Author’s Corner: Curse you sleep, for making me unable to write until late!

After confirming that the message was sent to everyone, I began looking for other important news. What I found made me quite angry. It turns out, every home in the world now had at least one Seed in it, more for larger families. There was no explanation about where they came from, they were just suddenly installed in the room when nobody was looking.

I spent three month’s worth of money to get that damn Seed, and now I find out everyone gets it for free?! What was the point of the preorders then? I grumbled under my breath as I continued reading the news. There weren’t any reports of monsters appearing yet, but I was sure that was only a matter of time. Naturally, my first priority was to protect my house from monsters spawning in, and I had just one way of doing it(at least, it should work).

Gathering my mana, I attuned myself to the Void Affinity, and began gathering my mana to begin the process of refining a Seed of Void. Since magic doesn’t function properly within a void field, there was a fairly good chance that monsters would not spawn normally inside of one. Unfortunately, there was hardly any void mana in Earth’s atmosphere, so I had to rely entirely on what I could personally produce. This made the first seed take a full eight hours to be completed, after which I began working on a field energy spell with runes.

It wasn’t uncommon for area effect spells to be included in enchantments, so naturally I knew about the runes to do this. And after seeing that large runic circle that had summoned me from another world, I had an idea on how to do this. Simply writing the runes isn’t enough, I also need to power them with mana to activate them.

In my room, I walked over to one of the wooden walls and activated my Plant Manipulation, engraving the pattern of runes in a circular formation. When I had seen Jacobs drawing a circle with his staff, it made me think that he was doing so to contain the energy from the enchantment. However, I didn’t want the energy contained for this, so I excluded an outer circle.

The instructions I wrote into the runes were quite simple, they would take energy from the air, pull it in, and then match that energy to the strongest mana type already inside the formation. With that done, in the absence of a restraining circle the energy should naturally dissipate into the air in its new form. As the final touch, I made a small socket at the center of the runic spell, and placed the Seed of Void inside, essentially guaranteeing that the strongest mana type would be void mana.

Thanks to my Void Manipulation power, I could suppress the effects around myself, letting the mana return to its natural state. Otherwise, I was worried that breathing would become quite a problem if there wasn’t any wind mana. However, this was still the safest method of protecting my house.

Enchanting has increased to Basic

New Sub-Skill Unlocked!Spell Formations - Basic Level 1

Exp: 0%

This skill measures one's ability to create written spell formations with lasting effects.

Currently applicable skills:

Enchanting

Runic Language

I was a bit surprised to have unlocked a skill, and a Basic level one at that. However, it was not that important. First, I needed to see how far the area of this spell was. Walking out of my room, I moved down the hall while using my Aura Sight to scan the mana. The spell had activated almost instantly, and the mana in the air had already been changed to void mana. About ten feet out of my room, the mana began returning to its natural state. As such, I went ahead and prepared another Seed of Void. This time, I had an ample source of void mana to work with, so there was no problem with the time taken.

After creating the second seed, and installing it into an identical pattern, it was already time to sleep. Thinking such, I was going to head up to my room when my feet froze, and I remembered that my room was currently like the vacuum of space, with no breathable air unless I maintained my Void Manipulation. Grumbling, I decided to go sleep on the couch until my Void Affinity was high enough to be maintained without any focus.

It was rather different, sleeping in the real world after so long. Not that my couch was uncomfortable or anything, I just had gotten used to sleeping in the game. Though, by now I was wondering just how much of a game it was. Was it possible that the game was, in some manner of time and space, real? And if so, what was the reason? This was definitely not an invasion to wipe out the species, because any race with this kind of tech could just as easily erase the planet from the solar system.

Then, another thing that was just as disturbing, was the realization that there were humans in the game. Obviously that shouldn’t be possible if this was just a case of aliens transporting us somewhere to adapt to a new ‘galactic policy’ with magic. Unless by some freak coincidence, humans evolved the same way on another world as well.

I put these thoughts out of my mind as I let myself fall asleep. When I woke, I ate an enrichment fruit for breakfast and then began cultivating Void Affinity. If I can get that up to 10%, sleeping in my bed shouldn’t be a problem anymore. I could only grumble helplessly, though, because Void Affinity was the lowest of affinities I had cultivated, so it would take several days for it to reach 10% even if I focused entirely on it.

Part of me considered logging back into the game in order to speed up the training, but my house wasn’t secure yet. If a goblin or something spawned in, they could wreck the place while I was training. At least with me here, I could either disperse the mana while the monster tried to spawn or kill it after it had done so. And sure enough, after I had spent about six hours cultivating my Void Affinity, I could feel a shift in the flow of mana. Opening my eyes, I got up and followed the shift, finding currents of mana running through the halls and into my kitchen. “Oh hell no, I am not letting some monster rampage in my kitchen.”

Once I got to the kitchen, I found streams of fire, wind, water, and earth mana spiraling in a single spot. “What’s going on?” Celeste spoke up from my wrist, making her presence known for the first time since I got back to the real world.

“Looks like a monster is forming.” While this would be an excellent time to study it and learn more about monsters, maybe even how to create my own, my priorities were more inclined to stop it. As such, I sent out a wave of my own mana, controlling the various elements to disperse before they could form into something solid. Thankfully, the mana types involved this time weren’t some obscure secondary element that I had no control over. Then again, the more rare an element, the less likely it would come together with enough density to form a monster in the first place.

“So… is that it?” Celeste asks in a rather disappointed manner from my wrist.

“I think so? Doesn’t look like the mana is gathering anymore. But this means that monsters have started spawning.” No sooner had my words ended than I got an alert from my house’s AI about an incoming call. “Put it through.”

What I saw on the wall, displayed by a hologram of far less quality than the one that made Celeste, was that same officer that had spoken to me before. What was his name? Fenec, Fingers… Faraday! Right, Officer Faraday. “What can I do for you, officer?”

The man let out a sigh. “Surely you’re aware of the situation by now, unless you just came out of the game.”

“Yeah, the Seeds were released, and by now monsters should be starting to appear. I just had to disperse one in my kitchen.”

The officer raised a curious eyebrow at that. “Do you know what type of monster it was?”

I shook my head in answer to his question. “No, I stopped it from spawning before that became an issue.”

I swear the officer nearly choked on his words. “Y-you can stop them from spawning? How?”

I thought about it, and realized this wasn’t anything obvious, so went ahead and explained. “Monsters are formed by dense mana coming together and giving shape. My class ability lets me interfere with most common types of mana, so I stopped it from gathering before it could coalesce.”

He paused for a moment, and then looked off to the side. “I’m going to put you on hold for a little bit, alright?” When I nodded, the hologram vanished and a rather annoying song began playing instead. “Mute the call until he comes back, please.” I really hated the ‘on hold’ music places offered.

It took roughly fifteen minutes before he reappeared as a hologram on my kitchen wall. “Sorry, had to talk with the chief. I’ve got him listening in now. What can you tell us about your current class?”

I blinked a bit, surprised, as I could see where this was probably going. “I’m a druid, and our special ability is to interact with the ambient mana of the world. In order to do so, we have to spend some time training our magic to properly match the elemental affinity of the mana in order to control it.”

After listening to my explanation, there was a second voice that came in through the call. “Can you teach it to others? If our officers were able to do that, we could stop monsters from spawning along our patrol routes.”

I thought about whether or not I could. “You’d have to learn how to control and sense mana first, which is best done inside NeoLife. Training there would also be faster, since time moves five times as quickly. If you got the mana control and mana sense, then I could teach you how to cultivate the affinities.”

There was a pause as they seemed to talk about it. I could see where they were coming from with this. Although warriors and mages might be better equipped to fight monsters after they’ve spawned, a druid’s abilities could keep them from appearing in the first place. Now, if they were able to learn the rune language, they’d have an even greater chance of fighting. Unfortunately, asking someone to learn language composed of a hundred million symbols was essentially an impossible task.

“We don’t have that kind of time, but we’ll have our off duty officers participate in this game. For now, we need a more immediate solution. It’s not widespread yet, but monsters are appearing randomly all over the city. We’ve confirmed only small ones so far, green monsters likely to be goblins or something, as well as slimes. We can handle the goblins, but those slime creatures are practically unkillable with conventional weapons.”

I nodded at that, and explained. “I encountered a slime monster in the game recently. They are strong against physical attacks, but can be easily destroyed with energy attacks or magic. As long as they aren’t a fire slime, you can try burning them to death.”

The man let out a sigh, and I felt like he was nodding his head in the background. “That’ll help a bit. Flamethrowers are better than nothing, and if energy works we can use shock sticks. Still, that’s going to be a rough job.”

They talk amongst themselves for a few more minutes before they get back to me. “I won’t beat around the bush here. We need someone able to fight these monsters as they appear, and currently the police aren’t able to do that yet. You want a job?”

Author’s Basement: I know! Short chapter, but that just felt like the best spot to end it on.