Jonathan’s eyes snapped open. He was laying on soft grass, feeling a warm summer breeze glide over his body. He tried to get up, but found his body aching and unresponsive.
“Wha…” Jonathan groaned, squinting his eyes at the bright sun far off in the sky. It looked weird to him, and for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out the reason why. Come to think of it, Jonathan wasn’t entirely sure where he was, or remember what had happened.
As the minutes passed, the aches in his body slowly subsided, and with them, the memories of recent events slowly trickled in. The reality of it all was unbelievable. Vilian using powers outside of her element. Leoric, Thalco and Tori, dead. Bartholomew’s and Vilian’s fates unknown.
The last thing Jonathan could remember was the Aether container breaking, and the raw mana tearing his body apart. The pain had been horrendous. Now that he thought about it, Jonathan couldn’t actually remember the pain. He remembered being in pain, but not the feeling of it. Probably a mechanic of his mind to keep him sane.
“Wait…” The word left his mouth a moment before the realization of his situation rose to a conscious level. He had died. His body was broken into atoms. But here he was. He could feel the ground underneath, the wind ruffling his hair. Instinctively, Jonathan knew that he wasn’t dead and in some form of weird afterlife. He was alive. Somehow, he had survived being ripped apart by the Aether.
A problem for the future. Jonathan focused his mind on his current situation. He was alive, which was great. Fantastic even. His friends were dead. He could mourn later. To do that, there needed to be a later for him, which meant he needed to survive.
Struggling a bit, Jonathan sat up. The effort hurt his body, but putting his willpower into it, he managed to stay upright. He felt weak. Weaker than he had been in.. Jonathan couldn’t tell.
To get a proper understanding of his current situation, he focused on manifesting his progression sheet:
Jonathan
Level: 1
Title: Windwalker
Path: Trials
World: Ebenoss (Planar identifier: Ringworld)
Attributes:
Strength: 10
Dexterity: 10
Body: 10
Intelligence: 10
Wisdom: 10
Charisma: 10
Mana: 200/200
Traits:
Awakened Planar Core (Air), Aethermerged
“What the hell?” Jonathan could hardly believe what he saw. He was back at level one. ONE! Moments ago he had been level nine hundred forty eight, with accompanying attributes!
Not only was he back at the start, Jonathan’s eyes fixated on his traits. His planar core was still intact. Another impossibility for someone at first level. And his mana pool was double what it should have been. Normally, you got ten units of mana for each point you had in intelligence. So where did the extra one hundred come from? Was it because of..
Aethermerged
Your body merged with the surrounding aether. You no longer suffer adverse effects from touching Aether. Your body has greater capability of channeling energy.
Effect Undiscovered
Effect Undiscovered
Effect Undiscovered
Effect Undiscovered
That must have been it. Jonathan had never heard of a trait like that. Granted, he wasn’t an expert in the field of traits, but if such a thing existed, Jonathan was sure he would’ve heard of it in his countless travels across hundreds of worlds. So what that means is that it had to be unique to him, or very nearly so.
“Level one…” Jonathan muttered. That was still a blow, going from what amounted to a godhood back to being a mortal.
“Okay. Level one. It takes some getting used to, but the early couple of hundred levels should come quickly enough,” He told himself. He had done it before, he could do it again. He had the experience and the skills of an expert planeswalker - an expert who got his and his team’s asses handed to him by an exile of the same order. It wasn’t great, but Jonathan doubted that he would run into her any time soon, if she had even survived the Aether.
That reminded him! Skills! He switched to the second page of his progression sheet that listed his abilities. After scanning through its contents, he let out a sigh of relief. Everything was still there. Granted, the majority of them were unusable due to their high attribute requirements and mana cost, but at least he wouldn’t have to learn everything from scratch.
“I can do this.” Jonathan said to himself, dismissing the progression sheet. “Next, gear.”
He patted down his body. Not feeling the fabric he expected, he looked down and realized that he was naked. Whatever remade his body here clearly didn’t think clothing was necessary. Lucky for him, there was no one around to see as he scanned the surrounding grasslands.
Losing his gear in addition to his powers was a setback, but not a huge one. Jonathan had made most of his equipment himself and would do so again in time. It might be a bit expensive, and gathering up the materials would be a pain, but what can you do? Can’t put a price on being alive, as much as some healers had tried.
Jonathan stood still for a few more moments, waiting for the rest of the aches to go away. Stretching his muscles helped to speed up the progress, and within a half an hour he was feeling pretty good.
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As there was little point waiting around, Jonathan started walking, while he gathered up all the pieces of information he knew about the ringworld.
“Three hundred thousand plus years old. Hasn’t developed extraplanar travel yet. Gods exist here.. better watch out for their followers. Ever widening flat rings, separated by void. Deep dislike for hellspawn. Technology rating is four, magic rating seven, martial rating seven, no cosmic level entities. Observing permissions for walkers. I’m going to have to ignore the last one seeing that I’m strande…”
Stranded. The word reminded Jonathan of something. His planar core was listed as awakened, meaning that he should theoretically be able to planeswalk away.
Jonathan’s walk came to a stop as he raised his hand, focusing on his planar core. He quickly located it right next to his heart and started to pull energy from inside of it. Or, that’s what he attempted to do. Something was interfering with his connection to Primordial Air.
As attempt after attempt didn’t yield any results, he stomped the ground in frustration. The slight glimmer of hope of returning to his home being crushed, lowered Jonathan’s spirit even further. He was truly stranded, with yet another mystery to solve for later. Perhaps it was as simple as ‘he wasn’t powerful enough to planeswalk yet.’ The minimum requirements for even awakening a planar core were high. The earliest chance one had to transform their elemental affinity to primordial core would come around level four hundred when you had a strong enough build to survive the process.
But that was for awakening the core. Once awakened, traveling between worlds should have been possible even if the minimum requirements were lost. It had happened before, most often due to some form of curse. Was the difference in his situation the fact that the changes to his being were permanent, or was something blocking him from opening a gate? Jonathan hated mysteries.
Now that planeswalking was truly out of the question, regular walking was the best course of action, so Jonathan resumed his journey through the grassy fields. One interesting quirk of this world was what made it somewhat unique in the planescape. It was the fact that the ringworld was flat.
Standing in the middle of the fields, Jonathan could see so much further than if it was a regular planet, the horizon not coming from the curvature of the world, but rather from something tall blocking off his line of sight.
On his left, the world ended in what he estimated was about fifty or so kilometers. Far in front of him he could just make out the edge of a forest, and in his right stood an enormous mountain, the base of which was covered in a thick layer of mist. Looking up, Jonathan saw the sun slowly starting to set to his left, and past that, barely visible was a donut shaped dark patch in the sky. Another quirk of the ring world. Standing on a ring and looking up, you could see the underside of that same ring. If you were to fall off from the edge, you would eventually cross a barrier separating the ringworld from the fundamental void. As one cannot exist in that space, they would re-emerge from the top of the barrier and continue their fall, until they would starve to death or splatter on the ground.
As he didn’t spot any buildings or signs of human life, choosing a direction to walk towards was the most important decision to start off his new journey. On his list of priorities, food, water and clothing were occupying the number one slot, followed quickly by money, monsters to kill and at the very bottom of the pile, finding out what happened to Bartholomew and to murder Vilian. In his current condition an errant sneeze from Vilian would be enough to finish him off, so that self appointed quest of vengeance could wait for a while.
For the direction, the edge was straight out of the question. With some luck, he might stumble into an edge village, from what he could recall, those were pretty rare. The mountain and the forest were much more likely candidates to hold people, and out of those two options, the mountain was closer. Jonathan adjusted his stride and kept on walking.
Hours later the body aches had returned. The soles of his feet were screaming for him to stop, the cold and uneven ground being somewhat unpleasant to walk on for hours on end.
By this time the sun had finally sunk, the moon was steadily climbing up over the horizon, and a cold had started to set in on Jonathan. Cursing his weakened body, he started to look for a place to lay down for a night.
It wasn’t just the cold that bothered him. There was also hunger and dehydration. Jonathan almost chuckled. It had been a few decades since those were even a possibility for him. Get the body to a high enough level and one can sustain themselves with mana alone. The perks of mage-hood. And now without them, it was so easy to forget to take care of your own body.
Complaining about it wasn’t solving the issue of what now. Just laying down and falling asleep was the last option, and the one Jonathan didn’t expect to wake up from. He needed shelter.
Jonathan drew out a strand of mana from his center, releasing the gathered power by clicking his tongue. A soundwave erupted from his body, illuminating Jonathan’s surroundings. The spell, Echolocation, was a simple wind spell that allowed air mages to navigate in low light environments. Jonathan had discovered in his early days that infusing the spell with more power allowed him to scan his surroundings over wider areas in exchange for fever details. In time however, he had learned to interpret the variations in terrain to tell landmarks apart. The spell he had just released covered nearly five kilometers, and over the course of the next thirty seconds, information started trickling in.
A possible location became apparent after only twenty seconds of waiting. A burrow on the ground, a bit over three kilometers to his right seemed like the best option. Jonathan wasn’t a fool however. A burrow of that size in grasslands left only one likely scenario. A beast den. The only two questions that remained were, what kind of beast was it, and who would be left standing after he found out?
The walk to the burrow took nearly an hour. Now that Jonathan was aware of its presence, he approached slowly, keeping a constant eye on his surroundings. If the beast inside was nocturnal, he didn’t want to get ambushed in the dark.
When he finally reached the place, Jonathan could feel strong energy waves radiating from within. If he had to guess, the beast was at least level one thousand, judging by its strength compared to him. He started backing away. There was no way he could take a beast of that strength at level… one.
“I’m an idiot” He hissed, and approached the burrow again. He wasn’t used to thinking in low numbers. The aura he was feeling was only strong when compared against his own prowess . And right now, Jonathan was about as weak as one could get. In reality, magical presence of this strength would translate to level five beast at best. It could still be a tough fight, but at least it was winnable. Lucky for him, the beast was inside. No need to worry about an ambush. Not for him at least.
The beast turned out to be a spitter skunk. An entry level creature found in almost every plane capable of sustaining life. Easy enough, even if it had a level or two on him. Spitter skunk’s main offense was its odorous spit it used to disorient its prey’s senses while the beast itself clawed its foe to death.
What made it a good matchup against Jonathan was that as an air mage, controlling scents was second nature to him. Keeping an air bubble around his body kept the beast from smelling his approach, while protecting him from its foul odor.
Jonathan got ready, gathering up mana to his throat, preparing a deafening scream. When he got close enough to the burrow entrance, Jonathan opened his mouth to finally release the energy he had been holding.
A scream echoed in the still night air, waves of amplified sound jolting the skunk awake, disoriented from the sudden deafening blast. It burst into action, spraying its spit everywhere, desperately trying to catch whatever was attacking it in its confusion. Unfortunately for the creature, Jonathan already had another spell queued up.
The moment the skunk’s eyes fixated on Jonathan, a wind blast hit it in the face. The force of his air cannon was equivalent to a solid punch, and Jonathan could see a bead of blood dropping down from its nostril.
The skunk was bigger than what Jonathan had expected, coming up to his waist in height. That was good though, since a bigger target simply meant that he didn’t need to be all that precise in his aiming. Maybe it was a bit stronger or more durable than a smaller opponent would have been, but that strength would only matter if it got close.
Two more air cannons landed on the critter’s head, before Jonathan switched things up a bit. The skunk started charging towards, and the mage shot two wind blades down at its feet, the sharp air slicing deep into its muscles. The skunk fell down on its face and to finish things off, Jonathan threw another wind blade that cleaved the creature's skull open.
Panting slightly from the energy expenditure, Jonathan approached his kill as a tiny little bar appeared at the corner of his vision.
Level up
Level up
Neat. He quickly placed the two free points to his body, which helped a bit with his exhaustion, and carried on to the skunk corpse. The burrow had started to reek, which was regrettable, but it wasn’t anything the air bubble around his head couldn’t repel.
Jonathan formed another wind blade around his palm and started to slice into the skunk’s fur. He had made sure not to damage it too badly, and within minutes Jonathan was a proud owner of a spitter skunk pelt.
After wrapping the stinky fur around his shoulders, he started working on the meat, cutting long strips off it before laying them on the cleanest looking patch of ground around him. Eating raw meat wasn’t amazing, but without a way to start the fire, the best he could do was to cure the meat with a steady, continuous breeze. Taking a bite out of the first slice, Jonathan almost threw up. The taste was horrendous, tasting like wet farts after having the reeking air blown into it for minutes on end. But it was food, and without any, Jonathan would be too weak to carry on come morning.
As he munched on, two of the three necessities taken care of, he finally had the time to gather his thoughts properly. Fully coming to terms with his current situation would take time, but for now, Jonathan could finally let warm tears run down his cheeks. Tears he hadn’t even realized he was holding in.