She spent the rest of the day anxiously making preparations, however futile those preparations might be. She peeled several roasted nuts in advance, in case forming a magic seed was really demanding on her calories and she needed a quick resupply partway through the process. She also filled her bowl with boiled water, just in case she needed it, either to drink or in case her first attempt at magic somehow caused something to catch on fire and she needed to put it out. Apart from that, she also got some smoked fish ready, as an extra bit of food if she needed it.

After preparing everything, she recognized that none these preparations were likely to be useful useful. She was mostly just trying to calm her nerves. She had no real knowledge of magic, and she was about to jump knee-deep into it in hopes that it would help her not get eaten. If she misunderstood something, or messed up, it might kill her. But the clock was ticking, and if she had already run across one monster in only a week, odds were pretty good she would run into more.

Soon, the sun began to set. It was time.

She did her best to follow her half-translated notes about how to make a Magic Seed, hoping that this wouldn’t kill her or cripple her. She had chosen to form a kinetic seed, so she focused on everything she remembered from her physics class.

The laws of kinetic motion, equations for force, a variety of half-remembered concepts and ideas about kinetic Energy floated through her thoughts as she tried to turn those ideas into a magic seed. After a few minutes of concentrating, she finally felt something move inside of her, just behind her heart where the unnatural heat had lingered after her baptism. She kept focusing on that sensation, trying to push her understanding of kinetic energy into that one specific area. She had a vague sensation of moving something, a muscle that she had never moved before, although it was very vague. After a few hours of trying to narrow down that peculiar sensation, finally, she felt something snap and change.

Suddenly, she felt something streaming through her, pulled out of the air before it flowed through her body and towards her heart. Then, she felt something thrumming deep in her chest, behind her heart, for a brief moment. It beat in time with her heart and her thoughts, over and over again, like a second heart, and she could feel warmth and energy flowing deep inside of her again.

It was like when she had suffered from mana poisoning, but rather than scorching flames and acid, this was more like a campfire, warm without burning her or hurting her. It was actually quite soothing, warm and friendly instead of hot and painful. She focused on that sensation, continuing to imprint her thoughts on kinetic motion into it in case she wasn’t done yet. The warmth behind her heart continued to soak up ideas and energy from the air around her like a sponge.

At the same time, she could feel the seed becoming attuned to something, and with a growing sense of realization she could feel the seed beginning to interact with motion.

She realized she was finally feeling mana in the air around her, filling her with energy that hadn’t been there before. It surged through her veins, and for a moment, she panicked, wondering if she had somehow lost control.

Then, with a second and final snap, seemed to fall into place. The heat behind her heart rapidly cooled down, the sensation of energy in the air around her disappeared, and everything felt strangely quiet. Everything except for a single kernel of energy that pulsed and thrummed just behind her heart, that is.

She felt a strange sense of loss as her sense for mana faded, as if she had been blind her whole life, and for just a brief second she had been allowed to see colors before losing her sight again. She opened her eyes, trying to fight off the strange sense of loss as a System notification dinged at her.

100%? What the heck does that mean? Alice had seen the author reference magic seeds, but she didn’t remember him mentioning anything about random percentages. Alice frowned, but couldn’t figure out what it meant, so she ignored it for now.

Instead, she opened her status screen to see what had changed recently.

 Magic seed 1/1? So that means I can only have one magic seed right now. There doesn’t seem to be anything like ‘secondary magic seeds’ the way I can have unlimited secondary classes. Alice frowned again. She had been hoping to experiment more with the other kinds of magic in the future, but that was apparently impossible for now.

On the bright side, she could think of a lot that she could do with kinetic energy, if this seed worked the way she thought it did. Even if she wasn’t 100% sure what mages were capable of, influencing motion in the world around her sounded like it could be incredibly useful for self-defense and heating purposes.

She felt a buzzing feeling of excitement and happiness welling up inside of her. She had successfully formed a magic seed! She could finally use magic! She reached inside of her mind, trying to recover her vague sense of Mana that she had experienced during her magic seed formation. After a few moments of concentration, she felt something, although it was very… different now.

Kinetic mages should be able to move stuff, right? In that case… Alice focused on a nearby rock, and with a thought, a tendril of mana clumsily sudden sprouted out of her body, as if she had suddenly grown a third arm. She felt incredibly confused for a moment, wondering what the heck this thing was and what it was supposed to do. Clumsily, she moved it around, waving around. To her surprise, it couldn’t touch anything – in fact, it passed right through the wall when she tried to use her ‘third arm’ to touch it. However, when she touched the wall with her new arm, she felt something.

Alice fell into thought for a moment, before she tried something else. She moved her new limb towards a small pebble and then tried to lift it up with her mana tendril.

The rock, stubbornly, remained in place. If she couldn’t feel the presence of something through her phantom limb, she wouldn’t have realized her mana tendril was there at all.

Then, getting an idea, she tried using her mana tendril as a sort of pipeline, drawing some energy from the core inside of her chest and pushing it through her mana tendril. The mana slowly drained through her new phantom limb, moving as slowly as if she was trying to pump molasses, before it reached the rock. The rock suddenly popped upwards a few centimeters, as if she had gently tossed it upwards. It clattered back to the ground, but Alice was too busy cackling to care.

Magic! This is actual magic! She grabbed the rock again and popped it back upwards, before she tried to slow down its descent when gravity kicked back in. However, she failed. She quickly realized that her mana tendril needed to be directly touching something to influence it – it didn’t have any ability to influence objects she wasn’t touching. Furthermore, the range she could move her mana tendril was quite limited – she couldn’t move her tendril very far from her body before the cost of maintaining it started to increase exponentially. It could move perhaps a meter or two away from her at maximum.

Alice frowned, trying to figure out what the two new skills did. She reached out her mana tendril again, waving it around, before trying to pump a bit more mana into it. The other side of the mana tendril was only touching air, so all that she created was a slight breeze, but Alice got at least a rough idea what the two skills seemed to be doing as she felt the changes in how her mana worked now.

Mana Control was her ability to move the mana tendril around, granting her greater control over her new magical limb. It was difficult for her to control it right now, but with more levels in Mana control she might eventually be able to move it even more quickly and precisely than her real limbs. Kinetic Manipulation seemed to be related to how accurately she could actually move things. Before, she had thrown the rock upwards, but hadn’t had very much control over what direction and how hard she actually threw the rock. The single level of Kinetic Manipulation didn’t improve her control that much, but she could still feel a slight difference.

Alice grinned, and checked the available perks for [Explorer of Magic]. She had already had this class for almost two weeks now, and it was the first time the class actually did something for her.

Hmm. Based on her understanding of Magic Seeds right now, Magic Seeds were similar to the ‘elements’ that one might find in most fantasy settings. However, instead of fire, water, earth, or air, it was kinetic energy, electromagic energy, and other types of Magic Seed that she couldn’t translate yet.

A second magic seed would probably be pretty useful to her in the long run, but having an intuitive level of control over her mana would also be important to surviving now. More importantly, she still wasn’t entirely sure whether there might some extra risks involved with magic, and if she hurt herself with her own magic it would incredibly dangerous since she had no way to fix any problems she caused. She also had no idea what mana conversion ratio was either, although the Perk explicitly mentioned it. That made it very hard to evaluate how useful {Second Seed} was as a Perk.

{Magical growth} looked sort of interesting at first, but given the fact that progress towards the next attribute seemed to take more and more work the higher the attribute was, she didn’t think that the effect would actually be very large. Not to mention, she already had a total of +80% growth to the [Magic] attribute from {Outworlder} and {Baptized by Broken Mana}. Adding 20% on top of those two didn’t seem particularly impressive, even if {Outworlder} wouldn’t keep helping once her [Magic] Stat reached 120 or higher.

Sighing a bit, Alice chose the magic proficiency perk. Alice knew that Electromagnetic energy had all sorts of strange uses, but frankly, her Physics classes hadn’t covered the core concept of electromagnetic Force in THAT much detail, and the parts of the force she understood would be difficult to apply and use in her current situation. While a second magic seed might be useful, it wouldn’t do her much good if she had no idea how to use it, and right now she had no clue what she was doing. Right now, she felt it was best to double down on what she already had and train it to a level where it was actually useful. It was much better to have one fully developed tool for survival, rather than having several undeveloped ones.

Furthermore, having an intuitive level of understanding her mana would probably allow her to grow her [Magic] Stat and Level up more quickly, based on how the system seemed to award Stats and Levels. It probably wouldn’t compare to the ‘magical growth’ perk, but it was more applicable to her current situation.

As the Perk adapted itself to her body, she could intuitively feel her mana more clearly than before. The information her phantom limb fed back to her improved, and while before she could only tell whether or not it was touching something, now she could at least get a very vague feeling of the ‘texture’ of whatever it was touching. More importantly, she could feel that the mana tendril was actually an active, if small, strain on the little mana seed inside of her chest. Every single second she maintained its existence, it ate a tiny amount of Mana in order to maintain itself, although the amount was quite small. She could also move her mana tendril more fluidly and precisely, as if she had gained several extra levels in the {Mana Control} Skill.

She could also tell how much energy was left in her mana seed more accurately than before. At the moment, it felt like she had a small thimble of water deep in her chest. It didn’t seem to ‘exist’ physically, but she could still feel it somewhere behind her heart. It was already almost half empty just from her moving the rock around a bit and maintaining her mana tendril, probably because her [Magic] Stat was a measly 6 right now.

She briefly glanced at her ‘preparations’ for creating her magic seed, and confirmed that besides settling her nerves they had done nothing useful. Although settling her nerves before trying something risky still had a value of its own.

She left her cave, satisfied for now, and checked her food and firewood reserves. Both were still enough to sustain her for a few days, especially after she got the {Extremophile} perk, which had drastically reduced her need to use firewood except for cooking. Still, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to get more supplies. The temperature had been dropping sharply recently, and she would need more of practically everything if she wanted to live through the winter.

She went to her usual fishing spot, and noted with some worry that the river was definitely starting to show hints of freezing over. If the river froze, she would lose access to fish. Perhaps she could give hunting a try? Would there even be animals to hunt over the winter? This was definitely something she was worried about.

Still, for the next few days at least, she was fine. She went quietly back to fishing, humming a merry tune to herself. As she felt her mana slowly recovering, she used it to experiment, trying to lift and move small objects in her surroundings and figure out the limits of her new ability.

She found that moving any object, regardless of what it was and whether it was closer or farther away, was incredibly difficult as she ran out of mana. She attributed that to her low Stats and Skills, but right now she was only capable of nudging objects a few centimeters random directions. She could move an object ‘away’ from her or to the left or right, but it would often also shift in an unexpected angle due to her lacking control.

Furthermore, she couldn’t really ‘control’ an object for a long period of time – if she moved an object with her mana tendril, even if it didn’t move very fast, she had a pretty hard time getting the mana tendril to touch the object again while it was still in motion. It wasn’t as easy to ‘catch’ an object with her man tendril as it was to catch something with her hands. That could probably change with practice, but right now, it was too difficult for a beginner like her.

If she hadn’t had her Perk guiding her, she suspected it would have been even more difficult.

However, she did still manage to ‘catch’ a rock she had tossed upwards one time, although it was more by luck than skill. She confirmed that stopping an object in motion was possible, although it was very difficult for her right now. In the future she could probably use this to stop a charging spidercrab dead in its tracks, once she had enough mana to exert more than a puny amount of force on the objects around her. Holding a spidercrab in place and then stabbing it with her spear sounded a million times safer than trying to dodge and weave out of its way, or starting another desperate fight with a Spidercrap while stuck in a tree. It was impossible for her right now, but the System rewarded training and constant grinding, and Alice was more than happy to play with her newfound magic abilities. Of all of her Stats, this one would probably be the easiest to level up just because it was so fun to use.

For now, however, more complex usage of her new powers was out of her reach. She could finally use her magic stat, and she had a new tool that would hopefully drastically improve her survival odds once she got more used to it.

She completely ran out of mana partway through the fishing session, and got a minor headache once her body realized it was out of Mana. Rather than keep trying to push it, she waited for her mana to refill. She had no idea how long it took mana to regenerate, but at least her attribute gains were pretty sizeable for [Magic] today. She needed to keep training, as well as make some more plans for food, but things were looking up for her. The river wasn’t going to stick around for much longer, and when it went away, it would take her fish with it. But with her Kinetic Magic growing by the second, she would at least have a tool to defend herself against further monster attacks. And with what she had caught today, she probably had a week’s worth of food supplies. Even if that that wouldn’t last the whole winter, she had more time to fish right now. Now that one of the biggest questions and problems that had plagued her since entering this world were finally solved, she felt optimistic about her chances, however slim they might be.