I woke up and, for a moment, panicked at the unfamiliar surroundings. Then I remembered where I was and that fear subsided into just a general unease that I guessed was caused by sleeping away from somewhere that I’d grown so comfortable.

Rolling out of bed, I winced at the sharp stab of pain that erupted from my side, and then I remembered the poor attempt at hunting I’d done.

Seriously, I got injured by a Level 6 monster even though I’m level 15 now. I seriously need to up my game.

Since I’d neglected to bring bandages, reasoning that as a Mage (or at least something similar) I wouldn’t even get injured, the wound was shoddily wrapped with a blanket that had already come loose. Thankfully, it didn’t seem to have bled too much overnight, so I should’ve been fine to continue hunting so long as I found some bandages.

After getting up and going through my usual morning routine, I opened the door and with the intention of finding some kind of doctor, holding the blanket to my side the whole while. Unfortunately, that plan was put on hold for the moment by the appearance of one of the villagers with the blurred faces.

“Oh uh, hey. I just need to get through here real quick, gotta find some bandages ya know? Heh.” I say ‘appearance’ as though they just appeared, but I don’t know if they just happened to be standing right there as I left the door. But there was no way that they’d just been standing there all morning, right?

I couldn’t continue that train of thought, however, as the villager roughly pressed their hands into my side- the one with the massive cut in case that wasn’t obvious enough- and I yelped at the sudden pain.

“Hey! Get the hell off of me, that hurts!” I tried to shove them away from me, but they just wrapped their hands around me like a vice, refusing to so much as budge. Any further complaints were temporarily put on hold as a light green glow began to leak out of my wound and it began to uncomfortably stitch itself together.

“Oh, you’re a Life Mage? Or Healer? I appreciate the help but don’t you guys normally have a Skill that makes this feel less weird?” It started off feeling like my flesh was wiggling around without my control, but the feeling was slowly ramping up into something more like a cramp across my entire side.

“Ah, man that hurts! Or woman, or whatever, it doesn’t matter. Can you slow down at least, it’s really starting to hurt!” And then it was over. A quick glance at my side revealed that it was completely healthy, with barely a thin line as evidence that anything had happened. Despite my annoyance at how they handled it, I was relieved that the problem had at least been dealt with, so the least I could do was thank them.

“Well, thanks I guess. What’s your name anyway? Mine’s Rob.” I held out a hand to shake, just to be polite, but as soon as I asked for their name they spun on their heel and walked away, oddly swaying side to side the whole time.

That was rude. Do people here just really like their privacy or something?

Regardless of their- admittedly rather odd- care for being unseen, they’d healed me and now I’d be able to get back to hunting without needing to worry about my injury slowing me down, which was a great relief.

The previous night I wasn’t able to run for Lightning Steps so I basically had to walk the whole way back. At night. Breath Of Mana let me make a pretty decent amount of light when combined with Channel Mana, but I basically had to be constantly Breathing heavily to get any real benefit out of it.

Let’s get to work.

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With the Crabs being so spread out I couldn’t imagine Chain Lightning would actually be particularly useful, but that was fine. I’d hopefully have plenty of opportunities to level it up later, and I’d rather focus a bit more on Lightning Cloak anyway, what with one of my new favourite Skills relying on it.

So whilst I was killing Crabs and lamenting the utter lack of any decent levels from it, I actually tried to improve Lightning Cloak for the first time since I’d gotten it. For the most part, it was rather simple. Basically just me using Lightning Generator across my entire body, without a whole lot in the way of actual use aside from being able to passively damage any nearby enemies and looking pretty cool.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

The improvements I could make in that regard felt somewhat slim, but where it got interesting was when I combined it with Breath Of Mana. So far, it appeared to have different effects for every spell I used it on, apart from a couple of notable exceptions.

First, it seemed to make the spells brighter and harder to control, though I couldn’t be entirely certain why. That also made it look a lot more impressive, so it was pretty hard to figure out just how much more power it gets, if any. I was just going to work off of the assumption that it gets a lot and move on.

The second effect is the stranger one, for Steps it takes a lot of the effort off of my legs and makes the Cloak effect feel much more solid. For Cloak it makes it physically protect me from attacks, and for Bolt it wraps my opponents in rolling strips of Lightning. With Bolt being so different it was hard to be completely certain, but I suspected that it made spells more… solid, I guess. Their physical effects were more pronounced at least.

So how could I use that to improve Lightning Cloak? Well, I doubted that I could level a skill just by using some meta magic on it, but I could at least try to improve in ways that would help the meta magic work better. For Cloak, the best way to do that would probably be to figure out how to control it better.

And that’s what I did. For the entire day whilst hunting Crabs, which were becoming harder and harder to find since I kept walking in circles for some reason, I periodically turned on Lightning Cloak and practised manipulating its Lightning. It wasn’t too difficult, the main problem was probably the lack of Lightning to be honest. The Skill was really inefficient, so I had to use twice as much Mana as my other Skills for the same amount of Lightning, and I’d rather conserve my Mana so that I could train for longer.

Eventually, I was able to get a pretty good amount of control, levelling the skill twice in the process, and managed some mostly useless but potentially not things with it. When using the Skill normally the Lightning was spread evenly across my body, but with Channel Mana I could force it to focus into bands across my body, which might be able to work as armour if I made enough of them. For now in order for them to have any appreciable solidity they had to be incredibly small, so they were barely a few centimetres long, but as my Mana and efficiency increased that could surely be changed.

The other, and frankly much cooler, thing I could do was make spikes. Or that’s what I called them, someone who’s a lot more negative might say that they’re more like tendrils or strings floating in water. But there was no such person here so I’m just gonna keep calling them spikes. This ability was much more promising than the other, and I was hoping that eventually I could use it in a similar way to my Telekinesis Equivalent, although I suppose the actual benefits of that would be somewhat questionable.

Anyway, I wasn’t spending all of my time on my Cloak, there was another much more pressing matter to attend to. Namely, I was struggling to carry all of these Crabs. When I only had to carry 4 or 5 it wasn’t too much of a problem, but any more than that and my Mana recovery was severely outpaced. It was especially bad because my recovery was actually much lower without the benefits of Breathing, even with my higher stats.

Breathing would be really helpful here, I’d probably be able to carry at least 7 or 8 of these things. But I guess it’s not gonna be able to help in its Merged form. Unless…?

I’d already established that Breath Of Mana made the effects of my Skills more physical somehow, so who’s to say it wouldn’t be able to do the same for Channel Mana? The way that I lift things up with Mana is frankly incredibly inefficient, and essentially boiled down to me forcing Mana into a cord until there was so much that objects couldn’t move past it. That created a lot of wasted energy that increased the cost for no real benefit.

But it would be a different story if there was some actual force in the mix.

Opting to actually test my theory out instead of thinking about it like some kind of Scholar, I turned to my pile of Crabs (currently 5 strong) and wrapped the entire thing in cords of Mana. Focusing, I breathed in deeply and pushed the Breath down the cord, watching as it became bright and more solid. Then the effect reached the end and the drain on my Mana drastically decreased.

Unfortunately these Crabs were still Giant monsters, roughly a metre wide and a metre and a half tall (which is giant for a regular crab), so carrying them was still a massive drain, but I imagined it would be viable for me to take this many back to the village whilst also using Lightning Steps as long as I took a few breaks.

May as well take these ones back and then look for more.

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By the time I returned to Saltrock it was roughly 1 pm, and there seemed to already be a villager waiting for me. I dropped the Crabs off and said hello, but they just looked at me and then wordlessly started carrying the Crab back to wherever they stored their food.

“Actually, I may as well carry them there for you. It’ll be way easier for me.” Instantly, they stopped moving and dropped the Crab they were holding. As they turned to look at me I thought I saw fear in their eyes, despite the obvious fact that I couldn’t even see their eyes, and they slowly shook their head back and forth.

“What, is it embarrassing? It can’t really be that bad, surely.” They didn’t respond, simply picking up the Crab and continuing on as though nothing had happened, “Alright, I guess that’s fine… don’t work too hard.”

That was-- disconcerting. Is this just that privacy thing again? I guess they're entitled to that, but that reaction was so extreme. How strange.

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Matthias watched the Follower carrying the Crab back to Crypt before glancing back at the direction the adventurer had left thoughtfully.

How did he get so many? It took him all afternoon and then some to get 5 last time, but now he‘s gotten the same amount in just a few hours. Was there some stronger monster that delayed him or something?

He grinned and began to follow the Follower.

Well, it doesn’t really matter. All I care about is the fact that he might not be so worthless after all. It looks like level 20 might just be within my grasp. I know 3 months is usually fast to get so high, but man am I getting sick and tired of this waiting game.

This next Skill is going to be the last thing I’m going to get out of this Godforsaken village, and then we can finally be done with it.

He came upon a cave under the docks, and wandered in like he owned the place. A few metres in a door seemed to materialise out of the darkness and immediately slide open with the deep, rumbling sound of stone scraping across stone.

The rocky cave quickly transitioned into smooth stone, then into bricks, before opening into a massive chamber lined with stone sconces. The cave didn’t seem to curve downwards at all, but the vaulted ceiling still managed to reach far above where the surface should have been anyway.

But it’ll be a shame to leave such a nice Church behind.