Learning magic with Martin today has been rather productive and he's even relaxed a fair bit after getting used to how easily I learn the spells. We just went with the basics and bolts for now and I can probably figure out more magics on my own later. If I find that I need to learn other spells and can't just intuit them on my own, then I'll probably pay Martin to teach me again.
That said, there's one question that's been on my mind ever since he taught me how to cast spells of wind and air. It's not actually the difference between those that I have a question about. Those were simple enough to understand.
Spells that have 'wind' in their name through the System are spells that use 'loose' air. It kind of shifts around on its own, sort of like wind, even if staying in the form. At higher levels of magical power, that wind will even move enough within the spell that contact with it can rip skin. Much like water magic, that's fairly useless at weaker levels of magical power.
On the other hand, spells with 'air' in their name have more solid forms due to being condensed air rather than wind shaped into a spell. They take on an appearance similar to glass but only around the edges, and they don't reflect light. The appearance is mostly the result of the denser air bending light.
"Martin," I hold up my right hand and an [Air Orb] and [Wind Orb] appear above it. "I had a question about these."
"The blue tint?"
Both spells have a faint blue tint to them. That's another reason why [Air Orb] is noticeable, though it still would be even without that. [Wind Orb], on the other hand, shouldn't be visible unless something's caught in it, such as glitter or dust or a leaf. The faint blue tint to it makes the swirls of air pretty obvious, as well as the gaps between them.
"Yeah," I say. "There's none in any of the air I create or manipulate, just the ones in the spells themselves. You didn't comment about it so I figured it wasn't too important right away. It does kind of take away some stealth factor, though."
"It does," he nods. "That's actually a result of an improper spell boundary."
"Huh?"
"You know how the spells have a structure to them?"
"Yeah."
"It's inefficient," he says. "That's one of the reasons why you can lower the Mana cost by training the spell. The more familiar you get with a spell, the less mistakes you make it with. Given enough time, you'll qualify for another Level and that's when you'll see real results thanks to the small boost the System gives. Or you can deliberately focus on improving it by studying the spell when you cast it and while you're sustaining it, then making corrections."
The drop in Mana isn't just because I got better at the spell but because I fixed mistakes in it that caused it to cost more.
"And this improper spell boundary… causes it to take on a blue tint?"
"Well… sort of," he says. "What causes the tint is your Mana leaking into other parts of the spell. That's a very faint trace of pure Mana. It's in all of your spells, but it's most noticeable in air magics because they don't have a color of their own already. If you look closely enough, you'll be able to spot it in your water magics as well. Once you learn how to cast the spell flawlessly, it'll lose the tint."
The difference with just conjuring or manipulating air is that there's no spell boundary in the first place and Mana isn't leaking. It's the most basic of basic elemental magics.
"Huh," I say. "That's good to know, thanks."
"You're welcome," he says. "You'll find that this happens with most force magics as well, since those should also be clear. The tint is more prominent and it actually makes them shimmer a little as well, since raw Mana is more of a glow or light in form. Force magics, such as [Arcane Bolt] are made up of raw magical force. In simple terms, it's just turning magical energy into magical force.
"Which is why it's more susceptible to this," I say. "Got it. Thanks for the help today."
"No problem," he says.
"Here's the pay," I flip him a coin worth five gold. "A little extra just because, though I'd also appreciate it if you kept quiet about just how fast I was learning. Summoned are known for learning fast, but it might make people a bit more wary if they realize I'm faster than the norm."
"I can do that," the coin disappears into one of his pockets. "Though you've honestly blown out of the water everyone I've taught before, even other Summoned."
"I'm naturally gifted," I smile at him. "Let's head back to town."
Martin and I return to Amadikols, where we part ways with him heading to go do whatever he's doing and me heading to my new home. The property looks a little bit different than when I bought it eight days ago thanks to the amount of money I've sunk into it.
Over the last week, I've had construction crews coming and going to fix the place up. The floors, walls, windows, doors, and roof have all been repaired or replaced as needed. The stairs to the basement and the ones to the second floor were ripped out and replaced. When I paid for the shutters to be replaced, I also paid for some glass windows to be added in just because I could. I had the gate to the external wall repaired as well.
The damaged or missing stones from the wall surrounding the house have been replaced, though they were altered a little with earth magics to match the rest of the wall so nothing looks out of place. Their appearance matches the old-wall look it has and I even requested that some ivy was grown on the wall in a few extra places to make it look even more 'old'. Some was already spread here and there, but I like the look with the extra. It's not completely covered in ivy, just enough so to make it a little bit more homey.
When I had the nature and earth mages fixing up the yard the other day, I also asked for a few bushes to be planted along the walls. Not completely around the walls, just in strategic spots on both the inside and the outside and I had some planted against the house as well. Some native grasses and flowers were also planted against the walls and house. It's made the yard a little bit smaller, but it's also cozier now as well.
A few trees already grew on the property, in both the front and the back, and that adds to the coziness. I'm considering having a small pond added in but I think I'd need to pay for a pump for it to keep the water flowing and that turns out to be a fairly expensive thing.
Today's crews should have fixed the magic plumbing system as well and the bathing room should have been renovated a little to make it nice. It seems that with the bathing and showering system, it's set up using enchantments that push, heat, and purify water. It cost me fifteen gold just for the system to be replaced, and that's not including the cost in mana crystals to keep powering it. Then I'll need to keep replacing those as they run out of juice, and replacing the rest of the bath also had an expense.
Public baths don't even run on this system, they have actual people heating the water themselves due to the cost of fueling the magitech baths long-term. The water flows for both the baths and the showers are mostly just gravity and the location of the heating/water-cleaning area, though they do have some pumps to move it and a bit of purification magic to clean the water.
I wouldn't need to spend as much for the pond's pump, but I would need to keep replacing the mana crystals depending on how long they cost. With it being uncertain how long I'll be here, I'm not sure I want to invest in something like that just yet. The property already feels pretty homely.
It's officially the nicest home on the block as far as I'm concerned, even if it looks older and a little overgrown.
When I enter the house, Caleb is spread out on the floor of the living room while Leif and Adam are playing cards in the dining room, both of them wearing just their pants and expressions of intense concentration. There's not much in the living room at the moment, just a coffee table and a couple of rugs.
The living room is fairly large and I have the coffee table close to the fireplace and will be setting up a couch on the side opposite of that. I'm debating on an L-shaped one or a corner-shaped one (with equal-length legs) right now, which is why I haven't bought it yet. One of the rugs is under the coffee table right now, just a little bit wider and longer in size than the table. A fire currently burns in the fireplace, a stand with pokers and a stand with some logs sitting beside it.
With more than double the space that the table and couch will take up in the living room, I put the other rug in the middle of what's currently an empty floor. That's where Caleb is currently lying, arms and legs spread out as he stares at the ceiling. His tail is completely still and I almost think Adam might have killed him before noticing the faint rise and fall of his chest and a blink of his eyes.
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Rather than going bare-chested, he has on a dark grey tunic with a black leather belt, along with his brown pants and black leather boots. Caleb normally strips off his tunic and boots as soon as he gets home, too.
This is new.
"Caleb?" I ask, and he looks at me without moving his head. "Everything okay?"
"I managed to find the inn the team stayed at," he tells me. "But the innkeeper didn't know anything beyond that they just didn't turn the key back in when it was time for them to leave. When they went to check the rooms, their gear was still there. It got dumped into storage and forgotten about. I had it moved to your basement, if that's fine."
Caleb's really been looking hard for the missing mercenaries these past seven days and that's the first piece of information he's found about them. I've been starting to wonder if it's depressing him even if he wasn't showing it. Based on his current decision to spread out on the floor like this, I'm going to say I was right.
"That's fine," I tell him. "Were you able to learn anything else? What were they doing here?"
"They were trying to locate a woodcarver who specialized in making weapons. Bows, mostly, but also wooden parts for other weapons. I'm looking into them as well but can't find anything."
"Alright," I say. "Good luck."
Caleb nods.
"Rematch!" Adam exclaims.
"Nope," Leif says. "I won fair and square. You lost that much. Come on, do it."
"No!"
"Going back on your word?" Leif looks mischievous when I look over. "Thought draconic beings hated doing that."
Adam's face reddens a little as he grumbles under his breath about an unfair hand, then he gets up and strips off his pants before leaving the house.
"Uh… what was that about?" I ask.
"We were playing a stripping game," Leif casually answers. "We offered to let Caleb join us but he turned us down to be a potato over there."
"Why did Adam leave naked?"
"First one naked has to run down the street before they get dressed."
As much as I want to know how he talked Adam into doing that, I'm not sure asking is a good idea.
"Ah," I say. "I'm going to get started on making dinner."
I enter the kitchen to get started. There's no magitech stove here so I have to use wood to cook the food. That's not much of an issue for me and funding and using a magitech stove would be about as ridiculously expensive as the bath.
Right now, I'm only interested in one major ongoing expense. I have enough money to be comfortable with it for now but I want more than that just in case of an emergency or my plans change or something.
"How'd your training go?" Leif follows me into the kitchen. "It was to learn magic, right?"
"Yeah," I answer. "It went pretty well. Only learned the basics and some simple combat spells, but it should be enough for now."
"Alright," he says. "What are we doing for dinner tonight?"
"Looks like the bread finished rising," I say as I examine the balls of dough resting on the counter (also new). "So we'll pop those into the oven once it heats up. Not just yet, they've got another stage first. It's a dish similar to ones already found here."
"Can I help?"
"Here," I place a basket of tomatoes on the counter. "Wash them, remove the rest of their stem, cut them down into smaller chunks, and then mash them a bit. I need them as a sauce, so we'll have to cook that as well."
Leif nods, then starts working on that using water and air magics. Raw creation and manipulation of them rather than any proper spells. He may not be a combat mage but I'm sure he'd do just fine considering how well he can puree the tomatoes using air magic.
While he does that, I put wood into the large stone ovens and use fire magics to ignite them. This house was originally built to house fifteen to twenty people and also probably host parties with more than that, so its kitchen facility is quite decent and their oven is no exception. A fairly large oven is perfect for what I want to make. There are actually two ovens here, which works out even better.
We had a brick oven at my home back on Earth but it wasn't big enough to do this so I didn't do it too often, usually when I could easily make enough to feed the siblings that were home.
I chop some additional vegetables and herbs, with some of the latter entering the sauce as it simmers. Some meat that I have is crumbled and cooked lightly, then I get to work on preparing the base.
"What are you doing?" Caleb looks over after hearing the sounds, and Adam looks over as well, having returned and pulled his pants back on by now.
"You know that dish you guys have," I say. "Where you have some flatbread with toppings on it? Usually cooked vegetables or some oil and herbs and stuff?"
"Yeah."
"This is a later variant of it from my world," I say. "I was pleased when I found out that there are markets that sell vegetables out of season here so I grabbed stuff to do it. It's called pizza and it's pretty good. But the dough needs special treatment."
With Amadikols being a major city, they have both special greenhouses that they can use to grow certain crops all year but also a dimensional gate network that connects to a few other major cities, allowing for the long-distance transport of goods as well. In the week I've been in this city, I've found plenty of ingredients familiar and not in their markets. I've also learned a lot about which foods I know that are here and which ones aren't.
"Pizza?" Adam asks. "Piece of what?"
I pretty much made up the Tielmarn version of the word using the words that match the similar ones in English, so I can understand his confusion.
"No," I say. "That's just the term, translated from mine as best as I could make it. Does sound similar. Anyway, it's a softer dough crust with sauce, cheese, and toppings. Each oven is big enough to make four at once and we have some decent appetites among us. There we go. The base-slash-crust is a round piece of dough. Whether there's a thicker edge to it or not is a personal preference and I prefer thicker, so you leave it up a little."
I finish making the crusts for the other pizzas, of which I make six in total, which is why I'm using both ovens.
Each crust is coated with sauce, then a couple of different cheeses, then I start adding toppings. Two pizzas have several meats as their topping, including the ones I crumbled and cooked. Sausage and beef, along with their version of pepperoni. I do one pizza with just one of each of those, then a pizza with all three plus some vegetables like onions and bell peppers. Diced to pieces of appropriate sizes, of course.
"There's more dough leftover," Adam says.
"Yeah," I say. "Not done yet. We're doing some bread sticks to go on the side."
I shape the bread sticks and brush them with lightly-melted butter before sprinkling an herb blend with garlic powder onto that, then sprinkle a light layer of cheese on top of that before I start moving the pizzas into the oven. Leif helps me with putting the pizzas into the ovens using the tools I had made for this, and the bread sticks will be put in later since they'll cook faster.
To also go on the side, a healthy salad is prepared. I make sure to use vegetables that don't compete with the ones used for the pizzas. It's stupid to put onion slices and tomato pieces (or cherry tomatoes) in a salad to serve alongside a pizza with a tomato sauce and onions on in. At least, that's my personal opinion.
This is something I made sometimes for my little siblings if there weren't too many of us home. Our parents hated me using the stone oven we had but the kids loved having a fresh, home-made pizza that was baked in there instead of the oven. The meltdowns that occurred when I told them it was banned was one of the few times our parents actually made a smart move. I learned how to make it from scratch and even how to toss the dough just to make it even 'better' for the kids.
Drinks for tonight include beer, ale, some red wine, and lemonade.
When it's time to pull the pizzas out of the oven, I use compressed air to slice them (and to separate the bread sticks). Everything is set out on the table with spare pizzas on the counter, then we start eating.
Predictably, Adam and Caleb only want to eat the meat pizzas while Leif wants to try a slice of each. Everyone ends up trying the supreme and the salad as well regardless of their preferences and no food is left once we're done eating. I don't need to ask how they liked the meal because they all commented about it before.
"So," I say as Caleb gets to work on cleaning the dishes. "What was with the loser-has-to-streak thing?"
"Adam and I got into a debate on if anything would be said if we ran naked down the street," Leif tells me. "I told him that they'd probably just think of a demihuman dragon doing it as 'that's just how they are' because of the view of them as beasts in some people. And that for my people, 'no one understands the mind of a fairy', so they'd just accept that it's probably something we do, especially if I was casually walking down the street. Adam was arguing that they'd probably say something and maybe even arrest him, so we made a deal and that's how that happened."
I guess that's one way to settle an argument.
"Alright," I say. "I'm planning on checking out the first stage of the Holy Dungeon tomorrow. Form what I've learned, it should be a beginner area. I just want to check it out and see some of the stuff in there, then I'll kill the Zone Boss so that I can just go straight there whenever I want to take on the second Zone. There's no need to come with me, but if anyone wants to I won't complain as long as they behave. I will also be doing some grinding for my [Elemental Wizard] Class, too. Keep in mind that the place is fairly large and I'm going to be spending some time doing stuff, so I may be in there for two to four days."
Each stage of the Holy Dungeon is extremely large, according to my research. Just reaching the area with the Zone Boss for Zone 1 can take an entire day and I don't plan on rushing things.
"I'll stay here," Adam says. "No one's messing with the house right now but they might if you leave it alone. They're at least not going to do anything if someone's home. Presumably."
"If they do, I'll make sure they regret it," I tell him. "First by attempting to 'negotiate' repayment. If they get physical, they'll probably learn what it means to take on a Summoned who can solo a Dungeon with four Zones within two months of appearing on this world."
Though hopefully, things don't come to that. I hate dealing with petty conflicts and would rather everyone just leaves me alone.
"Can I come with you?" Leif asks. "It's better than being bored around the house and I want to try and get some more Experience, too."
"Sure," I answer. "Caleb?"
"Going to continue my investigations," Caleb looks apologetic. "Otherwise I'd take you up on that, but I really need to find out what happened to the team."
"Alright," I say. "Then it'll just be Leif and me heading into the Dungeon tomorrow. Minds can be changed up until we leave, though. Since that's settled, I'm going to go take a shower, then soak in the bath for a bit if anyone wants to join me."
Adam and Leif both say they will while Caleb says he'll join us after he finishes the dishes. Leif doesn't have sex with us but that doesn't mean he won't join us for a nice soak.