Humanity has come a long way from the times when they first climbed down the trees and decided to walk on land.

It has been a very long way. We have fought, we have struggled and we have survived.

Many species have perished and the very planet has changed a lot, and yet, we have persevered.

We have shed blood, we have killed each other and we have conquered and almost destroyed our home, our cradle, our lovely and beautiful planet.

And yet, on this harsh and bloody path, we have achieved many unbelievable things and we have grown greater than those who have come before us.

Humanity has always strived to better itself. As the only species that possessed the wonderful gift of reasoning, we have outgrown the blood-thirsty and primitive savages we have started out as.

Humans chased their dreams and created magnificent cities that have survived for thousands of years.

Humans chased their dreams and left touching and beautiful works of art that allowed the minds of people to converse through the centuries.

Humans chased their dreams and they have reached the stars.

And yet, even though we, humanity, have shown the world our potential for greatness, even though we have shown ourselves and our descendants our ability to live by our rationality, time and time again, we have committed horrible atrocities.

Humanity always forgets the heavy and terrible price we have to pay for our irresponsibility.

Greed and pride lead to uncountable bloodshed and violence, grief and despair.

We remember those who led us to spill the blood of our Brethren and make them out to be the evil fiends, the sources of our grief and misfortune.

But who has allowed those fiends to lead us to the path of our own destruction?

Wasn’t it ourselves, who, in pursuit of our selfish goals or out fear, have discarded ourselves of our own responsibilities?

Violence and bloodshed will only lead to hatred and resentment, hatred and resentment will eventually lead to violence and bloodshed.

The ones who have allowed this vicious circle to continue on, wasn’t it us?

At the end of that circle, nothing will remain.

As a firm believer of these ideas, I have, therefore, decided not to follow those bloody footsteps.

I have decided – not to meet a violent world with a sword. I shall live by my own consciences!

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“Isn’t it all just because you were unable to create a good spell within the past month, resulting in you not having enough combat potential to raid the dungeon?”

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Yes. It is exactly as the demon residing in my head said.

Good consciences? Morality? What’s that? Is it tasty?

My good intentions won’t save my life should I be in danger. Magic would. If I were stronger that is.

You see, it’s been an entire month since I have acquired the absolutely amazing skill “Mana Insight” as well as the necessary skills to be able to use magic – “Mana Manipulation” and “Mana Perception”.

Those three skills, as well as my natural talents (given to me by a demon) for magic, should’ve been enough to give me at least some measure of combat ability.

In fact, they have given me the ability to design and use some simple spells:

Fireball – a floating sphere of fire. Explodes with collision. Its temperature, size, durability, difficulty of control and destructive potential can be adjusted by the amount of MP invested into the formation of the spell.

Ice Arrow – a sharp shard of ice. Its durability, size, sharpness and other factors can be adjusted by the amount of MP invested into the formation of the spell.

Wind Blade – a highly compressed projectile made out of the gas particles in the air or generated by mana. Its difficulty of control, stability, initial kinetic energy and other factors can be adjusted by the amount of MP invested into the formation of the spell.

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Light Beam – a highly concentrated beam of light. Its intensity, brightness, reach and other factors can be adjusted by the amount of MP invested into the formation of the spell.

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Water Shield…

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Mist Veil…

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As you can see, I have quite an impressive arsenal of various offensive and defensive spells.

Their formation doesn’t take up much time either. I just have to half-activate Mana Insight and use Mana Perception and Mana Manipulation to shape the spell matrix, as I like to call it.

It might give me a slight migraine but it’s not that bad. After I have designed the way mana should interact with itself and created the different matrices it became child’s play to recreate them.

The problem is, at most, I can make only make around 10 spells of sufficient power consecutively before I run out of mana.

Meaning, I can only fire 10 attacks against my enemies before I run out of resources.

Realistically, I can only fire 5 attacks, as my mana is basically the stamina of my spirit and if I run out of that stamina, I’ll just faint.

I can’t preserve the matrices either. I have neither the skill nor the knowledge to control mana well enough to preserve mana in its pre-activated state.

Take Fireball, for instance. I could theoretically control its entire trajectory and velocity as well as the strength and the area of its explosion, had I enough mana. But what I need to do in order to achieve the wanted result would be flooding the entire space where the fireball will be active with my mana with enough density to create “ripples” in the space to control the fireball.

It takes a prodigious amount of mana and a lot of precision to achieve such a feat.

I have neither at the moment. Remember how I described the feeling of my level 1 Mana Manipulation as using a pair of atrophied hands?

I could, of course, design a more convenient and efficient construct. Like, say, a power line in the air, connected to the active spell matrix that provides the necessary mana to control the output of magic. A mana-cable. Nah, let’s just call it a ley line.

The problem is, mana, though the calibrated output that Mana Perception provides might want to convince you otherwise, is not a form of energy, or a wave, or a particle, or any other form of matter. I could describe it as a field of sorts, even though its existence transcends the concepts of space and time, as I believe. Still, its behavior is quite hard to explain or predict accurately enough to design an intricate structure such as a ley-line.

I could, to an extent, force its behavior into some kind of pattern. But it would require a whole lot of concentration and control over mana. And it would need me to constantly supply a fixed amount of mana to it all the time.

Kinda beats the original purpose of maintaining several spells if I can only have so many of them at the same time, and all of them drain my mana anyway.

I have also considered several other models and possible solutions to the problem at hand, like preserving pure mana in order to restore my reserves quickly and such. In the end, none of them are feasible for the current me.

The only way for me to overcome this challenge is to either grow in level, which is possible through discovering and making skills as my prior experience has proved, or to come up with a completely new method of using mana that would be fast and cost-efficient. Or just cheap to say it plainly.

I could hunt some wolves, but I have tried and found out that they are great at evasion. I could try to create an Area of Effect spell, but the problem of cost still comes up. The only effective spells I can use for now are those with all the power concentrated in a single point.

I couldn’t kill a single wolf, which speaks volumes of my ability. I have also scared them away, which… speaks of nothing as wolfs aren’t exactly a good measurement point for the strength of anything.

I doubt acquiring skills will do my levels any good. I mean I literally have acquired a skill your average mage only tries to get at a level a little below 300. Not much progress, as you can see.

“Your soul was incredibly strong when you have spawned and it also had a small deficiency in lifeforce, so it created a temporary vortex that has absorbed the lacking lifeforce and allowed you to reach the first level easier. Lifeforce is basically what experience is. I won’t go into much detail about it. Anyway, even though the problem with the deficiency has been taken care of, the acquisition of Mana Insight should’ve pushed your levels higher… but your Otherworlder title has prevented the increase in levels. The title isn’t bad per se… but to put it simply, the System doesn’t quite understand how to integrate you, so it is slowly modifying your soul into a suitable state for complete integration. It should increase your potential later on down the line, but for now, it will hinder your growth”

Was Ralph’s analysis. So, no cheap status points for me.

So, I will just level my Mana Manipulation for now and see what I can do.

Sigh.

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After three weeks of painstaking work, I have reached a satisfactory level of control over mana:

[Mana Manipulation (rare) has reached level 3!]

Now my spells are more efficient as I have much more precision when making the matrices.

Still, it’s not enough. But recently, I have been having a few ideas on how to configure my magic in a way, that will be even better. The answer I have found is – abuse the system!

System’s calibration allowed me to easily visualize mana, though it shouldn’t be even possible.

I could maybe use a few tricks and ideas to utilize the advantages the system can give me.

“It’s possible for the current you”

Was all Ralph said to me instead of advice. Well, this piece of information is still very precious. It means I am going into the right direction.

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After two days, I have come up with a vague concept.

The system used some method to access my ability to perceive the world and has calibrated my perception in such a way that I was able to visualize mana as an entity with physical properties.

The system used some kind of method to access my comprehension of the nature of the world and used it to create a method of perceiving the nature of mana unique to me, which allowed me to perceive the inner workings of the arcane entity to an extent.

The system was able to determine my full name, age and place of origin the moment or close to the moment I have appeared in this world.

It was able to see the true name of Ralph and detect the nature of his intervention.

All of the statements above have been verified by Ralph, so they could be considered trustworthy to an extent.

It means that the system is able to access the inner workings of a living being’s mind and personality and not only accurately decipher the context of the insides of a being’s mind, but also control a being’s perception with accuracy to the point of it not leaving any seeming harm on said being’s mental health.

So, I have resorted to the overused fantasy trope – the power of imagination!

Well, not really. It’s a bit more complicated than it sounds.

I have more or less finalized the general model of how the new skill should work.

After countless experiments of imagining various effects and then creating spells with those effects and then seeing how the mana structure is affected by the desired effect, I have come to the conclusion that in order for a spell to be “stable”, it requires the effects not to defy the natural laws of the material world too much.

Say, for example, I create a stone cube. I try to add the effect of defying inertia to the stone cube (I wish I could do such cool things. I can only do so much, unfortunately). The spell will need a lot of mana to not fall apart as an object that originally had mass lost its mass.

In reverse, I can create foundations for my spells and leave various gaps in-between various effects that will be filled in automatically by the system.

Well, it’s not the skill, it’s still just an observation.

I have also utilized my Mana Perception skill’s calibration.

When looking at fire, I have created a fireball using my Mana Insight and Mana Manipulation.

Using Mana Perception and Mana Manipulation I have recreated the fireball’s structure.

It turned out to be a fireball.

Using Mana Insight, I have studied the new fireball. It was an unrefined mess with many strange repetitions in patterns and many useless spaces. It was as if it was made by a poor AI. It probably was.

Its functionality was the same though. It was just a little weaker and harder to control.

After repeating the process for three days and, according to Ralph, two thousand four hundred and six times, I have received a skill:

[Magic Visualization (rare, lvl 1)]

It was basically further calibration that the system used. It allowed me to develop the general shape and form of the magic I wanted to cast and letting the system do the small tasks.

It let me use less of my concentration and willpower on making spells, leaving the same mana cost and reducing the strength of my magic. But it was a very useful tool as it allowed me to bypass the requirements I have set on my level of Mana Manipulation and my ability to concentrate for several of my projects.

First being, the self-sufficient mana matrix that would draw the mana from the atmosphere to sustain itself.

This one is incredibly complex. It would need a huge amount of parts and a lot of time to design.

I have attempted to design separate parts on my own and replicate them with Magic Visualization and yet, it was too hard still.

I had to ask Ralph for assistance. He would point out the direction of an issue and I would do my best to interpret him right and follow those directions.

It was surprisingly fun, if not time-consuming, having taken an entire three days just to finalize the design.

After I was done with it, I spent a week learning how to make them until I could make one in a single hour.

After all was said and done, my vision would be full of floating balls of mana the size of a football whenever I activated Mana Perception.

The second on the list was an item that would let me interact with my inactive spells, making them active. I called it a simple button.

This one was much easier, though in order to integrate it into the structure of a matrix I had to make the matrix bigger, therefore more expensive MP-wise.

The third one I called a mana-wire. It allowed me to connect various parts of a matrix together and combine matrices. Integrating two matrices and making them operate together as intended, was hard. It was so hard that it took me a whole month to finally finish it. And, of course, I had to rely on Ralph on many many things.

By the time I was done with preparations, it was already mid-summer. I have spent quite a bit of time in the cave.

I was able to adapt to my new circumstances and didn’t find the environment as harsh anymore.

I was able to hunt, cook and take care of myself.

I was able to use simple magic to shave, cut my hair and take care of my dental problems and the various problems related to personal hygiene.

I had a routine of running and exercising and keeping fit in general, I have managed to hunt and skin a few wolves, I have processed their pelts, with Ralph’s help, so I wasn’t as cold anymore.

I was never lonely, partially because that was a part of my antisocial personality, partially because I could always bug Ralph to talk to me.

I was quite good at magic, I believed. For my level at least by that time, so I could defend myself.

I have created several spells, some bigger and stronger than others and had them stashed away in my cave for the time being. They would dissipate in time, but they could last a week.

And I was ready to raid the damn dungeon. Finally.