When Liliei woke up, she felt something was amiss. Her bed was too hard and felt strange. Then she opened her eyes and saw the grass. Right, she wasn’t in her room. She had been taking a nap literally in the middle of a Dungeon, which wasn’t admittedly the best idea ever, but she hadn’t had a choice.

Nalaine had kept pushing her around, making her fight slimes again and again, trying to make her improve her ability to move while in stealth, crate constructs faster and tune her first Ability without it taking her whole concentration. The small feeling of mental tiredness that she had noticed had grown into exhaustion until suddenly her body simply refused to move anymore, a large part of her controlled mana also came back to her soul, leaving her body quite fragile.

Nalaine had immediately brought her back outside the ruins. Carrying her while blasting any slime appearing with small fireballs. Once she was laying in a safe place, Liliei had immediately drifted to sleep, unable to stay awake any longer. Now that she had woken up, she looked around, seeing Nalaine sitting beside her in the middle of the tall grass. The Demon wasn’t looking at her, but when she moved to sit, Nalaine immediately turned.

“Slept well?” Nalaine seemed relaxed, but she had a small look of concern in her eyes.

“Yeah, thanks. But the bed is a little hard, they could have made it more comfortable.”

The Demon relaxed a little seeing her joking around, before taking a serious look.

“So why did you just suddenly quit on me like that? One moment you were running around and the next you just fell down on the ground in a heap.”

“Overexertion I think, it seems moving this untiring body around is quite taxing on my mind in the long run, so it shut down when I got too tired.”

Nalaine shot her a pensive glance, before frowning slightly.

“Then…” a large smile appeared on her face and Liliei prepared for the worse, “we’ll have to train that as well, we can’t have you falling down like that in a bad moment. Still you’ve got a gain from today’s fights right?”

With a small sigh at the added workload, Liliei opened her status, smiling slightly at the increase in her Stats.

[Liliei Sil

Race: Mana Spirit

Level: 6

Abilities:

-Main Ability 1:

1) Tendency to be harder to notice. Ability to use mana to reinforce concealment and reduce the chance of being seen.

2) Reduce the chance of being noticed when moving. Ability to use mana to hide a movement done for a short time.

-Secondary Ability 1:

1) Burst of movement tends to be faster and more precise.

2) Increase smoothness and flow of movements.

-Main Ability 2:

1) Increase efficiency at manipulating own mana, and allow faster reconstruction.

2) Increase ability at external mana manipulation, and allow creation of external constructs.

-Secondary Ability 2:

1) Increase perception of mana.

2) Increase the size of the mana pool.

Stats:

Own Mana Manipulation:

-Speed: 12

-Precision: 8

-Intent Potency: 4

-Perception: 3

-Mana Pool: 5

-Mental Strength: 2

Skills: None]

She had gained two Levels which was great. The main incentive for Leveling were the Stats. They were sort of a reward given by the World that would improve a certain characteristic of the one to receive them. Their usefulness was however proportional to the base on which they were applied. As such it was important to continue to train even if you got a lot of them.

The other thing Level gave was a very small all around increase. It was pretty much unnoticeable on one or two Levels, but the higher Leveled Adventurers made it clear enough since even those without strength Stats would be stronger than they should.

What Stats one would gain tended to be linked with what Abilities one got, and obtaining one’s second Ability or more Ability Level would sometimes make more Stats appear when Leveling. This made it so that those who only worked on their Levels without improving their Abilities would be at a disadvantage later on, and that Liliei who already got her second Ability had a small advantage.

“Yes, I got two Levels and quite a few Stats, which will be useful.”

She slowly got up as she spoke, feeling her body lighter than before, and more responsive. She happily noticed her maximum density had also increased a little, which meant she would also be a bit stronger and more solid. It was also a proof of the hard work she had done that she hadn’t got the Levels sooner, as the World wouldn’t give you a Level while you were busy, since the body wouldn’t be used to the new specifics and it could cause problems. It was however possible to force the Level up to occur if one wished so and thought the benefits would outweigh the problems.

“So what time is it?”, asked Liliei.

She usually was able to tell the time, but her little nap had pretty much scrambled her internal clock, and there wasn’t a real sun to readjust.

“It should be around 12 o’clock pm, so I think we should go back and continue tomorrow.”

Nalaine stood up as well, before stretching a bit. Then the two started walking through the grass in the direction of the exit – they had effectively picked a random direction and started walking. After only ten minutes wandering, they suddenly stumbled on a huge stone platform with a large circle of red metal engraved inside. They walked on it and found themselves in the cavern that served as an entrance to the Dungeon. From there it only took a few more minutes until they were back to the home where Nalaine lived with the group.

This time, Liliei stayed, there talking with them for a moment, explaining everyone what had happened. She then had to comfort Kshirn for a few minutes moment before the Beastkin consented to let go of her. Before going back to her house, she talked with Evlem the oldest of the group at twelve turns old. He was an Elf and was also the second best in magic of the community and its de facto leader – as much as one could be, it mainly meant that the other listened to him. He was also the one that managed everything that had to do with the earnings of the small group, and thus knew the shops on the first floor of the city a lot better than her. As such, she asked him to look if he could find some books about the workings of the body.

Finally it was nearly midnight when she got back to her house. She wasn’t tired at all however, having already slept in the Dungeon. As such she decided to try to improve her Abilities as much as she could. The thing with Abilities was the difficulty to get them to Level. The first one was always rather easy, but then the difficulty increased explosively. The reason was twofold. Firstly each new Level’s Ability became harder to master due to sheer increase in complexity. This was good in a way because it was a direct consequence of the increase in power of the Ability across the Levels. The second part was that to get the third Level to unlock, you would not only need to increase your mastery of the second Level, but also the first.

It meant that the higher you went, the more you had to push each Level before a new one would be given by the World. And since the synergies were also accounted for in the requirements, the more you had the more complicated it became to properly get it to increase. As such, most people wouldn’t get much higher than the fifth Level, and only the most dedicated, or talented, could get higher.

The fifth Level was also special in that that it usually gave access to the second Ability, allowing one to still increase their capacities without having to fulfill absurd requirements. It was also said that if one could get his two Abilities to the tenth Level, a third one would be granted, but this was so absurd that no one even took it seriously.

The highest Ability Level obtained was rumored to be seventeen, obtained by the oldest Voildren – a mysterious and powerful Race that had an infinite lifespan – Which meant that even if this was the truth, it should have taken him longer than what Liliei could even imagine.

Well, anyway, for now she had to improve her Abilities. Her first was hard without someone to tell her how it was affected by the changes she made, and she really didn’t want to go back to smashing part of herself for the first Level of the second. As such she was back to building mana constructs. It wasn’t easy to do and required quite a lot of concentration from her part. She first had to liberate a part of her Intent, reducing her body. Then she infused mana with it and began working.

She started with something simple, a solid cube. But even that was unnecessarily complicated. She first began by taking a small amount of mana and pulled it making it take physical form in front of her. There was now a small blob of mana floating just there and she started working on it. She first pulled on it, stretching it until the blob deconstructed into thin strands that she had to weave into the shape she wanted. As she constructed the shape, she also had to fuse the strands together to make the form solid.

Then when she got to the point where she had nearly exhausted the mana put into the shape, she started inputting more mana, letting go of the control over the part she had already fused back. Fortunately, she didn’t have to control each strand individually and could control them as a group, else the amount of concentration and precision it would take would be completely out of her league. It took her about one minute to finish the cube as she had been careful to do it as well as she could.

Finally she manipulated every part to fuse at the endpoint after sort of tying them together, before pushing on the fused extremity, making it lose its physical form, and keeping a thin part of her Intent on the place everything had fused, so that she could break it easily just by dissociating this point.

She then looked at the pale blue cube floating falling in her outstretched hand. As soon as every physical part was free of her intent, the shape would act like a normal item, losing response to her will. She looked at the small cube, pressing on it, and hitting it against the ground. It was fairly solid, and only broke when she hit the floor with a good part of her strength. It was surprising however that it wouldn’t dissipate as long as she kept the fusion point tied.

She needed to improve these constructs, but hadn’t many idea. She first tried to make the strands thinner before creating the shape. The result was a more solid cube, but also quite smaller and took more Intent to keep it solid. She also wanted to test a few things on cloth-like materials. She knew that to make something like cloth she needed to only half fuse the strands together, then the resulting material would be more easily bent, without loosing too much of its resistance.

She tried making a cloth-like sheet but with very small threads. The result was a thin square piece of a material that seemed like cloth but that took a lot of effort to cut. However, it was also not flexible enough to be used as clothing. What was more, it took her a lot of Intent to keep it from dissipating, and she just let it fall apart.

There was one last thing that she wanted to try: make her constructs lasting and independent. As it was now, she could hold them as long as she wanted, but if she let one get too far from her, it would need more and more Intent to keep it from breaking. What she wanted was to find a way to cut them from her without them immediately dissolving.

She created a simple cube, and tried fusing the end point to the rest, but the moment she touched the resulting item, it broke. It was the same problem she had first faced: if the end point was in physical form, a simple touch on it was enough to make the construct disappear. She then tried to push a random part of the construct before fusing, but then the construct didn’t even need a touch to start dissipating.

There was one last thing she could try. She constructed the shape, but this time she pushed the starting point of the shape before beginning the molding. Then, when she got to the end, she fused the two extremities together before cutting off her Intent. She was satisfied seeing the cube stay in one piece … until she tried to move it and it broke apart again, the fusion point not following the rest and placing a strain enough to break it.

She was close, but she didn’t know how to solve that last problem. After all, making it take physical form would just make the cube brittle, and letting it in its normal state made it impossible to move. The usual constructs didn’t have this problem as they were anchored to her and her Intent. She would need to anchor it while not making it physical.

Suddenly an idea popped in her mind, she made a cube again, but this time when she finished fusing the extremities, she half pulled it letting it in a sort of intermediate state. The difficulty to do so however was quite astonishing, as it always tried to get to one or the other state. Finally, it took her nearly half an hour before she let go of the thing and it fell to the ground, staying there undamaged.

“Gotcha!” exclaimed Liliei before starting to wobble as a wave of exhaustion fell on her.

She could only barely get to her bed, half laying half falling on it, before sleep took her. The small cube stood on the ground in pristine shape, proof of her efforts.