CHAPTER 107 LEARNING

Surprisingly, or maybe unsurprisingly, it wasn’t really all that hard to find my way around. It was more difficult just to learn what each of the buildings was used for since there wasn’t anything labeling them. You just kinda had to know what was on the inside.

The rooms assigned for my classes weren’t being used for anything at the moment, so there wasn’t anything interesting happening there.

So it had taken me all of an hour to get used to the layout of the building I was in and figure out what exactly the other buildings were used for.

I was curious as to how long these courses would go on for. From what I understood they wanted to quickly get people up to snuff and then start pushing them out onto missions. So what exactly would that look like?

Would I learn for like, a month, and then instantly squad up and move out? Or was it more in-depth than that?

Something to ask Katherine the next time I saw her.

I wasn’t in any particular hurry about it.

I was feeling a little hungry so I made myself an apple to snack on while I walked around, exploring my new surroundings. I got odd looks from people as they passed me in the hallways or outside, but I didn’t pay much attention to them. The staring was starting to get annoying, but there wasn’t much I could do to get people to stop.

What was I gonna say? ‘Stop staring at me or else?’

Like that would go over well. So I was just gonna have to deal with the awkwardness of the situation.

I idly wondered if I was allowed to leave and come back whenever I didn’t have anything going on. Cause if Fiona and the rest were still in the area I’d like to spend more time with them. They were the only friends I had at this point. At least the only ones I could reasonably get in touch with.

I wasn’t all that interested in going back to being a slave in Alixia just to talk with Jolene or Kayla.

After several hours of just walking around and not doing anything I started to get bored. I wasn’t exactly interested in working on grinding my skills at the moment, so I decided to head back to my room. Maybe I could get a headstart on reading the textbooks they had given me.

Now that I thought about it, it was kinda interesting that they just gave the books to me. I figured books would be a relatively luxury item, but maybe magic really brought down the difficulty of creating them without the level of technology invented by humans on Earth.

Well, I wasn’t going to complain about that. I was also interested to see how fantasy textbooks were written.

I was honestly starting to get a little excited.

It didn’t take me long to make it back to my room. From there I walked over to the desk, the afternoon light filtering through the window in front of me.

I pulled out the chair, sat down, and pulled the first book in front of me.

Beginners Magical Application.

I call them textbooks, but they looked more like grimoires than anything else. It really tickled the fantasy bone I had.

I flipped open the front of the book and moved to the first page, time to see what I had in store for my future.

***

How…?

How did they manage to do it?

How is it possible to make a book about magic and its practical applications in the real world boring?

I didn’t even know that was possible!

It was like a tutorial for an MMO dragged out over 752 pages of text with the most bland dialogue and explanations known to sapient life.

I cupped my head in my hands as I sat at the desk trying to reevaluate my life choices.

I let out a long groan before flipping the book closed. I wasn’t interested in reading past the ten pages I had managed to force myself through. I’m sure I’d have to read plenty of this at a later point in time, and the beginning parts of it seemed extremely basic and fundamental.

I stood up with a sigh. There was apparently a week before lessons actually started according to Katherine. So If I wasn’t going to spend time reading the world's most bland textbooks then I needed to do something else to keep myself occupied.

Normally I would be relatively fine with watching paint dry, but mentally I still wasn’t in a good headspace to leave myself to my thoughts for any particular length of time.

So I needed something to occupy my time and attention. If I wasn’t going to be reading I guess the next best thing I could do is grind my skills. But I didn’t really want to do that all things considered.

I let out a sigh, sometimes we don’t get the things we want in life though. I’d just have to suck it up and deal with it.

I made my way back out of my room, I didn’t really want to practice in there. It sounded like a quick way for me to break something I didn’t really want to pay for.

So I made my way outside to where other groups were training, sparring, or practicing their aim. Not that they were really missing on the latter part, but one of the archers was continuously placing arrow after arrow into the exact center of the target, splitting each arrow that landed with the next one.

I took the time to start using [Identify] on everyone I could see as well, along with [Mana Sense] and [Electric Sense]. Might as well work on getting those skills up while in the proximity of a lot of people.

I made it to a relatively secluded part of the outdoor training yards and plopped down on the ground and started spinning up my minds and designating tasks for them. Three of them started creating baskets, six of them started creating various fruits, veggies, and plants. Two minds for each.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

I then left one mind on [Rest]. That still left me seven minds to work with. Those I just kind of let roam freely, observing people that I could with my skills. I could potentially ramp up my production speed for a bit, but I’d burn through mana faster than I could recover it that way. I couldn’t rest faster anyway, so my mana recovery was pretty much set in stone.

So at the end of the day, I would roughly be able to create the same amount of stuff regardless of how fast I made it. And since there was no rush to create it, I might as well take my time to do so.

I let myself just sort of fade into the processes happening around me. I didn’t focus on any one thing in particular. It was a weird sort of state to be in, I was consciously aware of everything I was doing. I had to be able to do it, but at the same time, it was just sort of becoming a subconscious effort to perform these tasks.

So I didn’t need to actually focus on them. Which allowed my minds to wander.

As such I didn’t really notice when someone came up to me and said something.

I did hear the voice though and it shocked me out of my reverie of inattention. I stopped everything I was doing as I tried to re-center myself and focus on what was happening in front of me.

I opened my eyes slowly trying to bring all of my unruly minds to heel and focus on the pair in front of me. I looked up at them, the one closest to me was a woman while the one behind her was a male based on appearances. I couldn’t see their faces since they both wore hoods with masks on the inside, they were dressed up in the rogue-style outfits I’d seen plenty of people wearing around.

I shook my head still trying to reorient myself on them.

“Sorry,” I said, “could you say that again? I wasn’t exactly listening.”

They glanced at each other before the one closest to me spoke again.

“Are you selling those?” She asked, pointing to the baskets full of stuff that I had been making.

I frowned slightly as I looked over at them.

I guess no matter where I went people were interested in fruits and veggies. A rather odd cultural fixation it seemed, maybe this was one of the things I didn’t quite catch or understand being an outsider and all that.

“I uhhh…” I hesitated for a moment unsure what exactly to say, my minds still feeling sluggish socially given that I wasn’t exactly expecting to be talking to anyone.

“It’s fine if you aren’t, I was just curious,” the woman added hurriedly.

I shook my head, “It’s not that, I actually didn’t have a plan for what to do with them in the first place. I was just trying to level my skills. Honestly just take what you want, I can’t be bothered to try and collect money from people.”

“Really? Sweet!” She hopped forward, crouched down by the baskets, and started inspecting the different options available.

I observed her and the guy who was with her for a moment before I ignored them and got back to work trying to gain levels in my skills. Maybe in a bit, I’d switch over to leveling my martial skills as well. I definitely shouldn’t neglect them at the very least.

It felt like no time at all before I was interrupted by another voice in front of me.

This time it was a trio of three guys in front of me.

“Could you repeat that? Wasn’t listening,” I said slightly curtly.

“Are we allowed to just take some?”

I just nodded, not giving a verbal response before I melded back into my subconscious and let my minds take over the processes again.

When I got interrupted a third time I was starting to get a little angry. My eyes snapped up to see the group standing in front of me.

For a long moment, I didn’t say anything and we just looked at each other. They kind of shifted uncomfortably while I looked at them.

Eventually, I fired up one of my minds and started molding some wood. I created a sign and engraved some writing into it with [Wood Manipulation].

I then planted the sign into the ground in front of the baskets.

They glanced from me to the sign and then back to me a few times before they shrugged.

‘Free for the taking’

This should prevent people from bothering me going forward. With that I faded back into the recesses of my mind, if someone bothered me again I was going to hurt someone.

***

I was going to hurt someone.

I had gotten another few hours of uninterrupted training thanks to the sign at the very least. Silver linings I guess.

Looking around it was starting to approach late evening. Looking at the baskets, they were still full of fruits for the most part. I could see which ones had slightly more taken from them than the ones around them. But they weren’t even close to being empty so I wasn’t sure why I was being bothered.

Looking up at the group in front of me, I saw a group of nine people.

I managed to repress a sigh of annoyance as I looked at them, but I only barely managed to keep my tone even as I spoke to them.

“Can I help you?”

The guy at the front stepped forward, “Yeah, we’re looking to have a team spar, but we wanted to have even teams so we needed one more. We saw you off by yourself and figured we’d ask.”

I narrowed my eyes slightly. Call me paranoid, but ever since hearing Ili’kithari’s story, I was slightly more suspicious of people around me.

If they were magically predisposed to dislike me I was left wondering whether or not they actually wanted me to join in or if this was some elaborate ruse.

I looked at my baskets again. I guess I was starting to get slightly tired of this anyways, and my mana was pretty much completely topped off so I wasn’t in a bad spot to do some sparring.

I shrugged, “Sure. I was starting to get a little bored of this as it was.”

I stood up and dusted off my legs from having been sitting on the ground for the past five or so hours. My legs felt a little stiff and sore so I took a moment to stretch and get some feeling back into them.

“Awesome, that gives us two teams of five then. Alright, let's head over to the practice fields. There should be a few open we can use. Does anybody have any preferences for terrain?”

I did, I was much more partial to fighting in nature-based environments, but I wasn’t going to put it out there just yet. I’d just let them decide.

“I like nice open fields!” one of them said, I noticed the bow on her back which quickly gave me a good idea of why she liked open fields.

“I like them too,” a guy with a massive sword said as well.

The one who had spoken to me let out a long sigh, like this wasn’t the first time he’d heard these opinions from them.

“You both need to get used to fighting in other areas, you’re not always going to be in an open field. You’re going to fight in forests, mountains, tundras, the ocean maybe. You need to be prepared. if you’re only used to fighting in one type of area, you’re not going to be much use when you have to branch out.”

There were a couple of grunts of annoyance, but they didn’t argue the point.

“Well, regardless of where you all want to go, the only field open is the forest, so that’s where we’re going. So you all better start getting yourselves prepared for it.”

The ranger girl let out a groan of annoyance, “I don’t like the forest one. Even for a forest, there are just way too many trees.”

I frowned at that. ‘Too many trees’. In a forest?

That didn’t seem like it added up. But I guess I would find out once we actually made it to the field.

I took a moment to glance around the group.

This looked like it could be fun.