After a nice dinner of mushrooms, fish, and some giant spider, my family finished our dinner. We ended our meal with a few apples from the surface settlement as a dessert, before we made our way back home. My parents and siblings seemed eager to go to bed, so I dematerialized my Lake-Gazer’s dress right after we walked through the door. My mother helped me swap out my clothes for pajamas, before my mother helped me take a bath and then my sister took one afterwards. Then, we all went to bed.

As I lay next to my mother and thought about the day, I started thinking more about what I had heard throughout the day. First of all, I now knew that there were two major kinds of magic-user in this world: Witches/Wizards and Shapers. I suspected that Witches specialized in one of the two kinds of essence, and shapers probably specialized in the other kind.

Apart from that, I had a better grasp of this world’s history now. I didn’t know very many specifics yet, but I had a general overview of what I needed to look out for in the future. Orukthyri and Outsiders plagued the surface of the world, and apparently there was a black sun in the center of our… probably donut-shaped planet.

I was still having a hard time wrapping my head around the last bit.

Finally, I had a few short term and long term goals. Exploring the surface seemed like a decent long-term plan for farming Achievement, finding cool items and bits of history, and maybe advancing our social status in this world. If Sallia and Felix were also interested in joining me when I went to explore the surface, I figured we could probably get a good amount of Influence Achievement from exploring the surface and finding lost magical knowledge, if we got a little lucky. I remembered from Sel’thub’s description that Influence Achievement was the kind of Achievement which was influenced by world Tier, and this seemed like a potentially good way to take advantage of this world’s high tier without getting slaughtered by incredibly powerful enemies as long as we picked our fights well. Of course, I would need to make sure that Sallia and Felix didn’t have other plans first, but I felt that Sallia would love the idea of good fights with the Orukthyri, and ancient craftsmanship and spellcasting would probably interest Felix.

Of course, before I could talk about future plans, I needed to meet up Sallia and Felix again. I sighed.

It would probably take a while before I could make that happen. They were far enough away from our house that my parents wouldn’t just let me wander towards them, since I was basically a toddler right now. I might need to wait until I turned ten or eleven before my parents even considered letting me out of their sight; and depending on this world’s culture and how protective my parents were, I might be stuck in this area until I turned twenty. Which was incredibly weird to think about. On the islands, twenty was old enough to get married, and maybe already have a few children. Here, twenty years old might not even be the right age to wander too far away from my parents.

I sighed. This… might be an exercise in patience.

As I thought about ages, I started wondering if this world had any formal education system, or way of testing for magical talent. If it did, odds were pretty good that I could meet Sallia and Felix either in school or as fellow magical apprentices, at least if my suspicions about how essence stats interacted with my body was correct. I hadn’t confirmed anything yet, of course, but I really hoped that meeting Sallia and Felix again would happen as soon as possible. Being alone for years sounded awful.

I hesitated for a moment. I knew my mother might already be asleep, but if she wasn’t I hoped she could answer a few final questions.

“Mama?” I whispered, to see if my mother was still awake.

“Yes, sweetie?” My mother sounded drowsy, but she didn’t sound like she had been asleep yet.

“Is there school or something near here? Is there a place I can make friends?” I asked.

“School doesn’t start until you’re older, sweetie. Then they’ll test you for magical potential, and you can make friends there. If you’re lucky, and you have magical potential, a Witch or a Wizard will take you as an apprentice. All children with a certain level of magical potential get an apprenticeship as part of the city’s education system, and if not, everyone at least gets to learn how to read and write and do basic math, along with some basic history lessons. But you’ll have to wait until you turn 12 to find out. Children younger than 12 who learn magic might  blow themselves up with a spell gone wrong, so nobody teaches them anything before then. And nobody even tests children before that point.”

My curiosity was satisfied, and I nodded. In that case, I had eight years to work on my runes and bring my swordsmanship back up to par before I had a chance to interact with this world’s magic systems. I didn’t want to spend eight whole years away from Felix and Sallia, but at least I would probably see them again after the eight years were up. I sighed, before closing my eyes.

Even if being alone for eight years sounded awful, I would make the best of them. On the Islands, I had died well before I had finished maximizing my potential, because circumstances had pushed me to take risks before I was ready. This time, I hoped that I would have enough time to maximize my potential, so that I wouldn’t die so easily in this world.

* * *

The next eight years passed slowly. I didn’t have Felix or Sallia to talk to, so the entire time I felt empty and lonely. During my time on the islands, I had often thought about how grateful I was that Sallia and Felix were present with me. To have them missing for so long felt… maddening, and I didn’t like it one bit. My parents and family weren’t particularly eager to let me out of their sight during that time, since I was incredibly young by the standards of our species, so I spent most of each day with my mother as she sewed dresses and ordinary clothes and got to know my mother’s friends. They weren’t bad people, but they weren’t Sallia and Felix.

Apart from that, I got to know a lot more about this world’s color culture. Apparently, most children didn’t get to know other children their age until school, and spent most of their early years close to their family. Children who wore pink clothes often spent their entire days with one of their parents, until they got old enough to change to wearing other colors. 

Children above the age of ten were expected to wear some kind of color related to the profession they hoped to join in the future; however, one needed to mix their color with strips of gray color near the edges of their clothes, to show they weren’t actually part of that profession.

After learning this fact, I quickly started inquiring what blue and black clothes meant, where I learned that shade of blue mattered a lot. Light blue meant that one was a Witch or Wizard, and black meant that one had a profession close to death; so soldiers, adventurers, and graveyard keepers usually wore black. Dark blue usually meant one had a profession closely related to water; for example, the farmers who kept the mushroom caverns producing food wore a mixture of dark blue and brown. However, wearing light blue was frowned upon until one had their magical talent assessed.

As a side note, there was one other color one needed to keep an eye out for in the city. That was the color white, which was the symbol of prestige and nobility. The more renowned their status, and the more powerful they or their family, the more white one wore. The overseer of the city wore pure white robes, and most of the Grand Witches had a great deal of white added to their clothing, based on their power and how much they had contributed to the city.

Naturally, once I turned 10, I pretended to be interested in learning how to wield a sword and adventure around, as a ‘means to protect myself.’ My parents weren’ thrilled that I was taking after Jonathan, who had gone off to apprentice under a Swordmaster, but my father grudgingly convinced my mother that children experimenting was normal. Thus, I had a proper excuse to wear my Lake-Gazer’s Dress everywhere, as long as I added in an appropriate amount of gray thread to my clothing.

I also learned a bit about why everyone was so obsessed with colors in this world.

Unlike my previous world, where we had worshiped the ocean mother, the gods of this world were dragons.

Very real, very well documented dragons that also lived underground, near our cities, and occasionally woke up and demanded tribute. Most dragons took naps that lasted centuries, and the dragon our city worshiped had been asleep for over a hundred years, but nobody knew when it would wake up next. The dragons of this world were rather intelligent, and didn’t usually lay waste to human cities so long as they paid tribute on time. Surprisingly, living near a dragon also had benefits; they seemed to hate Outsiders just as much as Outsiders hated the native inhabitants of this world, so living next to a dragon kept us safe in exchange for needing to pay a massive tribute of gold every couple centuries.

We also visited a church once a month, to pray to the local white-scaled dragon for blessings, which was why in our city white was associated with nobility and good luck. Every dragon had different colors for its scales, which shaped a big part of each city’s color culture. This meant that every city in the underdark had a very different idea what color was associated with nobility. Merchants that traveled the underground passages between cities to trade often had to carry around multiple sets of clothing, so that they could match the correct colors of whatever city they were visiting. However, apart from the ‘noble color,’ of each city, many of the other colors were at least somewhat constant in what they meant, even if smaller details often varied a bit.

Even though I felt lonely without Felix and Sallia to talk to, I didn’t let the eight years of time I had go to waste. I worked on retraining as much of my skills from the Islands as I could. Since I couldn’t engage with this world’s magic systems until I turned twelve, I made sure to use every single moment of time I had to prepare for all of the adventures Sallia, Felix and I would have together once we became adults.

Once I reached Intermediate grade swordsmanship at around the age of seven, I started to notice the same gradual reduction in growth speed I had noticed during my previous life. However, my {Two Purpose Training Sword} and my previous experience training on the islands helped me reach my previous level of skill quickly. I wasn’t anywhere close to {Advanced} grade swordsmanship yet, as far as I could tell, but I felt that I could probably get there within a few decades, if I lived that long. A distant goal, but one I wanted to reach if I could.

Since I was claiming to be interested in swordsmanship and adventuring, my mother and father, grudgingly, let me practice in front of the house sometimes, although they never seemed entirely happy with it. 

Apart from swordsmanship, I worked on my runes. Trying to rebuild my runes was… difficult in this world, given the lack of naturally occurring absorption essence. Without my body simply producing absorption essence every second, I had to explicitly be touching my dress or taking a bath to generatore more absorption essence.

The biggest problem with creating new runes, apart from the period of adaptation being much longer than before, was the construction process of each rune.

Anytime a rune was started but wasn’t completed, it would slowly lose progress towards completion, every single second. In my previous world, this hadn’t been much of a problem. One didn’t lose a substantial amount of progress per day, and one could basically just power through it and keep making steady progress until the rune was complete.

However, in this world, my body didn’t produce absorption essence naturally, and I produced far less absorption essence per day to use on rune construction. This meant that the little amount of progress I lost actually became a huge annoyance, since my progress was already slow.

I also discovered that, if I failed to pay the upkeep cost for one of my runes, the runes would start to cannibalize other runes in order to keep functioning, starting from the most recent rune I had formed. In other words, I needed to make sure I kept contact with water for at least a couple minutes every day, if I didn’t want my runes to start destroying themselves.

Luckily, this was pretty easy to manage. The amount of ‘decay’ experienced by my most recently formed rune was quite minor, and if I was wearing my dress, I still generated a good amount of absorption essence per second. However, all of these factors combined meant that my ‘maximum’ number of runes would be much lower on this world than it would have been on the Islands, even though my Absorption Essence Grade was pretty good this time.

With the 390 Achievement I earned from forming my runes and practicing my swordsmanship, I gone from 218.89 Achievement to 608.89. It wasn’t an overwhelming amount of Achievement, but it was steady progress, at least. I couldn’t help but wish that the ‘increased achievement’ rewards from higher tier worlds worked for all kinds of achievement, instead of merely for influence. However, at the very least, I was still making a decent amount of Achievement right now, which would make it easier to purchase better Stats when we returned to the Market. And I was also getting stronger, which would be critical if I actually wanted to gain some Influence Achievement and take advantage of the heightened rewards of a Tier 4 world.

Despite my problems with rune formation, I still managed to form three runes during the eight years of training time. It would take a lot longer before I could form my fourth rune, but I was confident I could at least form a fourth rune and keep it stable. I strongly suspected I could get a fifth rune built as well, although six or more runes sounded a little dubious to me unless I managed to get some of my keywords consistently activated.

I also had to be very cautious about where I placed my runes this time, since nobody had any knowledge of the rune-based magic system in this world. On the Islands, people who saw me strolling around with some glowing runes on my arms knew exactly what they meant, and would respect me more if I flaunted my runes.

In this world, however, they would just see funny glowing tattoos. Tattoos weren’t a problem, per se, and sometimes people wore tattoos for decorative purposes. 

However, tattoos were subject to the same rules about color culture that clothes were. My runes would appear to be a kind of white color until I formed my fourth rune, which would probably change the color to white-blue if I copied my old ‘image’ of the life-giving ocean for my rune abilities… which would mean that I would be declaring that I was a noble or person of prestige. This, obviously, would go over poorly with the rest of the city. 

Therefore, after some thinking, I had placed all of my runes at the bottom of my feet, and only started forming runes after my family didn’t have any points in time where they did things like help me get dressed. Socks and shoes were both pretty common in this world, so my runes were fairly well hidden there. I couldn’t help but wonder if there was some sort of ability or item that would help me disguise the runes more thoroughly in future worlds, in case I ran into similar problems in the future. I resolved to look into it whenever we returned to the Market.

However, once I turned twelve, I started practically humming with excitement. Because it was finally time to go to this city’s school, and also get tested for magical talent.

And most importantly, it was time to see Sallia and Felix again.

I couldn’t wait.

acaswell

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