With her decisions firmed up, she went to the door and put her ear against it to listen for any activity. After five minutes of absolute silence, she made her way over to the secret door and left the room.

To get to the secret room, she only had a vague outline of where she needed to go. When she was studying the map from the barracks, she was more worried about plotting out her route from there instead of seeing all of the corridors in the main building. She decided that she would use the walkway with the glass railing to go as far as possible in the correct direction. Once she got to the end of the walkway, she entered through the dwelling to get into the classroom on the other side.

Carefully exiting the classroom, she made a short walk to the end of the hall. She had never entered from this direction before so it shocked her when she found another hidden doorway at the end of the hallway. From the other direction, this doorway looked normal.

When she arrived at the mural room, she was not given the choice of another magic right away. It would seem she needed to pick up new aspects before she can see about getting another type of magic.

Back in her dig site mindscape, she had one aspect to unearth from the middle row and three left in the hardest last row. Deciding to get the easiest of her options done first, she got to work excavating the Fear aspect object. It was another complex object that she needed to take a little bit of extra care on to not break any of the fragile roots.

Excavation integrity calculating…

100%

Congratulations, with your attention to detail and speed, a bonus of 9% synchronization has been added to this aspect at the start for a total of 10%

Moving on to the next aspect she wanted to uncover, she moved up to the back left square. This square held the object for the Hypnotize aspect. The ground in this square was difficult to work in. It was hard-packed earth except for the areas she had previously broken up to find the aspect in this section.

When she was about three-quarters of the way done uncovering a very complex root-like object, disaster struck. She had let her mind wander and her moment of inattention caused her to snap off a chunk of the object she was trying to excavate. Cursing to herself, she took even more time and care to uncover the remaining parts of the object.

Excavation integrity calculating…

80%

Due to damage caused in the excavation process, no bonus synchronization will be awarded. This aspect will start at 1% synchronization.

Be aware, anything less than 80% integrity will begin to degrade the effects of an aspect.

Phew, she dodged a bullet there! She did not even want to think about what degraded effects would mean.

[Magic]

Type

%

Aspect

Illusion

56%

Illusion

100%

Disguise Self

Illusion

100%

Decoy

Illusion

100%

Cloaking

Illusion

98%

Shadow Blade

Illusion

87%

Dazzle

Illusion

10%

Fear

Illusion

1%

Hypnotize

Wow, she barely had enough synchronization to get her third aspect. The system gave her a new aspect for every 8% overall synchronization with Illusion.

After giving herself a mental breather, she started to work on the third and in her opinion most important aspect for tonight, Enchant. It was in the center plot which is why she chose to get Hypnotize first. That way she could use all but one side of the plot square and not have to worry about damaging another aspect.

She was thankful for the time freeze that happened every time she entered her mindscape. Having to worry about being found missing on top of the delicate work of uncovering the aspects would have had her almost unfunctional by this point. As it was she was extremely nervous about damaging Enchant.

Excavation integrity calculating…

98%

Congratulations, with your attention to detail, a bonus of 4% synchronization has been added to this aspect at the start for a total of 5%

To return for more aspects, you must have a total of 64% synchronization for illusion.

Finding herself back in the mural room, she took a moment to celebrate and then relax a little bit before doing anything more. After about five minutes she was too excited to rest any longer. She quickly touched the crystal one more time to get her next magic.

Greetings Ancient One.

Are you ready to decide your next type of magic?

Y/N?

Clicking yes, she held her breath in anticipation. Orange of earth magic was going to be her next system exploit. Ok, it wasn’t really an exploit, but magic was overpowered.

The huge circle of colors was once again brought up in her vision. Unlike last time, this time there were only seven colors on the wheel. As she watched the wheel began to spin and her heart sank. “What! NO! I want to choose this time!” The system paid her no mind as the wheel started to slow down. Purple went by, then white, slowly red went by looking like it may stop there until it had one last burst of motion flipping it over to blue.

Fate smiles upon you, Water shall be yours.

She once again found herself in her mindscape dig site. The illusion area looked exactly as she had left it not too long ago, but when she looked at the water area quite a bit had changed. There was a giant tank surrounding the dig section for water. No longer were there any orderly squares marked off.

Due to your limitless trait, the maximum limit of magic schools adding up to 100% has been removed. Gaining new aspects will become more difficult.

Getting closer to her newest challenge, the lip of the tank was only two feet off of the ground. If water was placed the same as illusion was, that meant she had three “easy” aspects within reach of the front edge. She would need to be careful to not kick up too much of the sediment while she was searching for the aspects or it would be difficult to see.

Looking further in, the middle section appeared to be in two feet of water and the farthest section would require her to get in the pool to reach the bottom. She hoped she would pick up a few water aspects to help her with those sections. Swimming down to unbury delicate aspects while holding her breath did not sound like an easy thing for her to do.

She had plenty of time to worry about the future later. For now, she set her sights on the front section of one-foot-deep water. The first thing she did was take her bucket and start bailing out as much water as possible. It was a large pool but she thought given enough time she could eventually empty it or at least drain it quite a bit.

After over an hour of bailing water, she gave up on that method of attack. The water level never fell. If she could have removed the water, that would have made this challenge quite simple. The water loosened dirt would be easy to carefully remove from the aspects.

She carefully ran her hands along the bottom of the pool to feel if any of the aspects could easily be located. When she did not feel anything right away, she started filling her bucket with soil. Thankfully when she dumped the soil over the side, it disappeared and did not reappear back inside the tank.

You have located the aspect for Create Water.

To obtain this aspect, you must completely unearth it. If the aspect becomes damaged, it is possible to lose it or obtain a weak version of it. Proceed with caution.

Create Water didn’t sound so bad. She would need to practice near a drain but she could find a way to do that slowly over time. Two more aspects should be easy enough for her to uncover so she got back to work.

You have located the aspect for Ice Shards.

You have located the aspect for Water Manipulation.

Ice Shards sounded like an attack spell, but Water Manipulation had merits. She needed to decide if she wanted to be able to manipulate water that was already there or create water. Making up her mind, she got to work excavating her choice.

Excavation integrity calculating…

100%

Congratulations, with your attention to detail, a bonus of 5% synchronization has been added to this aspect at the start for a total of 6%

To return for more aspects, you must have a total of 8% synchronization for Water.

[Magic]

Type

%

Aspect

Illusion

56%

Illusion

100%

Disguise Self

Illusion

100%

Decoy

Illusion

100%

Cloaking

Illusion

98%

Shadow Blade

Illusion

87%

Dazzle

Illusion

10%

Fear

Illusion

1%

Hypnotize

Illusion

5%

Enchant

Water

1%

Water

6%

Water Manipulation

Congratulations! For gaining your second type of magic, you have earned 5,000 experience.

[Level Up +1 (31)]

[Level Up +1 (32)]

Looking down, she noticed a new mark on her belly. This one was a blue teardrop located next to her belly button not far from where her swirl mark was. Using Disguise Self, she was able to hide that mark just as easily as her previous mark. The rash on her skin continued to catch her eye whenever she was not paying attention. She had decided to leave the rash on her skin because it did not cause her any extra effort and if she got caught somehow, she wouldn't have to worry about quickly remembering how it looked before and recreating it.

As she went to touch the mural to exit, she noticed that the words now made sense to her. Well, she could read them, they still didn’t make much sense.

Long ago the Ancient Ones bound their souls in a cycle of reincarnation. Divinations foretold a catastrophe that threatened all human life. To combat this, a barrier was created to preserve the knowledge they will need to save humanity upon their return. When the barrier beings to fail, the Ancient Ones will return to bring salvation to the chained ones.

Wait a minute! She read and reread the mural on the wall. Why did the system keep calling her Ancient One? She was reincarnated yes, but only once that she knew of. The system must have it wrong, she did not feel like some savior who will save “chained ones.” Deciding that the system was mistaken, she committed the mural to memory with her Visualization skill and tried to forget about it.

She had quite a bit to think about on her long walk back to her room. But first, she wanted to see if her gamble had paid off. Using her newest aspect, Water Manipulation, she manipulated the humidity out of the air and caused it to condense into a few drops on her hand. That little bit taxed her mana pool greatly but it was worth it in her opinion. She couldn’t create water from nothing, but she could use her past life knowledge to pull the water that already existed out of the air.

There was not very much moisture in the air. This was probably due to the enchantment this structure used to keep everything at controlled levels. She was probably going to have quite a hard time when she finally left this place getting used to normal weather.

Another thing that was on her mind was the system talking about usual people having a maximum of 100% magic. If that were true, then normal people could only have a maximum of two different types of magic. The requirement for gaining another magic was 50% overall synchronization. No wonder why the system was trying to make it harder for her inside her mindscape. She had the potential to be extremely powerful.

She wondered how sentient the system was. The mindscape that she was always dropped in had tools and items she has only seen in her past life. She was pretty sure her clothing alone would never be acceptable here. Based on the lack of emotion she got when reading anything from the system, she felt that the system was artificial intelligence that had not made the leap to emotion and sentience yet.

Shaking herself out of her musings, she just remembered that she had obtained Enchant. In preparation for her to receive the enchanting aspect, she had slowly squirreled away several different types of enchanted objects. She made sure to only take those that were in abundance so they would not be missed. The adults had not gotten around to taking an accounting of how many of each type were found and organized yet because they were still in the process of organizing them.

That and she had overheard one of the adults saying that if they wanted an accounting of how many of each type there were, then they had better get an actual accountant over here to count it all. They had better things to be doing.