spells, at least when compared proportionally to the size of the garden, but it was definitely big. It was also very strangely designed – probably because it wasn’t designed, but evolved.

I shaped it out slowly and carefully, and even with the Beast Mage’s Soul turning it into an energetic circuit within my body, it still took a long time for me to finish getting the spell written out. When I did, I flooded the spell with life, death, and time mana, allowing the Magister’s Body to cover for the rest.

A cool, almost minty sensation washed over me as the spell took hold, and I could feel all sorts of tiny wounds that ran through my body begin to die off, fuel the healthy tissue, and draw on my mana to build back better. It paired well with Magister’s Body assisting with the repairs and building back of my body, and I felt myself relaxing under its effects.

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After several long moments, though, the spell guttered to a halt as it ran out of anything it could heal. Sure, each step created microscopic tears in the muscle, but they were so small that a third gate spell couldn’t really pick up on them until they’d had a good amount of time to accumulate.

Still, I could see the use of pairing it with Foxstep. That strained my body as if I was physically walking the distance, so something that could help me recover at the cost of mana. Or if I took Ed up on his offer to join him with workouts, I could use it to heal myself afterwards. Or even to just help stave off physical exhaustion in a fight.

Possibilities…

I wandered through the habitats for a while, trying to track down the rainbow kirin or its less-friendly golden counterpart, but to my annoyance, I couldn’t find them at all, as if they were intentionally avoiding me.

I headed into the plains and found Dusk hovering next to a world mammoth on her cloud, happily conversing with it. She would pause after asking it a question, then it trumpeted back. I frowned as I approached, since the trumpeting sounds didn’t have any meaning in my mind.

Dusk’s speech sounded like nonsense – birds or wind in trees or a rushing river or whatever – but the meaning was always clear. Even at the worst of times, I still could hear the translation, if not the meaning behind it. I attributed that more to her talking nonsense, or about things I didn’t know about, rather than an error in translation.

These world mammoths weren’t clear at all. It wasn’t as if they were speaking, even in the strange ancient language that the library used for its motto or that the Kirin had used to describe the full gate spell it had shown me.

Dusk waved to the mammoths, and I nodded my head to them, then glanced at her.

“Do you understand them?”

Dusk cheerfully exclaimed that she did not!

I stared at her. She stared back.

“So what were you talking about?” I finally asked, and she told me that they were teaching her to reinforce the energetic underpinnings of reality to oppose the dominions of spirits and certain more powerful spells.

I stared at her again.

“But you can’t understand them?” I asked, and she nodded, confirming that no, she could not understand a single trumpet-sound they made. She wasn’t even entirely convinced that they were sapient, though they were definitely sentient, and might be partially sapient.

“Huh,” I said, then shook my head. “Alright. Can I get your opinion on spell selection?”

Dusk agreed, and I spent a while going over the spells that I’d picked out. When I got to the Ninelight Bindings or Prismatic Depths or Rainbow Connection or whatever translation-name it was supposed to have, she whacked me on the head. Her hand was tiny, so it felt more like a raindrop, but the sentiment was there.

“Ow! What was that for?”

Dusk gave me the most exasperated look I’d ever seen on her tiny face and asked if I was seriously going to turn my nose up at a full-gate spell designed to work with huadu mana that clearly invoked or imitated the power of deep mana in some way.

I bit my lip.

“You know, when you put it that way, it really does sound kind of ridiculous,” I finally admitted. “But the focusing lens spell is so good! It could enhance most dragon breath varieties, and it could enhance other attack spells I learned. Empower sensory spells…”

Dusk shrugged and suggested I pick up the Sky Dragon’s Senses, if I was worried about losing out on the opportunity to enhance one of my strengths. It wasn’t going to be a revolutionary part of my magical spell loadout, but it could be a consistently useful bonus. If nothing else, the passive boost to my already impressive mana senses would be nice.

“But what about using the fruit mimic to hide, or the draigg-blaidd to amplify, or the…”

I sighed and ran a hand through my hair.

“Yeah, they’re all good picks, I just can’t take them all.”

I tapped my lip in thought and turned towards the dragon breath variations. Studying them, two popped out at me: Kelp Dragon’s Breath and Mantle Dragonfyre.

The kelp spell’s lingering power would pair well with my hit and run fighting style, and if I locked down opponents and kept them under a steady stream of it, it could be the punch I was looking for. Given that it came from a kelp dragon, I also thought that there was a chance – however small – that it would interact positively with my plant magic and boost the synergies.

But that was exactly the problem. It could be the punch I was looking for, but it wasn’t inherently on the raw power level that the others offered.

Mantle Dragonfyre, on the other hand, was every bit of raw power that I wanted. Nothing else even came close. The fact that it could cycle through the body to build up energy paired well with my existing full-gate spells and benefits, adding more power.

I wasn’t planning to kill people. Far from it. But there were defenses that quick little hit and run tactics simply couldn’t punch through. I could fight above my gate, but it consistently wound up with me taking hits as I whittled them down.

And there were things I was willing to kill. Killing a revenant wasn’t killing a person, it was destroying a bundle of bones possessed by a restless spirit.

I really wanted both. I was tempted to get both. I did have two open piles of soil in my third beastgate, after all.

But I resisted. I’d written down the spell arrays for both. As I revealed more of my third gate, traveled, and picked up more options, I’d consider it. I wasn’t a dragon mage, after all, there were good odds I’d wind up finding other spells I needed more than a second dragon’s breath.

I flickered into Dusk, appearing in the desert region that she cultivated, and she appeared next to me, having decided to come with.

As she formed a large mound of sand roughly the size of a fridge, I started working on the spell form.

It was slightly more complex than most attack spells were, likely due to the cycling effect, but it was still smaller than the starfish spell. I gripped onto my beast mana and shaped the spell,

Power built in my hands, and I started letting it slowly move through my body.

The spell bucked and writhed, trying to escape my grasp, to run free and explode out in a cloud of aimless mana, and caught by surprise, I released the magic, which dissipated.

Getting a firm grip on the spell was hard, but on the fourth try, I managed to complete a rotation within my body, then felt it pause. I could keep cycling, release it now, or try to hold onto it to release later.

I released the spell. It exploded from my cupped palms, a wave of red and brown light that blinded me for an instant. When I lowered my hands, the ground was smoking, and the pile of sand had turned to molten glass slag and scattered across the desert in front of me.

Dusk let out a cheer.