Chapter 9 – [New Quest Available]

🙞❤︎🙜

What the heck, why not do it? There was absolutely nothing logical at all about my transmigrating into the world of Adventure Incarnate, so why use logic now? I decided to follow my heart and learn how to cast spells. Of course, I would still practice with the bow and sword occasionally, but my heart was set on magic.

Magic was a very special skill in the game because it was used for everything, not just fighting. There was farming magic, elemental magic, crafting magic, alchemy magic, star magic, puppet magic, etc.

The next day, I woke up at the crack of dawn and put on my farming clothes after washing my face and brushing my teeth. It was yet another beautiful spring dawn in the woods. I hummed merrily as I watered the crops, noting that the potato plants were growing nicely. After making sure that each plant had enough water, I pulled out a few weeds. Nowadays, this only took a fraction of my energy since my stamina had grown a lot from the time that I first started farming.

Then I went back to the cottage to prepare breakfast. As I ground the coffee beans in a hand grinder, I mentally blessed the cash shop for providing me with a coffeemaker. The barista costume set was really useful! Mornings were so much more pleasant now that I had the means to brew my own coffee.

Unfortunately, my cooking level was still a disastrous level one, so all I could do was take out a loaf of bread and cheese from my inventory and eat them separately. I found that if I tried to make a grilled cheese sandwich, I ended up with burnt bread and cheese instead, so I was forced to eat only cooking ingredients without combining them into something better. I finished off my meal with an apple from my inventory.

With plenty of energy to spare, I went to the northern part of my farm and cut as many trees as I could until I was too tired to continue. I reckoned I had cleared more than enough land for the summer planting.

By noon, I was exhausted and had another simple meal of carrots, avocado, cucumber, and a rice ball from the Five-Star Luxury Bento. This was hardly ideal, but I had gotten used to eating to live and not living to eat.

However, I swore to myself that one day I would hire a magic chef to cook the most exquisite and delicious dishes for me.

After lunch, it was time to start training my magic. Though there were other ways to train it, I felt it would be good to level up herblaw first.

[Herblaw:

The study and usage of herbs in potion-making.]

A new player would normally have to farm or buy herbs, but I had billions of them in my inventory, so I didn’t have to do that. All I had to do now was to clean the herbs, identify them, then mix them together with some other ingredients in my inventory to make potions.

The most basic potions restored health, cured status ailments, and temporarily boosted stats.

Before I could do anything, the first step was to clean a bunch of “unidentified herbs.” I took one hundred of those from my inventory and piled them up on the table that I had set up outside my house. I picked the most comfortable armchair from the cash shop and set it in front of the table. The last step was to grab a bunch of spell stones and place them beside the herbs.

In the world of Adventure Incarnate, there were different magic systems. The player, however, could only use spell stones to cast magic. As I understand it, the non-player characters, or NPCs, used something called “cultivation,” which meant using the qi or spiritual energy that was present in all living things.

Once I had taken out the spell stones, the System’s magic tab was activated. I clicked on the spell book icon to see that the “Clean Herb” spell was available.

I wasn’t sure what would happen exactly. In the game, the player’s avatar had an animation for every spell. Hoping for the best, but expecting the worst, I said, “Here goes nothing. Clean!”

The moment I willed a spell to activate, my hands started moving on their own. My left hand picked up an herb, while my right hand glowed a bright red. I could feel some sort of energy pouring from a spell stone into my hand. The energy then started flowing from my right hand to my left, where the herb was.

I watched with fascination as the herb was lifted until it floated between my hands, where it started rotating inside a ball of red energy.

It only took a few seconds for the spell to clean the herb and identify it as a “Fencress Herb.”

“Well, that was okay…” I said to no one in particular. “So this is magic.”

What had I been expecting? Fireworks? My first magic spell went off without a hitch, which was good, but it was rather unexciting. Perhaps I should’ve started off with combat spells?

… No, that was probably a bad idea. I only had one life, after all.

One of the spell stones had crumbled into crystal dust, depleted by my use of it. I put the dust in my inventory and continued casting the spell until I had finished identifying the pile of herbs in front of me. Through experimentation, I found that I was in control of my hand movements and the spell. I could stop casting whenever I wanted to, even if it was in the middle of the [Clean Herb] spell.

When I was done, I got up and stretched. Unlike doing farming chores, I didn’t feel tired after casting spells. That was probably because I used energy from the spell stones instead of my own energy.

Wasn’t this an extremely overpowered type of magic? As long as I didn’t run out of stones, I could cast as many spells as I wanted!

I rubbed my hands together with glee. Could the same be true of combat magic? I couldn’t wait to find out.

Though I was badly tempted to just go out and start testing combat magic with Mr. Bear, I got more herbs and continued to clean them. It was mildly entertaining to make them spin between my hands.

The reason I refrained from combat magic was that the failure rate of combat spells was quite high unless the player had ten magic levels over the required level.

For example, a simple Fireball was a level one spell. However, at level one magic, it would fail nine out of ten times. At level two, it would fail eight out of ten times. And so forth. It was only at level eleven that one could be certain that it would almost never fail.

Almost.

All spells had the chance to misfire or fail to activate until the player reached the maximum magic level, which was ninety-nine. Therefore, it was better to level up magic before using it in combat.

By the end of the day, I had a few hundred herbs that were ready to use. As I was sorting them into piles, I got a pop-up message from the System.

[New Quest Available: Rescue Prince Baiyu]

Oh, I remember this! There was definitely a newbie quest to rescue a prince in the game.

Wow, to think that I would be able to rescue a real life prince!

I hope he’s handsome.

LinMeili

• Unlike in other magic systems where magic is mostly used for combat, this story has a lot of mundane magic spells.
• Thanks for reading this far.
• Please leave a comment if you found an error. I'll fix it right away!