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The Returner’s One Millionth Life
Chapter 1 - Magic is Hard Man

Chapter 1 - Magic is Hard Man

  After reading those words I did the natural thing and tap it to make it disappear. However, this time instead of disappearing the screen just changed to another screen.

\Congratulations on completing the tutorial!

As of this moment the world as you know it has ended! And because of this we have decided to give every person in your world a system to help you to survive in your new world.

If you look at the box beneath this one it should tell you all that you need to know about your new life in this falling world.

We thank you for your cooperation/

  “What the heck,” I mutter under my breath.

  I sigh deeply before reading the aforementioned “box below”.

  In the box was a very boring info dump on how skills work and what not.

  To summarize, there are three skill classes; normal, advanced, and unique, normal and advanced skill classes are exactly what they sound like with advanced being a better version of normal.

  But the one that piqued my curiosity was unique, unique skills are skills that only one person in the entire world has and can be as helpful as complete weapon mastery to a straight up curse with some very unfortunate effects. Also unique skills are extremely rare, only showing up in about 1 in 10000 people, and only about 0.1% of those people have useful ones.

  Skills also have levels and their levels depend on someone's mastery of the skills, you can also learn new skills or level up skills by using what are known as points and there are two ways to earn points; the first is by defeating monsters, and the latter is by finding points or getting achievements.

  It is also possible to see your skills by saying status open, and no one can see your status without you allowing it or having a unique skill to see it.

  Well now that I’ve gotten that exposition dump out of the way it’s time for me to see my stats page I guess.

  “Status open,” as the last syllable leaves my mouth an absolutely monstrous box opens in front of me.

\Name: [Unsure]

Class: Returner

Points: 10

Normal Skills: Endurance-lvl6; Strength-lvl8; Agility-lvl6; Luck-lvl3

Advanced Skills: Extreme Intelligence-lvlMax; Complete Scientific Mastery-lvlMax; Complete Language Mastery-lvlMax; Complete Adventuring Mastery-lvlMax; Mastery of Artistic Talents-lvlMax; Advanced Military Strategies-lvlMax; Master of the Arts-lvlMax; Death Sense-lvl--; Shadow Master-lvlMax; Echolocation-lvlMax; Weapon Crafting Mastery-lvlMax; Perfect Recollections-lvlMax

Unique Skills: Martial God-lvl--; Returner-lvl--; Death God’s Curse-lvl--; Complete Curse Immunity-lvlMax+1/

  What in the world is with my skills. Why are all of them maxed and how do I have 4 uniques, what am I some kind of web novel protag!

  Ok, ok, calm down, ignoring the fact that it doesn't know my name let's check out these unique skills.

\Martial God - A title given to those who have mastered and perfected all martial arts and weapons. Ups strength and agility by two.

Returner - A super rare skill that allows the target to return to a specific point in time after death.

Death God’s Curse - The highest level of death curse that instantly kills it's target in any way possible and makes the target immortal until the point of death. Also cannot be cured or negated.

Complete Curse Immunity-lvlMax+1 - A curse immunity skill that has broken through the max level and has the power to negate even god tier curses. It removes all negative sides of a curse./

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  But I guess that explains why I kept dying and coming back, and the Curse Immunity skill is why I didn't die this time. Wait if it only removes negative sides of a curse then wouldn't that mean I am now immortal.

  Well I don't care to test that so I guess I’ll leave it alone for now.

  Now onto the main part of my unique skills, Martial God, on paper this doesn't seem to be a very big deal but once I start thinking about it, isn't this like super good?

  This means that I can advance advanced skills into unique skills that give myself a major boost in power. However it does seem like it would be nearly impossible for a normal human, I mean what kind of condition is “mastered and perfected all martial arts and weapons”. Aside from mastering what does perfect even mean? How do you perfect a martial art?

  Anyways, aside from that, the rest of my skills are just what I did for most of my lives, so I can Ignore those, but aside from that, why is my luck so low? I mean I have the cheat skill returner, and sure the death god’s curse is bad but not that bad considering my other skills, well anyway I guess I’ll just raise my luck for now. The way that raising a skill’s level with points work is that you spend the amount of points to level up to that level with advanced skills automatically adding 10. So for example to raise a skill from 3 to 4 it would require 4 points from 4 to 5 would be 5 points and so on and so forth.

  So I raise my luck to lvl5 and start looking for skills that I would be interested to learn, and after about 5 minutes of looking at skills I found a few that piqued my interest because of one word, magic.

  After Thinking for a few minutes I finally decided which skill to go for, magic sense.

  I chose magic sense for two reasons; one, because at higher levels I can sense anything with mana around me, including people, and two, because it allows me to learn magic myself.

  The one thing that I have realised about this system is that it rewards people who learn things on their own. I realized this while thinking about the points and how you can level skills with your own because things that are higher level naturally get harder to improve on your own, so if you waste all your points on stuff early on then you have to learn it yourself without ever having a good grasp on the basics.

  And as such I decided to teach myself magic, and in order to make that easier on myself I learned magic sense which allows me to sense the movement of magic around me, sorta like the name implies.

..

.

  Too many hours later I lie on my back out of exhaustion, “Finally. I finally. Finished it,” I say between gasps while taking a few glances at my newly acquired Magic Manipulation-lvl1 skill.

  May I just say that acquiring the magic skill was a lot harder than I thought it would be. While using magic sense I learned that magic exists in two places, inside me and outside of me, and in order to use magic it required me to bring the magic inside of me outside and then use it to shape the outside magic into whatever I wanted.

  Now while moving the magic inside of me was pretty simple to do both getting it outside of me and getting the outside magic to move was like trying to push a boulder up a hill, and every time I falled I had to do the entire thing again except being more tired.

  Essentially imagine having to do a hundred pushups all at once and every time you fall you have to start over. Also imagine yourself as an overweight middle aged dude doing the same thing.

  I also want to give a shoutout to my man magic sense, because without my mystical third eye I can guarantee that the entire process would have been completely impossible.

  Anyway, now that I’ve gotten the skill it feels like second nature the way that I move the magic around my body, I think I might have underestimated these skills.

  …

  After about a day I have raised my magic manipulation to lvl3 and my magic sense to lvl4. At this point I have enough control over my magic in order to make a spear of magic that can pierce through the wall of my room.

  “Now to try some elemental magic,” I mutter to myself as I stand up and head to my bathroom.

  When I enter the bathroom I fill the bathtub with water and begin running my magic through it. After about an hour the water begins to move as I pass my magic through it and when I check my status I see the water magic skill.

  I then went over to my fireplace and did the same thing I did to water to fire and got it with only a little more trouble than water.

  I got wind almost immediately, so fast in fact that it spooked me a little when I wiped up a mini tornado on my first try. However, earth was a real pain, taking about twice as long as all the other elements combined to get it.

  From my little experiences with the elements I learned that affinities to certain elements do indeed exist in this world and that I am almost unnaturally good with wind magic, and unnaturally bad with earth magic, and I can only assume that I am average with water and fire since I haven't seen any other people using magic.

  “Now, I got all of the elements but it doesn't look like it’ll become elemental magic until I max out all of them,” I mutter to myself while staring at my status page. Also my magic went up to lvl6 and magic sense went up to lvl7 during that.

  Over the next few weeks I trained my magic skills and maxed out all but my earth magic. I also gained two new skills; Parallel Casting-lvl4, which I got while trying to use two kinds of magic at the same time, which was a major pain by the way, and Magic Presence-lvl2, which just appeared at some point and I'm not entirely sure what it does but I can somewhat guess, magic sense has also evolved into Elemental Sense-lvl1.

  The evolution of magic sense into elemental sense skill has reaped a lot of benefits, and the main one being information, because elemental sense is not an advanced skill, which means that advanced skills seem to have some kind of condition to reach besides just maxing out a skill.

  Anyways time to max out earth magic, and while I was thinking about how to better train my earth magic I heard a knock on my door and a familiar monotone voice saying, “Sir, may I come in?”