The most rewarding attempt of all had been earth magic. Simply shoving the element out in front of her, like with [Mana Pulse], had caused a rippling wave of dirt and rocks to shoot forward out of the ground ahead of her. It barely travelled ten feet in front of her, but the shallow cone of destruction and rubble spread out from a narrow point just inches in front of her toes to wider than she was tall at its farthest away. Morgan thought it certainly looked impressive, and so did Lulu, if the puffball’s drawn out wurble was anything to go by. The ensuing [Earth Wave] spell adding itself to her repertoire was equally welcome. But the awesomeness of those things interested her far less than what she’d learned from using [Spell Channeling], and a more gentle approach.
A little practice as she walked had earned Morgan the spell [Earth Sculpt], and she’d gained [Earth Affinity] while absentmindedly molding a ball of Mana-infused stone into different shapes over the course of an hour or so. She could manage it without actually touching the stone, but the magic seemed to flow much more easily to her will if she used her hands. The stone was soft like putty as long as she kept a trickle of her Mana flowing into it.
She was keeping an eye out for a suitable place to bunker down for the night, planning to use earth magic to burrow in and reinforce a suitable campsite. Morgan had found she could dig in two different ways. She could move the dirt and rocks out and push them around, or with a higher expenditure of Mana, she could compress them into a stronger form. The earth got harder to work with the denser and more compact it was, but she could overcome that with more Mana and a bit of effort.
A promising spot presented itself just before the dusk fell to night. A large tree had fallen over, and its clump of roots had pulled a massive plug of dirt out of a gentle slope. This tree had been dead for some time, and the trunk was mostly rotted away and covered in a thick blanket of moss. The excavated opening faced down the slope toward a small, open meadow nestled in the forest. The gap opened by the treefall had allowed the smaller plants and grasses to rush in to take advantage. “OH! BERRIES!” exclaimed Morgan with sudden excitement. With [Naked Instinct], the berries stood out like bright clumps to her eyes.
The skill had been giving her lots of extra information the entire day as she walked. It didn’t display detailed information right onto her eyeballs; it was more like things she looked at had a taste to her vision. Lots of vines and other plants had felt sort of itchy to look at. A clump of mushrooms on the side of a tree had almost made her gag to look at them. Some of the trees had borne what looked like large pecans the size of her fist on them, but while she got the impression they were edible, she hadn’t been hungry enough to spare the effort of trying to knock some of them down. The berries looked like clusters of blackberries writ extra-large, and the only feeling she got from looking at them was tasty and delicious. Resolved not to rush into another churple type mistake, she left the berries alone for the moment and turned to try to excavate herself a campsite.
“Okay, Lulu, this is probably gonna take a few minutes,” she said as she plucked the loofah off her shoulder and set it on the fallen tree. The scrubby set off to explore the immediate area while Morgan turned toward the partially excavated hole. She dug in by compacting the earth outward to leave an opening roughly as tall as herself and around half as wide. The path inward she flattened out, and the ceiling she condensed even further for extra strength. She worked her way in at a slight upward angle for almost a dozen feet, hoping the sloped floor would keep water draining away. The strain had given her two more levels in [Earth Sculpt] and another in [Spell Channeling]. She stopped to rest a moment, leaning up against the newly formed cave wall. “It definitely looks like the harder something is, the faster you level the skill,” she said to Lulu as the scrubby made its way over to investigate her progress.
While her Mana recovered, Morgan decided to use the last of the day’s light to gather some of the berries in the meadow. She heard thunder rumble in the distance and decided to wait until morning to make a trip back to the last creek she’d passed. With a quick push of Mana, she pulled a sort of bowl-shaped shelf out of the wall of her cave and set her double handful of berries in it, and then resumed her excavations. She decided on a simple single-room dome, and she had to stop twice to let her Mana restore itself. She partook of a tiny bite of the berries both times, simply to make sure they wouldn’t cause her to be violently ill, or worse. She had no intention of exposing herself to something like the churples ever again.
The clouds of the impending storm soon stole the last of the evening light, bringing her efforts to a temporary halt. She stood there in thought for a few minutes before an idea came to mind. With as gentle an effort as she could manage, she pushed a trickle of elemental fire Mana into the palm of her hand. The small flame sputtered, and it took effort to keep it from expanding into a conflagration. As with everything else, her magic felt almost eager to be let loose. While that was great for shooting lightning bolts, and throwing fire, or moving earth, it made small things tricky. “So with just a little fire Mana I can make a light,” she said to Lulu. “OH, SHIT!”
Trying to talk had diverted her attention, and the candle-sized flame had engulfed her hand until she shook it out. A brief moment of healing fixed the blistering skin, and she tried again. This time she focused on holding the flame farther away from her hands. It drained her Mana nearly twice as fast to control the fire barely a foot away from her upturned palm, but that was preferable to burning herself. The hard part was, the flame just didn’t want to be still. If she let it, the fire simply roiled in a sphere that spat jets of flame several inches in every direction.
With her Mana almost halfway depleted and her frustration building, Morgan gave up on holding the fire still. Moving her hand back and forth, the fire followed, and the drain on her Mana actually lessened. “Huh,” she said, this time managing to keep the fire under control while she talked. “If it likes to move, then I’ll just try to let it move!” She let the flame move around her hand, keeping it from getting too close to her skin, then she held it up in both hands and simply let it twist in place. It settled into a rotation that just felt right. And then she received a notification.
You have gained the skill [Fire Affinity]! Fire gives life and burns it away! Your ability to sense the forces and flows of Fire have increased, improving the effectiveness and efficiency of all Fire spells!
You have learned the Spell [Candleflame]! Weave Fire into a persistent orb of magic to produce light and warmth! Practice and experience will help you focus and control the flame for increased power and efficiency!
The Affinity didn’t make the flame easier to control, at least not directly. Rather, it let Morgan sense more detail about the flame itself as the Mana was converted into fire. That, on the other hand, gave her a better feel for how the fire wanted to move, which did make it easier to nudge it into a shape she wanted. Guiding the flame instead of forcing it into a specific shape was far more efficient, and the drain on her Mana dropped low enough that it was recovering faster than it was being spent to maintain the orb of flame.
With the flame hovering over one hand, Morgan tried to resume her digging—“tried” being the operative word, as using two spells at once proved more than she could currently manage. Moving hundreds of pounds of dirt at once required a lot more concentration than the little flame did, and focusing on the Earth magic caused the Fire spell to sputter and flare in intensity.
“Well, this isn’t going to work, Lulu.” The scrubby gave no response; it seemed preoccupied with scrubbing its way back and forth across the ceiling, leaving polished stone gleaming in its wake. Morgan stood there for a few minutes in thought, completely at a loss and letting the flame slowly rotate in place. Then she tried looping the flow of Mana guiding the fire back on itself into a circle.
A very singed and wheezing Morgan struggled to get back to her feet near the entrance to the tunnel a few minutes later. A very angrily warbling Lulu made its way back into the cave,
smoke still steaming off the scrubby’s lacy fronds. “Okay,” she gasped as [Naked Recovery] healed the last of the blisters that had been burned across her arms and chest. The loofah’s angry tone shifted to one of concern as it hopped up Morgan’s arm and began gently scrubbing the soot and singed skin away. She gave it a grateful pat and sat there waiting for her Stamina to recover. “That didn’t go as planned. As soon as the circle closed, it just glomped up Mana and burned it up all at once…”
The healing had left her exhausted, so she sat and thought while she ate a supper of berries. “I think closing the circle just let it squeeze the Mana too hard,” she said, holding up another [Candleflame] orb. Lulu had finished administering her impromptu pseudo-bath, and edged away from Morgan and the glowing ball of fire with a nervous sounding trill. As she formed another circle with the Mana, she left several gaps in it. It took more of her Mana to keep the fire rotating this way, like the gaps were resistors in a circuit. Almost as if the magic had a will of its own, the segments of the circle bent between her hands, forming a slight spiral instead of a circle, followed by a very surprising notification.
You have gained the skill [Runic Enchantment]! Magic follows patterns woven of will and imagination! Inscribe runes with magic to store or empower permanent spells! Practice and experience will allow you to create more detailed runes and inscriptions for more advanced and unique enchantments!
You have learned the Spell [Candleflame Rune]! Anchor your [Candleflame] to any non-living material able to withstand the flame!
Morgan’s dancing and whooping in celebration was cut short as she realized the message gave no indication of exactly how to anchor runes. Sticking the orb to the stone wall didn’t do anything at all when she tried it a few times. Pushing the Fire Mana into the stone proved more effective, although the stone began to rapidly heat up under her hand. Then she tried pulling the Earth Element Mana away from where the rune would fit, almost like a socket. It was like writing or drawing with a pencil thinner than a hair. The Fire Mana snapped into place in the minute gaps with an inaudible pop that Morgan felt in her mind, the lines of the rune lighting up like glowing red embers.
“BINGO! Hahaha!”
Morgan now had a fist-sized orb of flame mounted directly on the stone wall of her cave, and it took no concentration at all to keep it burning. She could feel a tiny pull on her Mana, but it was less than what her regen provided. She placed a second light on the opposite wall, and the drain felt just about equal to her natural Mana recovery rate. “Now I can see what I’m doing!” she said to Lulu as the scrubby purbled in agreement and made its way back to her shoulder.
With the light now taken care of, she returned to excavating a decent room to spend the night in. She had no plans to settle in one place for too long, since she hoped to find people, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t use her magic to make up for some of the comforts she lacked. She settled on a simple single room dome, pushing the walls out ‘til she had it about six of her paces across. Her efforts were rewarded with another level in [Earth Sculpt], and in [Earth Affinity] as well. Each level in [Earth Sculpt] allowed her to move more earth for a given expenditure of Mana, and each level in [Earth Affinity] allowed her to push more of her Mana into the earth with greater ease and control. Within an hour she was finished with the main dome, and pulling a raised section out of the wall for a couch-type bed took only a negligible effort. She placed another [Candleflame Rune] on the interior wall, and then sat down on the stone bed.
The stone was cold and uncomfortable on her bare bottom, but a sudden insight had Morgan sprinting back outside with a protesting Lulu tumbling off her shoulder. Thunder rumbled overhead, but the rains had yet to arrive. She jogged over to the fallen tree and inspected the fluffy, verdant moss that coated the nearly school bus-sized trunk. She anchored another light to a column of earth she pulled up from the ground so she could use both hands, and began to pry a section of the moss away from the log. The thunder grew closer as she worked to dig herself a rough rectangle of the moss away from the log, intact. The bark had crumbled underneath, so the hardest part was simply tearing through the interwoven fibers of the moss itself.
Rain began to patter down in fat and heavy drops as Morgan carried her improvised mossy bedroll into the cave. The blanket of moss was slightly larger than her stone couch, but pulling out more stone to match it was mostly trivial. She went back outside long enough to blast another part of the tree apart with a bolt of lightning, gathering an armful of firewood from the debris. After one last trip outside for another double handful of berries, she withdrew to the shelter of the cave as the storm overhead finally broke loose with a downpour of heavy rain. She cut off the rune she’d placed outside for light, and sat back down on the now moss-covered bed. She pulled another bowl-shaped wedge of stone out of the wall for the berries, and sat for a moment in contemplation.
Lulu was vigorously scrubbling its way all over the mossy mat, consuming the gritty debris and dirt from the moss, and leaving it with a soft and silky green shine. Morgan gave it several pats in adoration and approval and got up to leave the loofah to it, walking to the other side of the room to work on a fireplace. It hadn’t yet been cold in this new world, but the rain and the night were unquestionably getting cooler. She intended to make or find some sort of clothing or equipment soon, so she could test out the limits of her Naked aspect and skills and the restrictions the system messages had warned her about. Being stuck naked all the time around people, or worse, in the middle of an eventual winter, wasn’t high on her list of desires. Given her experience so far, she fully expected to gain a cold- or frost-related resistance eventually, but if they worked anything like [Heat Resistance] and [Pain Resistance], it would merely make things bearable, not pleasant.
She started on her fireplace by pulling a broad, shallow bowl out from the wall across from her bed, about half as high as her knees. Above that she extended a dozen finger-wide rods of stone to form a sort of simple fire grate. She inscribed a [Candleflame Rune] in the middle of the bowl below the grate, but left it inactive for the moment, instead of channeling Mana through it to power the flame. After stacking several chunks of firewood on the grate, she activated the rune with a slight touch of Mana. The fire licked up between the gaps in the grate, and less than a minute later Morgan had a cozy fire going.
Cutting off the enchanted rune, she realized she hadn’t accounted for the smoke. Another minute later, she realized she’d forgotten the rain as well, when the chimney she’d hurried to open through the earth above let in a torrent of water that promptly put her fire out. Quickly, she extended a cap over the chimney’s top, the effort of working Mana that far from her body through that much earth nearly draining her entire Mana pool. Taking Lulu’s wurble as snickering laughter, she reactivated the rune and sat back to let the magic flame dry and reignite her cozy campfire. Feeling quite proud, she made herself comfortable on the moss mattress. As the wood dried and the fire began burning once again, she cut off all the rune flames. As she sat there watching the wood burn, she finally pulled up her status menu once again.
Status Information for: Morgan Mackenzie
Level - 8
Primary Class: [Locked]
Secondary Class: [Locked]
Health - 210/210
Stamina - 224/224
Mana - 152/152
STR - 16
AGI - 16
CON - 20
VIT - 28
INT - 19
Stat points available to distribute: 0
Current Skills:
[Naked Instinct]
[Naked Recovery (Lvl 7)]
[Naked Camouflage]
[Naked Resilience]
-[Pain Resistance (Lvl 9)]
-[Heat Resistance (Lvl 8)]
-[Lightning Resistance]
-[Mana Resistance (Lvl 10/Mastered)]
[Naked Magic]
-[Mana Pulse (Lvl 10/Mastered)]
-[Spell Channeling (Lvl 5)]
-[Mana Affinity (Lvl 6)]
[Naked Elementalism]
-[Fire Affinity]
-[Earth Affinity (Lvl 2)]
-[Lightning Bolt]
-[Flame Bolt]
-[Candleflame]
-[Earth Sculpt (Lvl 4)]
-[Earth Wave]
[Runic Enchantment]
-[Candleflame Rune]
Skill Points available: 5
Titles, Mantles, and Aspects
[Worldwalker (Title)] - You have travelled through the void between the many worlds! Every world is different, each with its own gifts and dangers. To help you survive strange new places, you gain a slight boost to health and an increased ability to learn new things! (+50 to Health, +50% increased gains to Skill Experience)
[Blessed of the Guardian Tree (Title)] - Through an offering of the blood of your enemies, you have reawakened the ancient tree! You need never fear its hungry roots! Future offerings or actions that benefit the tree may enhance this Title!
[Naked Affinity (Aspect)] - Experience gained and points rewarded are doubled while you are [Naked] and [Unequipped]. Base recovery rate of all resource pools are increased. [Naked] variants of skills and abilities enhanced. Rate of skill and ability improvement greatly enhanced. While items or clothing are equipped, this Aspect’s effects are disabled and [Naked] skills and abilities are locked.
The skill list was definitely growing, and Morgan absolutely loved being able to do magic in this world. But the [Naked Affinity] aspect was beginning to concern her. All of her magic so far seemed to stem from Naked aspected skills. While she’d never been a prude, she was most certainly not an exhibitionist either. She also had no idea what this world’s system counted as clothing and equipment, and as of yet, she had no way to test anything out. Resolving to figure those things out as soon as a safe opportunity presented itself, Morgan fell asleep watching her improvised campfire.
Skyclad (Fate's Anvil Book 1) Page 8