Letting out a sigh, I focused on my magic once more. It had been about a little over a week since the survivors at Apple Gate Farm had started to try killing off the Undead, a task they had achieved limited success with. Lia had ventured out most nights, even on those I remained behind to experiment a little more, taking Alex with her to hunt down Undead and get their levels up as much as possible. The two made a quite deadly duo, striking from the shadows before vanishing back into them. It made me consider to try getting my hands on an actual melee weapon, one that was supported by the system, so I could join them. Sure, my magic would always be my primary strength but there was no need to discard the benefits of subtly. It might even help me with my Darkness Magic, as a good part of that element was quite subtle and formed a distinct contrast to the large-scale, flashy stuff I had been doing recently.

In the meantime, I had been trying to improve my elemental magic once more, especially that strange occurrence when a different taste had sprung up during my Wind Magic experimentation. I was somewhat convinced that I had accidentally managed to conjure up a different element in a pseudo-natural fashion and started to try replicating it, while hypothesizing what it might have been.

My primary theory was that I had accidentally created friction within the air, the different air currents rubbing against each other and creating a charge, so to speak. It seemed the most parsimonious explanation and some experimentation had allowed me to recreate that springing up of magic. With that in mind, I had considered how to get that spark of magic without forcibly rubbing streams of air against each other, bringing me to my current hypothesis, namely that Lighting, or maybe Thunder, Magic was a combination between Wind and another element. However, I wasn’t entirely certain which element. The most likely culprit was Fire, which made me a little…

I wasn’t too happy about the idea but it felt the most likely, as FIre would give the usually relatively soft element an edge. But mostly, it was the principle of exclusion, I was somewhat confident that Earth and Wind wouldn’t result in Lightning, even if there was some connection between the Earth and magnetism that might create the link. Similarly, Water and Air could work but I felt like that combination would be more aligned with Ice, though it would need some additional element to that. Or maybe I was barking up the entirely wrong tree with my theories and there was no easy way to generate Lightning from Air, without stumbling into the appropriate skill.

Whatever the case, the whole experimenting and training with my magic had been quite successful. Thanks to entire days, and even a few nights, spent primarily on my experiments I had managed to push my Wind Magic up to eleven, my Water Magic to ten, my Earth Magic to six and my Fire Magic to four. Furthermore, experimenting with Runes had granted me level seven with the Wind Runes, level twelve with the Water Runes, level four with the Earth Runes and a new skill, namely Fire Rune Mastery, which I had already pushed to two.

The description of the foundational FIre Rune was quite interesting, stating that it allowed me “to bring fire into existence, not limited to the process of burning”, whatever that truly meant. I took it to mean that I could conjure up the concept of Fire, instead of setting things alight, possibly more aligned with Heat in general than just flames. It would make sense and give context to those old fantasy staples like the Fire Ball, though I had yet to get anywhere close to creating one of those. Not that I tried too much, simply due to my dislike for the element.

Sadly, completing the set of basic elemental Rune Masteries hadn’t given me a new title, though I had received a notification that my Elementalist Title had been improved. I wasn’t quite completely certain, but the description might have changed from it granting me a minor increase to all elemental affinities to granting me an increase in all elemental affinities, taking away the minor qualifier. I hadn’t managed to quantify the difference, but then, affinity had never been easy to measure.

The last part of my magical experiments was an attempt to make sense of the dreams I had been having. Meditating, occasionally delving into the Astral in an attempt to look for inspiration, had given me a bit of an idea of what might be going on. Parts of the dreams had shown me runes, shapes I was familiar with, the Runes of Mundus. Not the minutely altered versions i was using here, but those I had used for the two years as Morgana. I wasn’t quite sure what the dreams meant, but by now, after having them multiple times with only minor variations, I was confident that they had a meaning. Sadly, I had yet to figure them out, though the runes I had managed to see seemed to form a ritual circle of some sort. Not that I had been able to memorise enough of it to draw it, or get an idea what it might do, but enough to make me confident in what it was. I was considering drawing it at some point, at least the parts I had seen, but I was hesitant, it seemed to be a rather large risk to draw an unknown runic circle I had only seen in my dreams. Who knew what might be lurking within the depths of my mind?

However, where my magical experimentation had been quite successful, everything else hadn’t worked out so well. The survivors had sent people out to find out how many more had managed to escape the city and, from what I’d been told, they had found a few, though far less than anyone had hoped. There was another group of similar size to the one at the Farm and a few with fewer people, ranging in size from about thirty to something in the neighbourhood of two hundred.

A decently large city, reduced to numbers that would barely qualify as a village. If nothing else, the numbers drove home just how bad things had turned out. While I couldn’t be sure how things looked elsewhere, I doubted it would be much better. Sure, at places where the change hit during the daytime, far more people would have survived the initial exposure to Shattered, simply because so many people had died because their partner, or another family member, had changed and attacked them before they realised what was going on. For people who had been awake and aware during the change, the number of deaths due to that should be far lower, though I couldn’t be sure about the magnitude.

Not that it truly mattered. It would take months, in some cases years, for communication between different communities to be re-established, and that was only when considering one landmass. I had no idea how the wider world looked now, with the repeated Earthquakes and whatever else might have changed out there.

But whatever the case may be, the first thing we needed to accomplish for long-term survival was to keep the people around my group alive. With that in mind, I had told the people searching for other survivors that I would teach anyone with a magical affinity who ventured to my lair, an offer Mrs Wu had mirrored, only that she, alongside a few others, had offered training in the martial arts. While I hadn’t heard anything, I was quite confident that Cassie would make similar offers, though I had no idea what qualities she needed for acolytes. Maybe sneakiness, at least in a social capacity. It was something she either had in spades or she truly wanted nothing more but to help people in this difficult time, to make sure everybody had a home and was as safe as she could make them. There was a cynical part of me that doubted it, but I just didn’t know whether that was pure, cynical paranoia or if I was subconsciously picking something up from her.

Whatever the case may be, we needed power in two parts. One part was the widespread, general power, many people all with at least some modicum of power, able to accomplish the countless smaller tasks that were needed to bring back a support system for humanity. It was why I freely offered my teaching, though the EXP I had previously gained, and might gain again, were a nice bonus, to say nothing about the potential to get a peek into different types of magic.

The other part was those at the top of the pile, where I wanted to be. Strong enough to make the countless people shut up and listen, in addition to having the power to strike down some particularly nasty threats. Getting to the top of that pile was my primary motivation. Being there, staying there, could eventually give me the ability to get Sigmir back. And that was, at the end of the day, all that mattered.