My friends in my head seemed to be disagreeing on the subject of the rat, but at least some wanted me to try it out. So I decided to kill and eat the little bugger, it would at least get it out of my room. A single Shadowbolt was well and good and snuffed it out in an instant.

*You have slain a rat, you have earned 1 xp*

I got a little notice and when I looked down to my sheet I saw that a bar labeled xp had been added just below my class. It was currently at 1/100, neat. I tried poking at that a bit, to see what it was, but got nothing of note.

I picked up the little beast, feeling a bit grossed out by the warm body laying limp in my hand. Figuring it was for the best I let my fangs come out and bit down, drinking deeply. The taste was... well it was alright, but it felt sort of, off.

*You have consumed the blood of the dead*

I stopped for a moment and blinked. I was fairly sure I'd consumed 1 Life worth, whatever that meant, but what did it mean the blood of the dead? How did that matter? Was that different than living blood? I was supposed to drink my sire's blood after all if I was normal, maybe that was...

As I was thinking about the message something akin to a the feeling of a sword entering my gut smacked into me. I fell, I wanted to vomit, I even curled up into a ball, it HURT. As I tried to rise and get to my bed I nearly collapsed. I found my pillow and screamed straight into it as pain hit me again and again. I needed help, but who could I call, who would help me?

A few moments later the pain receded, then finally ceased. I got another new notice.

*Dead blood purged*

Wow, thanks for that. Might have told me not to drink that somewhere, stupid announcement system, stupid book not telling me anything, stupid dead rat. A quick look at my sheet showed that I'd lost both an one HP and one MP leaving me at 9/10 and 10/12 respectively. I'd now also gained a good insight though, hopefully the next wouldn't hurt quite so bad.

With a sigh I picked up the rat and tried to find some way of disposal, eventually opting to look down to see some bushes. One quick toss later and it was well into them and gone, hopefully for good. I spent the rest of the night quietly pouting about how much I didn't know, not that it helped.

I had classes the next morning, and who should show up but my least favorite person Kale. I was fortunate that he seemed to be staying well away from me, apparently quite ashamed at having been kicked back grades. We learned basic theory mostly, with a few simple demonstrations on the board about what kind of magic was what.

There were two basic types of magic, ritual magic and casted magic. Ritual magic was like what had summoned me here. You drew a specific circle that had to be made just so and it did something. It had generally more powerful effects, but could go wrong in terrible ways. It was pointed out that one of our new students Kale was a walking example of how not to treat it. That was harsh, but deserved. The teachers seemed not to like him as much as I did.

Casted magic on the other hand could be intrinsic or learned. Everyone with the capacity to could learn to cast, though what you could learn reasonably depended on your class/race/abilities. It would draw on your mana pool and give an effect when you went through chants and hand movements. The way these were derived was not well understood, but some people seemed to just have a feel for it, magic was just like that. Intrinsic casting was what we could see on our sheets. These casted spells just worked for us, they took mana and it didn't matter if we understood them or not. I was also happy to learn that if we used learned casting on a spell enough it would eventually become intrinsic.

While that was neat and all I spent most of the day miserable. My mana slowly climbed back up to refill itself, but when I checked throughout the day I could see that my HP had not. I was also, ever so slightly thirsty now, which was not particularly fun. These things needed to be fixed, and soon.