The area I've found myself in doesn't look like much in the way of civilization but that's fine by me. That's partially what I wanted: a place away from others for a little while. Zolbiatz did mention there are others nearby – I'm only around four or five miles away from a farm at the outskirts of a village.
Though "village" is putting it mildly, in all fairness. My knowledge of the kingdom's geography is pretty good and Mistwood has less than a hundred residents. Not households, residents. Including women and children. It might actually be a hamlet.
By foot – the normal way of travel as most people can't afford a horse or a car – it'll take more than a week to reach the nearest settlement outside of Mistwood as well, and that's with good weather and other conditions. A storm can render the path through the mountains to the north impassible for days and it's completely cut off from the rest of the kingdom during winter.
This is the sticks of the sticks, and the only real downside for me is that it means the odds of me finding a future husband in the area is slim. I can accept that even if I'm used to being with others, and even had a boyfriend up until now.
Not having a significant other will give me time to settle in here. With my luck, I'll even have time before any of the locals discover me. They'll no doubt be wary, but only because I'm an outsider. It's not as if I really look different from most of the residents of the kingdom: I have the same curly brown hair most natives have, mine only a slight curl. My skin is the same fair shade as most from a city so I might stand out a little depending on how tanned the locals are, though I do have vivid green eyes.
There's a chance no one in Mistwood has seen green eyes before. Very few people have them as they aren't a natural color, so most only have brown or blue. At the most, someone who visits the town on occasion might know it as an eye color usually held by nobles. It's not exclusive to them, though.
This being the sticks works in my favor as it means I can hide some information about myself even once I'm found, as long as I'm smart about things. If they ask about the green eyes, I can just say I inherited them from my parents, who are foreign. It's a lie, but it's one I'm willing to tell to help me settle in.
They'll eventually learn the truth here, but I'm sure they'll understand the reasons for my lies once they do.
Finishing my smaller musings, I look around the area I've found myself in. Zolbiatz said it was formerly a farm but hasn't been in use in decades and thus has overgrown. That's putting it mildly, as it looks more like a forest he's dumped me in. Trees grow everywhere and the undergrowth completely covers the ground.
This seems like it might be a place which hasn't seen human life in more than a century, based on the growth level and the size of the trees. I know better, though. I can sense the mana around me and this area is thick with it.
The more mana is in an area, the faster plants within it can grow, even enabling things to grow outside of seasons. It's one of the things I learned over the course of my twenty years, as I grew up first in a city then as I traveled around.
While that might make an area like this seem like an ideal location for growing crops for the kingdom at large, it's not suitable for larger operations. The mana density is because we're close to the Mistwood, a much more dense forest with ever-present Mist, or mana so concentrated it's become visible even to normal people.
Areas like that tend to react negatively when the land is heavily exploited, and that acts as a deterrent until some fool decides they want to develop the entire area. Then there's a series of natural disasters which destroys everything, time passes and people remember until they forget, and the cycle begins again.
Which is why the kingdom sends powerful, experienced mages to oversee such areas. A proper magus can live for centuries and has little interest in politics, but also enough connection with magic and the world to stop any attempt at heavily exploiting it.
Not that Mistwood has such a mage as far as I'm aware… it has other protections that I'm not privy to. Rumor holds that the only person who knows the details of the protection is the king, his heir learning it upon taking the throne.
As I look around, I spot a sort of structure through the growth. When I approach it, I find that it's an old, windowless cabin. Ivy has crept up the walls and its wood has rotten or even collapsed in places, but the stones making up the foundation seem stable.
The moment I draw close, a vision flashes through my mind.
In it, a pair of boys run out of the cabin, one around ten or eleven and the other around seven or so. The cabin itself is different, larger. There's no forest around it, just neatly-kept yards, gardens, and farm plots. A wolf with black fur and golden eyes rests on the front porch, lifting his head to look at the boys as they run past before tucking his head back in.
Both boys are dressed in only shorts, their skin tanned from time in the sun, some sort of armlet on their right biceps, and a small earcuff on their left ears. They run to a nearby stream, vibrant green eyes filled with energy as they jump in and start splashing each other.
The vision ends and a message pops up in my vision.
[Time Magic] is now Level 1! +100 MP +1 Magic
A vision normally wouldn't give me enough Skill Experience to boost that up even if it's for something a decade in the future, except Zolbiatz reset my Status when he sent me here. The price for starting a new life. My Skill Levels are back to zero and the amount of Skill Experience they need is back to what they were at Level 0.
I might finally learn how many Levels my first vision gave me… messages expire after a time and I didn't even know how to read when I had my first vision. Excess Skill Experience beyond what's needed to reach a Level is discarded, but we always gain at least a little bit more as we sleep. Sometimes less than the total earned throughout the day, sometimes more.
The [Foresight] spell is one I was born with, random visions coming to me from time to time even as an infant. With a power like that occurring so early in my life, I never got to find out how much a long-distance vision gave at that point.
It's easy to tell that was pure [Foresight] as well and not some form of retrocognition. The cabin is rather different than what it must have looked like in the past, but I also know the wolf within the vision. His name's Aluci and he's not really a wolf, he just likes being in that form.
While he was left behind with my transfer, that's not the sort of thing which will stop him from tracking down his favorite human. That ancient beast can find me anywhere unless the gods themselves intervene.
That vision is likely of my future, a sign that even without its appearance, I'd choose to settle down here long term. The question is if those are my biological children or adoptive. The younger one actually bears a resemblance to me, but it's also possible he's a nephew or a cousin's son. One of the reasons Zolbiatz sent me here is because my birth parents originate from the area.
Before I can reach that future, I should probably finish taking stock of the now. I call up my Status just to confirm it's been reset as stated and find that all of my stats are down to what they would be without Skill Levels, plus the bonus from Level 1 [Time Magic].
Rowan Zovanzik HP: 100/100 HP Regen: 0.001/second MP: 100/200 MP Regen: 0.002/second Strength: 10 Constitution: 10 Dexterity: 10 Magic: 11 Mind: 10
I didn't need to do that, but I did anyway just to be sure. Having this little mana is going to be strange for me as I'm used to having far more. Fortunately, the additional Skill Experience I gain into [Time Magic] as I sleep will probably earn me a Level for the next night or three. Sleeping helps solidify information and techniques into our minds, which is why we receive gains as we sleep.
Now that I've confirmed I'm significantly weaker than I was just ten minutes ago, I pull off the pack I'm wearing. Zolbiatz changed my outfit and gave me a pack of supplies when he transferred me so I don't actually know what I have.
My outfit consists of a pair of brown pants and a green tunic, along with dark brown leather boots, a leather belt, and a pair of leather gloves tucked into the belt. Two pouches are fixed onto my right hip and a knife is fixed onto my left.
In the pack are some basic supplies. A pot with a lid, a skillet, some cooking utensils, simple tools, a mortar and pestle, a few empty ceramic bottles and jars, a few ceramic jars of cleaning liquids, some rope and twine, a change of clothes, and a few other miscellaneous items.
I stare at the axe and saw, then sigh. With my current amount of mana and magical power, cutting trees with spells will be troublesome and not really reasonable. While I have average physical strength for an adult male of twenty years and zero Skill Levels in things which would raise it, my slender build is from not doing physically-taxing activities.
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What I could once do by magic, I now need to do without for now. At least my involuntary visions don't consume any mana as I do need to conserve most of it in case of an attack.
The question at the moment, however, is whether I should set up a small camp for myself since the cabin definitely isn't usable right now, or if I should go foraging. I did eat breakfast already so I don't need to look for food, but acquiring reagents for alchemy wouldn't be a bad idea. If I can find the right reagents, I can make some mana potions to help me a little as I build my reserves back up.
The experienced part of me says to clear out a spot for my temporary camp first so I get to work on that. Not being able to clear the undergrowth using magic is a hassle and quite time-consuming. An hour ago, I could clear a sizable section in just seconds… which is no longer feasible.
Resigning myself to the physical labor, I walk around the cabin as I look for a good spot, finding a spot with around fifteen to twenty feet between tree trunks. One of the trees is on the thicker side while the other two are slimmer. Most of the trees here are on the slimmer but taller side, with thicker trees being one out of every six or seven. They're also spaced less than fifteen feet apart in a lot of place, so great is the density here.
Despite me viewing some of the trees as "slimmer", those ones are still five feet or so in diameter. The thicker ones reach up to ten feet in diameter.That will be good for later, as I chop them down and use their wood, but it's a hassle for now.
The first thing I do when clearing the zone is move the branches and sticks I can see scattered about. Those are placed in a pile to the side, which I'll sort later. With my knife, a spade, and my hands, I cut and pull out the smaller plants in my chosen section, then move them off to the side in a separate pile. The ax is then used to clear out some of the bushes, which are deposited in their own pile.
Some new branches and even a few stones are found as I work, and those get moved to their piles, whether the existing one for the branches or a new one for the stones. The rocks probably formed through magic as it condensed in the soil here rather than being brought here by some force.
I doubt the former owner of the cabin left rocks scattered about.
After almost three hours of work, I have a clear spot that's about twenty feet at its widest and fifteen at its narrowest. It's not fully clear, however, as some of the roots for the trees poke up around their base, but I can work with that.
For now, though, I want to cool off some. The vision showed a stream nearby and that seems like the perfect spot to do so. With it not yet spring and the air on the chilly side, the water is sure to be icy. I might be a little chilly from my sweat but I'm still hot at the same time. I even had to take off my tunic and boots as I worked.
Leaving my gear behind, I walk about three hundred feet west of the cabin, to here the stream should be. Instead of flowing water, I find a dry bed with stones making up the bottom. Nothing has grown in it despite the heavier growth outside of it, yet the bed of the stream is completely dry. Even the stones wouldn't have stopped plants over time, not in an area with as much mana as this one.
I descend into the bed and feel it. Nearly bone-dry, just as it looks, both on and under the rocks. There's no water saturation here which means it's unlikely this stream has flowed in a long time. At the most, maybe a trickle whenever it rains.
The stream itself looks like it should be up to around forty feet or so in width and can be waded across in a few spots when it's full, but up to ten feet in depth at a few points. A little further south of here are some larger stones which probably once acted as a path across.
This is troublesome but not fully. The fact that nothing has grown within the stream bed despite the growth outside of it is pretty telling. There's plenty of mana in the soil but the spirits of the stream are keeping it clean for the day it flows once more.
In other words, something is stopping the flow of water here. The last time I saw this, it was a frog that tasted quite good and earned me a lot of praise from the village I'd restored the main water source of. Also ten chickens, twenty pounds of flour, two kegs of their best ale, and a very good night which led into me having a boyfriend for the past year and a half.
I hope he understands why I've left everything behind.
Since the stream will be the main water source for my new home, it's probably best if I investigate to see what's going on. Even if I can't take care of it now, I can probably formulate a plan to clear it up once my mana capacity and magical might increase enough.
I begin walking up the stream, though find myself at a stopping point not even five hundred feet later. To be precise, at what was probably a pond at the base of a waterfall.
There's a cliff here, which I can't scale.
Well, I can… and will probably need to as I can't just fly up. The lack of mana is really inconvenient.
After scaling the cliff, I continue walking along the stream bed. The undergrowth is too dense for me to walk well outside of it.
Around a thousand feet upstream, I find the source of the blockage, which relates to the spring which feeds the pond from which the stream originates. While the spring isn't visible to me, I can tell where it is because of the plant growing on top of it. A bramble-like bush which absorbs and destroys water itself and which prefers to grow on direct sources of water.
It usually forms when ambient water-attuned mana interacts with corrupted mana released by decaying monsters. A lot of said monster mana.
The bush is growing out of the side of the pond, indicating that the spring is likely the type which pours water out of it through holes in the side of the pond. With how large the bush is, there might be a few openings the water flows out of, including near the top of the pond. The bush is roughly thirty feet across and eight feet in height, which isn't the largest I've dealt with in the past.
Though that one formed due to the amount of monster energy a lesser dragon released upon its death, and it's doubtful something that powerful would be out in a sleepy area like this. This one was probably the result of someone clearing out monsters which inhabited this pond or used its waters regularly. Killing monsters in the wrong way leaves behind a body which decays, and it's that decay which causes problems.
The pond itself goes up to about twenty feet in height and is up to a hundred and fifty in width. Judging by how the ground around the pond gets higher the further north we go rather than the pond itself getting deeper, the water probably only reaches around fifteen to seventeen feet in depth.
If this were the me of yesterday, I'd just lob a [Fireball] and call it done. Well, I'd probably use [Flamethrower] instead so that I could control what's burned to avoid damaging the surrounding area too much, but close enough.
I could leave this be for awhile, but having the stream flowing sooner than later is preferred. There might be water sources near to the cabin which I didn't see in that vision, but this is the biggest one as it's sure to eventually have fish again once it stabilizes and magic flows throughout once more.
It's also a source of running water I know about and spirits clearly want it back, so that's a guarantee that it's on the safer side without any further processing performed.
Letting out a sigh, I climb out of the pond and reach forward with my right hand and hold it over the bush. It's been quite a long time since I needed to use gestures to cast spells but with how weak my magic is right now, it's better to use a focus point like this than to not.
The spell completes quickly as resetting my Skills didn't reset my natural and developed casting skill, just what degree of it was added by the Skill itself. The bush begins to wobble as I turn my palm to face forward, then it tears away from the spring wall. Water begins to flow out of four separate, small holes in the wall but is drawn to the bush, where it vanishes.
Once the bush is far enough away from the water flows, they stop drawing into it and begin filling the pond. I gesture with the hand I'm channeling [Telekinesis] through and move the bush onto the ground about twenty feet from the pond.
It's better to get rid of this now rather than later so that it doesn't cause further problems, but that will be a little bit of a hassle for me right now. I could come back tomorrow and deal with it, or try to move it to my camp, but neither of those seem too good of options.
Bringing it back to camp and using an axe to chop it into smaller pieces for burning isn't a bad idea, but it's a lot of trouble since I need to go down a cliff. Even with my gloves on, there's no guarantee I'll not accidentally touch the bush with my bare hands.
Which is the same reason I shouldn't leave it here – it can drain and destroy water from within other things as well. The plants and soil it's in contact with now are already being affected and any animals which might touch it will find themselves dead if they remain in contact for too long.
I sigh as I realize I'll have to use more of my mana to deal with it. Casting [Telekinesis] costs 1 MP per second of casting time and I used it for fourteen seconds. With what I recovered over the last few hours of work, I'm at just a little over 100 MP right now. That's plenty to do what I want, but I really don't want to spend too much mana until I have a lot more. This is a new area and I don't know when an attack might happen here.
One option for dealing with it is fire magic, but that's pretty intensive in terms of mana cast. The other option will cost me less and has the potential to damage the area around, but I'm confident enough in my skills to reduce the range enough to minimize the resulting damage.
Extending both hands forward, I cast [Freeze], a spell which costs 25 MP to cast. It has a pretty wide range but I restrict this to a ten-foot circle so that only the bush and area immediately around it are affected.
[Elemental Magic] is now Level 1! +100 MP +1 Magic
While the spell itself might seem basic, it's not something which a beginner can ordinarily cast. A mage has normally reached Level 4 or 5 in [Elemental Magic] before they can actually cast it off of their own abilities. It makes sense that it would bump me straight up to Level 1 with the cast.
Which I'm glad worked the way I wanted it to.
Despite neutralizing water which comes into contact with it, there's still water within the bush itself. How that works, I don't know, but magic often has its own rules which it then ignores. That's why I can have involuntary visions which cost no mana but need to spend mana to force a vision.
Everything within the range of my cast freezes, then I close my hands into fists before opening them again to cast another spell. [Shock] costs 25 MP and sends out a wave of electric magic. The normal use of this spell is to stun targets, but it works well enough as a blasting force.
With the range restricted to the size of the frozen section, not much is damaged by the blast but the bramble-like bush shatters from the impact. A few other things do as well, but I'm sure the forest will recover well enough rather soon, based on how much mana is around.
I kneel and examine a piece of the bush.
[Frozen Broken Bush Shard] A frozen shard of a broken bush.
I check several more of the fragments, mainly the larger ones, but find them all giving the same description. That's good, as it means I broke the bush well enough that it possesses no more traces of the magic which enabled it to draw in water. If I hadn't managed that, it would be even more of a hassle to finish the job.
As I turn around to return to the cabin, I realize something important: I don't have any food and I'm very hungry after all this work.
"You could've at least given me some basic food, Zolbiatz," I grumble as I begin the trek back. "After all I've done for you, you're going to make me hunt my own food while I'm so weak."
At least I gained another Skill Level form this trek, and I'll probably gain a second to [Elemental Magic] when I sleep since I didn't when I cast the shock spell, for some reason. That at least makes up for the use of my more limited MP, but I'll be pretty restricted for the rest of the day.
Further work can wait until tomorrow.