On her way back to the cave, Sylvia used the cleaning technique she developed with water magic to remove the goblin blood from her clothes to cleanse the stench. While walking, she took a look at her updated stats, as she had almost just doubled her level; in fact, if only looked at through level ups, then she had actually straight up doubled the number of times she had leveled up.

Level: 9

Class: Classless

MP: 1149/1296 Strength: 27

Vitality: 32

Endurance: 22

Mana: 54

Wisdom: 20

Perception: 13

The absolutely insane increase in everything left her stunned for a bit, just trying to get her brain back in gear. “Holy shit! How the hell did everything increase so explosively?” A memory of a specific title’s rarity resurfaced as if to answer the inquiry. “Oh wait, I have a title rated impossible, this is just like when my mana was multiplied by 12, absolutely insane.”

An idea struck her, prompting her to ball her hand into a fist, in the same way one does to measure grip strength, and just clench as hard as she could. While she didn’t have anything tangible to really compare it to, she could simply feel her body exerting more power. “This will be really useful for gathering materials, not to mention battle.”

It was only then that she actually thought about the number shown at the MP. “O-o-one thousand three hundred MP?? I way overshot my hope of one thousand, though I had hoped something would happen due to it. Regardless of that, now I can increase my magic efficiency even faster. However, for now I should get home.” With increased vigor in her steps, she made short work of the walk back, arriving back quite a bit quicker than expected.

Arriving back home, she checked the sun and estimated that she had around half a day left for more practice. So, for the next quarter of the day, she resumed her spear practice with renewed vigor, this time with slightly more focus on feints, in case they’d work on other enhanced goblins as well.

At some point while training, her mind had begun to drift to battle strategy and it didn’t take long before she became annoyed by a certain limitation on something. ‘If I want to really make things more secure for me, then besides improving my abilities with the spear, finding ways to trap opponents as well would be a great benefit. But unless I dig holes, use a net, or something else, that’ll be hard, and making traps on the fly in enemy territory doesn’t seem too plausible.

If only magic wasn’t limited to such close range, then I would just make use of that. But oh no, of course it’s limited to just where I touch things, absolutely useless in battle.’ “SO! FUCKING! ANNOYING!” Along with each exclamation of annoyance, she thrusted her spear with more and more force, gripping it harder and harder each time. Upon pulling her spear back after the third thrust, she felt that something about it had changed, and it only took a quick look to know what it was. At the places she had held her hands while thrusting, the wood had been forced in, creating imprints of her palms and fingers.

“Geez, I need to make sure I can control this increased strength as well. Good thing this happened now and not mid battle after leveling up some more, then I would maybe have broken it into pieces instead.” As she sat down to use magic for fixing the indents, to ensure that they wouldn’t be causing internal problems in the wood, a thought struck her just before she began the fixing. But she quickly decided to just do it later in the evening, as for now she wanted to get back to practice.

As evening rolled around and the sun began to set, Sylvia called it a day and went inside the cave to light the fire, eat, and practice magic. Right as she was about to begin her regular magic practice, she recalled the idea from earlier in the day. The idea revolved around what had happened back when she first tried magic. Back then, the mana had come out from her entire body and moved into the pebble, meaning that mana could indeed travel outside the body, it just seemed like with less efficiency.

In fact, it was actually due to the presumed efficiency reduction that she began doing it through her fingers in the first place, and thanks to only practicing it that way, it had previously slipped her mind that it could be done differently. Had it not been for her first attempt at magic, she probably wouldn’t have figured out another way to potentially do it, at least not for a while.

She walked over to the wall and extended her hand, leaving a hand’s width of space between two. With a deep breath, she closed her eyes and tried to mentally pinpoint the spots on the wall juxtaposed to her fingertips. With the intent to just indent the wall slightly, she felt her mana flow down her hand and into the fingers like usual, but when it reached the tips and went into the open air, it suddenly felt both less connected to her and like it was disappearing into the air, until it was completely gone.

With little hope, Sylvia opened her eyes to check it anything had changed on the wall, but alas, everything was the same. “If my mana just disappears into the air that quickly, then it’ll maybe help if I try to just send it faster than it can disappear. After all, it took like half my mana for next to no effect back then, so why should it be all that different this time?”

Having renewed some vigor, she attempted it again, but this she poured out her mana multiple times quicker than previously. But when she went over to inspect what her over one hundred MP had done, absolutely nothing had happened at all.

It took a couple seconds, but frustration, at how futile these two attempts had made this kind of magic seem, quickly welled up. ‘The other magics were also inefficient in the beginning, but this doesn’t even show signs of working. Even if this is working, this inefficiency is on a whole other level, and this was only for a short distance away. Back then, probably the only reason anything happened was due to my fingers holding the pebble.’ Before it got too much too her, she began trying to calm herself down by looking at the brightest side.

‘Maybe so, but who’s to say that there isn’t some actual technique for this stuff, and I probably just don’t know it yet. Maybe I can be taught it if we find civilization, but for now, I just have to accept that it won’t it doesn’t seem to be a thing, otherwise I’ll just waste mana on it pointlessly.’ After successfully calming herself down, Sylvia simply sighed and got back to the wall, ready to resume practice until her mana ran dry, though this time she used her hands to try and carve out slightly more room in the cave.

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

As she got halfway through her MP, it struck her that she actually had to carry the dugout stone out of the cave if she actually wanted more room. With a sigh, she paused her training to instead clean up the newly formed pile of rocks. Though she found the increase in her strength to be a nice thing in this situation, carrying multiple rocks at a time was still annoyingly heavy, but she carried them all out, nonetheless. “I think I’ve just gained a new respect for masons and builders that haul heavy stuff around all day.”

Once she was finished, she now had an extra square meter or so of space, though it was barely 1.5 meters tall. “I’ll probably continue this another day, but for now I don’t want to carry more rocks, so I’ll just make intricate shapes some of the stones to practice fine control. I guess that can go under crafting or at least creating, so I may as well do it as Frank.” With that said, she turned into Frank, and spent his remaining mana there, before heading to bed for the night.

----

The following day, Frank got the idea to attempt to make a simple chair, so he wouldn’t have to sit on the cold stone floor all the time. But with what he had available and considered doing, he realized that by making the seat of stone all he’d change would be his altitude whilst sitting, and while unlikely, it would actually be possible for the stone seat to be warmer than the floor, as it didn’t have a lot of surrounding stone to suck out the heat.

Figuring that while there was no actual need be leveling up as fast as possible all the time, he wasn’t exactly in need of a chair, as it worked plenty fine to sit on the ground and eat. Therefore, he decided to just return to spear practice, then he could always return and make a chair if he got too fed up with that.

After a good couple hours of swinging her spear and practicing against an imaginary opponent, Sylvia decided it was time for a break, and as she was on her way to the pot she used as storage for the stew, it randomly struck her that she hadn’t showered or washed herself in over a week. After thinking about it for a bit, she decided to just head down to the creek and find out how deep it actually was. Then she could warm her meal and herself by the fire afterwards.

While walking down to the creek, she briefly considered using water magic, but decided that while magic was useful a lot of the time, sometimes she’d rather do things the old fashion way.

As she was undressing after reaching her destination, it occurred to her that she was about to see her body naked for the first time, and that it may be a more familiar experience if she switched back to Frank for this. But that thought was quickly pushed to the side, as she reasoned that she’d have to see herself naked at some point anyway, so why push it; she might as well get used to it right away, and going by how quickly she got used to everything about this form, she figured this would go pretty quickly as well.

So, she quickly finished undressing and slowly moved to enter the river. The first step went quite far down, reaching all the way up to her knee, and she could feel that her footing was quite slanted. Due to both the force of the water, which luckily wasn’t flowing all that fast, and the unknown depth and angel of the bottom, she concluded that it’d be best to hold onto something.

But, with nothing to grab onto in sight, she realized that she had to make her own. Filling her hand with mana, she just inserted it directly into the ground as if it wasn’t there, before having it harden around her hand. She lowered the other leg into the river, stepping a bit further out and quite further down.

The force of the creek was most certainly noticeable, but it didn’t feel overwhelmingly powerful, so she decided to continue. It only took a couple small steps for the water to reach her chest, but the ground also felt to flatten out quite a bit. As she water reached her chest and diaphragm, her breathing immediately sped up, as while the water wasn’t all that cold, it was still quite a bit cooler than the air, so her body reacted in a natural way and left her short for breath for a bit.

Carefully, she pulled her hand free again and took another couple steps, reaching around the halfway point between the two sides; at this point, the water barely covered her breasts. With slow and steady breaths, she fairly quickly got her body back under control and could once again breathe normally.

The next couple minutes then went with her doing her best scrub her entire body, just in case the flowing water hadn’t already taken care of most of it. As she hadn’t thought about her hair, quite a bit had of course ended up in the water as well, so she figured she may as well wash that now that she was in full swing anyway.

Once she got up, she quickly shook off as much water as she could and prepared to redress in her clothes. Then an idea struck her, so instead of immediately putting the clothes on, lowered her finger into the water once again. Through magic, she pulled up a little bit of water and made it form a small disk, before beginning to move to over her body while intending for it to take all water with it, and it worked.

As it took a fair bit of time with the small amount of water she currently had, Sylvia grabbed a bit more, so she could fully encircle most of her appendages. Through that neat little trick, she managed to quickly dry, though it had also consumed a fair amount of her MP. After quickly redressing, she was home not many minutes later.

When she looked into the pot with stew, she noticed that there wasn’t exactly a lot left, only around a single portion, so it seemed to be time to make another. But that was an issue she could worry about later on, for now she wanted to warm the remaining stew and sit by the warmth and eat.

As she ate, Sylvia contemplated what to do with the remaining half of the day. “I could possibly go in and hunt some goblins, but there’d still be that risk of enhanced goblins, and it could end up taking more time than there’s daylight, and I would prefer to be back by nighttime. So,” -a sigh left her- “I think it may end up being more practice. Then tomorrow I’ll head out.” With her plan made up, she finished eating and resumed her practice.

By the time evening rolled around and she decided it was time for dinner, she was drenched in sweat, which reminded her of her bath from earlier, making her smile at how pointless it had been. “Oh, maybe I could make a stone bath in the cave, and then I can fill it with water through magic. That way I can practice both water and earth magic. I could even add room for a small fire beneath to warm up the water.”

With a big smile on her face at that idea, she was suddenly hit by the reality that she ate the last of her stew earlier and hadn’t done anything to prepare a new batch. With a sigh and growling stomach, she walked over to the remains of the bunniv and quickly realized two things: one, she hadn’t done anything to store it properly, so it had definitely begun to go bad in some places, and two, she didn’t know what, if any, parts were safe to consume, so there wasn’t much point in letting it stay in the cave and begin to rot.

So, she dragged it outside the cave, where she covered it in a shell of stone through earth magic. While the meat may not be worth much anymore, the bones could still be used for making things, so she had no intentions to leave it for a luckily animal in the night. Back inside, she found that there was still some carnips left over, so she settled with those for dinner.

After dinner had ended, Frank began to dig into the wall at the previous spot again, but instead of carrying out all of the rocks, this time, he kept some to make the walls of the bath. By the time his MP was close to dry, he had dug another half meter and a bit deeper in and formed a nice and smooth wall to hold water. To his surprise, making the inside of the bath smooth had taken more mana than expected, though to be fair, it also had quite the surface area. As he didn’t have enough mana to actually fill the bath, he just went to bed.