Getting used to the changes in my body was a weird experience. My instincts, the intuition and senses that were governing my body, were sharper than they had ever been, allowing me to move in a precise and determined fashion, only that my mind wasn’t quite up to the task. If I simply moved, without actively thinking how I was moving, everything was fine but if I tried to think how I was moving, to consider distances and try judging them, things went wonky, fast. My arms were too long, my steps reached further than I anticipated and I managed to bang my head against various low obstacles more times than I was comfortable admitting.

And it wasn’t just a change in height. I had spent some time gazing into a mirror formed out of a combination of Water and Ice Magic, studying my features. It was odd, I still looked like myself, I could easily recognise the features I was used to seeing in my face but at the same time, I looked differently. As if the features I always had were now more obvious, the contours of my face sharper. A lot of the annoying soft roundness that had always given my face an air of childish immaturity was gone, leaving behind sharper edges and clear lines. I quite liked it, though the best feature, in my opinion, was the contrast between the deep, inky blackness and my pale, blue skin. I had always loved my hair but now, with the various elements I was gaining mastery over giving it a glittering shimmer and the contrast to my skin? For once, I enjoyed seeing my own reflection, a part of my mind wondering how Sigmir would react to the changes my body had undergone.

Shopping, or rather looting, was similarly weird. Before, my first need when looking for clothes had been to ascertain that the clothes I might be interested in were available in my size, even before I could consider what I wanted to look like. Far too often, I had been left with fewer, or unappealing, options, simply because my body was too diminutive to fit into the normal-sized clothes. I had just been too far on the edge of the bell curve.

But now, after my body had grown by crossing the First Divide, that problem was much attenuated. While I was still a little on the small side, still blessed with a slender body, I was close enough that the vast majority of clothes existed in sizes fitting for me. Looting around, the likelihood of failing to find clothes due to prior looting was far higher than the likelihood of failing to find clothes due to mismatched sizes.

It was downright enjoyable to find clothes that truly fit me, to have the choice, especially once we broke into one of the high-end boutiques, a store with rather sturdy shutters that had sealed the place when the change happened. Nobody had managed to break into the place before we arrived but with the increases I had gained after crossing the divide, it was trivial. Inside, I had been able to find clothes that felt wonderful on my skin and it was there that I carefully chose my future outfits.

I might have overdone it a little, putting quite a bit of focus on form while ignoring function but there was a part of me that wanted to have the wonderful clothes. The silk underwear, the garments that cost multiple times more than my monthly rent had been before the change, the indulgences that told the world you had too much money. Some of those felt like the comfortable embrace of an icy storm to me, cool and pleasant, almost akin to my own magic wrapping around me. Sure, others I happily tossed into the nearest corner, but some of the clothes were just divine, to the point that I was planning to enchant some of them, likely by embroidering them with my hair. The cloak I had made before was slowly unravelling, but it had served me quite well, making me think that I could replicate something, or maybe create something similar.

But it wasn’t just the high-end boutique that yielded some useful loot, we also broke into a few other stores, gathering clothes for me, with a few for Lia thrown in, making sure that we had things to wear. The constant battles were quite hard on our wardrobe, but by the end of our looting trip, all of us were weighed down with bags. Even Silva didn’t escape, she, too, was forced to carry some of the clothes we found. As we moved, Lia kept making jokes about mother-daughter bonding by going shopping together, jokes that somehow only got more amusing when a few Undead tried to kill us, it added a wonderfully surreal element to the experience.

It also drove home again just how much crossing the divide had changed me. Not just on the physical side, which was easy to feel and see, but on the magical side. I had noticed before when breaking into the boutique, but in a fight, things became far more obvious.

The fight against the undead, brief as it was, made it clear that I needed to put extra effort into mastering the difference crossing the divide had made in my magic. My power had increased, far beyond what the change in attribute points should have done, making me realise that there were multiple traits playing off each other to increase my power. I needed to learn just how my magic had been empowered, especially by the draconic magic trait. It was my primary class trait after all, and from what I could feel, it was a massive change.

Back at our temporary base, we started to experiment, only to stumble across the first change almost immediately.

Namely, when Lia asked to be fed after our excursion. Before I had crossed the divide, she had insisted on having a had a small ritual for her feeding. It was a simple, brief process where I cut my hand and let some blood infused with Astral power pool in my palm before allowing her to drink. Lia always reacted to drinking my blood, but it had been a mild one, like somebody taking a cool drink on a hot day. Pleasure, relief, comfort, those were the sensations Lia had described before.

Not any longer, now, with the different changes to my Astral Power, drinking my blood had sent Lia to the ground, shaking as if she was being electrocuted. It took almost a minute for her to restrain her shaking body, making me realise just how potent a sensation it must have been.

Her description was fairly intense, to the point that she considered trying to draw Astral Power from Withered in the future, simply because mine had become too overwhelming. When I listened to her, she sounded more scared than excited, making me wonder just what she had felt in that moment. But given that she didn’t go into details, I wasn’t comfortable pushing my daughter on them. Either way, we now knew that she should try getting her power elsewhere unless she liked doing the safety dance.

But there were other changes to my magic, changes that only started to manifest as I used my spells. The force, the impact and penetration of all my spells had increased. For offensive spells, that was a wonderful boon, allowing my workings to easily pierce through flesh, bone or stone, to the point that I thought I might be able to bring down buildings with my Ice Magic, while being confident that I could start breaking through solid walls with my Earth Magic.

Sadly, that made the subtler magic arts more difficult. Healing, for one, was challenging, trying to keep my Astral Power contained enough to stop it from wreaking havoc within the target’s body was almost as difficult as healing wounds in the first place. No matter what I tried, my healing spells would take more out of the body of the people I healed, though I had a feeling that the spells would make a greater difference in turn.

There was, as always, an equilibrium between power and control, the power of my spells had gone up, disturbing the equilibrium until I managed to bring my control up to the same level. Sadly, I couldn’t just reduce the power I used, the efficiency wouldn’t change, I would get the same effect as I would before the change, but I would retain the proportional side-effects.

Maybe healing was just not for me, certainly not the healing of weaker people. Healing my companions wasn’t a problem, not unless they were gravely wounded and exhausted, in such circumstances my healing might do more harm than good but for the usual cuts and scrapes I was sufficient.

Maybe the biggest change I experienced was in my ability to enchant items. Where before, it had been a slow, ponderous process to gauge the lines needed for magic to flow through an enchanted item, the increased force, and possibly the Astral Impression trait, made it far easier. By simply forcing the runes into the metal of a blade, I could get the initial form, before slowly letting a slow wedge of Crystal Astral Power flow into the runes, carving the needed channels. It might not be the perfect technique, I noticed there was a bit of damage to the items I enchanted, likely reducing their durability, but it was far better than anything I had been able to do before.

But with a first, successful experiment completed, I now could begin to refine the process. I was curious about where that particular path might lead me in the future.