As morning came, I managed to find a secluded cave right behind a larger tree, quickly set up camp, and went to sleep. I wanted to get at least a few hours in, otherwise if I only slept the next night I would wake up too late and wouldn’t be able to fall asleep at a normal hour and so on, into a never-ending spiral of a shitty sleep schedule.

Waking up at noon, I quickly got up, brushed and all that, made my business in the magical toilet that would erase anything (thank God for magic, am I right?) and started counting my spoils.

Let’s start with the non-important stuff. Weapons and armors, the most basic ones, like swords, spears, and just normal armor, nothing special. I wasn’t usually a normal sword guy and never a spear guy, and armor just made everything worse, so everything was going on the market.

Next, money. Anything magical was paid with Crystals, but anything not, needed coins. Nothing special, the usual bronze, silver and gold coins, each one valuing 100 of the former.

So 100 bronze=1 silver, 100 silver=1 gold and that’s that. Maybe there was a platinum something for rich people but I didn’t know. Unlike the Crystals, these only had one use, and that was transactions.

Any kind of currency was quantified in the System on the bottom of your Inventory panel, including Crystals, but in the coins case, they weren’t really bronze, silver and gold. Yes, they felt like gold, scientists studied it and had the composition of gold, but the moment they were melted they turned into something with the color of gold but shittier.

Namely, when trying to mold it into something else it would just fall apart in a few minutes. So, even though Mages had tons of coins of all types, they could only be used for normal stuff, and for a pretty advanced person anything not magical was shit.

Even I had enough gold to buy entire cities - not that anyone sold, but you get the idea. Only Alinna had ten times anything I’d gotten until now. Thus, considering all this, gold was only used in a “virtual” way, meaning you didn’t take it out, you just paid through the System, by physical contact, like I did at that cafe. The norm was handshakes, but high-fives worked anyway.

Anway, even then this family was pretty poor, like I said, Alinna had ten times what was in the treasury. Which takes me to the second currency.

Crystals were expensive. You couldn’t buy them with coins, obviously, and they were pretty hard to get - by mining usually. You get a mine, if it has a lot of Mana Crystals form and you mine them. Which sounds easy, but it’s really rare.

That was why the treasury had barely over 200, while I got tens of thousands from Alinna. The difference was inexplicable. As this planet was huge, territories were also the same, meaning there was a dire need of people to manage it. Here comes the Baron. But in this case, this area was shit, no natural resources, no Beasts to hunt for materials, and nothing interesting to see, meaning that they were poor. Really poor.

What I was planning to give the son of the Baron was a quarter of their whole treasury. Anyway, that was disappointing but expected.

Next there were storage rings full of miscellaneous materials, artifacts of all types, and some other stuff.

Now, the highlight of all this. The books!

Magical ones, of course. Like I said, these were protected on the whole globe, and they only got some because of their status. Still, only the beginner ones but it was fine. It was all I needed.

Smiling, I laid each one in order on a sheet on the ground and inspected their titles.

First one was titled “Introduction to Structured Spells”. Awesome, next was “Beginner Spells”, next to the third, named “Affinities”. Coming in fourth was a fucking skill! Then the fifth was something called “Ice Soul”, but it was only half the book, the rest torn off.

So uh… tedious explanation incoming.

We’ll talk about skills for now. So, like in a game, you could get skills. Learn it, and you could do it like a pro. Skills could be acquired from Dungeons, another thing usually found in games.

Usually, if a relatively powerful individual ever set up a building or a base of any kind anywhere, after that base or whatever kind of settlement, (even a lab in a cave could work) was abandoned, the System would take the courtesy of turning that into a Dungeon.

It works like you can probably imagine, go in, fight a bunch of monsters, fight the big boss, get the reward. In some cases, that reward was a skill.

Skills are really nice, but also really limiting. Namely, every skill came in a book. Touch the book, get a prompt about it, and you can choose to learn the skill or not. However, that Skill was set like that, meaning you couldn’t modify it in any way. Yes, you could remake it from scratch as a normal Spell and modify it yourself, but the Skill was set as it was.

Now, most Skill Books still remained as a book after you learnt it. You couldn’t give it to someone else to learn it, but you could read the book normally and make the Spell or whatever by yourself, like with a normal book. Which was cool.

Ok, that done, I looked at the Skill Book. Lo and behold, as expected, it was called Ice Needle, like my good friend ‘what's-his-name’ used in our fight before I got to the city. Obviously, I didn’t get a prompt to learn it when I touched the cover, so he already learned it before. Oh well, I could study it myself.

Did I mention I loved studying stuff myself? I loved learning anything, even if it wasn’t in my expertise, all the way since I was a kid. Reading books took most of my time in the past life, and hopefully in this one as well.

I also loved experimenting and doing things myself, even if I always failed, or if it didn’t even matter. My mom always said I was a very curious boy.

I’m not about to bore you with the next part of magic theory, so we’ll skip that for now.

What I had to do was pack up and go on my way. And that I did.

Every plan I had from now on was without any time constraint. Last time I had to rush to the city as soon as possible, but now I could just take my time, sight-see, stroll through the deadly forests and just have fun.

Every Dungeon or ruin I planned to visit would only be discovered long from now, the closest one six months in the future, which was more than enough time to get there. This time with no map, of course. Like I said, I loved doing things myself.

I would try and direct myself by asking online, which would hopefully work until some point, when I would buy a map.

So I set on. The first day was spent by just strolling, dodging a pack of wolves, a squirrel that barreled into a deer like a cannonball, and picking random plants. I stopped at about 7 PM, taking out a large pot and throwing anything I had in there (by following a recipe, of course).

Cooking was another guilty pleasure of mine, especially in the wilderness with ingredients picked by myself. I would’ve loved to go to a culinary school on Earth, but the cost made it impossible.

The main ingredient was the meat of a deer from the inventory of one of my victims (forgot which one), cooked with mushrooms, some moss that supposedly did good for the liver, and a touch of one of the toxins that remained, ‘cause why not. Hundred percent efficiency, remember?

All in all, it tasted good, with the whole eyes watering thing, either from the poison or the spice.

Next I sat down and meditated, guiding the Mana from my core to the bones - the second body part that I had to enhance - by injecting them with enough Mana until it was full, before destroying the whole skeleton and replacing it with bones that held Mana better.

It was a slow process, but since this was only the first Stage, it wouldn’t take that long.

As my Core emptied and started absorbing more Mana from the atmosphere, I got up and took out one of my new books.

Now, I am indeed embarrassed to say that I had no idea what the fifth one, “Ice Soul” was, since it wasn’t a spell, nor a Skill, nor a Spell so I had no idea what to do with it. It said something about peace of mind, and calmness or whatever, but the rest was all unknown to me, so I left it for when I knew more.

Frankly, it was probably some kind of meditation method, but I only knew one, the one that everyone used, so no idea.

Thus, I started reading the first one, the “Introduction to Structured Spells”.

I knew some stuff about Structured Spells, but not much.

So like I already mentioned, anyone could use magic, just not as good as those who called themselves Mages. You could use spells even at the Formation Stage, but not structured ones.

Anyone could make a ball of fire, or an ice needle like that guy used, maybe even raise the ground a bit. But they were honestly shit. Unstructured spells were just elements taken out and moved without any structure or complex composition. Take the ice needle for example, I could make one myself and launch it at someone, but the best it could do was poke them a bit and fall apart, only useful for a distraction.

Like I said, they were shit.

Structured ones, on the other hand, were actual spells with a set form.

Like I said, this was all I knew so it barely made any sense.

Now as the book said, each spell had something like an infrastructure. Like a skeleton on the inside that you filled with mana of a certain element and powered that skeleton to shape the spell. If you modified that skeleton you modified the spell, whether in a good or bad way.

It likened it to a constellation, with points placed in a certain shape, each one doing their own job and connecting to the next one. If you didn’t go through one of the points, the spell would either fall apart, have more power or explode in your face. And nobody knew what to do before actually trying. It was all trial and error.

Of course, specialists have been doing this for ages, so most spells have already been documented and they knew what each “node” - as they called it - did.

The first example was the fireball spell, the most basic and popular. The constellation was shaped like a boxing glove, or the letter “C” but crooked. Each node did its job, making it more powerful, or hotter, or made it have more force.

Then it raised the question: why not fill that “C” with more nodes? Well, for one, it required more mana to cast, and was just all around too complicated for a beginner spell.

It spoke of the level of each spell, and of this particular one that should stay a beginner spell as it was made to be. You see, there were no actual levels to spells, only that people actually called them beginner, intermediate and whatever else there was.

The fireball spell was a beginner one, and should always stay as such, since a lot of Mages spent their lives to make it better but always failed.

And that was the difference between a structured spell and an unstructured one, the former being a building with pillars and a foundation, the latter being just cement put in the shape of a building.

This particular book gave no instruction of any certain spell, the fireball being just explained in a broader form, so I had to learn my first spell from the next tome, the ones with the beginner spells.

But that was an issue for tomorrow, I’d been reading for hours and it was already bedtime.

G’night!

—---------------------

You know what I also really love? Writing. Just scribbling stuff. Actually, it was the feeling of pen on paper, the sound of it all.

Know what else Mages did? They wrote a lot. I’m sure you’ve heard of Grimoires before, whether in stories of movies, right?

Well here, Mages wrote down their thoughts on spells and their research to be studied later or to just pass on to the next generation. A Grimoire was a Mage’s most precious belonging, (besides their bodies and Mana, of course) containing all of their secrets.

So, right after I woke up I took out a huge notebook I bought before, along with a fancy pen and started writing.

As paranoid as I was, I wrote everything in Romanian, a shitty language from a shitty country, being the only language I knew besides English, to deter any would-be thieves. Of course, I wasn't the only one from Earth, and maybe there was something similar to Romanian on this planet, but I hoped there wasn’t.

Either way, it was the only way I could think of to protect what I wrote and it didn’t hurt anyway. Even the journal I wrote in the System was in English.

I started with the title “Spells” and scribbled the image of the fireball I saw in the book yesterday, along with its structure.

Then, I tried it. Not the structured one, of course. I liked to take things slow and experiment in my own way, so I took my time.

Extending my hand forward, palm up, I stared at it, trying to imagine a sphere, no bigger than a golf ball, red and flaming, floating above my palm. While guiding just a little bit of Mana - not too much - from the Core to the pathways and to the hand.

I could feel a current quickly passing through the arm, and quickly coalescing in the center of the palm. With a poof, a small, flaming red ball appeared. I stared at it for a couple seconds, mesmerized by the beauty I’d always imagined, when I realized the current wasn’t stopping.

Then with a whoosh, that ball instantly turned into a ball the size of a soccer ball. I quickly got back, taking my face as far away as possible from the fire, like it stank and I was trying to get away.

Quick lesson, your own Mana can’t hurt you, so I was good, but the unconscious reaction to a fire in your face was typical.

Leaving that aside, I looked back at the flaming ball, astonished. Call me weird, but it was the most fascinating and beautiful thing I had ever seen. Imagine seeing yourself sprout fire out of your hand for the first time. It was surreal.

Then I realized the whole thing was unnecessarily big and I was subconsciously fueling it with Mana, wasting too much. So, carefully I let half of it dissipate, just imagining it go away, and it did just that.

Now I was left with the intended tennis ball sized fireball. It was just a piece of mana turned into fire, and that fire molded into a ball, but it was amazing. A few minutes later I let that dissipate as well and felt my Core for its remaining Mana. The Mana requirement for maintaining spells wasn’t that big, so I was left with quite a lot.

Like I said, unstructured spells were shit, thus not requiring a lot of Mana. That was also why it blew in my face; I put too much in. I thought it was just enough, barely a few drops but it seemed like I overestimated it. Good to know for the future.

That was also what I wrote in the notebook. “Unstructured: shit. Barely needs a drop of mana. Too much and it blows up in your face”. That was how my Grimoires usually looked, straight to the point and with no regards to language since only you would read it.

Anyway, next was the structured spell. The Formation Stage was just that, transforming your body to be able to take in more Mana in a smoother way, something that even Mages that never trained their body did, so spells were usually weak, even if structured. Thus right now this was just for practice, I wouldn’t be able to kill anything with it.

Slowly, I imagined the shape of the boxing glove, bulging at the end and thinner at the beginning, formed with small points connected by lines. I guided the Mana, this time much more to each point, straight to the next one, and when I was done I was left with a faintly glowing blue orb, floating above the palm.

Then, I thought of that Mana in the constellation turning warm, just to test something. Taking my other hand, I put it above the orb, noticing that it was indeed warmer.

Smiling, I thought of that orb turning flaming hot, and that it did. Only after that did I turn it red, give it a form and it became a fireball.