For a time, enchanting was a godsend when it came to keeping me busy. The bulk of the time I wasn’t hunting with Cal or Verin, I was busy making new enchantment matrices, giving every spellform I knew a mud bath. On one occasion, I even recruited Verin to help place a matrix in ice. She was suitably impressed even if the lackluster Illumination spell wasn’t much to look at. As a bonus, the ice had even resulted in a Poor quality item instead of Trash. Truly, I was moving up in the world.
Through trial and error, I discovered the limitations of my new skill as well. While enchanting was hardly constrained to only Illumination, a lot of the spells I tried to use outright failed.
Some of the failures were easy to understand. Any targeted spell -- Minor Healing -- for example, fizzled out, the matrix unable to choose a target on its own. To my great dismay, while I eventually got Conjure Water working, I was also unable to get the moonshine variant to work either. On top of that, anything with advanced mana resisted my control, and I was unable to solidify their spellforms enough to work with.
With my single-minded focus, I sped through the first five levels of the skill with ease. As was true for all skills, however, the rapid leveling couldn’t continue forever. At level five, I hit my first roadblock.
The first enchantment matrix I’d worked with had been labeled “for levels 1-5,” and having reached the end of the suggested levels, I tried to move onto the next training aid. Much like the last, it was a metal sphere, and as I soon discovered, this one was also for the Illumination spell.
The major difference was a small bump on its surface, right where the hole to insert my mana was. Some part of me expected to have to skillfully dissect the exact purpose of additional metal, but the very moment I tried to use the matrix, it became abundantly clear. I inserted a thread of mana, gently pushed it forward, and then snap.
All at once, the thread shot forward, pushing itself through the matrix without any input from me. The first time this happened, the sheer surprise broke my concentration, and the thread dissolved midway through. More prepared the second time around, my mana filled the matrix in record time and with only a fraction of the control I usually had to exert.
Is this how regular enchantments are usable for people without mana manipulation skills? Except, that couldn’t be right. I had still needed to solidify my mana.
Curious, I decided to skip ahead, pulling out the final of the three spheres I’d been given. I located the insertion point with my thumb, the bump even larger than it had been before. That wasn’t the real surprise, though: As soon as I touched the raised section, I felt the familiar sensation of an item I could push mana into. With barely a thought, I activated the matrix, feeling a few points of mana leave me. Otherwise, though, nothing of note happened, the usual light failing to form.
Hoping to figure out what had gone wrong, I repeated the process while paying special attention to my own mana. The problem was immediately clear, my core feeding the enchantment neutral mana when it needed light. This time, I shifted my core to use light mana, and the spell succeeded without a hitch.
Not that it was entirely smooth -- Using the sphere was far more jerky and unpleasant than I was accustomed to with other enchanted items, likely courtesy of how it took my mana. Rather than pulling off a fine thread, the enchantment yanked off a rough blob from my core, dragging it to the activation point. I could only assume that the grand magus had dumbed down the standard enchantment for me, making it easier for me to learn at the cost of comfort.
All of that was well and good. Clearly, the new sections were for taking a user’s mana and feeding it through the matrix without requiring any explicit mana manipulation from them, which I could understand the need for. The issue, however, was that I had no good way of recreating the new additions.
I tried, of course. Careful mana manipulation let me map out the “push” addon, but it was one thing to explore it and another to form it myself. The only reason I’d succeeded with recreating the Illumination spell was that I’d already known how to cast it. Worse yet, a few woefully failed attempts made it clear that mud would no longer cut it. The first addon had a complex shape, with a series of coiling funnel-like cones weaving around one another. Even small defects seemed to ruin the end effect, forcing me to accept that I’d need higher mana manipulation levels and a better substrate to use.
Which, to be honest, kind of sucked. While my new skill had been a great diversion, I was no closer to making the sort of items I’d wanted to in the first place, and now I was back where I’d started in terms of keeping myself occupied. Admittedly, I did add in more mana manipulation training to my schedule, but that was the only real change.
The day I finally accepted my defeat, I couldn’t help but heave a great sigh. In some bizarre way, my problems didn’t feel all that dissimilar than they had on Earth. True, my mind had been shattered and I was practicing magical skills in a pocket dimension now, but that was neither here nor there. The struggle to find meaningful hobbies to fill my free time was a constant across universes.
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Without a particular passion project to throw myself into, I ended up spending more time training. Even a month ago, that wouldn’t have been feasible, but with my heightened level and resistances, I’d hit a strange sweet spot, in a way. I had just enough willpower to devote myself to my training regimens, and my mind was just broken enough that I could overlook how mundane most of them were.
I still struggled if I tried to do something too monotonous, and I needed to see results fairly quickly or I’d crash. As long as I turned my skill leveling into anything broadly resembling a game, though, I could often tolerate my training for even longer periods than I had back in Sylum. Occasionally, I wondered if the new version of me would even be an improvement to the old once I leveled up my resistances more, at least for some definition of “improvement.”
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Speaking of resistances, it was one of them that ended up being my next skill to hit a new rank. Without having to lift a finger, I woke up one morning to the notification.
Soul Resistance has reached level 10!
The skill had been stuck at nine for well over a month by now, and I liked to believe that was because I was finally healing enough that it didn’t need to put in as much work.
Congratulations! You have reached the Initiate rank in Soul Resistance!
Based on your skill usage, you have been granted a skill augment for achieving a new skill rank.
Augment of Soul Recovery
Increases the natural healing speed of the soul, allowing it to bounce back faster from soul damage.
The augment was a definite plus, but I was fairly sure whatever had happened to me was still well beyond the realm of natural healing.
On a positive note, my Soul Resistance wasn’t the only helpful skill to hit the next rank. Knowing that we were headed to the darkness biome next, I’d spent some time working on my Light Magic. I hadn’t arrived here wearing any of the training aids the archmage had given me, so it was far slower going than it would have been otherwise. Back when I’d had his cursed contacts, though, I’d relied on the Tint spell more than almost any of the others, with Light Magic only a hair behind fire and frost. Coupled with the countless times I’d worked with the Illumination spell recently, I eventually managed to break through.
Congratulations! You have reached the Apprentice rank in Light Magic!
Based on your skill usage, you have been granted a skill augment for achieving a new skill rank.
Augment of Equipment Enhancement
Slightly amplifies the effects of light magic and light-mana based skills when applied to objects worn by the caster.
Class Quest Completed: Raise a basic magic class to level 20 (Repeatable)
+2 Class Points
+5000xp
I got the sense I’d mostly received the augment for casting Tint so many times, but it sounded like it would apply to Arcane Armory as well.
On a less cheery note, it would be some time before I completed that particular class quest again. My water, earth, and life magics were still at level 17, while death and air lagged behind at 16. Hardly insurmountable distances, but without the benefits of my old training aids, it would be a slog to get them higher.
Plus, if I was going to sit there casting spells over and over again, I was more inclined to train space or mental magic. Having gotten in the habit of traveling via Spatial Step, I’d started to cast Mold Space to make each spatial jump go further. Having incorporated the magic into my day-to-day life, I continued to level the skill without even trying to. Mental Magic was a harder ask, especially without an Initiate tier spell to practice it with. I knew it was important for my mind, though, and so I’d managed to raise it from level 14 to 17 since arriving.
To various degrees, a number of my less frequently used skills leveled as well, with periodic increases to Cooking, Herbalism, Woodworking, Stonemasonry, and Clothworking as well.
At the same time, most of my combat skills were languishing.
As much as I wanted to ensure their safety, I found my hunts with Cal and Verin growing increasingly soporific.
Over a long-term perspective, they were interesting: I found it fascinating to watch how their fighting styles changed as they spent their class points. Both were still in the stage of consolidating their power and enhancing their main skills rather than shoring up their weaknesses, though each of them manifested that in different ways.
For Verin, defense was the name of the game. She seemed to have no trouble completing a slew of starter class quests, and almost all her points went into enhancing the strength of her Advancing Glacier. It felt like an odd choice at first, but she’d been fast to explain: Short-term, if her glacier was strong enough to stop an unfrozen scorpion, she’d be able to kill as many as she wanted, even if multiple of them attacked her at once. Long-term, she was the easiest of us to hit, and she expected to need the extra defense during harder fights.
Cal, on the other hand, leaned almost entirely into her recovery. One or two points went into increasing her magic damage, but that was it. By her estimation, she was already hitting hard enough for now, and the bigger priority was her Apex Shroud.
While the skill was completely outrageous in some ways, it was an incredible resource hog, and it drained those resources even faster whenever it had “extra” work to do. Any time she actually interacted with the world while invisible, the usage skyrocketed. That was true for unconventional skill uses too, like keeping herself warm in a blizzard through thermal invisibility. Her first goal was to be able to use the skill indefinitely at rest, and then work her way up to using it as much as she wanted in combat.
As interesting as all that was, it did nothing to make the actual hunting more fun for me. Well aware that Cal and Verin needed the experience more than I did for now, I left almost all the fighting to them. On occasion, I would step in to help when something looked dicey, but with each new week, that happened less and less, turning me into a silent observer. With my favorite prey already spoken for and me already stuck with two days a week of hunting, I didn’t have the heart to delve into the forest much either.
Given that I still needed a regular day of rest to keep myself from crashing, I’d already had one day out of five wasted. With the new hunting schedule, I suddenly found myself with three.
Perhaps it was selfish of me to say, then, that when Cal and Verin finally came to me with an announcement, all I could feel was my own relief. It was a day like any other, but right before I was about to head to bed, the two cornered me in the common room, Verin acting as the duo’s spokesman.
“Lady Tess. We are aware this may seem somewhat rash from your perspective, but we have both come to a similar conclusion. As it stands, our skills align well to take on our respective biomes, and it has been some time since either of us has felt any sense of danger from our training. With that in mind, how would you feel were we to start hunting without you?”
From that day forth, the three of us spent far more time on our own.