Chapter 11
The road to Vellhorn stretched before them, winding through increasingly tamed wilderness. What had been dense forest gradually gave way to clearings, then to fields, then to farmland that spoke of generations of cultivation.
Alsen spent most of the walking hours practicing his new breathing techniques.
The first one, which he had creatively named Breathing Exercise Five, completely ignoring its original name, worked remarkably well.
He could feel mana flowing through his body with unprecedented smoothness, his magical channels hopefully widening with each repetition.
The problem was that it exhausted him almost as quickly as casting actual spells, so he could only do that when they were close to setting camp.
The second technique, Breathing Exercise Four, was slower. Gentler. Like a stream wearing down a stone over centuries. He could practice it while walking without getting tired, but he wasn’t sure it did anything other than make him feel good about himself.
“You know,” Luna said on the second day, breaking off her humming to comment, “watching you do those exercises is like watching paint dry.”
With a frown, Alsen exhaled and then inhaled normally, glaring at her. “It’s a crucial practice for any mage.”
“Except that it eliminates you from talking, which makes it so much more entertaining to walk next to you. Not.” She gestured at the wilderness. “Not that you talked much before, but still.”
Well, obviously, he couldn’t do breathing exercises and talk at the same time. On second thought, he even glared at her whenever she started talking, as he didn’t want to interrupt the exercise in the first place.
“Do they even do anything?”
“I hope so.”
She rolled her eyes. He only hoped she understood the impossibility of measuring one’s limit without completely exhausting oneself.
The meditations brought similarly mixed results.
Meditation one, borrowed from what the book called the “School of the Burning Mind,” produced immediate results but left him with splitting headaches.
Meditation two, from some monastery records, did almost nothing, but it perfectly relaxed him for sleep.
And meditation three bored him to tears.
On the third day of travel, he ran into the issue of not remembering which breathing exercise had which number. That was unfortunate, so this naming convention also had its drawbacks. Seeing Luna jabbing the air as they walked, he also summoned his System menu.
The floating white text showed him his stats, and the skill tree.
He had a bunch of stat points to allocate.
If the drake encounter proved anything to him, it was that spell power was the stat to care about.
Dexterity wouldn’t raise the rain’s effect.
Ignoring damage reduction would have made the rain more effective against the drakes, but not for putting out the fire.
Spell power did both, so he put all stats into strength.
Then, he allocated three pathing nodes for Archmage and selected strength for all of their stat bonuses. Finally, he faced a choice.
He could either spec into an active spell, or a stat bonus. The stat bonus gave plus twenty to two stats, and plus ten to two more. That was a lot of stats.
The spell, on the other hand, was:
Type: Active spell
Name: Spell copy
Effect: Copy a spell you see to cast it yourself with your next action.
That sounded useful. But… was he going to care about other people’s spells?
The way he saw himself fighting in the future, he was going to have a spell for every situation and nuance. All of them were going to be written down in his spellbook, for the effect boost, and so why would he cast someone else’s spell?
Sure, countering a fireball with a copy of that fireball and making them crash in midair would look great.
But plus sixty to total stats was a lot of stats. He selected the stat node, and noticed it required level ten.
What?
He frowned, but indeed, looking over the tree, the first major node at every class had a required level ten, in spite of only having four prerequisite points, the starting point, and three pathing nodes.
Well, he was going to take it later. But that brought the question of what to do with the other points.
Sure, there were System skills, which he glossed over, as the level one skill, level scanner, had no appeal to him.
In time, he would care less and less about other people’s level, so why waste a skill point on that?
He wasn’t ever getting that point back.
Looking at what awaited further down the tree, it branched, had side paths, and overall, had options.
He closed the menu. He was going to hold skill points for now and see how much he was going to take from the archmage.
The open points also made it tempting to splice into another class for some extra core skill.
He needed to think about that more closely. “What build are you going for?”
“Wow, you remembered how to speak. Well, right now, I just allocated some pathing nodes, waiting for level ten to grab the major node at blade dancer and assassin. Both are evasion related. Then I’ll path up blade dancer to twenty, then drop a point into ranger, then get lvl10 skill of the duelist, and then I’ll go up on blade dancer to thirty.
I’ll see what the level fifty system skills are once they unlock and decide how to proceed from there. ”
He looked over the nodes. All evasion-related. “Aren’t you going to put anything in offense?”
“Nope. If there’s a magical sleeping bag, then there are magical weapons. Just need to get a really nice magical dagger, and then I won’t need any offensive stats beyond the dexterity I’m putting points into. I should be fine.”
Right. He could also fix his lower stats with magical items. That made the pure-strength build even better in the long term. He just needed to not die until then.
The landscape continued to change as they traveled. More farms appeared, their fields stretching toward the horizon in orderly rows. Rivers crisscrossed the land, feeding irrigation channels that spoke of sophisticated water management.
They also saw more signs of dragon rule.
Every major crossroads had a stone pillar marked with a draconic symbol.
Or at least so Alsen thought, because the symbols usually had a dragon head in them.
Often, they stood at places where the burnt ruins of a former temple could be seen.
At many of them, not even the grass grew, in spite of it being decades.
“There’s one thing I’ve been wondering,” Alsen said. “Dragons and their followers don’t seem to worship anything. Why do they care about what their servants worship, then?”
Luna kicked a small stone from the road.
“I know nothing about the history of this world, but from what I know from mine, dragons have some primal beef with gods. Since dragons got pretty much driven to extinction in my world, I guess they had a good reason to. Or they brought it on themselves, that’s one thing I didn’t quite figure out.
Like, since dragons had been attacking cities and people and everything that had symbols of gods, then naturally followers of gods hunted them and wiped them out. ”
“Your world seems to have quite a few extinctions.”
“You have no idea.” She chuckled. “There’s something about my world that makes everyone want to war with each other. If a minor race or city or nation got caught up in it, well then, tough damn luck, they got wiped out.”
Alsen shook his head. “Where does it even get enough people? I would expect enough people to die over time that everyone would have to stop fighting.”
“Oh, yeah, so there was this fun mage, who meddled with nature, and decided he would help the world. He cast some massive enhancement, which made everything grow and multiply much faster. More crops, more animals, more fruits, more kids, more of everything. I think he meant well, but with easily replenishable armies, everyone went on fighting.”
Alsen sank into thought. The irony of what she just said struck him with a fascinated sense of amusement. He imagined himself as the ruler of the city, seeing his population skyrocket, having enough to eat, but simply lacking other resources and land to expand to.
Earth’s population rose with the advancement of technology. Luna’s world didn’t have that, though, just more people who needed much more than just food.
So, that lord made an army from the excessive population and went on to try to claim more land for the people to live in. It didn’t even have to be malicious. Irrespective of the intentions, other city lords inadvertently raised armies to defend themselves.
They continued walking, following the river that would eventually lead them to Vellhorn.
The water ran clear and fast, swollen with a mountain runoff.
The waterfall came out of nowhere, as the river suddenly fell into an abyss.
Another river, from the abyss’s other side, fell in there too in a twin waterfall.
How did two rivers even run in opposite directions?
The river they followed came from the mountains they came down from. So, what about the other one?
They circled the abyss, and walked along the other river. The fact that the river next to him suddenly flowed in the other direction gave his brain an error for a while.
They spotted the city in the distance. Far across the river, man-made spires reflected sunlight. Between them and the city, however, lay the river, and then a swath of fields. They even spotted a village or two among the fields.
Alsen pulled out the map. It didn’t show the abyss into which two rivers fell.
They looked like one river on the map. In any case, they needed a bridge.
“There should be a bridge upstream, near some village that has a symbol of a horse drawn next to it.” As far as the map that omitted an entire abyss could be trusted.
Luna measured the river. “We could swim through that.”