Wintering
After Grandfather Deprim left, I set out as well.
My destination was the mountain peak!
Having learned the truth of mana and how to wield it from Grandfather Deprim, the urge to train welled up like a spring. Imagination! Will! Creation! And among those, what was stopping me from “imitating” something else and recreating it? Ahh—I needed to settle on a training ground, and fast.
I climbed the highest mountain in the area. Luck was with me: near the summit sat a small cave, and the ground around it was flat enough to make a perfect training site. And this time I would not be living inside the cave! From the start I had meant to savor the flavor of winter and live a little romantically. Being this close to the mountain meant there was almost nothing else to do, but six months would give me all the training time I needed.
I marked out the house site and began deciding how to use the space. The cave behind it felt cool deeper in, so packing it with ice for a food store would be perfect. Here for furs… here for tanning… here for training… here a spot to play the flute under the stars… a fence around this… a workshop over there… Once I had assigned every corner and the site was set, it was time to get to work!
The house would only need to last six months, but for the sake of romance I meant to build it pretty and large. I set a single log in front of me and tested a spell; the log rose smoothly into the air. Bob, bob, bob—
“Nice! It works!”
My master—Grandfather Deprim—had shown me something like telekinesis, and when I copied it the mana cost was absurd, but using it to haul materials would let me gather everything at ridiculous speed. Hmm… I should throw up a timber shed too. No telling what else I might decide to build.
Even while constructing the house, my crafting masteries ran so cleanly that a fairy-tale log cabin rose without a single gap or error.
“Heh… now that is a fine look…”
I still hadn’t made the chimney for the roof or any furniture for the inside, but the cold had deepened; winter was almost here, and I needed to stockpile food in bulk. With Hugin and Hati around, we would fill that food store to the brim, wouldn’t we?
“Hati! Hu…gin?”
Whoa… those two had gone incredibly fluffy and plump. No wonder they had been eating more than three times their usual amount lately—it must have been the instinct to prepare for winter. Fat stored up, coats changed, they were so fluffy they were almost painfully cute.
“I’m going hunting. Want to come?”
“Woof woof!!” “Beep!”
I took both of them and hunted the slopes hard. The other game animals had fattened up just like Hugin and Hati, so there was an almost ridiculous amount of meat. Another week of hunting slipped by, and the cave walls of the food store were packed solid with hanging meat. In the center I conjured massive blocks of ice with magic until the place felt like a walk-in freezer. To hold the cold I raised thick walls and set a door. After a little time I checked and found the meat frozen solid; with that, the stores would never spoil.
For the finishing work I built tables, chairs, a bed, shelves, and the rest, then spread a huge animal-fur carpet across the floor. When I finally looked at the completed interior of the house…
“This!! This is romance!!!”
Ahh—a romantic, fairy-tale hunter’s cabin… every bit of the back-breaking labor had been worth it. I checked that the fireplace inside worked properly, then—
“Hati! Come over here!”
“Woof woof!”
Hugin and Hati would live in the house with me. Hati was still smaller than the house-sized wolf I had first seen, yet he had grown so large that it almost became a problem. But I no longer needed to worry!
I activated the magic on the earring my master had given me; Hati’s body shrank steadily until he was the size of a large dog.
“Woof woof!”
He had been fascinated the first time it happened, and watching him bounce around now told me he was still delighted. The earring hanging from my own ear carried an enchantment called “miniaturization,” made by a friend of my master’s. It could be used on only one animal, left strength and power untouched while reducing size alone, and drained more than half my mana pool to activate.
“Still better than having to leave you in the forest when we go into a city, Hati.”
“Woof woof!”
Once the miniaturization was lifted he would return to his original size, so there was no worry about using and releasing it. Grandfather Deprim had handed me the earring when I mentioned I planned to go to a city and was fretting about Hati. Ngh! Thank you, Master!
Hugin seemed to remember how Hati used to be when he was small; he didn’t pick on the shrunken Hati at all and treated him gently. Blanc found the reduced Hati so adorable she spun circles around him. From their friends’ point of view it must have felt like Hati had grown younger.
I finished fencing a wide yard around the house, built an entrance, and completed the remaining workshops and storehouses. Winter preparations done, I climbed to the true summit and looked up at the sky…
Snow was falling.
After a few days resting my exhausted body from building the house and outbuildings, I stepped out onto the broad clearing.
What was I going to do now? Right—training!
From this moment I would put into practice the mana circulation method my master had taught me. For humans, mana had originally been created as a substitute for life force, so I would use it to enhance my physical abilities. I willed mana to circulate through my body and kept it moving, yet the will kept breaking. It couldn’t be helped; a person simply cannot hold the same thought forever. Right now I could sustain it for about three minutes, but continued practice would stretch that time until, eventually, I might circulate mana through my body unconsciously.
Mana coiled around every muscle fiber, power surging. How much amplification was that? I drove a fist toward the sky.
BOOM!!!
Trees around me shook, the wind tore, and the force racing forward punched a hole straight through the clouds. That was it. The foreign god and demon who had once committed divine slaughter and threatened to annihilate the world had reclaimed his original power. Temporary though it was…
The mana efficiency was outrageous; recovery outpaced expenditure so completely that there was effectively no cost. Damn it! Just as my master had said, my old magic had been garbage—horribly inefficient trash. Sigh… my physical stats had already climbed to around forty, so I no longer needed to worry about my body.
Next I created a barrier to protect that body. When I had tested myself earlier, scraping my arm with a Magic Knife had not even left a mark. Still, the world was full of unknowns. Taking the protective aura from the martial-arts novels as a reference, I wrapped mana around the outside of my body, yet the effect was… underwhelming. It might stop a flung stone without cracking, but that was the height of mediocrity. Pouring in a massive amount of mana made it dramatically better, yet if I was going to do that I might as well just pick up a shield and reinforce it.
Wait… a shield?!
I could generate a shield with physical ice magic and plant it toward the enemy! Strength didn’t matter—I would simply make it ridiculously thick. The result was a complete success. As for visibility through the ice shield, I remembered how Grandfather Deprim had dropped lightning into a lake without killing a single fish: the product of will and imagination. I wanted ice that did not refract, ice as clear as a window, and that was exactly what formed. Crafting it still took time, but with practice I would be able to call it up instantly.
The transparent ice floated and orbited me; when I wrapped it around my body my movements remained unrestricted. Its hardness was fucking ridiculous. I finally understood why you need a drill to punch through the ice of a frozen lake. Efficiency was excellent as well—once I grew used to it the duration became extremely long, and the cost was only that of two intermediate spells. With the transparent ice as the first line of defense and the protective aura as the second, any enemy facing me would feel as though some formless thing had simply stopped their attacks. I could also enclose a foe in the thick transparent ice to form a barrier, or make the ice vanish in an instant; the applications were endless. I named this transparent ice simply Ice Shield.
Next came swordsmanship!
Why swordsmanship, you ask? Think back to the protective aura. Wrapping mana around the body had worked. Then why not the sword as well? The kinds of sword arts and lightness skills that appear in wuxia novels—petals scattering from the blade, fire coiling around it, lightning raging, death beams firing. Every step crackling with lightning, water jetting out… just imagining it was insanely cool. Even in games a plain sword swing feels bland; slap those effects on and suddenly it is worth watching. I trained precisely to gain those visual effects when I swung a sword, yet after training I realized something.
“This is!!! Not wuxia!!!”
Absolute garbage!!!!
Picture a gathering of old martial-arts geezers talking. All you hear is how the sword art goes, how the lightness skill works, formless power whooshing out—pure nonsense. Anyone who is not one of those geezers can think the obvious: “Does it really need those flashy effects? Wouldn’t just reinforcing the sword or the body be more efficient?” The moment you say that out loud to the geezers—
“Gah!!!!!!!”
—they erupt in a massive shout and start thrashing. Then comes an endless stream of excuses: this case, that case, heart methods, and so on. Why does that happen? Because the observation is correct. Let’s apply a reality patch. Effects blooming from a sword are romantic and magnificent, yet they are pure waste of power. Because of the heart method, you say? Then maybe that heart method was poorly designed from the start. Energy is supposed to keep circulating inside the body; if its form is leaking outward, that means there is a hole somewhere and power is escaping. And so this is what happens…
After only a few sword techniques my mana bottomed out. Unable to accept it, I kept refining, fixing, and remaking them until I had produced whole styles—Plum Blossom Sword Art, Taiji Brilliant Sword, Azure Sky Martial Sword Art, and more. Dog… dogshit… All of them worked, but they were weak. Finally came the pinnacle of inefficiency… If my master, Grandfather Deprim, ever saw these sword arts he would pull the same complicated expression he had worn when I showed him advanced magic, only far worse—“Uh… that… whew… ahem… ow…”—and try to stop me. Damn it! Must romance remain only romance!! No… I had already made them all… I had spent three whole months… and simply stacking physical reinforcement or sword aura was stronger and more efficient… I despaired at romance receiving a reality patch.
Still, creating those wuxia-style sword arts had given me one thing.
Whoooosh!!
Bands of wind coiled around my body and wooden sword; I swung. Shhhk-shhk-shhk-shhk!! Wind blades tore across the earth as they raced forward—
BOOM!!!
—and I could fire sword aura made of wind. Damn it!!! Why does this one work!!! My petals!!! My lightning!!! Setting the grief aside, I had modeled the technique on the way Hugin wrapped wind around his body, simply stacking the basic Wind spell and binding it to myself and the blade. I tried wrapping other elements as well… the results were catastrophic. Ice cracked and left my hands and feet awkward—out. Flame looked cool but had no physical force—out. Water soaked my clothes and slowed the sword—out. Earth kept dust in my eyes and mouth—out. Light blinded me and made my eyes ache—out. Lightning and darkness, like flame, lacked physical force—out. I could overcome those flaws with will and mana, but then I might as well just reinforce the sword and body. Wind was simply the best. No discomfort on sword or body, physical force when concentrated, easy to control—just wrap the wind. As a basic spell the mana cost was practically nothing, and for more power I only needed to stack more wind bands. How useful was that? When I needed to stack them quickly I could even stomp a mass of wind hard with a Wind Stomp, generating a fierce blast in an instant and blocking an opponent’s approach at the same time. At least now I could fight like those wind-wreathed knights from hardcore games, or use it the way certain weapons’ special abilities work when catching snakes.
Finally… magic. I used it whenever I had a spare moment. Applications had improved enough that simply placing a hand on the ground let me form stone weapons at high speed and with excellent efficiency. Aside from telekinesis and Ice Shield there was nothing urgent left to invent… maybe I should try invisibility or clairvoyance?
A short while later the sun sank and the stars blazed brilliantly. Having been taught magic, the strange young man who insisted on training with a sword continued his wintering.
In a winter forest a certain boy was fleeing something.
“Huff… huff… huff…”