Kaltyr was currently in possession of more pills than she honestly thought she needed—considering that in just one more Life Level most would become useless to her—but her teacher had said that it wasn’t possible to overdose on them, so made quite a few.

After being given the little lesson on keeping her attitude in check, the girl was taught how to concoct more than just a single pill at a time. If she changed the recipe only by adding a higher ratio of ingredients—instead of 1 goo, 1 grass stalk, and 2 flower buds, that’d be 2 goo, 2 grass stalks, and 4 flower buds, etc—then the resulting number of pills would increase after the same wait time…at greater the risk. The refining process became more difficult because she required a more fine-tuned grasp on controlling the fire, and if she failed she lost more ingredients…which did happen once. Her ego overinflated after too many successes in a row, and she tried concocting the pills with five times the number of ingredients, only to lose concentration in her hubris. However, she didn’t have to worry much about failing outside of such a situation. With a level 0 pill recipe, the amount of leeway she had available was ridiculous, and every other attempt ended in success. Additionally, if higher-quality goo was used in a recipe than necessary, then there stood a chance of the recipe resulting in more servings than average, but at the cost of quality.

Only so many pills could work their literal magic at once and they were still at the very edge of what could work on her, so healing still took longer than an entire day. Nonetheless, the time spent healing did not go to waste. It was true that she wanted to visit the settlement upriver as soon as possible, but after killing the Life Level 5 praying mantis, she was determined to obtain the jelly its phantasm would drop. Fortunately, phantasms often only required a couple days to form, so she wouldn’t be waiting long until she had within her hands a level 5 wind-affinity phantasmal goo. It was unfortunate that the goo would be of the wind affinity—the lass had grown quite fond of water despite the storm that continued to rage overhead—but at least it would be level 5. As was the case with Life Levels and medicine effectiveness, enchantments would only function on people if they were within a certain number of levels, starting at the level of the equipment…

Which was to say that none of the enchantments on her level 0 clothing would activate once she hit Life Level 6. When she first figured it out—with Sir Quiggly-Do the Fifth’s assistance—Kaltyr was more than a little pissed at basically wasting jellies on gear she’d soon grow out of, but recalled her teacher’s wise words and did not take it out on it. After all…would she have survived the battle against the praying mantis without the extra speed and strength her clothing had given her under the watery influence of the thunderstorm? Sure, she had quite the leg up on it even after it rendered one of her arms useless and surprise attacked her with external spells, but how much of that was due to her proficiencies in combat? How much was her personal power, and not the power of her equipment?

That was what Kaltyr wondered about as she trained her control over the elements, alone in her clearing, by simultaneously directing her campfire to dance and preventing the storm from putting it out. Granted, the storm had lessened its assault against her by quite a bit for the time being, but she figured that the light rains were probably still enough to put such flames out, so erected a thin barrier to protect them.

Day had long since ceded its territory to Night, but the girl wanted to spend as long as she could healing. Each pill’s effectiveness only lasted three minutes and she could only stack their effects three times—there was that number again. Twice, even… Her arm just barely healed at a rate visible to the naked eye, and she’d definitely regain full use of it sometime the next day, but the lass couldn’t help but want it now.

Like that, Kaltyr cooked a fish as slowly as possible, savoring every moment she had to practice elemental manipulation—which wasn’t a skill, strangely enough, unlike Alchemy, which grew from level 0 to 3 after all the drugs she made.

Suddenly, an idea struck Kaltyr square in the forehead…

No, that was her palm for the eighteenth time. The idea had no physical effect on her.

“Of course!” She shouted into the night. “Elemental manipulation! The spell the deer used!”

It came to her all at once: the reason she couldn’t cast the spell that conjured an armor of earth was due to her lack of comprehension in elemental manipulation at the time! Well, she was still unpracticed in the controlling of earth specifically, but she had the principles down! If it was anything like learning to control water and fire…

Kaltyr’s mana let go of the campfire—though not the rain, since she was still cooking the fish—and laid herself down on her back. Like that, with her back pressed against the ground, she extended many tiny tendrils of mana into the dirt, getting a feel for the essence of earth. It wasn’t anything like fire, which was full of energy and desired to be unfettered. It was more like water, which didn’t mind being taken ahold of by gravity. But unlike water, which was still inclined to spread itself out as far as it could horizontally, earth could build in any direction. It could take a form that resisted outside forces. If earth so chose, it could be the road one treaded, the boulder that squished one, or the fortress one was protected by.

With her eyes closed and enlightened, Kaltyr gently guided the earth, slowly making it rise in a half-meter tall wall around herself. Initially, the girl thought she succeeded in taking full control of the earth as she could with water and fire, but upon letting go of the wall, it crumbled like sand. Where had she gone wrong? She performed the attempt again, but the result was the same. There was an issue she needed to address but just couldn’t see.

She sat up, combed the mud and dirt out of her hair with her fingers, and looked around at the mounds surrounding her. Something didn’t feel right. Something told Kaltyr that, though the earth moved, she’d accomplished nothing. Her lips pursed, she dug her hand into the mound, being met with little resistance… She was on the right track.

The girl resurfaced the imagery she related to earth. A road, a boulder, a fortress… She formed a fist, enforced herself with mana, and struck the ground beneath her. Yeah, that was it.

Kaltyr returned to her previous position, lying on the ground. She felt the warmth, the energy, the life of the earth through her back—another difference to water; the deeper one goes in water, the colder it is. She recalled what she had done with the dirt, treating it as though it were a liquid, which it most certainly was not. Roads were hard-packed, boulders were crushingly dense, and fortresses were impenetrable. They were not gentle and were not to be treated gently.

With a harrumph through her nose, Kaltyr commanded the wet ground with domineering intent to bend to her will. With a grand rumbling, the earth around her body erupted upwards to the same height as before—half a meter—but with much more strength behind it. When the girl released the packed mud from her will, it did not crumble. No longer was it treated like water. No longer did it behave like sand.

Kaltyr lifted herself, a proud smirk plastered all over her face after succeeding so quickly, before she closed her eyes again. No longer would she fail to cast the deer’s spell. She would add it to her arsenal, improve her survivability odds, and increase her killing potential. Nothing would survive against her if she didn’t let it!

She summoned the tiny vortexes of mana on the outside of her body, wove them together so they resembled a chain-link fence, then poured her mana into the ground beneath her. Controlling the elements didn’t require that she infuse them, but the infusion seemed to be a part of the casting process, as was proven when she succeeded a little in the days before.

The girl willed the dirt to surround her body, raising it in sheets then having it mold to her form as though she were making plate armor with metal. The effort used from doing so had Kaltyr panting for breath—it didn’t help that she was still keeping the light rains from putting out the fire that was cooking her fish—but it was working! She “saw” the entire process through her Magic Sense in detail, but opened her eyes anyway because there was something special about visually perceiving the fruits of her labor.

She shrieked and stumbled backwards, suddenly being met with a horrifying sight. Kaltyr couldn’t sense it before because all of her mental resources were being occupied by the spell she was casting while maintaining the rain barrier, but an ugly beast had shown up at the edge of her clearing. Her concentration greatly disturbed, both the rain barrier and earth spell were interrupted. The dirt fell off her body in large segments while holes formed in the rain barrier. Worst of all, she failed to catch herself.

The backlash produced from her mana being disrupted seared Kaltyr’s meridians, causing a burning pain to shoot through her insides. She screamed, unable to think straight, overwhelmed by agony. She tripped backwards on the half-meter tall earthen wall she’d erected earlier, arms flailing around helplessly. Then, she fell into the campfire.

Unfortunately for Kaltyr, the backlash combined with the fright of seeing the beast and surprise torment from the fire she played with not too long ago caused too great a disturbance in her mind, and she could only save a small portion of herself. With all the mental energy she could muster, she forced mana out of her soul and through her meridians, barely keeping her hair and face from burning, but too late for the rest of her body, which was farther from her soul. Her skin below her shoulders burned before her mana reached it, working to distract her mind further. She channeled the mana as forcefully as she could, but focusing her thoughts was a monumental task. Writhing in agony, she mistakenly began casting the earth armor spell in a panic, as it was still fresh on her mind…but without infusing the dirt below the campfire, no dirt came to shield her. Heat scorched her from every direction, and her attempts at clawing herself out of the fire were impeded by the limited utility of her right arm. The short life she led in Manic before this moment flashed before her eyes as the sound of her own wails deafened her…

Until the flames disappeared.

A modicum of sanity returned to the girl as she realized multiple things at once: the beast she couldn’t see very well on account of it being a dark night had entered her clearing and was the same level as the praying mantis had been, the fire from her campfire was now, strangely, completely absent—rain still fell, but it was pretty light, so it couldn’t have been put out that quickly—and her skin glowed red.

More of her focus returned to Kaltyr, allowing her the capacity to wonder if the ugly beast had saved her…until it released a spell in her direction. The ground beneath the girl shook as it was taken control of by the creature and shot up diagonally at her from all sides at the same time. The packed mud lifted and pressed against her body from all directions, keeping her in place. Panicking and still trying to mentally collect herself, Kaltyr urged her internal energy to move, to strengthen her body so that she could break free from her earthen pillars of restraint.

Instead, it seemed like the campfire suddenly came back to life as flames exploded outwards, consuming both her and the pillars… Yet, she did not shriek. Hell, she didn’t feel herself burning at all! Yes, her skin warmed greatly, and most of it still ached horrendously from the burning earlier, but she was unaffected by the new flames! Additionally, the sudden appearance of the billowing blaze caused the gross beast to retreat in fear, since it was previously advancing on her—presumably to go for the kill—after she was restrained.

Kaltyr used the time she abruptly gained to inspect her insides—she’d sustained damage from the backlash earlier, but it was nothing more than what she’d experienced days before when experimenting with spells, so she didn’t worry about it. Her meridians would heal. More importantly…there was fire beneath her skin.

Not fire exactly, but a lining of mana that certainly appeared and acted like fire. It danced and burned within her body, but left her unharmed. That was what she had released when she meant to fortify herself.

Boss music played in Kaltyr’s head as she flashed a malicious, toothy grin. Thanks to the thing that attacked her, her arsenal had increased by more than just a single skill…and she would use both to kill the bastard.

Nearly her entire body still throbbed in pain from being burned alive, but the girl persevered, ignoring it. She dug a few tendrils of mana into the ground below her, reconnecting with the earth. She first tried to take control of the packed mud the beast had used to cast its spell on her, but the creature, despite being pushed away by the roaring flames surrounding her, still held full sway over it with its own connection. Too bad for it that it wasn’t fast enough to prevent her from taking the dirt she needed from directly below.

The wet ground made its way up her body in seconds until it covered every centimeter of clothing and exposed skin, acting more like chain mail than plate armor despite the way it covered her, and leaving only thin slits to see and breathe through—however, she realized she could have closed those, too. She could hold her breath and rely on her Magic Sense to fight without worry of weaknesses, but that required more concentration than she had available. The girl chose to make do with what she had.

Then it came time to break out of the pillars that squished her from every side. The pressure from the pillars was only almost enough to crush her normally, but now that she was aware enough to cast Body Mana Reinforcement, she couldn’t be hindered. From scanning her body she sensed that she only had a few more seconds worth of fire, so she stopped releasing it and focused on making room for herself. She flexed her muscles while forcing her arms and one of her legs outwards as much as she could, causing cracks to appear on the packed mud. The beast had begun to cast a spell as soon as it was pushed back by the fire, but whatever spell it chose to cast next was taking too long, and its prey escaped her confines too quickly.

As the creature was on the last stretch of the casting process, Kaltyr broke out of her mud prison and made a beeline for the damned thing, activating the magical rock disk and finally recognizing the beast to be an octopus nearly her size. It lashed out at her with only a single tentacle, giving away that it still needed more time and the fact that it couldn't spare any other appendages. The girl had no trouble bypassing the octopus' weak defense by batting the tentacle aside before closing the last meter of space between them and grabbing the creature’s bulbous head. She dismissed the Dirt Coating around her hand, and in the same way she did to the praying mantis, flexed her fingers, crushing the thing’s flesh. Strangely, it was leathery rather than squishy, but that fact only worked in her favor by giving her a better grip as she slowly pressed her digits deeper into its head. When its Body Mana Reinforcement began to give out under the pain, she added the final touch, and the last remnants of fiery mana exploded from her palm like a…grenade, swallowing the beast. Having its head crushed and being burned alive worked well to disrupt its spell, and the octopus suffered mana backlash on top of it all.

“Not so fun, ain’t it?”

A sadistic smile played across Kaltyr’s lips as the land octopus soundlessly writhed in pain, its tentacles uselessly slapping against her legs in a pitiful retaliation. Eventually, her hand dug so deep into its fleshy, bulbous head that her arm began sinking into it. Only then did she realize the creature had stopped moving.

She removed her arm with a soft squelch before taking a few steps back to look at her handiwork. It was…disgusting, to say the least, and it caused her smile to fade.

“Well, I can’t tell if I’m feeling guilty or grossed out, but…”

The girl kicked the corpse aside with her mud-covered leg, winced, dismissed the entirety of her Dirt Coating—what the notification said the spell was called—and returned to her cold campfire, which she sat next to with a pained grunt…

She put her face in her hands—or rather, tried to, because one of them still wasn’t moving very well.

“I really could have died tonight.”

Just moments before…she’d been on fire and screaming for her life. Her mana quickly protected her before the burns became too severe, but the campfire was still stupidly painful in the moment.

“And somehow my clothing’s fine when my skin isn’t.”

Kaltyr lifted her face to look at her hands and arms—which stung simply from moving—noting the lack of arm hair, horrendous smell, and slightly warped skin. Thankfully, she had all those healing pills from her elixir refining session…

Though, those wouldn’t help unsinge the tips of her long, dark hair.