I screamed. I couldn’t help it, I was falling from the sky without a parachute. The Monarch had just warned me about Story magic. And now I had awakened to this. I would bet they were connected.

The question was, what the heck did Story magic find interesting in this? Was it trying to see if I could fly? I did not have time to think anymore about it. Not because I had thought of a way to fly, but because I hit the lake.

The fall had been far shorter than expected. The landing had been less painful too. I felt like I had just collided with something really hard. Like someone had pressed the brake in a car too quickly, and I crashed against the chair in front of me.

For some reason, the landing was only that painful. I didn’t even think I was bleeding. That was strange since I was seeing a lot of blood. The clothes stuck to my body, making my movements uncomfortable and difficult. But that barely even registered at the moment. There were far more important concerns.

How was I even able to see underwater? Heck, how was I breathing underwater?

I looked around, my brain scrambling it make sense of things. The surroundings did match what I had expected underwater. There were plants. There were caves, tiny depressions in the ocean floor that seemed to lead into the darkness.

The surroundings were dark, light diminishing as we sunk down. And I did mean we. Elena was with me. There was just one problem. Elena was injured. The fall had clearly been worse for her than it had been for me, for she was bleeding from several places.

The difference in Rank? Even if Elena had already awakened her mana, she was still a Rank 1. That meant that mana hadn’t enforced her body yet. A normal human wouldn’t be well after such a fall.

I rushed over to her, trying to see if there was a wound I could heal. There was. Elena’s leg was facing the wrong direction, and there was blood coming out of her knee. A lot of blood. I gulped, pulling out the table cloth. The cloth was clean—the bag expelled the food and other things that were stuck to it. And by this time it was a fair bit cleaner than what we were wearing.

The Fae Queen probably wouldn’t allow me to put this back in after this. But that mattered less than Elena’s life. I tore the cloth and wrapped it around her knee like I had seen in movies.

But it wasn’t of much use. The blood kept flowing even as I tried to keep it in. Like a dam about to burst, it pushed back against me. Elena would not survive this. I didn't even know if she was still alive. I had not dared to check her breath.

Would she even have breath? I had not solved the mystery of us breathing underwater.

I had to solve the problem of her dying first.

This was a deadly wound. More than anything I felt ready to deal with. I did not have healing magic. Tying a cloth around it wasn’t working. Perhaps the wound was too big for it, or I was targeting the wrong bleed. I did not know.

And it was too dark to tell now anyway. I could not even see in front of me. If I hadn’t been holding onto Elena, I probably wouldn’t know she was here either. This was darker than the Forest of Tragedy.

Hmm, darkness.

I had Darkness magic. Could that be used to heal? This type of magic was usually a part of Light magic—the enemy of Darkness. But I did not have Light. I had Darkness. So I had to make do with what I had.

How could I get Darkness mana to heal?

What was a negative emotion that could get Darkness to heal Elena? Fear? The fear of losing her? The fear of Rowan killing me for daring to get her killed? That could work.

I called upon mana, thinking of my fear and asking mana to do the work. Mana came, surrounding Elena until her mana cloak had grown twice as large. But there was no healing. Darkness mana did not act.

There wasn’t even any magic.

I looked at it, panicking a bit as I saw her continue to bleed. Just work you bloody thing! Why was it that every time I needed magic it insisted on doing this. I was ignorant about magic. I knew that.

But was it really necessary that every problem I deal with have to do with a part of magic I hadn’t dealt with before? Could this part not have been just a few murdery fish? I could have done with fighting a few monsters.

At least I knew how to do that.

I took a deep breath, calming myself as my heart tried to beat itself out of my chest. I did not know why I was even so upset. Elena had only been with me for a few hours. The two of us had barely talked to each other. But she had been there for me, supporting me without question when I had been so out of it after the second test.

And she had risked her own life to come save me during the third test. Even now, she was in this situation because of me. This was the doing of Leif. Or Story magic. Or both. The girl had suffered enough. Didn’t Darkness mana take power from pain and help the user?

Where was the power now?

I looked at the mana cloak around her again, calling on it once more. I thought of all the things she had suffered. The things that were clearly much more painful than anything I had experienced. I imagined someone taking someone close to me and making them work in a place where they could die any day, while making me serve them tea.

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Then I imagined knowing that you would eventually be killed for mana. That you were living on a farm, and you were the ‘crop’ being raised. I swear my hand shook as I called upon mana to act on it.

I had decided long ago what type of Story I would build. I wasn’t sure that would be the Story I would build in the end. Heck, I didn't even have a goal. The Monarch had said that I needed a goal, but I didn’t have one yet. What I did know was that people that transmigrated into side characters did everything they could to save main characters.

That was how they prospered.

I just wanted to do what I should. The Story should help me with that. For some reason, my idiotic logic felt powerful. Mana seemed to agree for some reason. The cloak of mana around Elena moved. Not just the mana I had called upon, but the mana that followed her too. The mana moved into her body.

The bleeding stopped. The leg returned to its previous position. I did not have control over the mana—it was acting on its own. But it was doing its work. This was not a spell, this was something else. I didn't even know what to call it.

A spell followed a caster’s will, it needed thoughts and mana to mix. There were no thoughts in this casting. I did not even know what mana had done or why. And I did not get the chance to consider it.

[Story magic has increased.]

[Light magic detects what you have done.]

The space filled with light, multiple glowing squares suddenly appeared around us making out surroundings visible. That was not all. There were people around us. More than one.

The people looked just like us. The clothes were medieval, far simpler and rougher than what I was wearing, but something that belonged to the same time period. That was expected.

The clothes were also wet, sticking to their owners body. That was also expected. After all, we were underwater. What wasn’t expected was the mana coming from them.

Twelve men stood surrounded us, spears in their hands as they leveled them towards us. Mana cloaks surrounded them and their spears, their weapons ready to attack us at any moment. The mana was what surprised me.

There was so little.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“A stranger dares to enter our land and ask us who we are.” one of the strangers said, taking a step forward.

That was fair.

“I am..Aphra -” I stopped myself from continuing. Speaking that name would not do good. The Eldanveir were famous.

“Just Aphra.”

The man narrowed his eyes on me. “As you wish, just ‘Aphra’. I shall pretend you are not trying to hide your identity from us. Why have you come to the Lake of the Forgotten?”

I stared at him open-mouthed, unable to conjure an answer.

“Aphra?” the stranger asked, clearly confused by his reaction.

I bet he would be. That was not a normal reaction for the kind of people that ended up in this lake. I really should have figured it out when I could breathe underwater.

The Lake of the Forgotten was not a famous place. I wouldn’t have heard of it if I was really Aphra. But the book had mentioned it. This was the place people went if they were no longer welcome in their previous homes. Rowan had come here looking for someone to make him a sword.

This place was such a well-kept secret because of its special properties. There was a large concentration of Air mana here that allowed even a Rank 1 could breathe underwater. There were even several rare materials that could only grow here.

That was why the royal family had declared this place their property and stopped others from entering. But the royal knights had taken to taking bribes and allowing some people to pass. Just weak ones they could control. And that led to the building of a secret town of missing people under a lake.

I had somehow landed in this town of missing people.

The stranger was looking at his comrades, waving his spear around as he tried to figure out why it was taking me so long to reply.

“I apologize. “ I suddenly said. “ I was simply surprised. This is not where I expected to be.”

The stranger looked even more confused. Oh right, you had to bribe guards to get in here to begin with. Getting lost and landing down here wasn’t really a good explanation.

“I had an incident with a flying carriage that landed me here.” I explained.

The stranger looked surprised at that. “The knights…do not know you are here?”

I looked at him suspiciously. “I am sure they sensed my presence.”

The stranger just grinned and pointed his spear at me. “Follow us, healer, we need of you.”

The other guards pointed their spears at me, and I realized how bad my position was. I was surrounded with people pointing spears at me. That was normally how you got captured.

But in this world it might not be so easy.

I called upon mana and cast a shield. Then I cast bolts of darkness and hung them in the air, pointing them at the men. Casting them was harder, much harder than before. I did not know how much of my mana it took, but it was a large amount.

A part of it was the fact that I did not have a strong emotional base. The rabbit was a hated enemy. I wanted to kill it. The men here were…not as threatening. I didn’t really feel much about them. A bit of fear about what they could do to me, but little else.

That fear could be the reason the spells were harder. Or it might be because Darkness just seemed farther here. Like it was standing a few meters away instead of right next to me. I had to reach out farther to connect to it.

But I did and it worked. The men had taken several steps back, their faces looking horrified as their hands shook. I guess they were able to see the spells. The mana bolts each had as much mana as them—actually it probably had more. I’d had to spend more mana to get the spell going than I expected.

Well, either way they were scared. And that was just what I intended.

“So, can we talk?” I asked, unable to keep a grin off my face. The leader of these men nodded.

I really was good at acting like a protagonist, showing off that I had the bigger gun. I just hoped I was just as good at healing.

For I still did not know what mana had done, and whether Elena would recover from it.