Congratulations you have completed merged the four basic elemental body traits into the unique trait [Essence of the Elements].

Excited to be done with his final torture session Tide left the air element room to go back to the main entrance of the world tower.

Once he got there, Tide quickly pulled open his stats to look at the new trait’s description. It had everything that the previous traits had along with some more stats, but most importantly a new bonus.

Essence of Elements: A body refined by the four basic elements, finding balance between the four. A body fit to wield enormous power without fail. It will constantly and passively absorb ambient elemental energy in the environment. +5 to all Stats, +20% Affinity with each of the basic elements, Greater Fire Resistance, Lesser Physical and Lesser Cold Resistance.

With this new trait he gained an additional five stat points for both wisdom and intelligence. The more important part was the sentence stating that his body will consistently absorb elemental energy. He wasn’t quite sure what it meant, but it seemed to be a passive with a beneficial effect.

He took a moment to just go over his status screen just to double check if there was a tangible change.

Tide Blackwater

Lv: 12 (17%) [25 Stats Undistributed]

Class: Elementalist

Health: 850/850 (Regen 42/h)

Mana: 1200 (Regen 120/h)

Stamina: 600/600 (Regen 60/h)

Vitality: 17

Strength: 10

Endurance: 12

Agility: 10

Intelligence: 23

Wisdom: 24

Control: 25

Affinities:

-Earth: 28%

-Water: 25%

-Fire 22%

-Air 23%

Traits: Shamanic Senses, Essence of the Elements

Looks like there was nothing else besides what the description stated.

Either way he was glad he took the risk of merging his skills. Now that he had finished all the challenges, Tide was a little confused on what to do next with his time remaining. He took some time to deliberate.

He didn’t feel like he need to go to either the Mind or Body Tower after getting some many stat points from the tests. His stats were already high enough. He had essentially a free seven levels worth of stats. And eventually stats became less important, as everyone gains levels, the additional five stat points become negligible. Not that it wasn’t good to have, the extra stats Tide gained in the tests would give him a big advantage early on at least.

Of course, the Tower of Faith was ruled out as well. That left him with two towers left. The World Tower that he currently was in or the Tower of Skill. In the Tower of Skill, he would be able to refine how he uses his skills and have a more reliable set of tools to use in and outside of battle. On the other hand, the elemental mana density in the World Tower’s rooms would be hard to find once he left.

As he continued to deliberate between those to option, he decided to compromise. He wasn’t limited to only practicing his skills in the Skill Tower. He could get the best of both world by just training his skills while in the world tower. Having figured that out Tide walked back towards the fire room to work on his lack of “Fire Power”.

Once he went back inside, he made a mental list while soaking in the ambient fire mana. While hunting and during the trials he has had a variety of ideas on how he could use his spells. There was a ton of different uses for them, but Tide figured that he should focus on four categories. If he could get at least a good option using each of his elements he would have a decent pool of options to select. If he found more than that it would just be a bonus.

1. Defensive Use

2. Offensive Use

3. Movement

4. Minions

Having these four categories of skill usage Tide began to think about how he could use Fire Manipulation or Fire Augmentation to accomplish them.

Before he didn’t have enough mana or control to do much more than throw around a ball of fire or dry off his clothes. Now that he had some extra wisdom and a much higher affinity, it was as bad.

Taking things in order he began working on a defensive fire spell. Tide first thought was a fantasy classic fire wall. Not many people or monster would attempt to go through a wall of flames to attack him. He had a very clear image of what he wanted, but the question was how to achieve it.

Tide summoned a ball of fire to use as a base. He then attempted to channel more mana into the fire and stretch it out. At first all Tide could do was cause the flame to move horizontally. Trying to stretch it upward Tide began to take different approaches, but they were all fruitless. Tide began to get annoyed with how uncooperative the flame was being and just put it out. Maybe he was going at this the wrong way. Taking a moment to collect himself he thought for a bit before it hit him. When he went to create the flame, he would send his mana out of his body and condense it a bit before igniting it creating the fire. Any additional mana set its way would almost instantly ignite before he could manipulate it.

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What if rather than making a single flame become the base of the wall why not just make the wall all at once. Using this concept as his base he channeled a decent chunk of mana out of his arm and spread it out in a line. Then once he was satisfied with his control over the line of mana began to focus on just one section of it to ignite. As flames sprang to life, they began to ignite the rest of the line. Soon Tide was left with a line of fire about five feet long and about a foot wide. Its height wasn’t quite wall like, its height was more along the lines of a shrub. Someone really determined could jump over it and avoid most of the flames.

While this was great progress, he was a little frustrated that just that puny wall of fire took almost a third of his mana to use. After a bit more experimentation, Tide was able to figure out that flattening the mana out vertically before igniting it would make the fire taller, but the walls thickness would decrease instead. In the end Tide was satisfied with what he learned but with the time it took to make and the amount of mana it took, it wasn’t practical to use in the heat of combat. As he gained more control and wisdom it would probably become much easier to manage. For right now, it would be best to only this type of spell to cover choke points like a door or a cave entrance. It was much easier to shape the mana if the area it needs to cover was smaller.

With the defensive capabilities kind of covered Tide continued after a brief meditation, now looking for a way to use the fire offensively. He started by figuring out his range when using summoned fire. It turns out that now his range was about eighty feet. Anything past there any the mana wouldn’t be controllable and the ball of fire would fizzle out of existence. As for his range for summoning flames that was more around the thirty feet mark. With that figured out Tide began to look for a way to give his flames a bit more of a bang. Here the options were endless, and he spent almost two hours coming up with different ideas and implementing them. In the end he sorted them by practicality, use and mana efficiency before ending up with two good options.

First up he figured out while attempting to make himself a flame thrower. He thought that having the ability to spray flames out at a close distance to reliably burn something would be useful. He started by simply spraying fire out of his palms, but the flames quickly dispersed, and it wasn’t that powerful. After messing around a bit, Tide figured out a great trick. If he closed his hands together and pressed them into a closed container with some space in between he could condense and build up fire mana. Once it was at a high enough level, he simply had to move one of his fingers to let the pent-up flames shoot out in a much longer and hotter stream of fire. As long as he kept channeling mana the flames would maintain the same intensity. It was quite efficient as well, he could maintain the stream for about thirty seconds and only lose around twenty percent of his mana.

Second offensive option Tide discovered was his own attempt at the Elemental Burst skill. Essentially with in the thirty-foot range where he could manipulate and summon fire, he would concentrate as much mana as possible in a small space. He continued to do so it would eventually become unstable and explode. The power shocked Tide, it was comparable to Tide just lighting and throwing a stick of dynamite at his foes. There was plenty of draw backs to the spell, but Tide decided that worth it just because it had the best damage to mana cost ratio out of all his ideas.

There were three drawbacks to the spell that made it quite hard to use. First off Tide needed to focus uninterrupted for around five seconds before it activated. He also couldn’t move the spot he was exploding during those five seconds meaning he would have to predict where he wanted the attack to go. If his enemy moved, he would have to cancel the spell and start all over again. The last problem was this range. The fact that he only had a thirty-foot radius circle to cast the spell gave him little room to work with. He couldn’t even us it any where within ten feet of himself, otherwise he would be hurt by the explosion as well. Of course his fire resistance would help mitigate some of the damage, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t be unaffected by it.

Once he finished picking these two, he once again meditated for a bit before moving on to the next ability type, movement. For this one Tide got a little stuck. He messed around for a bit trying to make himself fly or hover using his flames like jets, but the flames didn’t seem to generate nearly enough thrust to do so. Perhaps when he had a bunch more stats or higher affinity it would be possible, but at the moment it seemed impossible. He did eventually find away that the fire element could help speed him up. He stumbled on to it while he was messing around with the Elemental Augmentation skill. If he absorbed fire into his legs his muscles would gain extra energy to use while moving. He could reach about one and half times his top speed while active and it seemed to also increase his strength as well. When he absorbed fire into his upper body, he was able to exert much more power using his arms.

Of course, this had its fair share of drawbacks as well. It took a large amount of mana to maintain for longer than a minute and afterwards his limbs felt exhausted and weak. Tide was still happy with this discover it was almost like a mini berserk ability that he could use as a last resort.

Once Tide felt that he had explored each of those skills enough he moved on to his summoning spells. He would classify any ability that could some a separate entity to fight with him or skill buffing them apart of this category. So, Tide began to experiment using his fire mana in the Bind Golem and Summon Lesser Elemental skills. For Golem Bind, Tide started out by giving it the normal amount of juice that he would create an average pebble but this time use fire mana.

I front of him where he was focusing a small flame came into existence. It very quickly expanded and took on a humanoid form that was much lanker build. Its outline wasn’t definitive and waved like typical fire almost like it was just a suggestion. It obviously didn’t have a real physical form and once Tide confirmed it couldn’t burn him was able to stick his hand through the golem’s chest. He decided that his fire golems names would be Igneous and would use Igni as a nickname in battle to speed up commands.

The only issue Tide had with the fire golem was that it was way too small. The amount of his mana that he used could’ve made a pebble that was four feet tall. In comparison the Fire golem only stood at about two and half feet tall. Try again Tide used almost half his mana and he was able to generate a fire golem that reached the four-foot height. The fire golem was a lot less mana efficient but had plenty of uses.

For example, Tide found that it wasn’t really harmed by physical attacks. They would just soar right through it leaving it no worse for wear. It also was able to float a couple feet off the ground and was decently fast. Once he orders it around a bit and found its intelligence on par with the other golems did, he shift his attentions to the Summon Lesser Elemental skill.

He went to use the ability and channeled a large portion of mana to use it, but a window popped up in front of him.

No Unauthorized Portals or Plane Hopping Allowed in the Training Dimension!

Flashed red brightly shocking Tide and causing him to lose his control of his mana. With any other element this would have been fine, but because he was using fire mana, it instantly exploded. Tide’s body was blasted across the chamber until it was stopped by a wall. Moments later after Tide’s body stitched itself together did, he decided to be done with fire. Obviously Merdon didn’t want him messing with the fabric of space in his pocket dimension so he would have to test out the lesser elementals once he left.

Happy with his progress and noticing a five percent increase in his fire affinity, Tide left the fire room.