Emily immediately sets to work, clearing her workbench before taking out potion making supplies aing up. She collects the potion materials from shelves and her spatial ste, gathering them in preparation.
She carefully follows the same process as with Ivor, quickly f the dangerous mix of venom and flesh. However, as she ts down the seds to the final step and reaches out to grab aongue, her sleeve catches ay beaker and knocks it over. The beaker shatters, sh the tongue she prepared in gss shards and ruining her brewing attempt.
“Urgh,” Emily groans. “What a waste of materials.”
She pulls out The Clod presses rewind.
***
Returning to the evening of the previous day, the first thing Emily does is check her system quests. The requirement on Alchemical Aspirations remains errored out, as she expected, so gathers supplies and tries again. This attempt fails even faster, when the imperfes in the mixture form slightly too far apart ooo many times, ruining the mixture when she fails to destroy them all.
“Third time’s the charm,” she mutters with resignation as she activates The Clock again.
***
Her third attempt bears fruit, and she mao brew the potion without any signifit issues. Breathing a sigh of relief, Emily checks her quest log and finds the requirement on Alchemical Aspirations has been satisfactorily pleted again.
She tinues with her evening, cautiously waiting for something bad to happen again. The night passes without issue, though, and she cruises through the day without running into any of the same annoyances as before. Iernoon, she repces the pin in her boot, before it breaks, finding a small scratch across its midpoint that was the failure point. The scratch was too small for her to eveer as an issue in her previous ss, and she’s certain it wouldn’t usually fail so dramatically.
Then, in the evening, Marever appears, so Emily and Juliana pass the evening together happily.
***
Time in The Dome moves slowly for Emily after the expedition. She signs up for a few different courses of study but discovers most of them to be unhelpful and that it’s faster to explore the subjects with her own research. She soon runs out of iing csses and spends most of her time gathering information in the library or experimenting with spells and maes in her room, finding endless i in the Spellweave.
Her progress iation slows down drastically after leaving The Gde, and even with the help of the training room’s high density mana gathering array, she struggles to increase her intelligeat. After four months, she starts spending the majority of her day fog oation, and even takes on a few strange requests from Ago make her some non-ventional ons, to help alleviate her boredom alessness as she runs out of hings to grab her attention. She spends a lot more time with her friends and Juliana, celebrating together wheer reaches sed circle ten months after awakening, a sizable achievement for a e.
When Emily’s seveh birthday arrives, she spends the day iation and experimentation as usual. But, in the evening, Juliana drags her out of The Dome to visit a restaurant together for dinner.
Eventually, Emily enjoys the fruits of her bour. Three months after her birthday, oenth month of the year five hundred and thirteen, whilst sitting cross-legged in the tre of one of the training rooms, her intelligence finally hits 75.
ˉˉˉˉˉ
[Status]
[Name:] Emily Coldstone
[Race:] Human
[Age:] 17
[Magic Circle:] Sed Circle
[Maa Cortex:] Sed Stage
[Attributes:] Strength 12 > 15 (21), Dexterity 35 > 40 (43), Agility 27 > 31 (36), Vitality 13 > 14 (19), Intelligence 61 > 75
[Health:] 220/220
[Stamina:] 380/380
[Mana:] 4500/4500
[Maa:] 4500/4500
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
[Progression]
[Circle/Stage:] Sed
Requirements:
-Intelligence 75/75 (plete)
-Create 5/5 unique E rank maes (plete)
-Learn internal casting (plete)
-Create 3/3 sed circle spells (plete)
-Sy 1/1 third circle beast (plete)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Progression requirements met.
Would you like to begin stage assion? [Yes]/[No]
(Warning, it is reehat User finds a safe area with a high may to ehe best results of assion)
_____
Emily grins at the system windows floating in her vision.
“Finally!” she cries gleefully. “I wonder if I’ll get another reward fressing to third circle only a year after reag sed.”
Letting her excitement flow out of her, she takes a few deep breaths, settling again in the tre of the gathering array and clearing all unnecessary thoughts in preparation for the oning pain. After a few minutes of quietly gathering mana and calming down, her heart is still, so she agrees to the assion.
Instantly, the pressure inside her bursts like a dam. Pulses of maa flood her system and hold her still for the pain to e. The mana around her vibrates with power as she’s slowly lifted into the air, ed in a co of lightning. Emily grits her teeth, trying to remain scious as pain overwhelms her mind.
Mana ceaselessly flows into her, mixing with her internal energy flow and f two vortexes of wild, urained energy around her heart and cortex. She’s uo appreciate the power flowing into her though, as her attention is held pletely by the all-enpassing torture assaulting every fibre of her being. Emily feels her muscles burst, her skin rip, and her bones shatter. The dizzying bination of sensations and pain wears on her mind as she silently wishes for the experieo end, uo trol her body to even release a scream.
FUCK! THIS IS SO MUCH WORSE THAN BEFORE!
A chorus of sciousness screams in her mind, but she doesn’t even notice the duplicated internal monologue. Still held in the grasp of misery, Emily bears wito the world falling away around her once again. The enting ic stream of energy that’s revealed to her fills her with a sense of wonder and more pain, as her mind races to prehend its ws aract every scrap of uanding it .
As the ethereal vision starts to fade, something clicks in her mind. The internal screams for the suffering to end vanish as all her physical pain is numbed, and she focuses on the sense of trht by uanding a fra of the ider revealed to her. She pulls on the co of crag mana around her, feeling more ected to it than ever before, dragging it into her body to accelerate her assion.
She guides the energy through her body, splitting it between her cortex and circles, densing the energy into them. Her cortex finishes first, pleting its remodelling and reeling in the violently flowing maa filling her body, f the energy bato a calm but powerful flow. She focuses all the remaining energy on her heart, increasing the rotation speed of the mana vortex around it, pulling the energy into a densed ring.
The momehird circle clicks into pce, Emily emits a wave of power, revealing her rength to the world. A loud thundercrack sounds, eg through the halls of The Dome and out into the city around it, announg her successful assion.
Emily slowly falls to the ground, still holding her lotus pose as she observes the ges within her body, reeg her cortex with her paiors. Her eyes snap open, maa dang across her gaze as she lets out a slow breath, crag with the power of lightning.
I probably shouldn’t ever use it in a fight, but it's helpful to know I cut off pain now.
She notices the new voices in her head, four internal monologues where there should be one, and quickly disables them.
Set core one as primary sciousness. That should do it.
She smirks at the new method for managing her cores that she instinctively uands after reag third stage. Excitedly, Emily ands her inactive cores to show her any important new information in her system, and several system windows pop into her vision at once.
ˉˉˉˉˉ
gratutions! Assion successful.
[Status]
[Name:] Emily Coldstone
[Race:] Human
[Age:] 17
[Magic Circle:] Sed > Third Circle
[Maa Cortex:] Sed > Third Stage
[Attributes:] Strength 15 > 20 (26), Dexterity 40 > 64 (67), Agility 31 > 50 (55), Vitality 14 > 17 (22), Intelligence 75 > 118
[Health:] 270/270
[Stamina:] 520/520
[Mana:] 15930/15930
[Maa:] 15930/15930
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Sub-system updated: Progression
[Progression]
[Circle/Stage:] Third
Requirements:
-Intelligence 118/180 (Not plete)
-Upgrade [Basia Manipution] to [Intermediate] grade (Not plete)
-Create 0/1 unique D rank mae (Not plete)
-plete 2/3 k quests (Not plete)
-Kill 0/2 fourth circle mages (Not plete)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Insight gained!
[Skill upgraded]
[Intermediate Spellweave (active)]
[Cost:] 200 Mana/Hr
User gaze into the truth of ruo form spells.
-Upon activation, user enters a trance-like state to use mana to experiment with new or known runic matrices.
_____
“Woah!”
Emily’s mouth falls open as she stares incredulously at her stat increases.
Almost 16000 mana. That’s insane! No wohird circle mages cast ritual spell level attacks repeatedly. Though, my strength and vitality don’t appear to be increasing much. I guess it’s not surprising, I’m already physically strohan Agnes when she doesn’t use enha spells. I don’t think mages bodies are affected very much by their cultivation. The improvements to my agility aerity seem to e from my meic progression. Otherwise, they’d both probably be just as low too.
Flexing her fingers, she feels the fine trol enabled by microscopic streams of maa that allow her to trol her every move. She feels as if she trol each muscle twitch through the hat seem almost too closely entwined with her muscles and tendons.
Hmm. That’s weird. This jump ierity is incredible, but I almost feel like my movements are too smooth. It doesn’t feel like my fingers move like a human’s should. It almost feels like all the muscles and bones have been moved and reshaped to flow perfectly. Are my assions gihat much?
She slowly moves her focus up her arms, flexing and stretg everything, adjusting to the drastic ges in her body. She stands up while w through every joint and muscle in her body and, as the feeling of ingruence fades, she starts to appreciate the alterations. The strange inhuman mix of subscious grad calcuted movements brings a bubbling feeling of fort: scratg an it the baily’s mind that she never even knew was there.
With a satisfied smile, Emily finally aowledges the rest of the system windows.
“It seems reag fourth circle will take a while. It took me over a year to increase my intelligence by twenty-one, and now I o increase it by another sixty-two! Not to mention it was getting harder to increase towards the end. This alone will probably take at least three or four years,” she mutters to herself, pletely motionless other than the rhythmic tapping of her fingers ohigh.
She brings her other hand to her mouth, bitihumb as one of her cores begins drawing on Teancer’s Breath to fulfil her goal of cultivating.
Leaving my cores w as sedary sciousnesses is useful. I didn’t even have to make a scious decision to meditate, they just decided what was best on their own. Now, finally, we have this Spellweave upgrade. It costs more to use, but being able to experiment with known matrices is new.
She sits back down withihering array, happy to keep using points on the high may. Shutting her eyes, she pulls on her skill, activating it and revealing a new sight. As opposed to before, where the skill guided mana to her eyes and cortex, instantly revealing the mystical weave around her, ihe mana flow from the skill pauses on just her cortex.
Even with her eyes closed, her sight opens up to reveal a bnk expanse of empty space.
So, this is the Spellweave now.
She follows her knowledge of the skill, pushing mana into her eyes and opening them, returning to the familiar twisting fractals of colour that she associates with the weave.
I still use the skill like before.
Having firmed this, she releases the mana in her eyes and shuts them agaiurning to the bnk expanse.
Let’s try burning hands.
The moment she thinks of the spell, the intimately familiar magic circle rises to the forefront of her mind. As she remembers the circle, a rge, glowing copy burns itself ience before her mind’s eye.
Woah. That’s new.
She admires the bzing struct, fog on one of the runes.
Element designation. Fire.
Uanding of the rune flows into her mind, f a closer, more intimate e with it, just like before. However, this time, the e is far more crete and immediate. Emily tell that when she drops the skill, this time the e and uanding will remain.
She quickly runs through all of the runes in the spell, trag the lihat ect them and the shapes that enpass them, rapidly improving her prehension. Once she feels like she has gained everything possible from the spell, a thought occurs to her.
It said experiment with, right? Surely, I do more than just learn about the spell.
Following this thought, she reaches out with her mind, pulling on one of the elemental designation ruhe spell reacts to her will, the rune floating free of the strud dissipating. Immediately, the warm e glow of the spell fades to a pale shimmer.
Emily watches with i, before pulling out the other fire-based rune and watg the struct take on the ral blue hue of mana. She pulls on the memory of a cutting ice ruhat she discovered in the weave before and wills it to form in pce of the missing fire ruhe spell shifts, taking on a pale icy glow aing off a sharp, frigid air.
As the new spell solidifies into pce, Emily feels a nagging in the back of her mind. She focuses on the feeling and pushes more mana into her cortex. The image of the spell spins to life, twisting in pce as it tries to activate. After a few seds, the delicate bance of the circle crumbles as several lines intersect, and the entire struct crumbles.
The experiment fails, and Emily opens her eyes, but she doesn’t show a hint of disappoi. Instead, her face breaks into a wide smile.
“This will make spell creation iing.”
