With his fear of self-mutilation slowly decreasing by the day, a worrisome prospect, it was time to sleep not long after. Though, he did spend a short while killing zombies to push his count of hearts back up to 30. Like this he could afford the expenditure of solar magic better.

And, he had to forget to ask for some ivy from the villagers.

With the half-finished sun slivers collected before sun completely set, he also found out what the sun well did. Quite interestingly, the moment darkness completely descended, he saw a beam of light escape the well and illuminate his surroundings. It allowed him to see out all the way to the forests nearby, and a few nearby zombies caught in the light wailed.

But those wails turned to screams and roars, not that they could do anything else as blisters formed up and down their bodies, eventually becoming large rotten boils all over. And finally, the collapsed on the ground and were set aflame, but not actually destroyed.

The fire burned their skin until the zombie truly stopped, and it explained why they only came out in complete darkness. With such sensitivity to sunlight, it appeared that solar magic would utterly destroy them.

“Except. Did it have to run out after like 10 minutes?” It really annoyed him as he had been using the well as a major light source, but then it ran out so quickly! That was hours of time under the sun, yet the thing ran out of juice at a ridiculous speed, although this made sense with how much it illuminated the surroundings compared to the size of its opening. “Maybe I can just cover it up until I need it?” That being his best option for the moment, he didn’t put much thought of it.

An uncomfortable bed is still a bed at the end of the day, and he just wanted to get some rest. Which he rather easily did.

That night left him with a nightmare of being caught in a forest fire. But strangely, even as he burned to death and the pain was slightly excruciating, he didn’t scream. In fact, his body just stood there, wincing slightly, but never truly reacting to the flames devouring life all around him.

In the morning he awoke with a slightly confused face. Without a cold sweat, he didn’t really understand how someone could be so desensitised to such a horrible torture so easily.

“Is it the solar magic influencing me now? Or just a bad dream…” Head shaking, he decided to place attention elsewhere for the day. To be exact, he placed the sources of darkness by the oak tree once more, but behind a small wall to stop slimes taking them, and dropped all his magical items in the small storehouse there. Just a pair of pants and a shirt…

It was time to see where this went.

About half an hour later, he crossed the prairie and forest to reach the yellow-bark trees. The tracks from just a couple days ago already faded, but with the direction being straight north, it was easy to reach the place once more.

“Arcane magic… Really do hope this guy wasn’t an arcanist,” he said whilst recalling Diavolo’s summary of the various arcane magic types. The only one he disliked was this due to its dependence on mathematics.

Unsurprisingly, whilst he knew a fair bit about building and construction, it was his maths which caused him to almost fail two years in a row. Realistically, he found most things about it easy until about calculus, and that’s when the drop started. Barely scraping together B’s back in high school, it was fortunate that the almost obsessive studying paid off.

Just barely scraping a 50% grade in those classes, it was no surprise that he remembered quite literally nothing about them besides how much he struggled to grasp the concepts.

Enough ranting about his poor fortune in mathematics though. What now stood in front of him was the large stone tower once more, completely cut off from the world around it and invisible until he stepped close enough. As he walked closer, nothing on his body reacted, and for absolute safety he left the cube back at the oak tree as well. Whatever was used to make it, he doubted that anything not similarly advanced could detect it, but there wasn’t any reason to play about...

“Will having that solar magic within me do something… No, that’s ridiculous. Everything alive has a bit of nature magic, and I shouldn’t have enough for that to matter.” He quickly saw an issue and solution to his case, but a slight concern remained. However, a second reasoning also existed, in that it in no way benefitted any arcane practitioner to outright kill those with nature magic!

In the best case scenario they killed someone from a nearby village which was dead set on exterminating them. But did other scenarios even need to be mentioned?

He doubted that it was beneficial for a hermit to become the enemy of thousands. At most the tower would gravely injure him for trespassing, and that realisation allowed him to relaxedly walk towards its walls with ease. Even with his nose against it, nothing happened, and it became clearer that the thing didn’t care about the tiny amounts of solar magic within him. Now, how to get inside…

“The obvious door might be the answer,” he said with rolling eyes. On the opposite side of the tower was a simple door made of a dark grey wood, almost black like charcoal, but without any sort of handle or knocker.

If this was a magical tower… He just touched the door a bit and waited to see what happened.

It opened with a slight creak, the hinges rusted from years of disuse. When he stepped inside, he also used the time to look at the door and its frame as well, the latter made of wood as well, but a hole about waist high.

“No lock but there is a latch. I hope getting out isn’t a pain.” As his other foot finally stepped inside, the door closed on its own and the latch audibly snapped. That happened because retracted against the door frame, and slotted into the hole, proving that it was real… Which also meant that something opened it without a handle. With full belief in the wonders of magic, he chalked it up to the tower doing so.

The bottom of the tower did not open up to a room, instead directly opening to a tight spiral staircase to which he followed up. After just a single flight of steps it opened up to a room, evidently some sort of reception for guests as it appeared… homely?

No fanciful rugs or furnishings littered the place. Instead, rather intricately carved wooden chairs were placed around a small dining table designed to hold a group of six at most. A small fireplace at the room’s back lacked any way to store wood or coals in it, not to mention being completely closed off so no smoke could escape. But with solar magic allowing for the creation of smokeless flames, why couldn’t arcane magic do the same?

“So what exactly am I meant to do? Continue upstairs then… Why would someone capable of hiding their tower from others not just teleport between floors? Unless they couldn’t teleport.” He frowned whilst looking at the spiral staircase, and for a moment had to admit that this mysterious arcane practitioner was a lot less powerful than imagined.

For a start, who’s to say that the tower exists in some sort of pocket dimension?

For all he knew this all might just be a very good form of invisibility. Or the tower was special because of its size.

Well, it depended on how hard invisibility is to replicate.

Nothing in the room drew his interest though, as the walls were rather bare except for a few paintings of an man throughout his years, definitely the former owner of this place. And while some books sat on the mantle, these were mostly just poems and short stories that had been written up to entertain guests a bit.

With that in mind, he took another flight of stairs up to the tower’s next floor, coming to a small workshop this time round. Well, what seemed to be a that.

Only the rocky or crystalline materials seemed to survive all this time, many of which were sitting on a series of tables with a variety of sharp tools. With some magnifying glasses and lenses for precise work, it appeared that this place was mostly used for carving and engraving, perhaps similar things to the rings that solar magic worked through. How the rings worked, or even why, made no sense to him, but the fact that it created a response is enough to tell that they did something.

And besides all the mess, a few shelves above these tables housed dozens of books but lacked titles on their spines, as such he’d have to reach up and grab them to know what type of magic they talked of…

Or he could just read the one on the table. The one titled ‘To a Qualified Apprentice’, and as he flipped open the first page of such an old book, he was surprised to see it so intact.

Unsurprisingly, it started with an account from the previous owner about his own history and inability to find an apprentice before his death. He mostly skimmed this section because it really didn’t matter anymore, the man clearly died from old age and the only thing he could offer as a disciple was to hopefully find a way to stop the malignant force, which also affected this man.

It seemed that he had a full tablet in the basement of this place which made it a safe zone… A full fucking tablet.

But after skimming enough he came across the things he wanted to read, whether he could loot this place freely or had to meet some sort of agreement with the tower itself. He didn’t really know if intelligent, magical objects existed, but the tower evidently ‘managed’ itself rather well to stay so clean to this day. Although the lack of light sources was a small pain.

‘I do not ask of much from my apprentice, however, I would hope that the one who comes has talent in my field. For this reason, every floor of my tower contains a single test, which will unlock the floor above as well as all its resources. I do not care what this magic is used for, but simply that you learn everything my life created and develop it further. Books such as this will explain your test with considerable detail, however, such precision is not required until the final floor. A working result is acceptable.’ He read the paragraph slowly, and came to realise this place was effectively his from the day onwards…

He doubted that many more children with talent in arcane magic would be coming along anytime soon.

With that, he flipped through the next few pages of this preface until finally reaching the real start of the book. A description of the magic was soon found, and the equipment around him began to make sense at a rapid pace. At the same time, a strange relief washed over him as he realised this arcane magic did not require any intense theoretical skill, it was almost entirely dextrous for these lower levels.

Gemstone magic, a form of arcane magic which primarily focused on the creation of various accessories and tools. Whilst it didn’t allow him to cast directly cast powerful magics, like what solar magic would one day allow for…

He’d eventually have a full set of powerful equipment which made him near unkillable in battle!

Or at least, sort of.

While a practitioner of this magic, the previous owner was extremely down-to-earth about the flaws of this type. So much so that it took a few read throughs for Joey to realise that the man simply didn’t want any apprentice to view themselves as invincible after gathering a tiny fragment of power.

Gemstone magic, as its name suggests, was focused around cutting and engraving gemstones of all sorts of shapes and sizes for various effects. On top of this, a runic alphabet unique to it was included, and these were then engraved on the gemstones to use something called ‘The Arcane’, simply a power source for all arcane magics. As for what it was. Nothing in the book explained it, either due to being a mystery or the owner viewing it as unimportant.

However, it was clear that he had a lot to read today, especially if he even wanted to be partially introduced to this magic.

Now, where to even begin with such a description?