It wasn’t too long before the winter weather waned and spring returned to my town. New buds and blooms appeared, and the birdsong I had been missing returned around me. Of course, to me, birdsong still meant the murder of small animals for EXP, but nonetheless, I was glad to see the end of the worst of the rainy season.

More time outside and away from prying eyes meant more training and magic practice, and it wasn’t too long before the culmination of months of work paid out as I hit level 3. Alongside my level came 3 SP, an increase in HP, and a sizable bump to my MP. I now had 29 total HP and 34 total MP. With my previous level, I had gained more HP than MP, possibly because I gained all my EXP from physical training. This time, it was the inverse, but I had slacked on physical training through the winter and had mostly been practicing magic.

By now I had a solid grasp on various techniques using earth magic, a decent idea of what I could do with small amounts of water, including how much I could pull out of the atmosphere comfortably without causing myself harm, and a rudimentary grasp of air magic and fire magic. Both of those were a bit too dangerous to practice indoors without my mother figuring out what I was up to, but come spring I was able to apply my knowledge of earth and water magic to air and fire quickly and had a decent grasp of both.

Upon achieving level 3, I immediately stopped all elemental magic. I didn’t want to accidentally assign more of my SP to 4-point magic. While gaining more strength in that field was worthwhile, I was not the type of person who wanted narrow breadth. I wanted a broad range of experiences, even if that meant, for the moment, my skills in each would remain shallow.

The first thing I had to do was pick up 5-point magic. I had already read both of my mother’s grimoires cover to cover and done much additional theorizing of my own. It was hard to maintain it all in my head; I really wanted to get my hands on some writing tools of my own so I could start writing my own notes down.

I pulled a pre-prepared 5-point magic circle stone disc from my inventory, like the one I used to do my 4-point magic with. I had several different kinds of stone discs prepared, of differing sizes, as well as some other stone contraptions I had worked on through the winter. I had also practiced summoning a magic circle from my inventory, casting, and then storing the disc, as swiftly as possible, so that I could act more responsively and on the fly.

For now, safe in my yard and away from prying eyes, I didn’t need to act swift, but rather, carefully. Despite having much more MP, I didn’t want to over-tax myself and cause injury. I set my 5-point magic circle down in front of me, opened my profile screen to monitor, and started carefully channeling 1 MP at a time into an attempt to create light, like I had initially done to learn earth magic.

Skill acquired: 5-Point Magic

It had taken a surprisingly small amount of MP to get the skill. I was now at 30/34 MP. Of course, the light magic that was cast was also quite small, and making a sufficiently large light would likely drain my magic faster. I dismissed the light immediately and swapped the stone disc.

As much as I wanted to play with 5-point magic and discover all sorts of ways of using it, the fact of the matter would be that I didn’t really have sufficient MP to do much. My mother’s grimoires strongly implied that a weak 4-point mage wouldn’t have the power to cast strong 5-point magic. Once I had my skill points allocated, I would regularly practice, and in turn gain EXP, so that I had a strong grasp of the basics for when I leveled up further. For that, I only needed the base skill. Which brought me to my second skill point, and an admittedly dangerous experiment.

I swapped out the 5-point magic circle for a 6-point magic circle.

I knew there was a lot of danger in what I was about to do, but after experiencing 6-point magic at the Church, this wasn’t something I could ignore. If I got hurt, having healing magic would be absolutely critical. I had no idea how long it would be before I could develop any kind of healing potions, if it were possible at all. I strongly believed that I could make a weak healing potion just by juicing certain fruits which already had a decent healing property, but it would only be possible to concentrate that so far. Until I figured out the truth of how HP and MP worked, I needed to rely on what this world could already teach me.

I withdrew a small stone knife that I had previously formed from my inventory. I wasn’t looking forward to this. I also knew that if I screwed this up and survived, I would somehow have to hide this from my mother, so instead of cutting myself somewhere obvious like my palm, I removed my pants and made a small swipe against my upper thigh. I hissed as the shallow cut was made and I started to bleed. I checked my stats for damage and was satisfied by the 1 HP of lost health.

I had several theories about healing magic. A healing spell would likely work one of two ways. Either it would have a flat cost, in which case there were likely multiple levels of healing magic, and one should probably be taught properly how they work and how to cast them so they didn’t accidentally kill themselves from MP depletion. Or, healing magic required a comparable amount of MP for the amount of HP they were trying to heal. Of course, normal mages in this world who didn’t have appraisal abilities could only roughly estimate these details, rather than know definitively like I did. So even if healing did work that way, they might use a relatively pre-determined and well-practiced amount of MP to cast healing magic as if it acted like flat cost spells, knowing that a certain level of healing was needed for a certain level of injury.

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Given that I had very fine-tuned control over elemental magic, it was my assumption that it would be similar for healing magic. Finely-tuned MP-variable magic didn’t preclude the existence of flat-cost MP spells, whether or not that was how magic was traditionally taught. On the other hand, flat-cost MP spells as the only way to do magic would preclude MP-variable magic, and I had already shown MP-variable magic to exist, at least for 4-point magic–and, though I had only successfully cast a light spell once, seemed to be true for 5-point magic as well. I was simply going to apply the same theory to this form of 6-point magic.

Still, I was nervous. I had little hard data about this. I knew Vorel, probably on his own against the will of the Church, had practiced and achieved 6-point magic, but he had a huge amount of magic power. I knew that if I was careless I could accidentally lose focus and cast healing magic that could get out of control and suck me dry. Killing myself by trying to heal a small wound would be a little funny, except for the fact that I wouldn’t be around to laugh about it. For now, since I was the target, if I couldn’t make the magic work with a small, controlled amount of MP, then I would simply clean this injury and live with it and let it heal naturally rather than force my own healing.

With my 6-point magic circle in hand, I focused my mind on one of the two triangles, the heal-cure-buff trifecta, and mentally washed out the opposing smite-curse-debuff triangle. I hovered my hand over my wound, and, focusing on 1 MP of magic at a time, willed it to heal.

Nothing happened, and slowly, I ratcheted up the MP I was willing to pour into the spell. 1 MP became 2, then 3, then 4, and suddenly I gasped as I felt a warmth in my leg and the wound stitched itself back together. It felt similar to what was cast on me when I went to the Church, but not exactly the same. This felt both targeted and surface-level. The spell the priest had cast on me had felt like it targeted something deeper. The wound in my leg closed and I looked at my notification.

Skill acquired: 6-Point Magic

I exhaled loudly, then pumped my fist. Hell yeah.

It seemed like 4 MP was the minimum amount of magic needed to acquire a new magic circle. Admittedly, with my first circle and my stone manipulation, I was later able to subdivide the stone into smaller chunks which required less MP, but at that point I already had the skill. Unfortunately, I couldn’t un-learn 4-point magic to see if it were possible to use 1 MP to re-learn the skill. However, from my mother’s grimoire, it sounded like most mages start by casting a small fire, and I would bet anything that the smallest fire you could cast to gain 4-point magic would drain 4 MP. I’d have to keep this in mind if I ever did try to teach someone else magic.

All that said, it had taken 4 MP to close up a 1 HP wound. Of course people of this world would see learning 6-point magic as dangerous. Even if, now that I had the skill, I could do the same with half as much MP, a young mage could easily find themselves in a position where they tried to heal more HP worth of damage than they had both MP and HP combined, which would almost certainly kill them. Despite having 6-point magic now, I would have to be extremely cautious in using it, both until I had a lot more MP to play with but also until I had add a few points into the skill so that I could get more out of each magic point cast, as I had found to be the case with 4-point magic.

I would need to experiment later on with more cutting and healing, despite cringing at the thought of all that self harm. Still, I had gained a lot of EXP already just from the one cast, and probably from the damage as well. It could also be a powerful tool to level up in these early levels. I also couldn’t help but marvel at the magic itself: my leg was completely healed and unscathed, no scar to speak of. I summoned some water out of the atmosphere to wash away the trickle of blood and put my pants back on.

I was down to my final skill point, and I had something I really wanted to do. I pulled some small wood twigs out of my inventory and made a little pile, then another thicker stick which I had sharpened to a point. I pulled a piece of nodmouse meat out of my inventory and speared it on my sharpened twig. I cast a small flame into my pile of twigs, and blew on it to get the fire crackling a bit, then held the meat over the fire, turning slowly.

As with literacy, this didn’t work like I had thought it would. I knew how to cook from my old life, at least well enough to cook a small piece of meat. I didn’t even feel like I needed to cook it well, just heat the meat up until it wasn’t raw. Yet, when I finally felt like the time was right and removed my speared nodmouse meat from my tiny fire, it was basically charcoal. I put it back in my inventory.

Nodmouse meat (ruined)

The (ruined) meat of a nodmouse. Inedible.

I apologized to the poor dead nodmouse whose remains I had ruined. It had given me EXP, but to waste its body like this felt pretty terrible. Still, I had a decent stack of these morsels in my inventory, so I tried it again.

It took a few tries, but finally, I felt something click and lifted the mouse out of the fire at just the right time. It smelled pretty good.

Skill acquired: Cooking

I dropped it in my inventory and took a look.

Nodmouse meat (cooked)

The (cooked) meat of a nodmouse. Edible. Restores 1 MP.

I summoned it back into my hands, and juggled it a bit as it was still steaming. I blew on it a few times and popped it in my mouth. A bit chewy, but surprisingly rich and tasty. I watched my 1 point of MP recover on my stats window.

This would change everything.