Nathan

Year 2849 | Month 9 | Day 12

I completely ignore the screaming skeleton behind me, along with the repeated flares of miasma that come out from the direction of his cage before slowing down to make my way down the hall.

Maybe there might be some other stuff here to steal?

Actually, this could make a decent home to live in. I wouldn’t have to deal with the annoying undead constantly bothering me outside, and I could train my mana arcs in peace.

The only problem would be that it’d be boring as hell. And I’d still have no food or water.

So I would be starving and dehydrated all the time. Which would be unpleasant.

Then again, who knows? Maybe one of those things I stole might help with that. Most of the vials didn’t have any labels telling me what the contents were – or rather the labels they did have were too worn to read – but there were a couple that I kept in my pocket that did.

At that thought, I bring both of them out. One has a faint green glow, while the other has a black one. Neither of which looking very safe to consume.

But the labels on them make them sound important, so I kept them.

The one with the green glow has a label saying ‘Mutagen’ on it. Which sounds interesting, although I doubt it’ll do much for me.

The main reason I kept it was honestly the tiny hints of magic I sense in it. Several different elements of mana to be exact. Space, poison, time, death, and one other I don’t recognize.

I do make sure to hold it carefully though, mostly to not lose whatever is in it but also to make sure it doesn’t get on me. After all, who knows? It has both space and time mana in it. So it could possibly affect me.

After spending a few minutes just looking at and studying the mana within the green vial, I open my spatial storage again and gently set it down inside before focusing on the black vial. This one is labeled as simply as possible.

Death.

And the thing is literally just chock full of a bunch of death mana.

Doesn’t sound healthy, but it might be a nice weapon to throw at someone if needed. Although I doubt the one I’d be throwing it at would feel the same.

Anyways, I put that in there as well while still walking through the hallway until I end up at the stairs and begin climbing up them to the second floor.

I do hope that there’s some water or at least food in here somewhere. Preferably not poisoned or tainted at that.

Nathan

Okay, so I guess food and water was a bit too much to ask. But at least I got this.

I can’t help but stare at the odd star shaped dial on the floor. It looks just like what I remember from the textbooks in class, so I’m pretty sure it’s what I’m thinking of.

Which means that my mana arc training should be easier from now on and take a tad bit less time. So that’s a plus at least.

But food and water would still be nice.

I look back out the door of the room through the hall, still ignoring the whispered swear words entering in my ear from the skeleton downstairs, before closing the door and entering the star. And almost immediately, I feel all of the mana arcs in my body that are currently trainable being strained from the warping of mana within the star itself.

This little device should drastically increase the speed of my training, since I don’t need to use any of my current arcs to train the other arcs, making me able to train them all at once. The only issue with that is that it’ll make me unable to use any of my mana while they develop after splitting, since all of my arcs will be newly split ones at that point. Unless they don’t split at the same time that is.

A grimace paints itself onto my face at the uncomfortable feeling spreading through my body from the star, but I just lie down and fall asleep under the strain anyways.

The last thing I hear before everything goes dark is the skeleton whispering, “You will free me one day.”

Nathan

Year 2849 | Month 9 | Day 16

Over the course of the next few days, all of my mana arcs split, leaving me with twice as many arcs as I had prior to leaving the academy for the internship. With twenty of them, making me honestly rather happy to have been left here.

Or I would be happy if I could get rid of this nagging hunger and thirst. But I guess I can’t ask for benefits with no pain or discomfort.

Speaking of discomfort, that star is much worse than starving and dehydrating myself, regardless of its benefits. And the skeleton’s whispers don’t’ help.

I wonder if it would be possible to make my annoying roommate shut up?

“You’re wondering about how to shut me up again, aren’t you?” said roommate suddenly whispers to me, distracting me from my own distraction away from the spell I was trying to create. It’s only been a few days of living with the thing, and I’ve mostly gotten used to it speaking to me at random.

Fortunately it stopped trying to threaten me into releasing it after the first two nights, but then it just started trying to spark conversations or just plain mocking me from time to time. Which really doesn’t sound like something one should do to their only possible benefactor.

Not that I’m ever gonna let the annoying thing out.

Anyways, I did manage to find a couple of other things spread out throughout the dead tree, but not all that much that I can use. The most useful things – outside of the star trainer device and the vials of unknown stuff – were the spell scripts and research written out. And even those weren’t too useful, since they’re all for death mana and not for fire.

But there are a few things I can glean from them, so I took them and stored them in my storage, nonetheless.

“If you were to let me out, then I’d teach you how to improve that spell of yours,” the skeleton says, returning to his ‘complimentary’ mode, where he tries to butter me up with rewards and stuff to let him out.

The skeleton really does have several screws loose if it thinks it’s little whirlpool of different moods and ways to treat me will accomplish anything.

I continue to ignore the thing while narrowing my eyes at a particular section of the script on my terminal.

Huh. Not sure how I missed that.