Mage Cultivation

Mage Cultivation

With her greatest survival crisis resolved, Ivette, who had been anxious and uneasy before, suddenly relaxed. She felt calmer than she had ever been, to the point where even time seemed a little less valuable.

In fact, considering that the original owner had been an ageless monster for at least three hundred years, time might truly have been the least significant thing to her.

Of course, that was only if she really was ageless and immortal, rather than merely able to endure hunger.

Finding a metal chair that had not yet fallen apart, Ivette sat down and stared at the pile of bones left behind by unknown, mysterious creatures on the floor, lost in thought.

"Based on the clues provided by the dream, the original owner should indeed have been a patient in the Metamorphosis Project. Many details from those six months of life can confirm that..."

"Later, the original owner gained traits that suggested agelessness and immortality. Does that mean her special abilities came from the Metamorphosis Project itself, or from one of Black Tower Pharmaceuticals' experimental programs?"

"But what is confusing is that after such a long time, even using the Meditation Method, she should have accumulated a considerable amount of mana. Why was the original owner, aside from being ageless and hunger-resistant, no different from an ordinary person in every other way?"

"Could it be because of restrictions placed on the experiment? Fearing that the original owner would escape control, they deliberately prevented her from gaining power. Then the apocalypse suddenly broke out, the base was destroyed, and she accidentally ended up in her current state..."

Unable to make sense of it and having found no relevant clues, Ivette could only temporarily settle on that conclusion.

Soon after, countless details concerning the Meditation Method surfaced in her mind.

Yes. With no need to worry about survival, plenty of time, and nothing else to do, improving her strength through the Meditation Method was undoubtedly her best option for escaping the Ruined Base.

"It's slow, but fortunately, time is what I have the most of right now," she murmured. Then she closed her eyes and entered a meditative state.

The room returned to silence. Only the faint light continued flowing rhythmically beneath the skin of the Magic Light Vine, as though nothing would ever change.

In the boundless stillness and darkness, the world outside the ruins saw the sun rise and moon fall. Unknowingly, a year passed.

Over that year, Ivette completely adapted to life in the Ruined Base. Most of the time, she meditated diligently, absorbing the magic elements drifting through the air. During her free time, she wandered through the various floors, tidied up, and sorted the junk she found into three categories: useful, useless, and uncertain.

Sometimes, she would secretly open the small exit door to the Water Platform. She never approached the lakeshore, merely sitting quietly in the doorway to watch the clear blue sky or the star-filled night, thinking of her family back on Earth.

At other times, she sat on the steps inside the exit tunnel and read by the sunlight falling in from outside. At first, she read "Detailed Explanation of Inner and Outer Mana," and later, "Rune Siphon Effect," both reference books on magic that she had found in the library.

"Detailed Explanation of Inner and Outer Mana" explained that on this planet called Origin Star, the mana of all magical creatures, humans included, was divided into two types: Internal Mana stored within the body, and External Mana drawn from the environment.

Thus, the more Internal Mana a spell relied on, the easier it was to control. Conversely, the more it relied on External Mana, the less stable it became.

"Rune Siphon Effect," meanwhile, described something akin to gravity on the magical side. By explaining the attraction of high-density rune mana fields, it explained why the planet's magic elements did not drift away into space.

How should she put it? They were both good books.

They were just a little difficult for a beginner to chew through. They took her several months, during which she also learned some relatively rare technical terms in Black Tide Language.

Then, when she finished "Rune Siphon Effect," the second book, it happened to be one afternoon near the end of the first year.

In the winter cold wave, fine, quiet snow drifted down like willow catkins, coating the once-black Water Platform in a layer of silver frost. The lake in the distance was calm and still. The monsters seemed to be asleep, and only a few lonely birdcalls echoed through the desolate mountaintop basin.

Closing the book, Ivette stood at the doorway. Something seemed to come to mind, and she stared blankly into space until a snowflake 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 underground floor 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 come here to escape the cold, Ivette was still wearing the same white dress and white stockings from a year ago.

She found that her skin neither produced oil nor shed flakes, and her clothes rarely got dirty, so they seldom needed washing.

And now that she had cultivated for a year, she planned to properly test her Mana Points in a while and see how her training "results" looked.

Recalling the data provided by the AI, an entry-level spellcaster required 10 Mana Points, which took over seven years of cultivation using 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 per 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 the chosen one!

Could the Meditation Method, which was inefficient for others, work differently for her?

Then...

After reciting the entry-level spell for testing one's own mana, which she had read in "Fundamentals of Magic Theory," she waited for a while, only to discover in utter shock that her result was barely over two points. Considering that she neither ate, drank, nor worked and had more time to cultivate each day, her actual efficiency was completely ordinary.

"So I'm just a mortal..."

After anticipating it for so long, this was the result she got. For a moment, Ivette was utterly heartbroken, feeling as though the whole world had turned gray.

Fortunately, she could still endure.

For someone who was supposedly ageless and immortal, there was nothing she could not outlast! If talent could not give her something, then she would make up for it with diligence!

And so, that was how it went.

Spring passed into autumn, and time flowed on. Amid day after day of meditation and study, five years quietly slipped away.

Over those five years, aside from meditating to increase her mana, Ivette compiled a series of professional books related to magic that she had collected from the various floors. Although the overwhelming majority involved advanced fields, with content so specialized that it left her completely lost, she could still gain something by forcing her way through them.

For example, she picked up some simple rune arrangements from a case template, or learned basic structures and inferred simple rune formulas from them.

It was worth mentioning that chanting incantations was not actually necessary for casting spells, nor were incantations the same thing as runes.

In the human civilization of Origin Star—referred to simply as Origin Civilization—there were already more than ten thousand known runes. When combined with one another, these runes could create "substances" and "elements" with vastly different properties.

Thus, for beginners, simply distinguishing among those tens of thousands of runes was already a major challenge.

So, to ensure that one could still cast spells without remembering the runes, "incantations" were created.

They were somewhat like encrypted translations of runes, with slight embellishments added to make them smooth and easy to remember. If one knew the form of the runes, one only needed to run them through one's mind to cast without chanting. But if one did not know the runes, chanting the translated notes and supplementing them with mental power could still release magic.

For Ivette, who was still a beginner, using incantations was clearly much easier than memorizing tens of thousands of abstract symbols.

"Breath of freezing mist, souls weep tears, blizzard binds form, let thought be the guide—Niflheim, heed my command!"

Standing on the Water Platform, Ivette chanted the incantation and reached forward with her pale hand. Not long afterward, an ice crystal roughly one meter in diameter condensed on the metal wall before her.

After the spell ended, Ivette estimated the mana consumed within her body and roughly determined that this simple Frost Art had used 3 Mana Points. Yet she currently only possessed around 9 Mana Points in total, so this small spell alone had used up one-third of her mana.

"My mana is way too low..." she sighed.

She had already trained as a mage for six years, yet even at full effort, she could only cast four small spells. This growth rate was truly enough to break one's spirit.

Fortunately, she was built to last. An ordinary person probably would have given up long ago.

With no other thoughts, Ivette turned to leave.

But the instant she turned around, her peripheral vision swept across the ice crystal she had just created on the wall, and her movements paused slightly.

She did not know whether it was an illusion, but in the crystal's refraction, she felt as though she had grown up a little.