With the greatest threat to her survival removed, Ivette, who had been anxious and uneasy before, suddenly relaxed. She had never felt as peaceful as she did now. Even time itself seemed to have become somewhat worthless.
In fact, considering that the original owner had been an ageless monster who had lived for at least three hundred years, time might truly have been the most insignificant thing to her.
Of course, that was assuming she really could remain young and immortal, rather than simply being unusually resistant to hunger.
She found a metal chair that had not yet fallen apart and sat down. Looking at the pile of bones left behind by some unknown, mysterious monsters on the floor, Ivette sank into thought.
"Based on the clues provided by the dream, the original owner should indeed have been a patient in the Metamorphosis Project. This can be confirmed by many details from those six months of life..."
"Later, the original owner displayed traits that suggested agelessness and immortality. Does that mean her special abilities themselves came from the Metamorphosis Project, or from some experimental program run by Black Tower Pharmaceuticals?"
"But what is confusing is that after such a long time, even with the Meditation Method, she should have accumulated a considerable amount of mana. Why was the original owner, aside from not aging and being able to endure hunger, no different from an ordinary person?"
"Could it be that the experiment had restrictions? Afraid that the original owner would escape their control, they deliberately prevented her from gaining power, and then the apocalypse suddenly broke out and the base was destroyed, accidentally leaving her in her current state..."
Unable to make sense of it no matter how much she thought about it, and with no relevant clues to gather, Ivette could only temporarily settle on that conclusion.
Soon afterward, countless details about the Meditation Method surfaced in her mind.
Yes, now that she no longer had to worry about survival, had plenty of time, and had nothing else to do, using the Meditation Method to increase her strength was undoubtedly the best way for her to escape the Ruined Base.
"It may be slow, but fortunately, time is what I have the most of right now." She spoke softly, then closed her eyes and entered a meditative state.
The room returned to silence. Only the faint light continued to flow rhythmically beneath the skin of the Magic Light Vine, as though nothing would ever change.
Amid boundless stillness and darkness, the world beyond the ruins watched the sun rise and the moon set. Before she knew it, a year had passed.
Over that year, Ivette had fully adapted to life in the Ruined Base. Most of the time, she worked hard at meditation, absorbing the free magical elements in the air. In her spare time, she wandered through the various floors, cleaned up a little, and sorted the junk she found into three categories: useful, useless, and uncertain.
Sometimes, she would secretly open the small exit door leading to the Water Platform. She would not approach the lake, merely sit quietly in the doorway, looking out at clear blue skies or star-filled nights, and miss her family back on Earth.
At other times, she would sit on the steps in the exit tunnel and read by the sunlight falling in from outside. At first, she read Detailed Explanation of Inner and Outer Mana, then Rune Siphon Effect. They were all magic-related reference books she had found in the library.
Detailed Explanation of Inner and Outer Mana explained that on this planet called Origin Star, all magical creatures, humans included, possessed two kinds of mana: Internal Mana stored within the body, and External Mana drawn from the surrounding environment.
Therefore, the more Internal Mana a spell relied upon, the easier it was to control. Conversely, the more it relied on External Mana, the more unstable it became.
Rune Siphon Effect, meanwhile, described something akin to gravity on the magical side. By explaining the attraction of high-density runic mana fields, it explained why the planet's magical elements did not escape into space.
How should she put it? They were both good books.
They were just a little difficult for beginners to chew through. They took her several months, and along the way, she also learned some relatively obscure proper terms in Black Tide Language.
Then, by the time she finished the second book, Rune Siphon Effect, it happened to be one afternoon near the end of the first year.
In the winter cold, fine, silent snow drifted down like willow fluff, draping the black Water Platform in a layer of silver frost. The lake in the distance was calm and peaceful. The monsters seemed to be asleep, and only a few lonely birdcalls echoed through the desolate, vast mountaintop basin.
Closing the book, Ivette stood at the doorway. Something seemed to come to mind, and she stared blankly into space until falling snow landed on the tip of her nose, making her sneeze.
Because of the wind pressure, cold air often blew through the ventilation ducts in winter. On the tenth basement level of the abandoned base, Ivette gathered every small piece of junk she could find that could block the wind and made a simple windproof insulation layer.
Having hidden there to escape the cold, Ivette was still wearing the same white dress and white stockings from a year ago.
She had discovered that her skin neither produced oil nor shed flakes, and her clothes rarely got dirty, so she seldom needed to wash them.
And now that she had been training for a year, she planned to properly test her Mana Points in a moment and see how her training results looked.
According to the data provided by the AI, the standard for an entry-level spellcaster was 10 Mana Points, which required more than seven years of training with the Meditation Method.
So the normal efficiency of the Meditation Method was essentially one and a half points per year?
Wasn't that far too slow?
But...
Even so, a little unnecessary anticipation still arose in Ivette's heart.
How should she put it? The calculation of one and a half points a year was correct, but that was the meditation efficiency of ordinary people. Was she an ordinary person? Absolutely not, right? Not only was she not ordinary, she might even be one of the chosen!
Could the Meditation Method, so inefficient for others, work differently for her?
Then...
After reciting the entry-level spell from Fundamentals of Magic Theory that was specifically used to test one's mana, she waited for a while, only to discover in great shock that her result was just over two points—considering that she neither ate, drank, nor worked, and spent even more time training every day, her actual efficiency was completely ordinary.
"So I'm just a mortal..."
After hoping for so long only to get such a result, Ivette was heartbroken for a moment, feeling as though the entire world had turned gray.
Fortunately, she could still endure.
For someone who was presumably ageless and immortal, there was nothing she could not outlast! What talent could not give her, she would make up for with diligence!
And so, that was that.
Spring passed into autumn, and time flowed on. Amid day after day of meditation and research, five years quietly slipped away.
Over those five years, besides meditating to increase her mana, Ivette also organized a collection of magic-related professional books she had gathered from various floors. Although most of those books dealt with advanced fields, their specialized content left her completely lost, she could still gain something by forcing herself through them.
For example, she could obtain some simple rune arrangements from a case template, or learn basic structures and infer simple rune formulas from them.
It was worth mentioning that chanting incantations was not actually necessary for spellcasting, and incantations were not the same thing as runes.
According to the research of human civilization on Origin Star—referred to as Origin Civilization for short—the number of known runes alone had already exceeded ten thousand. When combined with one another, these runes could create "substances" and "elements" with vastly different properties.
Thus, for beginners, merely distinguishing among those ten thousand runes was already an enormous problem.
So, to ensure that people could still cast spells without remembering the runes, "incantations" were born.
They were somewhat like encrypted translations of runes, with slight embellishments added to make them smoother and easier to remember. If one knew the form of the runes, one could simply run them through one's mind and cast without chanting. But if one did not know the runes, chanting these translated tones while supplementing them with mental power could still cast the spell.
For Ivette, who was still a beginner, using incantations was clearly much easier than memorizing those ten thousand abstract symbols.
"Breath of cold mist, soul weeps tears, blizzard binds form, guided by my will, Niflheim, heed my command!"
Standing on the Water Platform, Ivette recited the incantation and reached forward with her pale hand. Soon afterward, a crystal of ice roughly one meter in diameter condensed on the metal wall before her.
After the spell ended, estimating the mana she had consumed, Ivette roughly determined that this simple Frost Art had used 3 Mana Points—and she currently only had around 9 Mana Points in total. This one small spell had consumed a third of her mana.
"Too little mana..." she sighed.
She had been training as a mage for six years, yet even with all her effort, she could only cast four small spells. That rate of growth was enough to break anyone's spirit.
Luckily, she was built to last. An ordinary person would probably have given up long ago.
With no other thoughts, Ivette turned to leave.
But at the instant she turned around, her peripheral vision swept across the ice crystal she had just created on the wall, causing her to pause slightly.
She did not know whether it was an illusion, but in the crystal's refraction, she felt as though she looked a little older.