Mike sighed, after watching the Level up process he had been sitting down on the opposite side of the fire pit to Crosse for almost an hour, trying to sense the amount of Arcane mana in his own body. He had had little success.

The only reasons as to why that he could come up with were that, his body had a lot more Arcane mana in it than Crosse’s did, or that all of the spells that the AI had left throughout his body, which he had a hard time sensing when they weren’t actually active, were messing with his reading.

He figured it was most likely both and decided to move on. He opened his Status Window in front of him.

He wanted to feel what spending the points felt like, he thought if he could get a grasp on that then he may have a way to properly use arcane mana. So he thought about his current distributable points, which were quite plentiful.

He had two Physical stats and one for both mental and magical. He wasn’t too sure what to do with any of them, for the first time it didn’t look like his status had any glaring deficiencies.

His lowest stat was resistance, but he had yet to use it or any of its related Skills though he had two, would this extra stat point that he got from his class be best put to use raising it to seven? Or should he put it in Control, the actual Core stat of the Wizard Class. Out of curiosity, Mike willed the AI to bring up the descriptions of his Resistance Skills.

Interestingly his Max Mastery for Light Magic Resistance was higher by a stage, he wondered why. With the sarcasm out of the way, the skills seemed pretty useful honestly, if he was going to be fighting someone who used either of these kinds of magic but didn’t want to use their brand of magic personally, either because he didn’t have spells for it or didn’t have it unlocked.

That was a path to unlocking types of magic that he didn’t have, if he managed to get their Resistance skills then he could use them to sense the mana types and possibly unlock the Control Skills.

Well, they seemed a lot more useful than he had assumed if he was going to utilize that method of unlocking he would need a higher base Resistance so he would put this point into it for now.

The points only applied after he closed the window so he went up to the Mental aspect next. He felt pretty good just putting this point into wisdom straight away, three of his four Mental Skills relied on Wisdom and upping it would likely help train them.

For physical it was more of a question, he had two points and could see putting both in either Agility or Strength. Agility felt like the right choice because two of his Physical Skills were primarily reliant on it and he had seen how useful that was while studying Arcane Logic. He nodded, Agility it was.

Having assigned all of his points he focused on his head with his Attunement sense, then closed the window. He felt a spell that seemed to cover the entirety of his brain come to life. It sent it a pulse through the part of his head that contained the stat point and Mike sensed it change. Its generic impression of ‘Mental’ changed to ‘Wisdom’.

The new impression that it had seemed to resonate with a part of him, a part that he couldn’t sense or feel, the Stat point started to dissolve, quickly fading from his awareness as he tried to process what it was doing. He lost track of it before he could completely understand what was happening, but it was another data point. He still wasn’t sure exactly how to do it but he felt like he knew what Arcane magic could do.

It seemed like arcane magic improved and altered other things somehow, he didn’t quite understand how though, he absorbed it and some reflex of his soul made it change to make him better in specific ways. The AI had found a way to counteract that reflex, letting him choose how the improvements were gained instead.

The AI had said in the Skill description that Arcane magic could ‘temporarily increase mental ability’ from what he had found from Dark magic these hints in the description weren’t the entirety of the Skills capabilities even at this level, though he was sure that he had barely scratched the surface of the use he had found on his own.

Mike decided that this was likely enough studying around with Arcane magic for tonight, He had wanted to get it to level, but his inability to cast a spell with it seemed to be hampering that. He felt that this likely had to do with its governing stats. They were Affinity and Control, not Attunement, the Control skill let him sense the mana types but that wasn’t their main purpose, so getting better at sensing the mana wouldn’t level them up.

He opened his Skills window.

He looked it over and moved the checkmark for from Arcane Magic too Dark Magic, he had understood something new about that element tonight and wondered if he could incorporate it into the spells he already had for it, the ability to sense hostility might make him capable of not letting his spells affect allies, which would be a huge boon if he ever worked out how to add elements together for spells, a fireball that didn't harm allies would be amazing.

Once he could cast Fireballs at all of course. So he started Practising.

***

Mike had just cast Chill touch for the 40th time that night as he saw light peeking through the trees to the east. Well, he assumed it was to the east, this planet might rotate in the opposite direction to Earth, which would make it the west.

He had had a productive night, finding a new use for Dark Magic, which was already his most useful Magic type and studying Arcane Magic as much as he could. He wasn’t too let down by not working out how to use it immediately, it seemed like it was a very important part of how this world functioned, and he wasn’t going to learn how it worked in just a few hours.

As he walked towards the camp from where he was standing he looked around at the mana in his surroundings. He hadn’t felt any real fatigue from casting magic for almost three hours, only pausing now and again to consider how he could alter his method of casting and drink some of the water that Crosse had left him.

He had found it rather difficult to incorporate the Hostility sensing aspect of Dark mana into Chill Touch. Every time he thought of the name the AI had given the spell he couldn’t help but feel amused. He hadn’t had time to think about it after the fight, due to immediately passing out. But of course it was Chill touch, even though it didn’t do any actual cold damage and didn’t require touch, what else would it be?

When he had first tried, it simply hadn’t worked. No spell at all. After casting it a few more times and dismissing and re-casting hostile Awareness did he realise that it had to do with mana cost, Hostile awareness was a costly spell by his standards, which were the only standards he currently had, it was his most expensive spell at 30 Dark mana.

Chill touch only used 20, and that meant that trying to cast Chill touch with the ability to recognize hostility built-in didn’t work. So he had tried using more mana, but he found a limit. He couldn’t control more than just over 50 mana at a time.

This meant he could control enough to cast each spell individually, but it seemed that making them work together was not quite as easy as 20 mana + 30 mana = 50 mana. So he had started his experimenting, He had been casting both spells continuously, seeing if he could make them cost less mana.

He had eventually succeeded, managing to lower the mana cost for Hostile Awareness down to 20 mana by specifying how long he wanted it to keep him aware of hostility for. Which hadn’t been as easy as requesting it make him aware of hostility for 4 hours or 6 hours? No that didn’t affect the spell at all.

He had eventually managed to make it last “until dawn” but that had only saved him 5 mana. He figured from that working that he had to give it a timeframe that related to it somehow. Like the sun rising and getting rid of the darkness. He had found that the finest way to give it a timer was through a specific number of blinks.

Which had involved sitting and counting how many times on average he blinked in a minute, which wasn’t fun without a clock or someone else to count seconds, also complicated by the fact that when he was thinking about blinking he tended to do it less. He had eventually come down to an estimate of between eighteen and twenty times a minute, which had then required him to calculate the number of blinks in an hour and so on.

He had managed to get the spell to last an estimate of 8 hours by requesting it last 9600 blinks. This had reduced the cost of the spell down to 20 mana, though interestingly he couldn’t get it to go any lower, requesting it to last any shorter than 9000 blinks just made the spell fail and there wasn’t a cost difference between 9000 blinks and 9600.

After going through that he had managed to finally cast the combined spell. He pulled up the spell description to see what had changed after all that.

Perfect! So he now had a non-lethal spell that would only affect hostiles if he so chose and it would just completely ignore friendlies. This would be useful in a chaotic situation or if he ever started fighting with others, if he ever managed to make an area of effect version of this spell it would be even better, but he felt like he would need higher stats for that given his current cap on mana control.

He glanced up towards the camp and brought up his Skill window

He moved the checkmark from Arcane Logic into Acting, he would need it more right now, he had been able to cast just fine without it before. Though it was useful for experimenting with and studying his spells. He was happy to see another level in Dark magic as well.

Mike closed both windows and made his way back to the camp, as he got closer he saw that Crosse was already blinking rapidly in the early morning light, clearing his eyes before sitting up and looking around.

His gaze focused on Mike for a second then continued as he looked around, only after he had looked all around himself did he relax slightly with a sigh that progressed into a yawn. Mike felt the urge to yawn as well in sympathy, his mouth widening with the involuntary action.

“Good morning,” Mike said as he reached the camp. Moving to sit down beside the ring of stones that had housed the campfire.

“Mornin’,” Crosse replied gruffly. “See anything during the night?”

Mike shook his head, “it was quiet.”

“Good, ready for a long day? I want to eat and change the dressing of that wounds of yours then be out of here.

Mike felt a wince of pain from the wound on his head. He had been ignoring the ache from it all night but having his attention called to it didn’t help. “As ready as I’ll ever be,” Mike replied.

To go on a journey in an alien land full of Magic, monsters and who knew what else, Mike finished in his head, excitement, wonder, curiosity and sheer terror boiling in his head