The sands shifted beneath my feet, almost sending me to stumbling. I regained my footing before the worst could happen. Tired as I was, I feared that even falling once would be the end of me, the energy to get back up out of reach.

I looked down at the frail bundle I was cradling, at the face of a sleeping child, my child. I was producing only enough milk to keep him alive, but with the way he was steadily losing weight, I… I didn't want to imagine it.

My brain, ever a compliant organ, set me on a train of thought regarding possible solutions. I needed protein. I needed to get my aching shoulder checked, too, but the arm wasn't entirely nonfunctional so it wasn't a priority.

I needed food first.

It had been two days since the bandit attack. My water bottle had emptied hours ago, and still there was not a single settlement in sight. A part of me rebelled at my past self for refusing to wave down incoming cars on the road, to see if any of them could be of help. All the bandits were dead after all.

That also included my travel companions. That left me stranded and alone with a baby in my arm and an "agreeable" face. I didn't trust my odds.

I was bitten once already. I wouldn't let that happen to me ever again.

My eyes fell on my child, the one good thing to have come out of… everything. My life was ruined beyond measure, but I would live, if only for him, if not for me.

He was the only person in the world who made me feel the way I did.

I redoubled my pace. I could not die in this terrorized wasteland, not if my son would follow. I owed him that much at least.

A forest, the wasteland, a forest and the wasteland, again and again. The image flickered before me rapidly until it settled on a forest.

It was deciduous, from the look of the trees, but the canopy was dense, only allowing dappled rays of sunshine through. All too quickly, I noticed the heavy noise of sheer life registering to my senses. Crickets chirping, birds singing, the rustling of leaves and the feel of wet mulch underneath my boots.

Analyzing physical and mental parameters…

And, of course, the floating box of text in my vision.

Fear gripped me for an instant. If this was a hallucination, I had to continue moving. I couldn't just let myself succumb so early on. I had to at least fall unconscious somewhere near a settlement, and hope that after all the troubles, it was still populated.

Calculations completed. Uploading data to system sheet.

Welcome to Allmother

Name: Reza Talib

Class: None

Title: None

Level: 1 (0%)

Attributes

Power 1

Endurance 2

Coordination 2

Intelligence 4

Wisdom 4

Charm 3

I kept walking as the screen changed and new words came up. Focus on anything else, Reza. Even that bush of berries that were likely poisonous, considering my luck so far.

Magical affinity detected due to high wisdom and intelligence. 1 Spell Point awarded.

Spell points?

The moment my mind even brushed against the inquiry, my body locked in place and I perceived nothing but a vast, foreign starscape of evershifting constellations, chaotic and orderly in a way only a kaleidoscope could even come close to imitating, though it would have been a pale one, indeed. After all, a kaleidoscope could only show an image in two dimensions. Not only did this starscape have depth, but half another dimension.

I had no frame of reference to describe that dimension; only a profound, all-encompassing sense of otherness, of a depth of information that refused to become knowledge. It was quite literally unknowable.

I had a foreboding feeling, looking at it, like it should be doing something more to me than just being fascinating. I could almost perceive something protecting my mind, almost like a veil between myself and… well, insanity, considering how it all just… was.

On second thought, the veil probably wasn't doing so good a job after all.

It wanted me to pick a spell. The system did, at least. Staring at a few clusters of motes of light, I intuitively knew what they did, and names popped up in my mind's eye. They were arranged like an upside down tree, the trunk of the furthest branches hidden behind a stronger veil. I tried to push through it, like I always did when information was withheld from me, but a subtle turmoil in my mind made me disengage like I had touched something hot.

I would have to gather information a different way.

I looked at the furthest branches again, and learned the names of those stars. Regenerate Wound, Cure Disease, Purge Poison, Detect Life, the options almost seemed tailormade to my future profession of choice. I was a medschool student before it all, and the erudite student in me was itching to break down these spells and figure out how the hell they even worked.

Nothing of the sort would happen until I figured out how to stay alive. To do that, I needed to eat.

My mind snatched up Purge Poison. The starscape disappeared back from whence it came, pushing deeper into that dimension that I couldn’t know, and when I snapped back to reality, I felt for the spell and looked at the bush of berries.

Evoking the spell was… well, for the first part, evoke was exactly the right word. I didn't say it with my mouth or strictly think any phrases out. I bent my mind to create specific… glyphs were my best bet. I would call them logograms if logograms melded and morphed into each other almost ad hoc. Nothing about it made sense, but its nonsense did make sense. There were rules, and you just had to work your way up from there.

In terms of mental strain or complexity, it felt like I was being forced to recall and recite various bits and pieces of a book I had only read before once, and stumbling over it would carry grave consequences, a gut feeling I simply couldn't shake. Nevertheless, I had nothing to fear. My childhood practically forged me for this specific task, this specific mixture of overbearing complexity and unbelievable tedium. It felt like memorizing the scriptures all over again.

The spell itself built up around my hands during evocation. I pointed at the berries when the activation phrase came up, directing a lance of invisible power at it. At first, I was hesitant to trust that my magic wasn’t a product of my delusions, but if that was the case, then the berries would likely be the same. With that in mind, I picked the bush as quickly as I could, ignoring the pain of my injured shoulder as I stuffed my face in. The injury was nothing like the pain of childbirth, so fresh in my mind even after three mere weeks.

The sugars would help me stay alert and energized, but they would do nothing for milk production. It bought me time, but my child hungered, so time was not in abundance.

I came across fungus, more berries, and the mangled cadaver of an animal sort of, but not quite like a squirrel, a hairless beast with brown skin and inexplicably, a second pair of legs. I decided not to eat it, as I doubted Purge Poison would help destroy disease or rot. It just didn’t have that level of power in its blueprint.

In the throes of failure, I couldn't help but chuckle at my mental one-eighty. This was no longer a hallucination to me, though I never stopped walking straight forwards unless it was.

Perhaps I would wake up and find that I really was going mad, that there was no forest or system or magic. In the off chance that it all was real, I was either in for a treat or a world of hardships depending on how I performed right now.

It was all very reminiscent of how things usually went in my life.

Day turned to dusk, and soon enough, night. It got colder. I hugged my boy tightly to my chest as I considered whether to rest my aching feet or push on, but rationality got the better of my emotional side. I was no use to my son exhausted to the point of death.

I sat back against a tree and hugged him closely, hoping that I gave more warmth than I took.

He sniffled. I frowned. He coughed a little. My heart fractured in turn.

I used Purge Poison on him. The sniffles resumed after a few minutes, predictably. I needed something for sickness, not poison. I needed another Spell Point.

Unfortunately, I didn't know where to start on getting more. Presumably, I would need to level up, but what could that possibly require?

My mind strayed back to the starscape once more. I cast Purge Poison while focusing intently on the fluid logographs, wondering if I could use them to… make something else. The assumption was that the logographs came together to form a word or sentence, which was the spell in this case. If I could shuffle them, then was that not as good as creating a new one?

I meditated intensely on it, longing towards that starscape I had looked up on hours prior.

I breached a surface and… the starscape was back, showing me the Purge Poison spell.

Only problem? The veil protecting my mind was not there.

The starscape took me up the rest of the way, towards the shifting glyphs, through them and beyond, past even the current ceiling of stars.

There, I saw what lay beyond the stars in the sky. I saw what lay beyond infinity, and the truest, most physical representation of what lay behind zero. The dimension I couldn’t know.

The underlying syntax of universes entirely removed from mine whispered noises my simple brain was never designed to hear, showed me sights I was never equipped to see. Common horrors like torture and death paled in comparison to this, these things that could rival such morbid topics through sheer otherness alone. This lack of knowledge, ability to know, brought forth a fundamental terror that had helped humanity survive through the eons of ignorance and hardships.

I saw no other option before me, no avenue of learning or survival, so I swallowed the incredible fear while acquiescing to it. I turned around and headed down, down again beneath the more gentle starscape and further down still-

"Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop-"

Until I was in my own body. I looked at my son. He was crying, shrieking into the night sky.

I had a blaring headache.

"Stop sounds," I clutched my head. "Pounds, pounding, pain, brain, torn in twain. Shut up, shut up!" I whispered harshly. Whether it was to the child or to myself, I honestly couldn’t tell. "Get yourself together. Find calm. Do not go gently into that good night," I finished the poem, and repeated it again, raging and raging against the dying of the light. The humming and turmoil did not go away, but my mind acclimated to it. It was the best I could do for now.

Still, I could not focus on myself too much right now. My boy was sick. I did this for a reason. I knew the words. No. I knew that I could know them, if I gave it a blind try and let my instincts guide me. The others showed me the rules. I knew how to play. I had to. For my boy was sick and I did this for a reason.

The thing about evocation was that you could just as easily place a wrong glyph as well as a correct one. That way lay a backfire, and possibly madness. The backfire could have any given effect, most likely averse or deadly. I needed to get this right the first time. Like all things, I had to succeed or die.

Nothing out of the ordinary. I memorized scriptures at nine. I received a perfect SAT score on my first try. I walked the halls of an Ivy League institution.

I could cast a spell I just reverse-engineered from extradimensional syntax and the glyphs of another spell.

I inhaled deeply and used the spell.

Contrary to my expectations, this part was… trivial to say the least. It presented almost no challenge at all, and when I was done, I knew it had worked, even if the target was only a tree.

Spell creation complete! You have successfully recreated and learned the foundational magic Cure Disease. 1+ Intelligence awarded.

I wasn't done. I rearranged some parameters to the specifications of my own knowledge in biology and created something else entirely.

Spell creation complete! You have successfully derived a new spell from an existing one, with drastically different outcomes, Purge Disease. 1+ Intelligence awarded. 1+ Spell Points awarded.

Level up!

I grinned widely. Cure Disease worked by stimulating the overproduction of healthy antibodies—possibly more than the body could naturally regenerate but without any of the associated downsides—that would smother and destroy any pathogen while the Purge equivalent seemed to just… destroy the disease entirely from existence. The difference was one would cure cancer or HIV while the other could potentially just make it worse.

Just a few more touches here and there, and finally a little pirouette over here and...

Spell creation complete! You have successfully recreated and learned the advanced magic, Purge Life. 1+ Intelligence, 1+ Wisdom.

Level up!

That was pretty much it from me. The last spell worked on the principle of thermal contraction, stealing heat energy from the cells and microbes affected by the spell to a point where the cells remained inert for long enough that the organism as a whole proceeds to die. It was more of a fast-acting curse than a spell, I would argue, because of its tendency to stick around until the job was finished.

Surprisingly, such a spell did not take very much out from me. I was grateful for that. It was the only weapon against the creatures of the forest.

I refocused on my son and cast Cure Disease, all the while considering what else I needed. I could try spoofing all the foundational skills for this biology magic without using spell points, but I really would need a diagnostics tool to make better judgments in the future if I wanted to create more spells.

But I did it. My son needed food, but his inability to succumb to disease would give him at least another day before things got too dire, and I knew that they wouldn't. Crisis averted. For now.

My boy continued to scream, but at least he was alive to do so.