I woke up the next morning with the intention to practice magic, and then continue my exploration of the dungeon. I figured knowing magic would probably come in handy in there. But I was also just really excited to learn magic. It seemed like such a fantasy staple that I wanted to get my hands on it as fast as possible.

Despite my eagerness to start learning magic the necessities came first. So far it seemed dragons didn’t need to go to the bathroom, but I did still need to eat and drink. I speed walked over to the waterfall and lapped up a generous amount of water before heading into the dungeon to find something to eat.

Luckily for me I very quickly ran into a mono-horned rabbit which I quickly dispatched by slitting its throat. The rabbit dropped its usual pelt and meat combo. It seemed that its horns were probably a rare drop making me regret not grabbing them. I scarfed down the meat in a matter of seconds before returning to the cave to start learning magic.

Back in the cave I sat down in the middle of the main room. According to the skills description Innate Magic gave me knowledge of how magic works and I hoped that included how to learn it.

As I sat in the middle of the room, I attempted to use the skill. Thankfully, I was able to activate it without much hassle. As I focused on using the skill, it activated, opening a box in front of me. I quickly scanned the box and learned a lot of information.

Magic was the term for the manipulation of an unseen part of reality called mana. There are numerous ways to manipulate mana, with the easiest being to recite an incantation or draw a magic circle. This form of magic was likely unattainable for me as I had neither books nor teachers to teach me the incantations or magic circles, and besides that, it didn’t seem very fun either.

 The hardest, but also the most versatile form of magic is to directly interfere with the mana and force it to do what you want. This ability is called mana manipulation and was what I ultimately decided on practicing. It seemed perfect, there was no delay in casting and the possibilities were only limited by your skill level. Plus, I could teach myself.

With a greatly increased knowledge of magic I began trying to learn mana manipulation. I assumed that the first part of learning to manipulate mana would be learning to perceive mana, so I started with that.

I closed my eyes and began trying to feel the mana around me. I couldn’t feel anything at first, but I kept at it.

I continued meditating all day, but by the time night fell, I had only just begun being able to feel the inklings of mana around me. I could see that mana was there but not much more. I was certainly getting closer, but it seemed that this would be a multiple day long endeavor.

I went to sleep that night wanting to press on but being too tired to continue. I woke up at the crack of dawn the next morning, killed a rabbit as fast as possible, and got back to work.

I sat down in the middle of the cave and got back to meditating. As the day went by my ability to see mana slowly got better. It wasn’t quick by any means, but I was starting to get the hang of it.

A little past noon I had a breakthrough! As I was meditating the mana around me came into sharper focus, suddenly I could see all the mana around me. It looked like a fog, but I could see hundreds, if not thousands of mana particles making it up.

Suddenly a notification popped up in front of me. It read:

“You have gained new primary skill – Mana Perception lvl 1.”

When I saw this notification, I shot up from my sitting position, and literally jumped for joy.

“Wahoo!” I shouted.

It had taken me a day and a half to learn the skill. I assumed that was probably faster than average, but I had no way of really confirming so I tried not to let it go to my head. Regardless, now that I had the Mana Perception skill, I could start learning how to manipulate mana.

I sat back down and closed my eyes, to be able to better feel the mana. I decided that my first goal would be to create a flame. While I didn’t really need to be able to magically make fire, I assumed that being a fire dragon made me more in tune with fire, thus making it easier.

At first, I tried to manually move the mana. I lifted up my talons and swirled them around. The mana reacted like water, moving out of the way of my talons, and swirling around with them. While I was moving the mana, I didn’t have any control over it so I needed to find a different way.

I then remembered something on my status board. I opened it up to make sure I wasn’t misremembering.

Name: Nuriel

Species: Red Dragon

Level: 3

XP: 14/20

HP: 20/20

MP: 20/20

Str: 9

Agi: 8

Con: 8

Mag: 9

Racial Skills:

Fire Breath

Flight

Language recognition

Innate Magic

Primary Skills:

Mana Perception lvl 1

I was right! Just below my HP was my MP, from my knowledge about this stuff I knew that MP usually stood for magic power, or something similar. I also knew that in stories with MP it would always lower when you used magic! So why would it exist in this world if magic was just manipulating outside mana?

“Manipulating mana must use your own MP in some way.”

With this realization I returned to the Innate Magic skill. I began diving deeper into how mana manipulation worked. I had found it very quickly, as the answer was right near the top. In my excitement at activating the skill, and in learning about magic, I had completely missed an important part of how magic worked.

In order to cast magic, the caster would take some of their mana, and project it outwards to force the outside mana into doing what the caster wants. This is one of two ways to cast magic. The other being to use only the caster’s mana, but this is rarely used as it is much more mana intensive.

With this new knowledge I shifted my focus away from the mana around me and began trying to feel the mana inside me. I closed my eyes and began searching my body for my mana. It didn’t take long to find the small clump of mana right next to my heart.

Now knowing where it was, I began trying to move it. I didn’t have much success at first, but as the day turned to night, I was beginning to be able to move my mana. It wasn’t much, just moving a small bit of my mana a few centimeters, but it was progress.

Despite protests from my body, I refused to sleep in order to continue practicing. As the night went on, I continued making progress. I was slowly able to move more and more of my mana, though I still couldn’t move it very far.

As moon reached its peak, I began trying to move my mana further. I lifted up one of my arms and began trying to push some of my mana into it. I felt as the mist struggled against me, but I continued on. I forcibly pushed the mana onward, it felt as though I was shoveling snow out of a path, but I was succeeding. Once I had moved the mana into my arm, I tried to push some out of my body, but I was unable to move it even a slight bit out of my body.

I decided that I would continue moving my mana around my body until I had a better control over it, and so for the rest of the night I slowly worked on moving my mana all throughout my body.

On its way out of my other arm I noticed that it was much easier to move the mana somewhere it had been before, I had no idea why, but it certainly helped that I didn’t have to always fight my mana to move it.

As the sun rose, I pushed my mana into the end of my tail and, knowing that I had succeeded in my goal, I promptly passed out.

I woke up at midnight the next day to a number of notifications.

“Skill Mana Perception has leveled up.”

“You have gained new primary skill – Inner Mana Control lvl 1.”

“Skill Inner Mana Control has leveled up.” X9

“Skill Inner Mana Control has evolved into skill – Perfect Inner Mana Control lvl 1.”

While I was reading the notifications, I had wandered over to the waterfall, and had just gotten a mouthful of water when I saw the notifications related to Inner Mana Control. I had promptly spit out that mouthful of water in disbelief.

“Wh-What the!?” I stuttered, “All I did was move my mana around my body!”

“Grrrw!” But before I could even start to process what I had just read my stomach gave an enormous growl, reminding me that I hadn’t eaten in over a day.

I decided to drop that for now to quickly focus on getting some food in me. I rushed into the dungeon and took flight, zooming through the sky looking for any rabbits I could eat. My eyes roamed around the grassland for a while before I spotted two mono-horned rabbits lounging on a rock. Without giving them a chance to notice me I dove down grabbing both of them and cutting their throats. As the rabbits turned into pelts and meat, I got another notification.

“You have leveled up.”

I hadn’t really been paying attention to my XP, but I had killed a few rabbits, which was apparently enough for me to level up! I opened my status board to see the changes.

Name: Nuriel

Species: Red Dragon

Level: 4

XP: 2/30

HP: 25/25

MP: 30/30

Str: 12

Agi: 10

Con: 10

Mag: 12

Racial Skills:

Fire Breath

Flight

Language recognition

Innate Magic

Primary Skills:

Mana Perception lvl 2

Perfect Inner Mana Control lvl 1

Aside from my new skill, the only thing that interested me was the rather large jump my MP had taken. It went up a solid 10 points, which was the biggest stat jump I had seen at this point.

While I was studying my stats, I had decided to try something new with the rabbit meat. So far, I had just been eating it raw, but this time I decided to try cooking the meat. I tried to lightly breathe some fire on the meat to cook it, but unfortunately, I still wasn’t great at regulating my fire and I ended up burning them. As unfortunate as it was, I still decided to eat them, reasoning that food was food, and honestly, I was too hungry to really care.

I tentatively bit into one of the charred pieces of meat only to find that it tasted amazing! Maybe it had to do with my race, but the char tasted awesome! After taking one bite I hungrily gobbled down the rest of the meat and decided that I would always cook my food like this, it just tasted so great!

After eating my meal, I got up and opened my wings to fly home. But as I was doing that, I realized something. I could fly here! Maybe I was dumb, but I had assumed that I wouldn’t be able to fly in dungeons, it just felt at bit unfair. As I took flight, I decided to make a rule with myself for exploring the dungeon. I wouldn’t fly around the dungeon to scout it out, as it took away a lot of the fun of exploring.

I soon landed and headed back into the cave to continue learning magic. Now that I could control the mana inside of me, I was sure that learning how to cast magic would be easy.