They’d found a cave in the mountain range. It started out as a tight and narrow channel, but it opened up into a large, dark space. They’d almost been afraid to go any deeper into the darkness, but Yaraka had recovered enough to cast the light spell she’d used back when they’d been mining for the guild.

The sound of rushing water drew them deeper down the cave, and eventually they found an underground stream.

That source of water, which in Antia would have been hardly worth taking note of, was enough for them to decide to stay in this spot.

On the third day, while they were still scrambling to build beds and hunt game, Yorius and Nefa found them.

The two of them had lost their chest of ingots, but they had managed to follow subtle tracks that Dia had intentionally left for them.

With eight of them, the work went faster. The far side of the mountain had some trees growing on it—trees which grew along the path of the underground stream—which gave them access to wood.

The mountains gave them copper, and Elrick and Jocha worked long, grueling hours to dig a forge, and to mine enough ore to make proper pickaxes. They mined with the blunt ends of their swords, chipping pathetically away at mountain, sometimes only getting a few tiny, finger-tip sized chunks at a time, but once they had enough bronze and wood to make a pickaxe or two, things moved faster.

The first few pickaxes had to be forged with fire from Yaraka. She used a basic spell she’d memorized to convert raw copper ore to flame, which was enough for Elrick and Jocha to use to melt down the ore.

Once they could melt the ore, the next step was to make some ingot molds. They used a slippery bronze ingot to make a mold with—they had plenty of sand—and cast a few molds out of bronze. It was possible to use a mold made out of bronze to cast bronze ingots, you just had to remember to heat the molds up first, which gave them a nice layer of soot, which prevented the freshly poured ingot from fusing to the mold.

While the two former miners worked on the forge, Dia and Espa hunted. They killed small little animals that looked to Elrick like foxes and jackals, but Dia and Espa called the red little fox things “kubex” and the jackals were “sand hounds.”

Elrick didn’t like the taste of either of them, but meat was meat, and he needed as much as he could get after long days mining and smithing.

Occasionally Elrick would cook, which had brought his Cooking skill up to 59.2. He’d stopped one day after dinner and really stopped to think about his skills and where he was going. He had always been a min/maxer, and this world feeling so much like real life had made him start to lose sight of the fact that he still needed to min/max.

His skills were as follows:

Coppersmithing: 79.2

Swordsmanship: 74.7

Anatomy: 63.8

Stealth: 53.7

Red Magic: 50.1

Mining: 86.6

Stealth: 52.6

Shields 38.7

Bartering: 53.9

Monster Taming: 29.2

Cooking: 57.3

When he’d initially created his character, there had been skills he’d chosen out of immediate need to survive in the forest with next to nothing. Cooking had been critical when he’d first started, but now it was a mere convenience. With the way skills gained, he figured that performing utilitarian cooking like he was—just charring some meat over a fire—would probably not push him anywhere past 70 Cooking.

What would 70 Cooking do for him when it came to killing Hunter? Nothing. It would be the first skill on the chopping block.

Then there were more questionable skills, like Bartering. This was another skill he’d prioritized earlier, correctly foreseeing that he’d need to buy things and negotiate. Maybe a higher skill in Bartering would have kept him from doing what Taalia asked him to, which lead to him getting killed in the first place?

Still, now that Elrick was grouping up with other people, the optimal move would be to just have someone good at Bartering do his deals for him. He made a note to himself to try to force the group into Bartering situations in the future, and to check everyone’s skill to see who was best at it.

Monster Taming was a tough one. It had done so much for him early on, but that had been through nearly sheer dumb luck. There were no monsters around their cave now, and he couldn’t train or use the skill even if he wanted to. Also, since he was now with a group, having monsters to bolster his numbers wasn’t as important as it had been.

His Shields skill was going up because he was sparring with Jocha almost every night. When Jocha didn’t feel like it, Durka sparred with him. He hadn’t initially chosen shields as a skill, but with the frequency that his enemies had been equipped with spears, Elrick figured he needed to learn to use one. Shields might not end up in his final and ultimate “build,” but he’d hold onto it for now.

Stealth had proved extremely useful, and Elrick leaned toward keeping it, but he had found it very difficult to increase his skill in Stealth. He’d ask the archers if he could go hunting with them sometime, if only to increase his skill.

He didn’t know if there was a skill cap or not. There might be some soft or hard cap on his ability to learn new skills after he’d hit a certain threshold. At that point, he’d likely have to start giving up certain skills to focus in on what he wanted to actually be good at. He would cut Bartering, Monster Taming, and Cooking if he had to. He’d done the math, and his current total of skill points was 593.5. What if the cap was just 600? He needed to at least start thinking in these terms to optimize how he increased his skills, and how his skills fit and worked together.

The only other skill he was certain that he needed but didn’t yet have was Meditation. From the tutorial and talking to Yaraka, he knew it was essential. He wasn’t sure why he hadn’t chosen it as a starting skill. Maybe it was relatively easy to learn? He didn’t need to go out and do anything or take any risks, just sit there and focus.

The fur from the kubex and sand hounds was used to make clothing and bedding, and Elise used their teeth to make potions.

Elrick helped with the carcasses, which further honed his Anatomy skill. Elise had a lot of very specific requests for him when it came to getting certain parts out of each animal. Some of her potions used very obscure ingredients. Apparently, one of the most powerful refresh potions she could make required the testicles of ten sand hounds. He didn’t ask if that meant ten balls total, or ten pairs of balls, which would be twenty total. He just made a note to himself to never drink that specific potion.

It wasn’t pretty business cutting the balls off the dead jackal things, but his Anatomy gains made it worth it. His increased Anatomy skill had already given new insights into finding weaknesses in an opponent while he sparred with Jocha.

They had just about as much food, shelter, and fresh water as they could ever want, and the smithing operations were starting to chug along too.

The biggest breakthrough for Elrick though was getting to train with Yaraka.

He hadn’t wanted to press her after she’d agreed to train him. That meant that it took several nights before the first time she approached him to train.

They used the cave only for sleeping. Even though the cave was very large, they kept all their beds close to each other for ease of defense. That meant that when you went into the cave, you were going to be quiet and go to sleep. If you didn’t want to sleep early, you stayed outside at the fire.

That’s when Yaraka had approached him, when he was sitting at the fire. Yorius and Nefa were on night watch, but they were patrolling further out from the cave entrance. Elrick was alone in front of the fire when Yaraka sat down next to him, the violet Mage’s spellbook on her lap.

“Do you really already know something?” she asked.

He couldn’t tell her that he’d “allocated 50 points into Red Magic” when he’d created his character. Magic was guarded carefully outside of the guilds, and anyone who trained too much Red Magic on their own risked being taken as property of the Red Mage’s Guild. It was unlikely that someone like Elrick would ever know anything. He wasn’t even sure how people outside the guild ever learned a thing, as he’d been trying to increase his Red Magic since he’d “spawned,” and no one had ever done anything beyond telling him not to do it.

“I’m not going to try to convince you,” he said, “but just choose the easiest red spell in that book, and try to teach me it. If I can’t do it after three nights, we can give up on teaching me. We’ll get more supplies later, and I can start from nothing like the others.”

Yaraka just nodded as he spoke, and she opened the book to a page full of inscriptions that he could somewhat read—if he focused hard on them.

She stood up and placed the book on his lap. “This is a very basic spell. It’s in every Red Mage’s spell book, and though it’s not the easiest one, it’s the most important.”

“Which one?”

“The one that starts the chain reaction that turns metal or stone into fire.”

She put her finger on the page and ran it gently around the inscriptions. “The problem here is, this mage has added a lot to it. It’s harder to read than normal. I can easily see the core of this spell, but I don’t know if you can.”

Elrick focused. Certain glyphs were much easier to read. The purpose of some were crystal clear to him, but others were indecipherable. “I think I see what you mean.”

“I can’t just cross out the extra glyphs, or you’ll lose the whole shape of the spell. Study this, if you’ve learned anything before, you know what it means to study a spell. You’ll know soon enough if you are able to cast this.”

Elrick nodded, but Yaraka fidgeted uneasily.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“We were taught that only the guild can teach Red Magic. I’m not properly equipped to teach you. You know about the drawback of Red Magic, right? The reason we meditate? Have you felt it yourself?”

He had heard about the drawbacks of each color of magic, but it was usually as hearsay from someone who didn’t really know what they were talking about. Master Owen had told Elrick that Red Mages exploded if they cast too many spells at once. Elrick knew only from the tutorial what she was talking about, and he decided to pretend he’d never experienced that. It didn’t want to act ignorant just to cover himself, but mostly because he wanted Yaraka to give as much detail and explanation as he could get her to.

“I’ve never felt it,” Elrick said, “and I don’t know if I actually understand.”

“When you cast Red Magic,” she said, “more powerful spells, not parlor tricks, you start to feel something from deep under the world. I don’t think we’d ever be able to dig deep enough to know for certain what is so deep under our world, but every Red Mage already knows without ever digging.”

“Is it fire?” Elrick asked, remembering all the boring lessons from his Geology coach in high school about the layers of the Earth. And the core.

“So you have felt it?” Yaraka whispered, “then maybe you really will be strong enough to cast this.”

Shit. He should have played dumb about that.

“What does it feel like to you?” he asked, knowing he couldn’t walk back the knowledge he’d just revealed anymore.

“I call them the fires of creation,” she whispered. “The stronger the magic I use, or the longer I use it, I feel more and more connected to those fires, like I’m part of whatever is under our world. If I’m not careful, I reach a point where I don’t want to let go of that connection. The longer I delay cutting off from it, the harder it gets to let go. If I were to completely give in and never let go, I’d draw more and more power until it would happen to me.”

He waited for her to specify, but she didn’t. “It?”

“What they say happens to you,” she said, “it’s true. I think you become part of the fires, and it just looks like you explode. But you melt into the soil of Antium, and no trace of your body is ever left behind. I think all those red mages that has happened to have merged with the fires of creation.”

“So,” Elrick whispered, “the lesson is to not do that.”

“Meditate with me,” she said, “you’ll need to be able to meditate in mid-combat, like you saw me do back in the golem caves. If you can’t meditate, you’ll only be good for one or two spells.

Elrick had never meditated outside the tutorial, but Yaraka walked him through it.

He focused on the fire, and on his breathing, and he let her voice guide him. He saw his meditation gains start to skyrocket, like any new skill did when he first attempted it. He knew the gains like this wouldn’t last, but he relished them while they still came fast.

After he had hit 18 points in Meditation, which took a few hours, the gains started to stall out. Yaraka tried to explain things in a different way as he struggled.

“You’re not trying to clear your mind,” she said, “just remove the background noise. You are focusing on your own thoughts. You sit there passively, listening rather than trying to wipe everything away. When you listen, you’ll realize that most of the thoughts in your head have no real business even being there. Things will quiet naturally as you listen.”

He tried what she said, and it happened. He gained another point, raising to 19 Meditation. He was able to hold that “passive listening” place for twenty or thirty seconds at a time before it collapsed.

“Now imagine trying to do this as an archer loads a crossbow and aims it at you,” Yaraka said, standing up and walking away. Elrick kept trying to meditate for long after she’d left, but then he remembered the spell on his lap.

He looked down at it, and with his mind extra clear, the core of the spell jumped out at him. He could see it clear as day.

Your Skill in Red Magic has increased by 1.0. It is now 52.0.

He needed an ingot.

He got up and ran toward where they had built the pit that served as a forge. The regular bronze ingots were buried in a wooden chest. They didn’t want to have to keep all their supplies inside, so they buried a lot of things to keep them safe.

He pulled out one of the regular copper ingots and took it back to the fire.

He focused on the ingot, and then on the spell. As he read the spell, understanding sparked along different glyphs. He started to see the “shape” of the spell as Yaraka had called it, and as the shape became more and more clear—even parts written entirely in more advanced elements of the spell—the nature of the ingot became clearer to him as well.

He could feel the faintest hint of a connection, from the ingot to the fire inside the world. He knew it wasn’t still connected right now, but this perception he had for the fire under the world existed somewhat outside of time, kind of like he had when he was a ghost. The faint connection this ingot had to the deeper fires was faint because it was so long ago, but he still felt it.

He read more of the spell, and then he felt his own connection to those fires light up. It wasn’t a distant or vague thing like the connection the ingot had, he was connected for real, right now. His eyes widened as full understanding of the spell washed over him.

Your Skill in Red Magic has increased by 1.0. It is now 53.0.

He focused on the far corner of the ingot, wanting to pull off the tiniest sliver of it and give it back to the fires of creation.

Just as he willed that sliver off the ingot, half of the ingot fell off as if it had been melted. He barely moved fast enough to dodge the molten metal—it had come within inches of the book on his lap before he leapt out of the way, book tight in hand.

The molten bronze hit the sand and pooled, but it began hardening before it could fully melt down, and it settled as what looked like a molten disc in the sand before the fire, a few fractions of an inch thick.

Elrick looked at the remaining half of the ingot in his hand. He’d expected the side of the unmelted half to be molten red or orange, but it was completely cool to the touch.

“Shit,” he whispered, “I could have killed myself.”