Julia spent the rest of her birthday switching between magic practice and playing around with her bracelet. She had begun storing most of her things in it—even things that she used every day. She could take them out easily at will, so there wasn’t really a reason not to.

  Why go looking for something when she could just pull it out from the subspace?

  Gravity Magic was difficult for her. It both was and wasn’t difficult conceptually. On one hand, throwing something up and preventing it from falling back down was a simple visualization. On the other, how she could prevent it from coming back down completely eluded her.

  Braden had only briefly explained that gravity was keeping everything anchored to the ground. He said that anything that went up had to come back down unless it had some kind of power source constantly keeping it up. Just like how if he stopped supplying mana to the apple hovering above his hand, it would immediately fall back down.

  However, he didn’t explain much beyond that. He said it was a complicated subject that she wasn’t quite ready for, but he wanted her to begin thinking about it so that she was receptive to the lesson eventually. Julia wasn’t sure why he would just mention something amazing like this and then not explain further. Was he just teasing her!?

  This is not to say that she couldn’t make it work. She couldn’t make the apple float, but she could get a coin to float above her palm. Briefly. The mana cost was exorbitant just for a few seconds of making the tiny coin float. Braden said it was because she didn’t understand how to make it happen—thus, she was almost entirely relying on the World to figure out how, and she was just supplying the mana.

  The day passed quickly for her, and suddenly it was dinner time. Braden pulled some kind of meat out of what she now realized was a storage bag—a bag that had a storage enchantment. Where he was keeping the bag, and why he hadn’t ever used or even mentioned it before, she wasn’t sure.

  He said the meat came from the flank of a Reckless Charger, which was apparently some kind of large bull monster native to the plains west of Striton. It was hunted regularly by adventurers both because its meat was highly desired by restaurants around the city and to keep the population controlled.

  They become enraged very easily, which means they can pose a threat to travelers and villages if the population isn’t kept thin and away from roads and population centers.

  The meat was delicious. It wasn’t gamey like one might expect from a wild animal, and it had just the right fat-to-meat ratio to make it almost melt in your mouth. Braden only lightly seasoned it with salt and garlic, and it was still one of the best meals she’d ever had. He said the salt came from the sea, too. The sea! She’d love to see that some day.

  Early the next morning, Braden headed off towards the city. Julia walked with him to the gate as the sun began to peek over the horizon. She was going out to the woods to do her weapon training, so they walked all the way to the edge of the woods before splitting off.

  Julia walked a ways into the woods with Trixy draped across her neck like a scarf. She was still sleeping, which always surprised Braden. He was sure ferrets were ‘crepuscular,’ which meant they were more active at dawn and dusk. Yet, since she was first summoned, Trixy had been a late riser.

  Julia did her usual routine. It wasn’t too different from what her routine had been consistently throughout her life. The main difference was that Julia had consolidated the dedicated Strength and Dexterity training times into one larger training session for sword work.

  It tended to work both stats well enough, and Julia was still stuck at the Strength value Braden had warned she’d likely stay at until puberty, so there was no real point focusing on Strength too much.

  After the weapon training came her usual magic practice. She was still trying to make floating things easier. It wasn’t working.

  She tried for a couple hours with no progress before switching to meditation. It was something she enjoyed. She had learned over the years that there are different types of meditation.

  Braden had warned her before he taught her anything to stop immediately if she started experiencing things like having regular, negative thoughts or otherwise-unusual thoughts/feelings after beginning meditation and to talk to him if she did.

  Apparently, there were possible negative effects from meditation, but like Braden liked to say, “If there are no risks, it doesn’t work.”

  The meditation she was doing right now wasn’t about introspection or being present or spiritual or anything. It was about absorbing mana from the environment. A person’s internal mana is replenished/absorbed through the food they eat, just like pretty much anything the body uses as fuel.

  However, there are ways to absorb mana directly. Just as you can force your own mana outside of your body, you can pull outside mana into it. There are risks to this, though. Braden had warned her and made her promise not to attempt it unless he was there to supervise her the first several times. Since she was well-practiced at it, he had given her the go-ahead to practice on her own.

  The first dangerous aspect was that one had to purge the will—the Will of the World—from the external mana before incorporating it into one’s own mana store. Braden had already explained the dangers of mana with different wills clashing within the body when he explained the basic healing technique to her, so she was well-aware of the danger.

  The key was in the visualization. Her process was to pull the mana through a ‘will filter’ as it entered her body. Once it came out the other side, it would be fully saturated with a will and intent she assigned it. In her case, she told it to ‘merge’ with the rest of her mana.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  Braden had pitched this visualization to her by having her hold a rag between her two hands as he poured a small cup of dirty water on top of it. The water that made it through the rag was clear. He called this process filtering—although, he did warn that passing dirty water through one thin rag doesn’t make it safe to drink. Still, the demonstration was helpful.

  The other aspect that made absorbing external mana difficult was the aspect alignment. Air mana was very different from the un-aspected, neutral mana that the digestive system processed food into.

  The solution to this issue was to have System-recognized compatibility with an aspect. Of course, compatibility was not an inborn quality. It just means that the System had recognized one’s familiarity with that aspect of mana enough to list it in one’s Status. Once achieved, the System handles a certain amount of the conversion from neutral to aspected mana. The body gradually becomes used to the aspects as they are used.

  After all, building spells internally is much easier than projecting them outwardly, so this is one of the first things an aspiring mage learns. Thus, if one has used Air Magic before, their body is likely already very familiar with that aspect of mana.

  Still, it had to be a measured process. Julia kept the pace of absorption to a steady stream. If she absorbed too quickly, the incoming mana would outpace her core’s rate of conversion from air to neutral. That could be dangerous. Just as mana clashing within one’s body was dangerous with the potential to be deadly, so too would aspected mana rampaging around in one’s core.

  Though Julia was quite adept at absorbing mana at this point, she was bottle-necked by her core’s conversion rate. It wasn’t slow by any means. She could drain her entire core practicing spells and refill it to full through meditation in just over an hour. Still, it would improve once she hit her first milestone: Level 25.

  Each Level milestone brought with it qualitative changes to one’s body. The System improved the body in preparation for planting a new, more advanced Class in it. One of these changes was a higher quality mana core. This would improve all aspects of mana manipulation. From the body’s ability to move mana throughout it to its fine control to its conversion rate, all were improved. And improvements happened at each milestone.

  It was no surprise that people who made it to Grandmaster or higher frequently lived for hundreds of years. There was great disparity in how one looked (aesthetically) through those years, but all lived exceptionally long lives.

  Warriors often looked younger and remained spry in their old age simply due to (typically) higher investment in Constitution.

  Casters tended to focus less on the body Attributes and—as a result—showed their age more. This led to a stereotypical ‘Old Wizard’ look among older casters, despite there being a great variety of caster Classes that don’t have ‘Wizard’ in the name.

  With her mana refilled, Julia called Trixy over from where she had been chasing squirrels around and headed home. Trixy hadn’t attacked since Julia gave the order forbidding it, but she still liked to play with some of the animals in the woods.

  As they cleared the treeline, Julia noted that she had ended up farther east than she had expected. They weren’t too far from the western gate, but she was infrequently this far from it in her daily routine.

  They walked by a few farms that existed between the palisade and the treeline. These farms were stepped against the knoll to provide a level surface for both the crops and animals. Julia thought it created a neat effect of making the roads connecting the farms look as though carved through the knoll itself. She knew it was actually the opposite, though. Dirt from the ditch in front of the palisade was piled here to create the stepped effect.

  She began to hear shouting. It didn’t sound pained or angry, but Julia still wasn’t interested in any confrontations—not when they were so close to leaving permanently. She gave the signal she and Trixy had worked on: two winks of her left eye in quick succession to mean, “Make us both invisible—quickly and quietly,” or thereabouts.

  Now-invisible, they walked over to where she heard the commotion to discover a very familiar group of teenagers. She couldn’t remember every single face from the incident, but she recognized many of the kids from the group that had bullied Trixy. The Sherwood boy was there and—like last time—appeared to be leading the group.

  The kids were…beating on two chicken corpses. They were definitely dead, no question about it. Julia felt sickened, but the feeling was muted by her confusion. This was absolutely brutal. The chickens had a foot missing here, an eye was lying over there, and feathers and blood covered the ground.

  These kids absolutely brutalized these poor birds, and they were still not satisfied, judging by how they took turns stomping on what remained. They had blood on their hands, on their clothes, and some even had it on their faces, but they were completely unbothered by it.

  Julia knew these kids to be capable of cruelty, she’d seen it first-hand, but this was…beyond what she could have imagined. Maybe it was that distinct sensation of wrongness that made her think of her new Skill, and she activated Truesight.

  What she expected to see were green silhouettes, just like when she looked down at herself. She did see them, but there was something else, too. A sort of…wispy quality to their outlines, like they weren’t all there. Or, maybe that their exact positions weren’t completely clear? It seemed like they were made of a very solid fog that shifted this way and that slightly every second.

  Disturbed and unsure of what she was seeing, she made a mental note about the strangeness of their auras and started towards home at a brisk jog. She didn’t want to linger there any longer than she had to. Not to mention Trixy could only keep them both out of sight for a few minutes at a time. Trixy could make herself invisible for almost an hour, but making her and an entire other human invisible really taxed her.

  As they ran through the gate—visible now so that the guard who saw them leave this morning would know they returned—Julia hadn’t deactivated her Truesight. She wasn’t thinking about it after seeing the horrible, strange situation outside the gate.

  The streets were busy, being well-into the afternoon. She saw what she expected. Green outlines of people hustling here and there. What she wasn’t expecting was how many of those wispy, not-quite-there outlines were also present. It was perhaps one out of every seven people she saw that had those features.

  There was a commonality among them, too. The wispy people were undoubtedly more aggressive than the normal-looking people. She saw one bump into another person and immediately shout at them. Another was sitting on a porch giving an absolutely frigid look to anyone walking by that was unfortunate enough to meet his eyes.

  Julia was truly disturbed, now. She didn’t know what this was or what it meant, but something was not right. She walked home as fast as she could without drawing attention to herself. If normal townspeople were provoking shouting and glares, she did not want to know how one of those…others would react to her.

  Closing the door behind her, she locked all the locks, closed all the blinds, and even closed and locked all the shutters. Braden would be back in a week—two, at the latest. She just had to lie low, and not draw any attention until then. He’d know what to do.