Ok, this was odd. Avery had been a disembodied soul before, but last time she had intended to be one.

Avery could still sense things as though the spell was still active, in that she could tell there was nothing alive in the tunnel. Her body, left only a few meters away from the blanket keeping the light of the situation away from her gem, was completely undetectable to her, and she couldn't think of how any of the few low powered spells she had memorized would be able to do anything about her situation. A few detection spells, the power to cause fear in the weak, a bolt of negative energy to weaken monsters, and how to make a rope tie itself. The last one was especially useless, since she didn't even have any rope, though if she had hands she could cut the blanket into strips, which would make it ropelike enough for the spell to work on it. It wasn't like she tried to memorize useful spells, these were just the ones she could practice daily to familiarize herself with the basics of magic. Making a rope do what she wanted it to was a useful training exercise for learning how to get skeletons to do household chores on their own without needing constant focus. Manipulating the energies involved with the understanding was an essential part of learning how to prepare for higher powered necromantic spells. Detect life was going to be her coup d'etat into the wizard tower, and, well, identify was actually useful. She wasn't here to defend her spell choices to absolutely nothing in an effort to keep from freaking out about becoming another statistic about necromancers who play with forces beyond their control and disappear forever, to be forgotten by the world. No, she was her to figure out how to make this spell useful.

There was only one thing she could sense here, and considering the predicament Avery found herself in now, it seemed her initial estimate of it being a trap of some sort was correct. Preparing herself for the worst, she focused on the text at the corner of her mind, bringing it to the forefront of her consciousness.

Tutorial 2

Great! Now that you've gotten the hang of expanding your territory, you can start managing your resources. Think 'Status' to bring up your current mana statistics, and bring your regeneration rate up to at least 1 to proceed to the next step.

Mana Regeneration: -163 / 1

'Oh,' Avery thought, 'Oh no.'

o o o o o o o o o o o o o o

Far from the mesas, in a moderately sized town surrounded by farmland, the Mage of Magic was stealing a meal. The kobold had acquired a chicken on its way in, through the completely legitimate method of sneaking into a coop and knocking one out. An ordinary kobold would be satisfied with just that, killing the animal to cook and eat, but this was no ordinary kobold. It had in mind a daring heist, one where it would be able to eat for days through the clever application of a single living chicken.

Being incredible at everything, the Mage of Magic had discovered a method of swapping the physical location of two not-resisting living creatures through the magic of Magic. Combined with the common, but still incredibly powerful ability to move things magically from a distance with the spell referred to as 'Mage Hand', a name firmly approved of by the kobold, the Mage of Magic could sneak the chicken magically into a food storage area, and then, with magic, sneak itself in.

Small as they were, kobolds tended to be far better at sneaking around than the larger species. Generally, this was only because their lower mass made less noise and was harder to spot when one wasn't looking for them. Unlike lizards specializing in stealth, like chameleons, a kobold had no natural advantages relating to hiding, sneaking, or otherwise deflecting attention from themselves. They similarly did not have any advantages over any creature in terms of aggression, natural weaponry, or magical power beyond that of any learning species. Kobolds could hunt, but only like a less effective human. They could scavenge, but only like a less effective goblin. Most civilized creatures would stamp out incursions of kobolds, because their modus operandi was to steal everything they could, scavenge what they couldn't, and hunt when the opportunity arises. Additionally, as their survival strategy involved mass production of rapidly growing young, closer to that of fish or scorpions than that of mammals that raise a small number of offspring and nurture them over a long period of time, kobolds have no qualms about scavenging their meat from sapient creatures that are smaller than they are. After a human is about three years old, the kobold would generally recognize that it’s a creature they would have trouble picking off, and would be missed by the tribe, but their outlook is that the smallest weakest ones haven’t taken up enough resources to grow larger, so they must be the ones that are safe to hunt.

Hence, kobolds being hunted constantly by adventurers.

The Mage of Magic was therefore unsurprisingly apprehensive about attempting to interact with the residents of this local before building up their might to even more magnificent levels. Potentially, they could bridge the gap between species easily enough by using the magic of money, but with their small disagreement between themself and their tribe, the Mage had been unable to bring any sort of valuables along with themself to this town. That was unfortunate, as the kobolds had over time mined multiple caves of their shiny materials, which the Mage of Magic was quite certain the larger species valued almost as highly as the kobold leaders. It was rare that one would see an old kobold, as many would be hunted before their first year was over, but the leaders who managed to get cushy positions managing the deployment of the disposable younglings could live long enough to awaken the draconic power passed down from generations of becoming smaller, weaker, descendants of true dragons. Many of the kobold societies dig deep, crafting cave structures across the land and pulling rare metals from the earth at the command of their dragon-kin elders. Sometimes, they would evolve to become dungeons, with all that entailed.

The Mage of Magic's former tribe had not been nomadic for longer than the Mage had been alive, though that wasn't saying much by human standards. They had generally stayed in one location for a few years, building up traps and fortifications at the base of their current mine, only to leave when their rates of acquisition for precious metals and gem began to drop off. Less civilized monsters would move in, and the kobold leadership would locate a new source of shiny objects to satisfy their collective greed.

The Mage of Magic didn't draw power from the kobold heritage of dragons though. It watched as others did magic, and figured out what they were doing that actually had an effect. Clerics healed wounds, so the Mage figured out how to do that. Draconic sorcerer kobolds commanded the world to do their bidding, and the Mage watched the patterns form in man's until it could do those things on its own. Not that those hierarchs could understand the Mage of Magic's accomplishments, with how they revered dragons as the epitome of higher existence, and those kobolds who grow into their draconic might bring that much closer to divinity. Against that kind of ingrained power structure intertwined with beliefs and the assurance that one who lived long enough would ascend, a kobold who didn't do anything related to it growing as or more powerful than the draconic was nothing but a mistake to be thrown under a horse and buried before any of the others could get any ideas.

And that lead to this, the Mage of Magic floating an unconscious chicken into the ice room of a chicken vendor's establishment through a vent to exchange places with it and loot the place for ill-gotten edibles. The trick was to float the chicken when no one was paying attention. After that, an unconscious target is an unresisting target, and so the Mage was free to gorge themself, steal everything that wasn’t nailed down, and escape through simple application of unlocking the door from the inside. No one wants to be trapped inside a freezer, so basic safety practices were to make it so it was impossible to be locked in from the outside. The door could still be frozen shut, or sealed with external magic, but that would require someone to put actual effort into not maintaining the space, or to specifically want to lock a person in there enough to use magic.

Thus, the Mage of Magic was able to calmly exit the chicken vendor’s storehouse with a sack of food, and completely undetected as well. There was absolutely no way this could go wrong in the future at all.