They continued on their journey, following the lake heading south. Violet and her parent’s goal was to make it to the river running east from the lake. It took the trio two days to reach the area where the lake turned into a river. While there was a current along the river, it was not flowing at high speeds, and fish were plentiful.

Her mother had woven a net out of vines they found growing on one of the trees. The vines were difficult to cut but were flexible enough for her to knot together. After she had enough netting, she attached it to a branch which she bent into a wide mouth for them to be able to catch fish. It had taken several attempts before they could snatch the first fish, but with a few tweaks to her original design, they each took turns trying to catch fish.

Violet took this time to quiz her parents on some of the things she had been afraid to ask, or they would not answer in the past. The main thing she wanted to learn about was magic. Having a lack of information about something so big in her life was starting to bother her.

The first question she asked was what happened to all of the babies born with a mark. It took quite a bit of prodding to get any type of answer out of them. In the end, the answer was that nobody knew for sure, and all they knew of were rumors. Several rumors were going around, but only one fact was semi-proven. Any woman who gave birth to a magical child was placed in a noble’s harem immediately.

What happened to the children was a little more conflicted. Some people said that they raised the children in secret bunkers and brainwashed them from birth to love and serve the nobles. Another theory was that male children were adopted by nobles and raised as their next heir. They were rumored to barter the children off to one of the neighboring countries as a bribe to be left alone. In the end, nobody they had ever talked to about it knew for sure what happened to the babies.

When she asked if nobles were known to have magic, they said that she was the first person ever to do any magic in front of them. If nobles had spells, then they were careful about using them. Violet felt it was hard to believe that at least one of the servants around the nobles had not seen them do magic and gossiped about it. It was a mystery she would have to solve at a later date. She wasn’t going to start some crusade to free a bunch of likely brainwashed children she didn’t even know just because they had magic.

She had asked her parents for any information they had about magic through old texts or gossip. This question yielded even more conflicting results. Some of the older manuscripts said it was possible to learn specific magical spells from a special scroll. The spells learned were elaborate with hand motions, chants, and special conditions for use. Only one person could read and learn from the scroll before it would disintegrate. Violet could imagine how a high-level illusionist with enchanting may be able to create such a scroll, but the nonsense about gestures, chants, and special conditions confused her.

Her father chose that moment to chime in and say there may be more than one type of magic. He thought what Violet had was a form of magic that the ancients of olden times had used. Lore he had read said that the marks were how to spot people who could learn the old ways of magic. The new form of magic with scrolls and chants was a watered-down version of what the ancients had accessible to them. In the end, magic was a taboo subject nobody was allowed to discuss openly, so all her parents had to go off were rumors and a forbidden text they found that was heavily damaged.

She asked what they knew about magical areas and magical creatures next. They were a lot more knowledgeable in these areas. There were three different types of magical regions. Above ground and unmoving, below ground and stationary, and temporary places above or below ground.

The first type was magical areas that were above ground that did not move. These places were most often centered on an object or place. An example of one of these places was an area centered on an immense tree that could be seen from hundreds of miles away. Another site was located on a lake. They even knew of a place that was centered on a gravestone. Nobody knew how the places were formed, but there were always magical creatures in the area soaking up the ambient mana.

The next type of magical area was an underground cave system. These systems could span multiple floors and have several confusing rooms. Often, sections in these caves would cave in, or a pit would open up beneath you if you stepped in the wrong area. When Violet asked if particular groups of people made a living by killing magical creatures in this area, her parents laughed and asked why anyone would want to throw their life away. Killing magical beasts did not grant you mystical powers, and the meat was often poisonous.

The last type of magical area they said was the most dangerous. A magical site could pop up randomly in a temporary location. These areas were often so mana rich that it made people sick if they stayed in place for too long. There were fewer magical beasts in this area, but they were often more intelligent and more deadly if they took offense to your presence. The most famous temporary magical site was said to have a sapient dragon at its center. Supposedly if you amused it, it would grant you wishes. Her mother said a dragon granting wishes was ridiculous and made up to get foolish people killed.

As the days went by, their rations began to dwindle. They could supplement their food supplies with fish from the river when they got lucky and foraging plants along their route. The river was not always hospitable to fishing. She was glad they did not take the time to build a raft because they had come across several areas with large rocks creating rapids. Some branches had also fallen into the river, causing obstructions as well.

She made a workout routine that she did at night before they went to bed. Some guy who liked to call himself a bear did a full-body workout for the wilderness she had watched on social media and made fun of with her friends when it came out. She did not remember all of it, but she recreated what she could with squat jumps, pushups, pullups, and she even got a rock involved to make the exercise more intense.

It was becoming more difficult for her to raise her stats as she got older. When she had compared her Strength, Constitution, and Dexterity with Sky, she was only a few stat points higher than him. She had gotten lazy with leveling her skills and trying to keep raising her stats while she was engrossed in leveling her magic. Practicing her magic increased her Intelligence and Wisdom because she was constantly trying to develop new ways to use her aspects. All of Sky’s stats were in the twenties, with his Constitution being the highest stat he had. Not wanting him to feel bad, she had not told him how much higher her mental stats were compared to his.

She would spend extra time thinking of new ways to use her aspects or working on brain teasers in the mornings. She had been using Mental Notes quite a bit to help with her mental skills. Sudoku was the go-to mental puzzle that she created in Mental Notes. She had spent a whole morning creating blank puzzles to solve at a later time.

What shocked her the most was before she had been born here, doing a six-by-six grid was enough to keep her occupied for a while trying to solve it. Since she had come to Zogara, she found her memory and problem-solving skills had gotten better. She could now solve nine by nine grids of sudoku in the same amount of time she used to solve the six by six grids.

To level the skills she had been neglecting for magic, she used the trees and forested areas. When they would stop for their midday rest, she would start by practicing her sneaking skills. She would play sneak and seek with her parents with rules on how far they could travel into the treeline. Trying to incorporate as many skills as she could into these games, she made sure to climb trees to increase the difficulty of staying quiet and unseen and leveling up her climbing skill.

She could only get her newly acquired swimming skill to ten because her parents did not want her to swim unless they found an off-channel area outside the main river flow. Even if she was not allowed to swim, she made a point to spend a large portion of her mana trying to manipulate the water in different ways to raise her synchronization.