She spent the rest of the day anxiously making preparations, hoping that they would be useful. She peeled several roasted nuts in advance, in case forming a magic seed was really demanding on her calories. She stored them next to her bowl, which she had filled with boiled water, just in case she needed it for some reason. She hadn’t really been able to figure out what that reason might be, but it seemed useful to have laying around just in case. Apart from that, she also got some smoked fish ready, as an extra bit of food if she needed it.

She recognized that, honestly, she didn’t think any of these preparations would be particularly useful. She was just trying to calm her nerves. She had no real knowledge of magic, and she was about to jump knee-deep into it in hopes that it would help her not get eaten. If she misunderstood something, or messed up, it might hurt her. But the clock was ticking, and if where one monster was, odds were pretty good that there were more.

Night came, and it was time.

She did her best to follow the hints and side-notes in which the author discussed magic seed construction, hoping that this wouldn’t kill her or cripple her or do anything else crazy. She had chosen to form a kinetic seed, so she focused on everything she remembered from her physics class, trying her best to 'impress' that idea on the warmth she still faintly remembered had once been present in her chest.

The laws of kinetic motion, equations for force, and felt… something. She kept focusing on that sensation, trying to figure out what the hell she was doing while working with a patchwork understanding of magic, praying that this worked out. She had a vague sensation of trying to… push her understanding of motion and kinetic energy into… something, although it was very vague. After a few hours of trying to narrow down that peculiar sensation, finally, she felt something shift.

Suddenly, she felt something streaming through her, pulled out of the air around her like a compass seeking the north. She didn’t have a very good understanding of what was churning within her, but she felt something thrumming deep in her chest, right behind her heart. It beat in time with her heart and her thoughts, over and over again, like a second heart, and she could feel warmth and energy flowing deep inside of her with every passing moment.

It was like when she had suffered from mana poisoning, but rather than scorching flames and acid, this was more like a campfire, warm without burning her or hurting her. It was actually quite soothing, in a way, warm and friendly instead of hot and painful. She focused on that sensation, trying to focus on the sensation of the energy deep inside of her, continuing to imprint her thoughts on kinetic motion into it.

She was basically just throwing random thoughts and concepts related to motion at the seed, and it sucked it up like a sponge absorbing water. She could feel the seed becoming attuned to something, and with a growing sense of realization she could feel the seed beginning to interact with motion, along with the energy in the air around her.

She was finally feeling mana directly, and it was like taking a warm bath on a cold day, revitalizing her body and filling her extremities with energy that hadn’t been there before. It surged through her veins, and for a moment, she panicked, wondering if she had somehow lost control.

Then, with a sudden snap, everything began surging back towards her heart, like a yoyo snapping back towards the end of its string. Finally, everything settled into a single kernel of energy that pulsed and thrummed just behind her heart. The brief moment where she had been able to sense mana ended, and with it her ability to sense mana faded. Suddenly, she was blind again, unable to sense the mana in her surroundings at all. The only thing that remained was the tiny core of energy inside of her, which was blazing with heat. Then, slowly, the heat began to recede, dropping back towards bearable levels as her ability to sense mana around her faded away.

She felt a strange sense of loss at that, as if she had been blind her whole life, and for just a brief second she had been allowed to see colors before her newly formed eyes popped like soap bubbles and she was cast back into the dark. She opened her eyes, trying to fight off a strange sense of loss, and a System notification greeted her.

You have successfully formed a ‘kinetic’ magic seed (100%)

You have leveled up!

Explorer of Magic: 4

100%? What the heck does that mean? Alice had seen the author of her magic book reference magic seeds, but she didn’t remember him mentioning anything about a percentage sign related to a magic seed.

Alice quickly opened her status screen, eager to see what it looked like after five days of looking through the book, securing food, some scattered training, and finally forming a magic seed.

Name: Alice Verianna

Age: 15

Strength: 52

Perception: 103

Dexterity: 52 (102%)

Intelligence: 154

Endurance: 57 (102%)

Willpower: 121

Charisma: 125

Magic: 5

Primary Classes: 3/5

Survivor: 20

Explorer of Magic: 4

Scholar: 1

N/A

N/A

Secondary Classes: 1

Fisherwoman: 2

Perks:

Foraging (Survivor 5)

Microbe Resistance (Survivor 10)

Extremophile (Survivor 15)

Camouflaged (Survivor 20)

Skills

English (Language Proficiency): 100

Illvarian (Language Proficiency): 22

Weaving: 9

Woodworking: 6

Fishing: 6

Spearmanship: 5

Climbing: 3

Stoneworking: 3

Digging: 2

Cooking: 2

Sprinting: 2

Basic Medicine: 1

Dodge: 1

Mana Seed: 1/1

Kinetic Seed (100%)

Achievements

Outworlder (Rarity: 10)

Baptized by Broken Mana (Rarity: 6)

Monstrous Encounter (Rarity: 1)

Magic seed 1/1? So that means I can only have one magic seed, probably. There doesn’t seem to be anything like ‘secondary magic seeds’ the way I can have unlimited secondary classes. Alice frowned. She had been hoping to experiment more with the other kinds of magic seed in the future, but obviously that was a bust.

On the bright side, she could think of a lot that she could do with kinetic energy, if this seed worked the way she thought it did. Even if she wasn’t 100% sure what mages were capable of, influencing motion in the world around her sounded like it could be incredibly useful for self-defense, if she used it properly.

She felt a buzzing feeling of excitement and happiness welling up inside of her. She had successfully formed a magic seed! She could finally use magic! Fear me, laws of physics! I am become mage, destroyer of common sense! She reached inside of her mind, trying to pull out the brief feeling of mana she had right as she was recovering from mana poisoning, and this time, she finally felt something.

Kinetic mages should be able to move stuff, right? In that case… Alice focused on a nearby rock, and with a thought, a tendril of mana clumsily extended outwards from her core. She felt incredibly confused for a moment, wondering why it suddenly felt like she had grown a third arm that she couldn’t actually see. Clumsily, she moved it around, trying to figure out what the heck this phantom limb was supposed to do.

Since nothing happened when it touched the air around her, she tried touching the rock with the phantom limb, eager to see if something happened.

The rock, stubbornly, remained in place. If she couldn’t feel the presence of something through whatever senses her phantom limb seemed to have, she wouldn’t have been able to tell anything magical was happening at all.

Then, getting an idea, she tried using her mana tendril as a sort of pipeline, drawing some energy from the core inside of her chest and pushing it through her mana tendril. The mana slowly moved through her new phantom limb, moving as slowly as if she was trying to pump molasses, before it reached the rock. The rock suddenly popped upwards a few centimeters, as if she had just directly grabbed it and thrown it upwards.

Alice cackled maniacally, reveling in the feeling of doing the impossible. Magic! This is actual magic! She tried to slow down the rock, but the mana she sent through her tendril hit nothing. With a jolt, she realized that the rock had shifted its position slightly – meaning that her mana tendril was no longer touching it. Her mana tendril didn’t move automatically, and she could only use mana on things the tendril was touching – in other words, if she wanted to influence something that was moving quickly, like a lunging spidercrab, she needed to be able to get a mana tendril to touch the creature before she could do anything to it.

Through training, you have increased an attribute!

Magic +1

You have leveled up!

Explorer of Magic: 5

Through training, you have increased a skill!

Kinetic Manipulation +1! Mana Control +1!

Alice frowned, trying to figure out what the two new skills did. She reached out her mana tendril again, waving it around, before trying to pump a bit more mana into it. The other side of the mana tendril was only touching air, so all that she created was a slight breeze, but Alice got at least a rough idea what the two skills seemed to be doing.

Mana Control was her ability to move the mana tendril around, granting her greater control over her new limb whenever she formed it again. Kinetic Manipulation seemed to be related to how accurately she could actually move things – before, she had thrown the rock upwards, but hadn’t had very much control over where and how hard she actually threw the rock. The single level of Kinetic Manipulation didn’t improve her control that much, but she could still feel a slight difference.

Alice grinned, and checked the available perks for [Explorer of Magic]. She had already had this class for almost two weeks now, and it was the first time the class had shown signs of actually being able to do something.

Second Seed

Requirements: Explorer of Magic level 5 or higher

Allows you to grow a second magic seed at 15% mana conversion ratio.

Magic proficiency

Requirements: Explorer of Magic level 5 or higher

Grants a greater level of intuitive control over your mana and its effects on the world around you, along with improved understanding of manipulating magic in general.

Magical Growth

Requirements: Explorer of Magic level 5

Increases the rate at which the 'magic' stat grows by 20%

Hmm. Based on her understanding of magic seeds, at least as far as she could tell, they were similar to ‘elements’ that one might find in most fantasy settings. However, instead of fire, water, earth, or air, it was kinetic energy, electromagic energy, and other types that she couldn’t translate yet.

A second magic seed would probably be pretty useful to her in the long run, but having an intuitive level of control over her mana would also be important to surviving now. More importantly, she still wasn’t entirely sure whether there might some extra risks involved with magic, and if she hurt herself with her own magic it would incredibly embarrassing, not to mention potentially dangerous. She also had no idea what mana conversion ratio was, although she suspected higher numbers were probably better, since this was only a level five perk and her initial magic seed had started at 100%. She could also just be wrong about that, though.

Magical growth looked sort of interesting at first, but given the fact that progress towards the next attribute took more and more work the higher the attribute was, along with her current situation, she didn’t think that the effect would actually be very large. Not to mention, she already had a total of +80% growth to the [Magic] attribute from {Outworlder} and {Baptized by Broken Mana}… come to think of it, she actually didn’t know whether those were additive or multiplicative when it came to growth. Still, adding 20% on top of those two didn’t seem particularly impressive, even if {Outworlder} wouldn’t work once [Magic] reached 120 or higher.

Sighing a bit, Alice chose the magic proficiency perk. Electromagnetic energy would be difficult to apply and use in her current situation, and a second magic seed wouldn’t do her much good if she had no idea what she was doing. While her initial experiments with using mana to influence her surroundings had been successful, she had a feeling that right now it was best to double down on what she already had and train it to a level where it was actually useful. It was much better to have one fully developed tool for survival, rather than having several undeveloped ones.

Furthermore, having an intuitive level of understanding her mana would probably allow her to grow her magic stat and level more quickly, based on how the system seemed to award stats and levels. It probably wouldn’t compare to the ‘magical growth’ perk, but it was more well-rounded and also more applicable to her current situation.

As the perk adapted itself to her body, she could intuitively feel her mana more clearly than before. The information her phantom limb fed back to her improved, and while before she could only tell whether or not it was touching something, now she could at least get a very vague feeling of the ‘texture’ of whatever it was touching. More importantly, she could feel that the mana tendril was actually an active, if small, strain on the little mana seed inside of her chest. Every single second she maintained its existence, it ate a tiny amount of energy in order to maintain itself, although the amount was quite small.

She could also tell how much energy was left in her mana seed more accurately than before. At the moment, it felt like she had a small thimble of water deep in her chest. It didn’t seem to ‘exist’ physically, but she could still feel it somewhere behind her heart. It was already almost half empty just from her moving the rock around a bit and maintaining her mana tendril, probably because her [Magic] stat was a measly 6 right now.

She briefly glanced at her ‘preparations’ for creating her magic seed, and confirmed that besides settling her nerves they had done basically nothing useful. Although, to be fair, settling her nerves had a value of its own. Out of curiosity, she attempted to extend her mana towards the rock, trying to influence a small fraction of the rock rather than the whole rock. However, she quickly realized that she didn't have enough control - if she tried to affect anything smaller than about half the size of her fist, she just couldn't force mana into it. Maybe mana had size limitations, the same way human fingers did. In that case, trying to use Kinetic Energy to, say, increase the rate atoms vibrated in the air around her in order to increase temperature would probably go exactly as well as trying to pick a single atom with her bare hands. Or it could just be that her control sucked.

Either way, right now it really didn't matter. She decided to focus on celebrating the fact that she was successfully using magic. It was exciting, dangit!

She left her cave, satisfied for now, and checked her food and firewood reserves. Both were still enough to sustain her for a few days, especially after she got the {Extremophile} perk, which had drastically reduced her need to use firewood, except for when she wanted to cook and on particularly cold days. Still, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to get more supplies. The temperature had been dropping sharply recently, and she would need more of practically everything if she wanted to live through the winter.

She went to her usual fishing spot, and noted with some worry that the river was definitely starting to show hints of freezing over. If the river froze, she would lose access to fish. Perhaps she could give hunting a try? Would there even be animals to hunt over the winter? This was definitely something she needed to figure out.

Still, for the next few days at least, she was fine. She went quietly back to fishing, humming a merry tune to herself. As she felt her mana slowly recovering, she used it to experiment, trying to lift and move small objects in her surroundings and figure out the limits of her new ability.

She found that whenever she tried to move a mana tendril beyond a meter or two, the cost of maintaining her thread of connection seemed to increase exponentially. It wasn’t impossible, but with the amount of mana she currently had, it would almost instantly tap out her reserves and leave her exhausted and with a mild headache. Furthermore, moving any object, regardless of what it was and whether it was closer or farther away, was incredibly difficult. She attributed that to both her lack of Skill and skill, but ultimately, right now she was mostly just nudging objects a few centimeters in a semi-random direction. She could move an object ‘away’ from her or to the left or right, but it would often also shift in an unexpected angle due to her lacking control.

Furthermore, she couldn’t really ‘control’ an object for a long period of time – if she moved an object with her mana tendril, even if it didn’t move very fast, she had a pretty hard time getting the mana tendril to touch the object again while it was still in motion. After all, moving an object didn't cause her mana tendril to move along with it, and the moment her mana tendril wasn't touching an object, she couldn't influence it anymore. That could probably change with practice, but right now, it was too difficult for a beginner like her.

If she hadn’t had her perk, guiding her, she suspected it would have been even more difficult, although it was a bit more difficult to feel the effects of this perk.

She also had no idea where the force to propel objects around actually came from. When a person, for example, threw a baseball, they weren’t just somehow generating the force from nowhere. One of Newton’s laws of motion was that every action had an equal and opposite reaction, and similarly, a person throwing a ball also ‘pushed’ their body backwards by the exact same amount of force. This force then travelled from their arm through their body and into the ground, making it almost unnoticeable, but it was still there.

By contrast, when she used magic, force just seemed to come from nowhere. The rocks she flung around didn’t cause the air around it to move at all – she seemed to literally be creating kinetic energy directly from mana, without any of the consequences to her surroundings that probably should have had. This was odd and interesting in all sorts of ways - was she literally creating kinetic energy from nothing? At one point during her experiments, she got lucky and managed to ‘catch’ a rock that she dropped from her physical hands, and the rock temporarily halted in midair before she lost control over it. However, the momentum that the rock had built up when it had fallen for the second or so previously just… disappeared. Where did it go? Was it turned into friction, or temperature, or something? She was curious, but with no tools to measure anything, it was pretty much just guesswords on her part, so for now she discarded her thoughts on the subject - it was something she could think about later, when she wasn't stuck in the frozen wilderness.

For now, she decided to focus on the knowedge that she could also remove momentum from objects instead of just pushing things, which was fairly valuable information. Even if her control sucked right now, in the future she could probably use this to stop a charging spidercrab dead in its tracks, if she had the mana for it. Holding it in place and then stabbing it with her spear sounded a million times safer than trying to dodge and weave out of its way, or desperately fighting with Spidercrab while stuck up a tree.

She filed that under her thoughts for potential things to work towards in the future.

For now, however, it was quite a ways out of reach. She could finally use her magic stat, and she had a new tool that would hopefully drastically improve her survival odds. However, she still needed to keep training and working at her skills if she wanted to make magic into a useful tool for her.

She ran out of mana partway through the fishing session, and got a minor headache. Rather than keep trying to push it, she waited for her mana to refill. She had no idea how long it took mana to regenerate, but at least her attribute gains were pretty sizeable for [Magic] this time. She needed to keep training though, as well as make some more plans for food. The river wasn’t going to stick around for much longer, and when it went away, it would take her fish with it. With what she had caught today, she estimated she probably had a week’s worth of food supplies, but that wouldn’t last the whole winter.

Through training, you have increased an attribute!

Magic +6

You have leveled up!

Explorer of Magic: 8

Through training, you have increased a skill!

Mana control +1, Kinetic Manipulation +2, Fishing +2