Arthur was sitting on the floor of the oval platform surrounded by the underground lake into which he had first fallen in. It had been hard, swimming back through the underwater tunnel without much light to see in, but honestly, even at the first crossing he hadn't really relied on sight to navigate, and using his first experience as guideline he had been able to do it without much difficulty.

Probably what helped the most to make his way back was that all of his injuries and hunger had completely disappeared, and while he had no idea how that was possible, Arthur was not the type to look a gift horse in the mouth. Especially considering what size and teeth horses could be armed with, in this world.

Arthur shuddered from the cold clinging deep inside him, as if his bones were frozen, another issue he was trying to work towards resolving, possibly by building a fire.

Now, here is where you may be thinking: how can you build a fire trapped in a wet cavern underground which had never seen either the light of the sun or even a hint of wood?

The answer which Arthur had reached and been blessed with was simple: Magic.

Somehow, for some reason, the Skill Gem, as he had decided to call it, had granted him a new skill, a magical and totally not useless one this time, so now his status showed this.

Skills - [4/12 Slots Filled]

Rank

Level

Category

Desperate Dodge

Common

4

Active Skill

Sun Tolerance

Common

6

Resistance

Hide in Plain Sight

Uncommon

8

Ability

Magick of the Bountiful Oasis

First Invocation – From Sand, Seed

Rare

2

Magick Set

So, since he had gotten a ‘magick’ skill, he had been experimenting with it since he had come back half an hour ago and had finally worked out how to use it.

Parts of the whole mechanism had been installed in his subconscious, which was not creepy and worrying at all, so he understood how to shape his will and use it to flood his channels and invoke spells – or spell, in his case – by forming specific and complicated shapes.

Or something like that. It had only been half an hour, so he still wasn’t clear on all the things pertaining magick, and only had a couple of floor concepts to work with since sifting through your mind to find knowledge on things you never heard about before was both hard and uncomfortable.

Still, he had discovered enough that, coupled together with the power of the skill itself, he could invoke his spell. Apparently, magick was different from magic, which also existed, in that while the latter used a person’s power to form spells, the former expended an individual’s will to shape the world around them.

The difference was subtle but his new memories insisted it was very important. While magic users could use more powerful spells from the start and always had an edge of power more than others, magick users could shape spells more fluidly, by using their will to, well, will a spell to change.

For example, his spell [From Sand, Seed] used materials reduced to powder to create the living and fertile seed of an actual plant, which would then grow in a matter of minutes depending on the plant chosen and power of the user. While a magician could use the spell and always get the same tomato seed, or maybe a different variety of seed each time, a magick user could decide what the seed would grow into when creating it, and using some imagination even mould how it would grow.

As such, he was trying to create an oak seed, also often called acorn by normal people not too focused on their magick studies to think straight, from which would sprout a stick usable for firewood. It was the perfect plan, or so Arthur thought.

A couple of hours of smacking rocks against each other to make small the mounds of fragments required as components by the spell, several failed attempts, a couple tomatoes to snack on and many levels, Arthur finally managed to make a pile of sticks in what he considered to be optimal campfire form.

Rubbing his hands eagerly, a tired but excited Arthur prepared himself to finally be free from the wetness of this place, when suddenly, as he stood there above his stack of sticks, his brain informed him of the obvious. He had no idea how to light a fire without tools.

“Well, don't I feel like a fool now," Arthur muttered dejectedly. Still, not everything was lost, he still had the old tried method of utilizing the all-powerful force of friction.

He sighed, grabbed the two newest sticks, which were incidentally the least damp between all others in the stack, and started the long and tiring process of reinventing fire by rubbing wood against wood.

The whole thing went as well as one may imagine, and it took him almost another hour to realize he needed some kind of fibre, since the sticks would need too much energy and time to set on fire by themselves with just friction. He made do with some pulped bark stripped from the driest sticks he could find, which were starting to succumb to the dampness of the cavern fairly quickly.

Finally, the improvised tinder started to smoke, and Arthur delicately blew on it, promptly snuffing it out. They say you can still hear his shouts of rage echoing through the caves below the earth.

Luckily it took a fair amount less for the bark to start smoking again, and after some caring, begging and compromising, Arthur managed to get a small fire started, and from there it was quite easy to get the rest of the stack going.

After accomplishing this great feat, showcasing Arthur’s abundant knowledge of survival techniques, our protagonist stripped naked and finally put everything to dry, including himself.

As he sat by the fire buck naked as the day he was born, Arthur traced his fingers over the tense and rough skin where he had been sliced by the Mantis creature, both the gash on his left arm which had been infected and the small nick on the bridge of his nose.

While the gem, or maybe the water that had washed over him after it cracked had healed the wounds, the scars left behind were quite noticeable, both to the touch and to his sight for the one he could see on his arm.

Although Arthur didn’t consider himself a warrior scarred from many battles, as he expected the would-be natives of this world would appear, if they existed, he still thought it was quite the step in the ‘right’ direction, if that was what you wanted.

As for Arthur, while he didn’t exactly want to cover himself in silvery lines or even get hurt often enough for that to happen, he had to admit the scars looked quite cool, and it was a preferable option to losing one of his arms or dying from an infection. Or both.

Arthur sighed once more. It was starting to become a habit, sighing to stop a track of thought before he went down a rabbit hole, and directing his mind towards thinking about the next move for his survival.

Since his new skill set was now at level 8, rivalling what had before been his highest level skill [Hide in Plain Sight], he was trying to work out how he could use it to escape from this cavern in the bowel of the earth, as he expected the [From Sand, Seed] spell would also get more powerful as his level in the overall set grows. Also because it was the only skill he had which he could see have any actual usefulness in his current situation.

His first option would be to grow rope, or maybe fibres to tie together into a rope and use it to somehow get from where he had come from. Arthur had yet to see another tunnel underwater which he could swim through to get out from the caves, although he hadn't really explored much after coming back from his first voyage.

If Arthur was being honest, he was in no hurry to get in the cold water again and risk getting hypothermia. While it wasn’t frigid and he could still light another fire, he had started to feel tingling while he was attempting to light the campfire, and he wasn’t too keen on trying his luck again.

On the same line of thought as the rope, Arthur could try to grow or craft a ladder, although it would be much more complicated than a simple rope, at least with a ladder he would be sure he had a fixed point at the lip of the hole on the ceiling to which secure the ladder. On the other hand, he had no idea how or where he could tie a rope.

Before departing from the cavern though, Arthur wanted to grow himself some equipment, which he was pretty confident he wouldn't have too many issues with. A canteen to bring water with him, a replacement spear, a simple backpack to carry things around and maybe even a simple hardwood slab tied with rope to protect his vitals.

After seeing and experiencing on his skin what the creatures inhabiting this world could do, Arthur wanted to take no chances on his protective measures.

Trying to raise his levels and general familiarity of the spell before passing on to more difficult crafting projects, Arthur started out by trying to grow a long spear, around two meters in length, which should have been simple enough to create.

It should have been, because when he tried to make the seed and order it into the shape and dimensions he wanted it to take, he felt a pushing sensation, as if he had hit a barrier and his skill was telling him that he couldn’t get over it no matter what. He grumbled a bit but complied, and while he was waiting for the seed to grow into a spear almost a third shorter than he had wanted, he mulled over how he could adapt his approach to fighting.

He had wanted a long spear so that he could keep his distance when faced against opponents bigger than himself, but now that he had a weapon shorter than he was tall by a long shot, he wished he could make a sword instead. Which he obviously couldn’t, since iron didn’t grow on trees.

Arthur considered making a bow, but he had no training in using one and wasn’t confident in neither the accuracy he could gain from self-training nor the piercing power and damage he could inflict with wooden arrows, even if he managed to install a stone tip. Besides, when he got out of the underground he would be quite pressed to find hard stones to replace them, when all he had found on the surface was brittle sandstone.

The spear was almost done growing while he pondered over his options, and Arthur took a break from his deep reflection to admire his work, the results of which were unsurprisingly less than satisfactory in his eyes.

While the shaft was as straight and without too many imperfections as his current skill could make it, the tip of the spear, which he had tried to grow in a long cone of denser wood, wasn’t as pointy as he would have liked. There was also a pommel at the other end of the weapon, which he hadn’t included in the design but should have known would appear, since it was where the whole thing had grown from, its seed and point of origin.

As he examined it, he thought the whole thing looked much more like a javelin than the spear he had imagined and wanted to create.

"A javelin..." Arthur muttered, a light-bulb lighting over his head. He had no idea if it would be harder to learn how to throw a javelin over learning archery, but it was worth a shot, no pun intended, so he queued another three seeds in the same form as his first javelin and then went to work on using shards of stone to sharpen the point of his weapon, trying as best as he could to not make the whole thing more unbalanced than it already was.

An hour later, after various attempts and ruined lengths of wood thrown in the water, Arthur finally had a volley of five javelins at his disposal, bundled together in a rigid wooden quiver two-thirds of their length.

The next project he had in mind, a canteen, was quite quick and simple to make. He used as inspiration a movie set in Africa he had seen years before, the name of which he thought was 'Prey', although he wasn't sure. He didn't know whether it was also true in real life, but in this movie, a group of indigenous hunters used the gourd of some plant which grew in the shape of an hourglass as a makeshift canteen.

He figured he didn’t need it to be true since he could just imagine it, so he created seeds for a pair of the gourd canteens, designing them hollow and connecting the seeds to the open-top to use as stoppers.

Surprisingly it worked at the first try, and apart from some slight deformities around the body there were no issues with them, and the simple mechanism to keep them closed didn’t make water spill unless he shook or threw them violently.

Next up was trying to grow rope, or at the very least making fibre and experimenting with tying it into functional ropes. To practice, and because he needed something to tie his quiver and gourds to his body, Arthur started out with thinner pieces of string rather than the thick rope he envisioned at the start.

It worked nicely enough, but Arthur realized if he wanted a thicker rope to have the flexibility he needed, he would have to make softer fibres and actually weave them together rather than grow it all in one piece.

Also, while the volumetric limit placed on him by the skill had grown a couple centimetres after reaching level 10, Arthur thought he would need a couple dozen seeds to make a large enough supply of fibre so that he could have a sufficiently long rope to throw over the hole in the ceiling, after wasting enough to learn how to actually make it.

He went to work, but after only creating a couple of them he started to feel light-headed and had to stop, out of fear of passing out again, something he very much wanted to avoid.

Surmising that this was probably the limit of the ‘will’ pool that his magick used to function, Arthur decided to take a break on that front and train a bit in what was to him the absolutely unknown art of throwing javelins.