I rolled the crystal between my fingers. It was small and cool, faceted but not sharp, and the exact same turquoise color that the MP potions I had stolen from the shopkeeper were.
I had two of these now, one from each of the rock-shelled turtles I dismantled. My inventory called them magic crystals, and described them as a “build up of magical energy in the bodies of beasts.” This could explain the existence of MP potions, and slightly relieved me of my concerns about the potential use of human-based ingredients in those. I stored the crystal away as I considered what this meant.
If some beasts–presumably beasts of a certain strength of magic concentration–dropped magic crystals, and if that was the main ingredient of MP potions, that might explain why there weren’t HP potions. One would need some kind of “health crystal” to make an HP potion, and I didn’t think those existed. So maybe I was overestimating the level of conspiracy with regards to the Church controlling healing power, but I didn’t rule anything out yet.
The fact that magic could build up and crystallize in a beast also suggested a tangible, real-world, magical element of some kind which was related to MP. What would happen if I put this crystal inside my body? Would it reject it as an infection, or be utilized and raise my potential MP? Could MP be overcharged, and if not, how does the limit work? What else could these crystals be used for? What was the magical element?
I was surprised when I discovered my mother’s grimoires didn’t contain any theory on magic itself, and how it existed. Clearly people knew about these crystals, because I was virtually positive they were used to make MP potions. Did they just not have the knowledge yet, in this world, to form a theory of how it was that magic existed? Was it because they just took it as the fact, having no experience of a world without magic? There must be magic researchers who studied this thing, people more like scientists. Perhaps I had only met the types of magic researchers who were focused on gaining magic power itself, rather than understanding why and how it worked.
Setting that aside, I had a number of new inventory items after dismantling all my prey. My inventory called them “braygulls,” “jumpcrabs,” and “rocky shieldbacks.” I had meat from all three creatures, and when I removed the dismantled rocky shieldback meat I was surprised at the yield amount. Cooking this whole thing would be difficult, but I wanted to in order to get a sense of how much MP recovery came from an entire rocky shieldback carcass so I could compare equal amounts of its meat to other meats and gauge the difference. Putting rough cuts or pieces of meat back into my inventory would qualify them as “modified” from the whole, with a variable recovery amount, rather than giving me a new item description with a new fixed MP recovery value. Partial items didn’t stack.
In addition to the meat, I had the braygull feathers and bones, jumpcrab shells, rocky shieldback shells, bones, and hooves, as well as offal from all three beasts. I was getting tired of seeing all the offal in my inventory, as it seemed useless to me. I was only saving it thinking it could be useful as bait or chum, which would be worthwhile if I could use it to convert waste into more meat later on.
The rocky shieldback offal was the first offal I saw which also had contents and was able to be further dismantled, which gave me rocky shieldback heart, rocky shieldback liver, and a modified rocky shieldback offal item which no longer contained those contents and could no longer be dismantled. It reminded me of the difference between the original seabass I appraised at the pier and the modified one after it was cleaned by the fishmonger. The nuance meant I had to inspect everything a bit closer, both in my inventory and in reality when I summoned objects. I knew that there was some nuance lost by virtue of the inventory metasystem itself, but assumed that if something was important, it would be accessible in some way.
I couldn’t help but wonder at where the information was actually coming from. How did the inventory ascribe names and details to these items? How did it decide what was an item or waste? It was as if my appraisal skill tapped into some deeper, world-wide knowledge. Dismantling sometimes provided significantly less than the original item, like how you could dismantle a cherry tomato for the seeds, but lose the rest of the fruit. What happened to that matter?
It was easy to just dismiss it as “video game logic,” and I would do so more often than not in order to not lose my mind and instead to be able to focus on my real-world concerns, but the scientist in me couldn’t always accept that. This was the world I was living in and it had to obey some kind of rules. The humans of Earth didn’t always understand the laws of physics and the universe, nor did they know how it all came to be, but over generations of scientific pursuit, we were able to form a picture and better understand and theorize about the laws and truth of reality. I wanted to meet people who were doing that in this world. Of course, it was my metasystem, which I was positive was unique, and my own reincarnation that posed the largest questions. I would probably never fully understand it all.
I set the thought aside and instead focused on my more immediate problem. I had gained quite a lot of experience from the beach day, especially from killing the rocky shieldbacks. I wanted to get back there. I knew that the experience would start to drop off the more I killed, but for now that was the fastest route to level 4. Even if I could convince my mother to take me, without my father being present and distracting her, I didn’t think I could sneak away to kill more beasts. I also suspected the nesting season was a short period of time and after that the shieldbacks would be hard to find. I could kill the babies when they hatched, but that was a bit dark, even for me, and I didn’t think they would yield much EXP. They certainly wouldn’t have the fully developed shell yet, which I wanted to experiment with, and probably no magic crystal yet either.
Sadly, I probably would not get a chance to collect more shieldbacks until the following spring. In the meanwhile, I was getting the feeling that I was running low on inventory space. All the rock, especially with the rocky shieldback shell, was weighing me down. A full inventory didn’t feel the same as if I were carrying a physical load, but still caused a similar fatigue, and took a toll on me mentally as well, a similar exhaustion one felt after too much exercise. I was reluctant to try and hide too many items in the house lest my parents discover them and ask questions. I temporarily buried the shells in the yard, where I practiced my magic away from the gardens, and hoped my mother wouldn’t discover and ask questions about the disturbed earth.
I needed to upgrade my inventory, but I didn’t want to change my plans to upgrade my 6-point magic. It would have to wait until I reached level 8 or 9. That was a ways off, which meant I needed a better hiding place for my loot in the meanwhile.
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.
* * *
Spring turned to summer as I spent my days practicing 5-point magic and doing what little exercise I felt was acceptable for a child of my age. I was getting a good sense for what I could do at my limited skill level and with my limited MP. Creating light was fairly straightforward, and while I wondered how far I could push it and what other uses it might have, mostly I just figured out how much light I could cast, for how long, and for how many points. Dark was a little more complicated, as the magic would blot out all light. I could control the size of the field, but at my level and with my MP, I couldn’t make it very useful. Silence worked like dark, blotting out all sound, but again I couldn’t expand the field. I discovered I could control it two ways, blocking external sounds from entering the field, but also blocking internal sound from exiting the field. It would be useful for stealth.
Sound, like light, would let me use magic to make or alter sounds. It was rather MP costly to generate sounds out of nothing, but for a low cost I could alter existing sounds, mostly pitching my voice. It was then that I realized I could probably use light and dark magic to alter existing light. I toyed around with blocking certain colors of the light spectrum, either generating additional reds, blues, and greens, or blotting out existing ones. From there I played with bending light, just enough to distort, like light moving through a concave or convex lens.
This took weeks, as I often depleted my MP faster than I could regenerate it with food items. I was still holding onto those MP potions for an emergency, but the existence of the magic crystals in my inventory was really making me lose my patience; I wanted to figure out how to make potions and hunt more beasts for additional crystals so I could bust through these plateaus.
I knew all this light and sound magic would add up to illusion magic, but I was worried about zeroing out my MP, so for now I held back. I suspected that a slight pitch change to my voice while slightly bending the light reflecting off my face would be sufficient to create a minor illusion to hide my identity, which could be critical for future plans.
In between training my body and magic, I tried to study more from my mother, without revealing my hand too much. I picked up some more information about my cooking skill from watching her. I wished I had a skill point to acquire the horticulture skill as I helped her in the garden, but there would be plenty of time for that in the years to come. As the summer garden grew back in, I was able to start spiriting away fruits and veggies into my inventory, replacing the meat I was consuming during magic practice.
In this manner, the summer months passed by surprisingly swiftly. My experience earning was diminishing to a slow crawl, and I was starting to think I wouldn’t be able to gain my next level until the following spring. It was hard to stay motivated when I had such little control over my freedom. The occasional bout with reckless casting would sometimes bring in a few points, but it felt horrible to zero out my MP and take damage that way, and I didn’t want to make it a habit. I found myself increasingly dejected as the days started cooling off and my fifth birthday approached. Suffice it to say, I was pretty surprised when my parents sat me down on the day of, and told me that I was no longer a simple child.
“Today is your fifth birthday,” my mother had said. “Do you know what that means?”
“Uh,” I said. “It means I’m five years old?”
“Yes,” my father said, laughing. “But it also means that you’re grown enough to start experiencing the world for yourself.”
What the hell, I thought. Was I being kicked out? At age five? In my world, that was kindergarten age.
“Now that you’re five, you’re old enough to leave the house without us supervising you,” my mother explained. “This is how children grow. You’ll find what you’re best at and what you like doing, and that way you’ll know what training or apprenticeship you’ll want to do when you turn ten.”
Huh. While this seemed like child endangerment and recklessness to me, it made a certain amount of sense. This town seemed relatively safe, but more importantly, this must be the chance for children to gain their first levels. In that way, they would acquire skill points with which to acquire skills. It was only through acquiring skills that these kids would be in a position to train for future occupations and careers. Babying the children of this world would prevent them from growing and thus prevent them from being able to acquire skills at all.
I could see why this world didn’t just have school and education systems. A child of this world can’t acquire skills through knowledge alone, as they must have the points to translate knowledge into skill. The only way to gain skill points was to level up, and leveling up required experience. That meant getting one’s hands dirty and skinning some knees.
“What if I get hurt?” I asked.
My father nodded. “That’s part of growing up. But if you’re ever seriously injured, you go to the Church. I’ll show you where it is later today. Healing is free for children under ten.”
“Um,” I started. I didn’t want to rat out my mother in case she hadn’t told my father. “Mama already took me to the Church once. I got healed then but it wasn’t free.”
My father glanced at my mother, and she made a dismissive motion with her hand. “That was different, we went for a cure because you were sick. Curing costs money, but healing is free.”
My father asked my mother some questions about it and they spoke to each other for a bit as I pondered. I had assumed the Church was a money-grubbing organization squeezing the people dry, but actually, it served a critical and necessary purpose. There was no school save for the school of hard knocks, but with healing magic from the Church, kids probably avoided the worst of what could happen to them while still being able to start gaining experience and leveling up.
“Well,” my father finally said. “We’ll still be taking you to the Church, as we have to let them know you’re five now and to get your identification.”
That gave me pause. I did not love the sound of that.
“After that, they’ll heal you, no questions asked, if ever you’re hurt, up until you turn ten. You should memorize where it is and practice getting back to it, as well as how to get home, before you wander too far. But if you’re ever lost, ask an adult. It’s an adult’s obligation to help a child.”
My mother tousled my hair. “You’re such a smart boy, you’ll be fine. Just stay away from the pier and the beach, the water can be too dangerous.”
As strange as I found this practice, coming from a culture where children were coddled and cared for until nearly adulthood, I couldn’t keep the grin off my face. This was what I had been waiting for. I would have my freedom, which means I could finally start to truly gain experience and level up. I couldn’t wait to get started.