I take the next 2 weeks continuing to feed myself by hunting small game close to the village, and confirming or clarifying my assumptions. With only 2 imbuements per day, testing is slow going. Hopefully some level ups will give me more daily imbuements. Although there are clear differences between the magic of my class and that of the regular spellcasting classes, I fully expect for additional daily imbuements to be among the rewards associated with leveling up.

I’m not completely certain how one goes about level ups; those are very rare among lizard folk so there’s a bit of a dearth of information in that regard. According to the priest and the mage though, if you’re with a group, you get at or near an equal share of the experience from killing monsters. They also affirm that killing creatures is the best way to level up, but that there are many ways to gain experience. Accomplishing major tasks can grant levels, training can grant levels, crafting can grant levels, and so on. However, killing is king. A half a dozen fights might be enough to get someone to move from level 1 to level 2, but trying to go from level 1 to level 2 via daily practice and similar nonviolent means might take years of dedicated training.

The “sentient” races, by which the humans mean the happy go lucky Tolkien style versions like elves and dwarves, often have training facilities to help establish classes. Many training facilities strive not just to establish a class, but also to provide combat experience in a controlled environment. As far as the priest and the mage know it seems to help, but somehow who or whatever it is that manages the back end of the class systems seems to have a way to differentiate that it is still just training, because it’s even though it's more effective than nonviolent training, it's still far less effective than going out there and getting shot at and rended by terrible beasts. Wrent by terrible beasts? Rent? Mauled. In other words, the hands down best way to get stronger is to go out and put yourself through some good old fashioned perilous peril.

As for the health absorption imbuement? I get Slathric to help me test it, and frankly it’s less useful than I expected. It only absorbs a couple of health worth of damage before the enchantment seems to run out of steam, even his first claw attack is enough to dig into my health pool, and it provides no benefit whatsoever for additional attacks. Further, it doesn’t seem to stack at all no matter what pieces I enchant. Perhaps it will get better if I level up, but I’m no longer expecting much out of it.

As for the Spell release imbuements? They are harder to use than I expected, but also much better than I expected, and I expected them to be good. I seem to be able to replicate any beginner tier spell, or at least all the ones that I thought would be worth trying. Getting the timing right is still quite the trick: even hunting helpless game it’s just hard to predict when the right time to spend a minute to prepare an item with an enchantment such that I’ll run into a creature I want to kill in the next 59 minutes. But man, it’s a pretty amazing feeling to be able to pick up a stick and use it to release arcane missiles against an unfortunate bunny.

Not that I enjoyed the cleanup afterwards, but it was great to feel powerful, even if it was only for a couple seconds, and even if I know that a real mage would be able to do my amazing trick twice as many times as I was and without all the limitations on needing to precast the spell to be able to cast it and then needing to do the post casting from an item within a limited time. In other words despite the headaches associated with having to infuse an item with temporary magical powers, I remain very optimistic about getting value out of this. In fact, aside from the skill failures I get when replicating spells via spell release, the problem I am running into now is that I feel like I need to know more spells.

I’ve asked the priest and the mage and even a shaman for a list of all the spells that they are aware of. With some experimentation I was able to discover that knowing a spell exists is not, by itself, enough for me to be able to spoof a spell. However, once I learn specifically what it does and what’s required to cast it, at that point I can.

I don’t need to have seen it cast, or have been able to read a scroll, or knock out a mage and steal his spell book, or anything else that crazy. Knowing that there’s a spell called cone of flame, that it’s an arcane spell, that when it is cast a gout of flames erupts from your hands out in a 5 meter cone, that it requires suitable gestures and chanting but that there are no special materials required? That’s what it takes. I need to know quite a lot about the spell, but I don’t need to actually know the spell to be able to fake it.

Getting a spell release to work is a bit tricky mind you, especially since I have to make the attempt to replicate the spell within a 1 minute period using nothing but my newly acquired knowledge of the “core” of what a spell might look like. I suppose that must be the skill check at work; it’s almost a mini game of mental rune carving, and the specifics of how to make a spell function is complex enough that every attempt I make is different from the last even if it is for the same spell.

One might wonder what kind of success rate I have at spoofing spells. Honestly, I feel like it’s pretty good for low level spells. Something like the cone of flame or the arcane missile or the restoration of health I can succeed probably about one in four attempts.

Attempting to use a spell release for a spell that is beyond the tier a caster of my level is able to access, for instance if the more powerful spell were fireball? Imagine playing a game of jinga with your face. Not your mouth though, the entire face. I haven’t even come close.

I can see why you’d think my performance with regards to the spell releases is bad. That means I can only succeed on about 1 in 4 of my spell release attempts, and only on the weakest of spells will I see even that much success. Meaning I’m only able to actually succeed at casting a random extremely basic spell about every other day, and only if I’m putting all of my imbue attempts towards it. But even though I know that’s extremely unreliable, I can’t help but think I’ll get better at it over time. And by time, I mean levels. Which I need. But it doesn’t deter me, because frankly being able to cast spells at all is a remarkable experience. Just because I’m horrible at it isn’t enough to get me down.

Would YOU be disappointed if you found out you could teleport, but you’d only succeed once every couple days? Probably a little, but you’d mostly be over the moon because you can fucking teleport. I can't teleport yet, that's a mid-tier spell, but that's what it feels like to be able to cast those lower tier spells even if I can't do it reliably, objectively speaking I know I suck, but holy shit this is fucking amazing anyhow. Thank my time on earth for that little bit of optimism.

Getting back to pressing issues though, my lack of levels and materials. I need to fix these. I don’t know at exactly what point I’ll be able to use any of my abilities in a remotely useful or consistent manner, but I do know that it isn’t going to happen on its own without years and years of grinding mundane tasks, or progressing via alternate means. And when it comes down to it, there’s 1 method that stands heads and tails above the others when it comes to getting stronger.

I need to go and kill some things, but I’d also die if I tried to do it alone. I need a small team that’s willing to take me with them. I will also need to make some preparations; I still have no armor, no flint and steel, the only weapon I can call my own is my sling, and so on. I’m actually in a terrible position to be trying to do anything else except trying to earn some money. But as the saying goes, it takes money to make money. Even trying to craft my way to success is not promising: you need materials and tools and space for that, and materials cost money even if I’m able to handle somehow taking down creatures for their leather.

Looking for a small group that I can tag along with is not a small ask here, it's not like the swamp is rife with high experience granting deer. Our cute and cuddly creatures are venomous snakes and alligators. The inhospitable environment is the only real reason we haven’t been exterminated yet, after all.

In pursuit of some basic equipment, I lend my hand to the local leatherworker for a month. I still have to feed myself, but between already knowing how to make and repair leather armor and being able to improve the quality of the elders own work via my magical tool imbuements, I scrape together enough to buy the materials for my own cheap armor, as well as a low quality canvas backpack, a wooden bowl, flint and steel, a sharp knife, and I squirrel away a couple silver for good measure. The knife isn’t really meant for use in combat, but it’s a good survival tool nonetheless. My claws are effective enough for crude work, but they’re a bit blunted and are better suited for ripping than cutting.

This is good enough, now I just need to attach myself to a small team and I can begin "Operation Suck Less". I’m equipped, I have a level, and I've been trapped in this stupid village for over a decade. I’m ready to put together a small group and get out of here. Onward, to glory!