Awarang, a small elven town in Gretharea Kingdom, 47 Gearro 3982

My plan was actually very simple. It was strongly related to the use of my remaining two active magic slots. Most beastmages normally used their aez slots for either attack magic, recovery magic, or buff magic. Well, it made some sense since we, beastmages, had very limited slots for active magic. Not many would choose non-combat ones when they were restricted by only two possible spaces.

Several beastmages that I knew of, from stories I had read, actually tried learning a lot of different active magic skills to find what type of magic would be suitable for their combat style. It was not very effective but it could be done… by overwriting the magic skill that had previously been learned. Well, it meant that the previous aez they learned disappeared from their mind and could only be relearned through similar tedious work they had done before.

Different from those ‘normal’ beastmages, I planned to use the two remaining slots of aez in my mind for non-combat magic skills. My simple plan was to fill both of them with utility magic skills, which, even though, would not directly help me in battle, but would play a great role for powering me up.

The first of the aez I would try to get was [Matjiwa], a beast magic skill which, in RPG games, functioned pretty much like [Identify] or [Appraisal], a skill to identify items, monsters, and the likes. Here, in this world, the normal identify spell, although it was not that hard to get, was actually included in a master level of alteration magic. So, not that many people could use this spell.

For beastmages… well, no beastmage I knew of learned this active spell. Yet, I knew it was possible for me to learn it, since many high level monsters like black dragons, gryphons, giant three-eyed owls, and nightmare serpents, could use it. Of course, my plan would not involve those deadly monsters. I did not make a plan to commit suicide.

What I aimed was the less risky choice, even though unfortunately, was also less certain… the insects, not the gigantic-monstrosity ones, but the tiny normal-sized ones.

In Raea, what the elves called for this world, almost all living creatures were exposed to the world’s magic essence, mana. Simply speaking, most creatures possessed magic power within them. This basically meant that it was much more difficult to find a non-magical creature rather than the magical one. Even the ‘magic-less’ humans, dwarves, barbarians, and gnomes actually possessed magic within them. Most of them were simply unable to manipulate this magic power due to their low sensitivity to perceive mana.

In my previous world, up to the twenty third century where I used to live, there were already more than a million discovered species of insects, in which many of them possessed unique specialties. I was pretty much sure that this world was similar. My hypothesis was that most of the insects in this world would possess magic power, and that some would definitely possess the magic skill I wanted to have, the [Matjiwa].

This idea of mine to make a good use of insects actually came from many books of nature I read, especially the one entitled “The Tiny Lives” written by someone with a pen name of Green Druid. I assumed this writer was an elf with nature magic specialization, green eyes. As far as I knew, those with green eyes were the only mages who were willing to spend their time studying nature, plants, and animals.

As far as I knew too, no beastmage did any research on insects. Well, it didn’t mean that there was a hundred percent certainty that no one else with purple eyes had had the same line of thought with mine. There were probably some beastmages who carried out the same plan like I did but they didn’t publish it or let others know about it. That was a logical move actually. That was what I would do if I were them.

Anyway, I was pretty sure that most beastmages in the past would not have learned magic from insects, since insects’ power were generally considered either extremely weak or plain useless. That was a wrong line of thought though, since I was sure that, at least for beast mages, magic power was scaled to the amount and quality of mana used, other than the quality of magic skill itself.

There were many factual proofs of that, like, for example, how a beastmage’s [Heal] learned from a unicorn was significantly weaker from the original unicorn’s [Heal], or how a beastmage’s [Fireball] learned from a faerie imp was much stronger than the original. That meant that the magic from tiny creatures like insects, assuming that they did have magic, could be extremely powerful if it was scaled to ‘human size’.

However, I had a feeling that looking for high level restoration or destruction active magic from insects would be a very big mistake. Most magical insects depended on their body structures to survive after all, so their healing power was mostly related to their passive magic, their zea, not aez. And, well, the only way insects could cause large scale destruction was by relying on numbers. Several millions of locusts could destroy a very large area, but a single locust… well, not so much.

Yeah, destruction or restoration was not the right choice here. But buff or utility magic… that was a different case. And in my case, I already made a list of twenty two potential insects which might have [Matjiwa]. Among them, I had the greatest expectation for the wayjasmott (wise ant), matrog (beholder bug), and zarpod (jade mantis shrimp).

Why would I want to learn this [Matjiwa] identify-appraisal thing? Well, it was for three main reasons.

First, I could use it to check myself, especially… my left-over mana, so that I wouldn’t incidentally kill myself through the overuse of mana. Here, I also hoped that it could function like a character or status page in a game, which could be very useful in measuring my improvement.

Second, I could use it to check well… items, surrounding, monsters and the likes for dangerous things that could easily kill me, like poisons, diseases, or curses. After I managed to escape from the death caused by advanced biochemical virus, survive from the magical plague that killed my family… it would definitely be really frustrating and embarrassing to die just because I accidentally picked a cursed item or something silly like that. Although… I would probably not feel frustrated or embarrassed, since yeah… I would be dead already.

And, the last and the most important reason I needed to get the magic skill was so that I could find an insect, or any other harmless monster, which possessed [Glook] or something similar to that. This [Glook] was an active magic skill which let the user to devour, absorb, and learned its weakened enemy’s power, both the aez and zea. There was only one single monster species known to possess this terrible ability… glookalk, which was also known as the devourer, the harbinger of chaos, the pinnacle of predation, and the emperor of the underworld.

I had no intention to search for any glookalk. Nope, no way! This creature was even stronger and more dangerous than a dragon. I definitely didn't want to meet it. However, I refused to believe that no other creature could take the passive magic skills from other creatures. Perhaps there was indeed no other creature that possessed a cheat-like power at the magnitude of [Glook]. But, there must be other creatures out there that had an active magic skill to learn passive magic skill. An aez to learn a zea… that was my aim for the last slot of my active magic.

Similar to the one with identify-appraisal thing, I had already made a list of insects with the potential of possessing that kind of magic skill. The problem was that there were currently only three species of insects included in the list, the skreylang (greed locust), orxaliba (skull tarantula), and embasrog (doppelganger bug). Oh well, once I got the [Matjiwa], I could just analyze any creature I would encounter. I might get lucky that way.

I still had many things to consider, but I guessed it was time to return to the real world. My time inside my mind here was not dilated after all. I wished I could get an ability to make my time here a thousand times faster than the outside world…

......

I snapped out of my contemplation. My consciousness returned back to my room.

Stretching lazily, I stood up, and then I got out of my room. Nobody else was in the house. It seemed that my uncle hadn’t returned yet. What should I do now?

Oh yeah, I needed to sterilize these wounds all over my body. Ugh! Taking a bath with [purifying water]… that was not fun at all. The smell… the pain… I wished I could use [Heal]. Should I go to the Healers’ Hut? It was not too far away from here, but their price was quite expensive.

Oh, damn! That priestess in the Temple of Day was a healer, wasn’t she? Why didn’t I ask her to cast [Heal] on my wounds? Stupid me! Should I return back there? But what if she charged the same as the other healers? It was a damn waste of money…

I sighed and opened one particular drawer in the living room where my uncle put his health emergency kits. Resigned to my fate, I took a jar of [purifying powder], grabbed a set of clothes and a towel, and then moved down, out of the tree house… into our small bathroom on the ground.

……

Well, in short, I took a bath to sterilize my wounds. It was not entertaining… at all, but at least I could stop myself from screaming out loud, and the smell now was not as bad as the time I first mixed the water and the [purifying powder].

Anyway, my uncle still hadn’t come home yet, even though the sun had almost completely set, so I decided to spend my time enjoying the beautiful view of the sunset.

I looked at the sky, taking in the beauty of the serene scenery. Up there, on the clear cloudless sky, on which the western part had turned reddish, two of Raea’s four moons could be seen already, decorating the boundless sky. Some stars could also be noticed with naked eyes, even though the sky hadn’t turned dark yet. I had seen this view plenty of times, but it still felt magnificent yet strangely alien.

Looking at that sky, my eyes could not help but be captivated by one of the two moons above, the one that was... probably almost three times as large as the Earth’s moon, crystal-like in appearance, and pale yellow in color, Gearro. That moon was simply… breathtakingly beautiful. It was as if a gigantic round yellow diamond floated majestically on the sky. The other moons were also interesting sights to see, but since they were not as big as Gearro, their beauty was not that imposing.

The four moons in Raea somehow signified something like seasons… the divisions of time. Well, the time measurement in this world was quite different than that of my old world. One cycle of a day and night here was about thirty hours, which meant that this world either was bigger or rotated slower than the Earth where I used to live.

Here, there was nothing like month or week. There were four museeme though, which were pretty similar to seasons; each consisted of ninety six days. They were named after the moons… Gearro, Ageny, Silph, and Veruna. Those names themselves simply meant earth, fire, wind, and water… the cliché elements.

Gearro, the season of earth… not the planet but earth the ground-land-dirt-rock thing, was similar to spring, a season when flowers bloomed and animals mated, well… at least that was here in the northern continent, in the southern continent it was probably different.

Ageny, the season of fire, here was the equivalent of summer, the time when the power of the sun blanketed the world in its warm passion. Ageny the moon was the smallest among the four. It had reddish glow which was beautiful yet spooky at times.

Silph, the season of wind, was pretty much the same as autumn, the time when the wind led the fallen leaves in a wild dance of glory. Its moon was probably about the same size of the earth’s moon. Depending on the time during the year, its color ranged from pale green to deep turquoise. It was probably the weirdest moon, seen from its range of color.

And Veruna, the season of water, was easily comparable to winter, the time when cold snow covered the night of tranquility. Its bluish moon was just a little smaller than Silph, but other than its hue, it was the most normal one among the other moons.

About the smaller part of time measurement… it could be said that, in this world, time was much simpler. There was no such thing like minutes or hours. Time of the day was only divided in just eight parts which were equal to… dawn, morning, noon, afternoon, dusk, evening, midnight, night. Simple!

Still talking about measurement, well… I was really glad that most cultures in this world adopted base-ten numeral system, just like what was common in my old world. I would really hate it if the one used here was hexadecimal or binary or unary or any other strange numeral system.

I stopped musing about this random thought in my mind when I heard heavy footsteps.

When I looked at the direction of where the footsteps were coming, I could see my uncle, a very tall elf who looked more like a bear with his impressive muscles, messy long dark hair and imposing beard. This bear-like elf carried a barrel which seemed to be full of weapons on his shoulder.

He walked straight to my direction with rushed footsteps and heavy scowl, worse than the usual, on his face. Oh, gosh! He was in a bad mood. Did he somehow know that I almost died earlier today? This was bad… very bad.

When he was just a few steps away from me, my uncle opened his mouth. And the first thing he said was…