I left Selly, not quite closing the door to the loft so she could leave under her own power in the morning. Well leave the room without leaving the house, she could slip out through the window if she needed to, but that would just be the worst.

The conversation was still fresh. Selly’s pain, was still fresh, and despite me not knowing her mom, both of those were sore spots.

Both of those brought me down. Gave me a funk that I tried to work out while I cleaned up, taking the rest that I could and feeding the rest to the garden, a bit of egg and some tomato sauce that would go bad by the morning got tossed into the garden, mixed into the soil so it could be degraded, and returned to the soil.

I didn’t know if the plants cared, but I hope they liked it.

I headed back inside and stopped, an idea trickling around in my head. And I let it tick over while I washed the cookware.

I could go to bed, just, head on over to Anna and cuddle up with her and take a break.

It had been a long day, and I had covered a lot of ground, or at least it felt like I had. If I looked at it like a normal day, it was probably a normal amount of ground, but for my new life, it was a lot of ground.

I could just walk over to Anna’s room, it was right there, like fifteen feet tops from me, and go to bed, snuggle up to Anna and have a nice time going to bed.

Or, I could keep reading, and work on my magic a little bit.

On paper, I lost snuggle time with Anna, time to decompress, and time in a comfy bed for some basic knowledge. It was an ehh trade at best, or at least it would be if it weren’t for my knowledge and skill at magic being so poor.

I was levelling fast, far too fast, stupidly fast. That meant I was getting skills out of the wazoo, which would be nice if not for the fact that I was lagging behind in the ability to use them and understand how they worked.

Levelling at a normal rate and getting like a level or three every year for any given class means you have a long time to get acquainted with your abilities in a very passive manner. You got to understand how they worked inside and out, you got to the point where you could get away with not saying them out loud, doing them in your sleep.

You got to the point where you could understand the skill so well you knew it better than you knew yourself.

While I would end up practicing with them, slowly gaining a better understanding of those skills, I didn’t feel like doing it right now, in the middle of the night. But I was willing to read now.

From what I could understand, a spell was similar to a skill. As a matter of fact, the fact that you could get them as skills was more than enough to make me say they were the same thing.

Sophy had already told me that Skills shaped mana, there was very little difference that I could understand or appreciate besides the fact that a skill was a kind of perfected spell.

It required no knowledge of mana, no skills to manipulate mana, no nothing, just two levels in a class and bang, skill.

But a mage should be able to make up that difference, as hard as it was, a canny mage could do it if they understood it well enough. And in a way, they could do that without a specific amount of levels, for as many spells as they could get their hands on.

But you needed that understanding to cast spells, you needed it both to learn and definitely to create new spells. And you needed more to make those better spells, then you need practice to cast them better.

You needed to put in time to make them better, and time to learn, and time to put in time to do those things.

And the levels I was getting didn’t leave me with enough time for everything, I just didn’t.

My class alone showed that.

I was a [Journeyman Mage], but I didn’t have that level of information, or that level of competence. I was nowhere close to it. I couldn’t even answer one of her questions off the bat, nonetheless, all five. And I couldn’t because I hadn’t put in the time that I should have been able to if I levelled normally.

And that wouldn’t change, not if I put in the same level of effort I was now.

I cast [Status], pulling out a tiny amount of mana compared to my total supply to cast and started running the numbers.

Name: Saphine

Race: Kobold Psychopomp

Age: 2813

Titles and Information

Stats and Growth

Innate Skills and Spells

Titles: [Saint of Death], [Tall Friend]

Level: 20

Proficiency: 2

Hit points: 96/96

Mana: 2371/2400

Build: 52 Dexterous +2|+1

Speed: 5

Senses: 37 Accuity +1|+1

Durability: 96 Spirit +3|+2

Mind: 40 Wis +3|+1

Social: 40 Int +3|+1

[Natural Senses], [Child of the Aurora], [Saint of Death], [Marked by the Long Road] [True Immortality], [Magi], [Death Magic Affinity], [Tenebral Bane].

[Cantrip], [Status], [Analyze], [Inspect].

Classes

Class Skills

Class spells

[Grave Digger] Level 28

[Tool handling Proficiency], [Rapid action], [Toil], [Sense stones], [Displace dirt], [Sense Composition], [Durable tools], [Timeless construct], [Aura of Soil], [Last Rites], [Grave Magic Affinity], [Sanctify], [Tool Expertise], [Magical Tools].

[Verdant Nexus] Level 28

[Green Thumb], [Planters Delight], [Aid Yield], [Revitalize Land], [Aura of Renewal], [Guide Plant], [Verdant Touch], [Wild Growth], [Verdant Sense], [Wellspring of Renewal], [Greater Verdant Touch], [Gaze of the Coming Spring], [Renewing Presence], [Renewing Conduit].

[Journeyman Mage] Level 13

[Wisdom Proficiency], [Apprentice of Annabeth Mynes], [Crude Foci Carver], [Magical Tool Proficiency], [Proficient Magi], [Death Magic Proficiency].

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

[Woodsman] Level 9

[Long Strider], [Makeshift Weapons Proficiency], [True Strike], [Woodsman’s Stride].

If I counted every skill I had for casting magic, all of my proficiency, auras and whatnot, I had just about ten if I lumped in skills that I had taken from levels and only levels.

Ten skills, or twenty class levels worth of skills.

That was roughly a quarter of my class levels. A huge investment in skills to help me cast spells.

And I only had four of them.

That was, at least right now, five class levels per spell.

Even if I discounted it, because I could also use those skills to help with my other skills I would be hard-pressed to give it three levels per spell, at a discount.

If you considered those spells as the same value as a skill, that was eight levels worth of skills, or between 2.5 to 1.5 levels in skills to spells.

That was a year of skills for each spell, at least for a normal person.

For a nominal mage, that number should be lower. It should be the reverse, it should be the number of spells for every skill instead of the other way around, but it wasn’t because I had been leveling so fast. I was going to keep learning spells, but by the time I did, how many more skills would I have? Would I suddenly get five more levels and have it remain the same? Would I get more and have even fewer spells per skill?

I needed to get that ratio the other way around.

I needed to put in the effort to do it.

So, I finished cleaning, picked up my book, and made my way to the study. The environment suited the work, I didn’t know if that mattered, but I hope it did.

It was dark, obviously. The moon let off a lot of light, or it would when it got itself all the way up. Instead, it left the study in a dim contrast that would get better if I opened the windows but did not fully light a page.

So I needed a light.

I picked up a candle, and made my way out into the main room, and went over to the hearth, and stopped.

Fire…

The fire was air… and heat.

I already could light the candle… Or I should be able to.

It was such a simple thing. Of course, I should be able to light candles. Lighting a candle was like… magical baby work.

It was the kind of thing Anna could do without thinking about it.

So, I should be able to do it with a little effort.

And there was an example right in front of me.

I hunkered down with a piddly candle and got to work.

First, I let my senses open to mana instead of filtering it out like background haze, letting myself see the environment and mana in it. I let myself acclimatize and take in the stupidly complex environment around me. It was like opening your eyes when you were bleary after waking up, everything coming together, first as a kind of haze, then as different things, then as shapes and objects and detail and on and on.

It gave me a twinging feeling for a moment, like a migraine, as I took it in, but I could deal with the detail.

I took in the air around me, the ever-present air, and the moisture and dust, and the grain of the wood and earthy stone around the fireplace.

Then, I looked into the fire of the hearth and observed it.

It was waning ever so slightly, not enough wood, I guess, which I could solve later when I left.

I watched and saw the fire as one thing, a cohesive whole, as solid as the stone around it.

But I knew that fire was made of air and heat. I knew it wasn’t one thing, it was made of mana, and that mana was made of a mixture of two kinds of mana, so I looked harder, and picked out the red, energetic fire mana, and tried to see into it.

In the fire was more fire, and then more fire. I kept looking deeper, as deep as I could, but I couldn’t see a difference in the material. The amount I saw only decreased. What I saw as one was just so many more of the same, just smaller.

I reached out to the fire with [Cantrip], and like the day before, I started futzing around with it. And when I got done with that and found that there was no difference, I instead focused on the air and the heat the fire gave off. And compared them to the air around the fire, the stuff that wasn’t going up the chimney. Then I took in the air as it was pulled into the fire.

The fire pulls in air and produces air, and heat and more fire. But what am I missing?

The heat feels the same, decreasing a bit as it travels out through the air… The air does feel different from the inside and the stuff going up through the chimney, and if I ignore the smoke, it’s… still different.

So the fire produces fire and heat and uses some… part of the air mana to do it? Ok, so how can I use any of that to light a candle?

The answer was I couldn’t. I had missed the important components.

Could I just brute force it? Just take the air around the candle and pack heat in until it lights? I don’t see why I can’t, but that feels… unsatisfactory. I want to know how to do it, not just know I can do it. That’s what I do normally, just brute force everything.

I want to do it smarter for once.

But it is probably about adding heat to air… So I just need to find out how much heat I need to pack with the air to make fire. Probably.

So, I turned my attention to the greatest clue for how much heat I needed, namely the air around me.

It was carrying unbound heat through the room, so it only stood to reason that if I looked closely, right up against the flame, the heat it let off should be just a little less than that I would need to have a fire, so if I copied that...

I tried it, checking closely, before doing my best to pluck at the heat in the air, only instead of pulling it out of something like a cup, I was pulling it toward a specific point.

It was harder than I figured it would be because the closer it got, the more it wanted to expand and spread out.

It was incredibly frustrating. It was such a simple action but also hard. It was like trying to thread a needle, one of those tiny metal ones with the iddy biddy eyelets. The thread just didn’t want to go in.

I took all that frustration and just used it to help my focus, just focusing it down on the act of lighting a fire. The heat, resist as it might, did what I wanted, slowly, forcing it down to a spot.

And it didn’t start a fire, it didn’t light the candle.

A part of me wanted to throw the candle like a fucking animal, but I didn’t let the frustration get to me. Instead, I turned towards the fire and double-checked the edge, comparing it to my attempt. It was the same. As far as I could tell, it was the exact same.

So, I increased the heat a little more, pressing more into the same space.

A tiny flicker of red mana formed, flashing for a moment before it changed back, splitting into an itty bitty whisp of air and heat.

A spark, and where there were sparks, there was fire. My spirits soared, all the annoyance from the time I spent, and the sadness I felt from Selly, and the soreness of sitting on the floorboards was suddenly forgotten.

And for a moment, it was replaced by the pure feeling of excitement.

I moved it onto the tip of the candle and got more, pulling more heat in to mimic the same amount I had, but across the tip of the candle. One tiny spark of fire, mana, did not a fire make. I needed a proper spark to light a candle.

So I built a critical mass of heat and air around the tip of a candle, cupping my hand around the candle, my fingers moving in a pinching motion.

Come on then, stop teasing me, light damn you.

I was right there, just like when I hucked the shard of earth, where my hands moved and made a kind of automatic movement, a kind of mini spell shape.

The air and heat sheathed around the tip, and I pressed my fingers.

The mana pressed down into one another, pressing into the wick of the candle, amongst the braids of plant fiber and the charred bit that resembled earth more than a plant, and the mana sparked red.

Whisps of smoke rode off the candle wick, and some of the mana was taken towards the plant, the material of the wick, and I countered it by pulling in a bit more, sparking more as some of the fire dwindled out.

And then, some of the mana in the wick became fire, and it started spreading. Fire Became more fire.

And second, by second, the glow of it came off the candle; first, just smoke, then as a slight glow, then like embers, then a slight glow as the fire matched its namesake.

And just like that, I lit my first candle.

I checked my [Status] again and found that I had over half an hour or so; I had somehow burned some 300 points of mana figuring it out, but honestly? It was worth every second.

Instead of just brute forcing it, I now knew more, instead of just being able to light a fire, I now understood what it meant when it said components.

It wasn’t just looking closer and closer to find a singular point of air mana and heat mana; they kind of… merged into one, but they could come apart, fire was like a transition where air and heat merged and became air and heat again. It was more like… I didn’t know what. Adding them to a stew? You put the carrots and potatoes in, and then you got the stew and took the carrots and potatoes out, but that was reductive.

I didn’t know the best way to describe it, I just didn’t have a reference point that made sense and didn’t somehow distance it from the truth.

Truth be told, I didn’t know if there was something that mimicked it that I could point to and just say, ‘like that,’ some kind of minuscule blobby thing that clicked together.

I had to wonder, how far could you take it? How far could you split it? Fire to air and heat, air to its components, to their components and so on, until you had some kind of indivisible thing.

Did you even get something indivisible? Or was it mana all the way down? Like the story kindly told us where the boy found that the world was on the back of a turtle, and it was turtles all the way down.

“Red-headed stepchild indeed… Damn, but that is a good line. Well, no more putting it off, I suppose, now it’s time to get back to the book,”

I cradled the candle in my hand like it would go out and suddenly end all my hard work in dissatisfaction. And headed into the study with a sense of satisfaction to round the day out.

The triumph was almost enough to make me forget the terror of yesterday, the paranoia of today, the longing to just go to bed, and the fact that Selly was in pain.