Loran yawned as he stared out over the northern section of Demeter’s field, eyes straining against the darkness as the sun had yet to rise over the horizon, let alone the mountains of the valley. The village was deathly quiet this early in the morning, most people were still sleeping soundly unless they had the misfortune to be put on guard duty like Loran currently was.

It had been ten days since the version update (four since his [CONCUSSION] ended) and life had all but returned to normal for the players in the village. Hunters left to gather food, crafters were still working on refining the iron smelting process, and everyone avoided the Kitchen when Aman was feeling experimental.

As big of an impact the version update had on them and how they would play the game, everyone felt as though nothing had changed.

“Um.”

…Almost everyone.

Loran turned his head to look at his fellow night guard, the only other conscious person on this side of the village, a female player who had introduced herself just a few hours ago but whose name he had already forgotten.

“See something?” Loran asked, fighting back another yawn.

“No, I just wanted to ask something. You’re the one that knows the most about magic right?”

Loran sighed. “What do you want to know?”

After being the one to figure out how to use the new magic system, and then going on to have a pretty intense fight against Zed only a few hours later, everyone naturally came to the conclusion that Loran was the best magic user in the village.

He certainly wasn’t upset with such a title, but he certainly wasn’t fond of the attention it gave him. Every time someone had a question about magic or wanted to learn more about it, they started pestering him. At first, it hadn’t been too bad. Loran was doing tons of magic experiments over the last four days and having someone, regardless of magical skill, to bounce ideas off of was beneficial.

But with every passing day more people became curious, more people had questions, and more people went looking for or were directed to him for answers. Most weren't even interested in helping him with more advanced spells, they were just struggling with the basics.

It only took three days of answering the same questions on repeat for Loran to go from ‘Actually willing to talk to others about an interesting topic’ right back to his usual ‘please go away’ attitude.

“I just wanted to ask, how important is the void to learning magic? Because I tried it out the other day and… yeah, no, never again.”

“It’s useful, but not necessary. If using it is going to drive you crazy then don’t.”

The core benefit of the sensory void was that it provided a completely neutral environment for a person to practice in, allowing them to fully focus on manipulating their mana. Despite this, there didn’t seem to be any correlation between magic skill and void tolerance, as many of the players practicing magic seriously could barely spend a few minutes in the void without experiencing adverse effects. There were a few other players like Loran who could be in the void for as long as they want, but all of them were players with little interest or skill in magic that tried it out just because they could.

“Okay, that's good,” the girl said, visibly relieved. “So, any training tips you could give m-”

“If you want to get as strong as possible as quickly as possible, don’t spend AP on learning spells and focus on changing the shape and dimensions of the individual beads of mana as much as possible.” This was the question he was asked the most frequently, so he hardly needed to think about it anymore.

“Why change the shape?” she asked, her brow furrowed after Loran had nearly cut her off.

“It changes its properties. The shapes mostly increase damage, but there are a bunch of different applications.”

“Can you give me a dem-”

“Shift’s over,” Loran said, turning around suddenly and walking through the Gate.

Sure enough, their replacements were only a few dozen feet away.

“Wait, I still have questio-”

“Don’t care, ask someone else. I’m leaving,” Loran said as he quickly walked away.

As he passed their replacements his enhanced ears heard her muttering. “Fucking asshole.”

‘Maybe if you people stopped bugging me all the damn time I would be more talkative,’ he thought while knowing it probably wasn’t true. Either way, he didn’t care.

Loran had plans for today, and he needed to be decently rested for that.

~~~~~

After around two hours of tossing and turning in his shelter, the sun started to rise, and Loran gave up on the idea of getting any more sleep before starting his day. Double-checking the equipment and supplies in his inventory, Loran made his way toward the West Gate.

Just as Yang, Alexx, and Zed got the idea to head further north with the help of the inventory, Loran wanted to see what there was further west. The players had explored the west far less than the east, this was mainly to stop worsening the overhunting problem but also because the higher-level players (who could travel farther with their higher stats) were more interested in the greater EXP available across the river.

Loran would be making the trip on his own. It would certainly be dangerous, especially sleeping, but it had been some time since his last solo hunt and after the last few days he was desperate to spend some time far away from other people.

With his inventory loaded up with several days worth of food and rations, weapons and armor in peak condition, and feeling as rested as he would ever be, Loran crossed through Demeter’s field and entered the dark woods.

The sun was still completely hidden behind the mountains, cloaking the valley in complete darkness. Loran’s high PER helped a great deal, but he decided that it was time to break out a new trick.

Summoning up a few beads of mana, Loran focused and caused them to expand. As the half-inch-wide beads expanded to about half the size of his head, their dim blue glow faded to nothing for a moment before suddenly increasing in intensity, illuminating the area around him with an ethereal light.

Loran had spent the last four days experimenting and training with magic from the moment he woke up till he became too tired to go on. Most of his ideas turned out useless, but the sheer volume of tests he ran let him discover plenty of new spells.

Just as he had suggested to the girl from earlier, a big part of his testing had been on how many different ways he could change the properties of his mana. He had already learned that compressing mana made it more destructive, so he tried to do the opposite and discovered that the mana’s energy became harmless light once it was spread out enough. He was still testing to see if complex shapes had different effects, but he was still somewhat limited in how much he could warp the mana and would likely need better stats to get more creative.

Letting the floating lights drift around him, Loran returned his focus to the woods around him and continued walking. This was actually another of his discoveries in the form of a passive spell that he named [EXTEND SPELL], giving him the ability to maintain a spell without concentrating on it.

It was a complicated process that involved infusing mana into an already finished spell, and it was easily the most difficult thing he had learned to do with magic, so much so that he decided it was worth spending the Ability Point to learn it. The extended spells couldn’t do anything proactive, like attack or aim for him, but making a spell last longer had plenty of applications, especially when they could go for almost six hours if he poured all his mana into it.

‘I should probably refresh the duration on that as well,’ he thought looking down at his left arm. While there was nothing visible to the naked eye, anyone who could sense mana would see several orbs of mana floating around where his arm had been broken.

Expanding mana to create the light spell would first cause the spell to dim, and Loran discovered that if he stopped around when the light was completely invisible, its energy became harmless and could be absorbed by anything it touched. Just like the high efficiency with [MANA DART] the healing spell also restored lost HP at a decent rate (4 HP per 1 MP thanks to his stats) and closed wounds just as quickly. What Loran was most excited by was the fact that the healing spell could also be used on debuffs.

The effect there was extremely slow and he had only managed to reduce the duration of his [CRIPPLED HAND] by a few weeks, but that was weeks of healing over just a few days. It would still take him nearly a year of continuous healing for his hand to go back to normal, but that was a drastic improvement over the alternative, and it gave him hope that he could one day find a spell to heal the injury instantly.

With the healing spell on his arm set to continue for another few hours, Loran stretched his back and looked up at the western mountains that formed the opposite side of the valley. The white and grey peaks were the only things tall enough for the sunlight to reach this early in the morning, each of them gleaming like beacons calling out for people to explore them.

‘Goal number one, kill a Demon Bear. Goal number two, reach those mountains.’