Chapter 5

The bat turned out to be a meagre meal, mostly bone and sinew with no real meat on it. And the lack of any seasoning was also evident, but that was fine with that, I never was a great appreciator of culinary arts anyways. Food has mostly been just a source fuel for me, so I wasn’t too troubled by the taste. When I was done with my meal, I went to lean against the tree trunk that I felled, taking a short break to gather my mana and started to ponder what my next course of action should be.

Following the water downstream might be my best option at this point, it might lead me to a bigger source of water. And people tend to build towns and cities close to sources of water.

After an hour of letting my mana regenerate I decided to start on my journey again.

I walked for what must have been for hours before it started to get dark, so I decided to make camp here. I went to find some firewood and this proofed to be an easy enough task. There were a lot of sticks and branches lying all around the place. I quickly gathered a few armfuls of branches and made a campfire with my magic.

Now that I had a roaring campfire in front of me, I wanted to take a look at it with my Arcane manipulation turned on. The fire was releasing similar glowing mist as everything else around me. The only difference was the colour of it; it was red.

So trees and the plant life produce green mana, the ground brown, water from the released blue, dead leaves and the bat corpse produced black as they were slowly decomposing and the yellow must have been coming from the sun. It looks like its all pretty simply colour coded.

I’m sure there is more complexity to this, but for now, it looks to be pretty simple. My mana, on the other hand, is completely colourless. The only time it had any colour was when I gathered most of it to cast Pillar of Flame for the first time.

I was content with having just my new fire spell; I didn’t think it a good idea to experiment more with new spells until I gained more knowledge on how magic and spells work. For now, however, I would try to deal with any problems just by using my Arcane manipulation and my one spell. So I started training by creating small fires about the size of tennis balls and shooting them at targets around me. For my targets I chose, branches that were swaying in the wind and falling leaves and pretty much anything else moving, trying to make shots as hard as possible. I continued this until I ran out of mana, after which I went to sleep. 

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It has been two days now, since my encounter with the hare — two days of walking and practising with my Arcane manipulation and Pillar of Flame. The flames I shot with my Arcane manipulation wasn’t too strong or mana efficient, the mana cost would increase based on how big the fire I created was and how far I shot it. I could shoot a ball of fire the size of a tennis ball accurately, to a distance of fifty feet, about twenty times before I ran out of mana. I wasn’t going to use the flames as attacks I was mainly practising my accuracy.

For attacking I was going to use my Pillar of Flame, channelling a lot less mana to the spell so I wouldn’t repeat what happened during the creation of the spell. And like I thought actual spells were a lot easier to control compared to Arcane manipulation. I found out that even if I fed less mana to the spell, its power to burn through trees didn't lessen much, only the size was smaller. So with a lot less mana I could create a beam of fire thick as my wrist, that still easily burned through the trees. I even tried it on a few boulders I came across. After channelling the spell for few seconds on the rock, it started to melt a hole in it.

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I did come across a few more hares and some squirrels during the past two days and managed to kill them without ruining too much of the meat. But I hadn’t come across any bigger animals or seen any such tracks.

In the evening of the second day, when the sun was starting to set. The small stream I was following finally connected to a river. The river was about forty to sixty feet wide, its waters moving fast, almost turning it to rapids. And few hundred feet upstream I could see a wall, made out of grey granite. The wall was old and in terrible condition. Most of it was toppled down and covered in vines and moss.

Finally finding some sign of civilisation I started to head toward the broken wall, once I reached the wall, I could see that it used to run over the river. The overhang was collapsed and submerged under water. Even though the wall was broken, it still stood a good twenty feet high. But since it was already dark, I couldn’t see how far into the forest it went. Deciding that this was as good of a place as any to bed down for tonight, I started to make camp. I was going to try and climb the wall tomorrow morning, so I needed my rest. 

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I was woken up in the middle of the night, by a wolves howl coming from somewhere on the other side of the wall. I quickly stood up and moved to the other side of my campfire, that was just a few glowing red embers now and started to scan my surroundings.

Damn it; it’s too dark here to see anything.

As I was thinking this, I could hear rocks falling down the sides of the broken wall, and instinctively cast Pillar of Flame towards the sound. Some of the dry vines caught a flame as my spell hit the wall. And I could see a sizeable shadowy outline of a canine figure. It was a lot bigger than the wolves I have seen at a zoo back home; in fact, it was the size horse.

The beast leapt down from the wall, making more rocks tumble down as it did so. It landed only ten feet away from me and charged. I didn’t have time to react, as it closed the distance and bit down on my still outstretched hand. I let out a cry of pain as it did so.

I had never felt such pain before, and I lost the ability to concentrate on anything but the pain. It started shaking its head, clearly trying to rip my arm. I was still screaming in pain as it let go in the middle of shaking me from side to side, this ended up tossing me a good ten feet to the side. I landed hard against a tree, and the force of the impact knocked the wind out of me. I laid there heaving and retching trying to catch my breath, as it slowly started to stalk around me while letting out a deep growling sound. I shakily pointed my uninjured hand at it and cast Pillar of Flame at full force, the flames were even bigger than they were when I cast it the first time.

The wolf out of pure instinct, I think, tried to jump to the side almost dodging my spell. But I managed to hit its hindquarters. And as the flames faded, my vision swam. Before blacking out, I could see the front half of its body falling, missing the back legs completely. 

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When I woke up, It didn't feel like the pain in my arm had lessened at all, and I let out a groan as I tried to blink the tears away from my eyes. When I finally managed to clear my eyes, I saw another System window in front of me.

Congratulation! You have levelled up! Congratulation! You have levelled up! Congratulation! You have levelled up!

I was not really being able to concentrate on levelling up while in so much pain, I instead took a wary look at my arm. And all most passed out again. My arm was completely ripped to shreds where the wolf had bitten me, I could see down to the bone, and there were few chunks of flesh hanging down, only supported by thin pieces of skin. I had to do something quickly, or I would surely die. In a panic, I activated Arcane manipulation and started to gather mana around the wounds. Willing and hoping for my gathered mana to heal the wound. It took what felt like minutes, but in reality was only a few seconds, before I started to see any effect. I could see the wounds slowly starting to knitting back together, and the pain began to fade slowly. The whole healing process took only a few minutes, and when it was done just thick scars running down my arm was left, covering most of it.

I thought that the four years of medical school wasn't waste of my time after all. As I promptly fell unconscious for exhaustion.

Congratulation! Arcane manipulation has levelled up!