Log

It had been another peaceful, prosperous year. People had thrown themselves into a day of festivities, celebrating Silverymoon's grand annual festival—Shieldmeet. As night deepened, the crowds who had spent the day rejoicing gradually dispersed, each returning home to recover from a day of indulgence and excitement. The most beautiful city in the Northlands slowly settled back into its usual quiet.

Moonlight shone down upon the jewel of the Northlands, as if the Lady of Silver herself were bestowing a blessing from her divine realm upon this city she cherished. On the balcony of a tower on Silverymoon's southern bank, a handsome young man with long golden hair gazed dreamily at the silver moon in the sky, facing the scattered lights of the city.

His handsome face was filled with sorrow. In a voice only he could hear, he murmured, "May we live long and share the moon's beauty, though a thousand miles apart. The moonlight is different, but my feelings are the same. When will I ever return to that distant homeland of mine?"

For a wanderer stranded in a foreign land, no matter how beautiful the moonlight, its cool brightness could not soothe the sorrow of someone who had left home behind.

After gazing blankly for a while longer at Silverymoon's beautiful, peaceful nightscape, the young man returned to his room.

He fell backward onto the large bed with its velvet covers and murmured, "System." A screen visible only to him appeared before his eyes. It showed the familiar Windows desktop that countless internet users knew so well. With practiced ease, he opened a folder called "My Journal" and began working on the screen.

"1382 DR, Year's End, Frostfall

It's Shieldmeet again. This is my sixth year studying in Silverymoon, and the sixteenth since I officially arrived in this world of swords and magic.

In Faerûn, people can hold their coming-of-age ceremony at sixteen. By the standards of my previous life, I should be a responsible adult now, ready to endure life's hardships without showing it.

But festivals always make you miss your family even more. I still often dream of my previous life, longing for that ordinary yet peaceful home.

Sigh. My family in this life and the education I received in my previous one don't quite mesh. I still can't find common ground with them, so this year I want to keep wandering around outside.

As for choosing a third-circle spell, perhaps it's because the fear of insufficient firepower runs deep in the bones of the Rabbit Kingdom. In the end, I chose Fireball as my third-circle spell. I have to say, being a mage who can't cast Fireball is a disgrace to mages. Well, I've definitely come around to it.

But I still have to think about staying alive. I'll save my other Spell Slot for Fly. Sometimes, a strategic retreat is the best option after all. You can only deal damage if you're alive. Leave snatching kills to someone else.

Although I recently advanced to become an intermediate mage and gained a deeper understanding of the third layer of the Weave, I'm still nowhere near my goal of returning home. I still have a whole series of ideas from my previous life to bring to life, and my current abilities are nowhere near enough. I'll have to keep working twice as hard."

The young man was named Ryan Chris, the youngest son of the current generation of House Chris, a noble family in Waterdeep. House Chris was a middling noble family in the city, and its head, Count Chris, wielded considerable influence in the City Council. Under normal circumstances, Ryan should have lorded it over the family's lands, caroused with his peers, and squeezed in some lessons on noble traditions.

But Ryan had seemed unusually mature and indifferent from an early age. He had shown a keen interest in magic, and at eight or nine, he had insisted on going to Silverymoon to study magic at its academy.

Lady Chris had been reluctant to let her youngest son travel thousands of miles from home to study alone in a foreign land.

But Ryan had declared, "I'm a kid, so I have the right to be unreasonable. If you don't let me study in Silverymoon, I won't eat or drink until you agree."

After several beatings, and with little Ryan still stubbornly holding his ground, Lady Chris had no choice but to let him have his way. She did, however, arrange for a personal attendant to accompany him.

There was a reason Ryan had been interested in magic from a young age. After all, inside his childhood body lived the soul of an adult. In other words, Ryan was a transmigrator.

Before he transmigrated, Ryan had been an utterly unremarkable graduate student, a textbook engineering geek. After working hard to get into a certain top-tier university in China and enduring three years as a wage slave, he had finally found a job he liked. Unfortunately, while he was out celebrating with some classmates, he saw a little girl about to be killed by a heavy truck. He rushed into the road to save her.

He did save the girl, but Ryan died on the spot. In the second before his death, he was still grumbling to himself: "Damn it, I was just about to leave campus, end my single life, and reach the pinnacle of success. And now I'm dead? This is so unfair."

Perhaps Heaven had decided he wasn't meant to die. His soul happened to be swept into a spatial rift and carried along the currents of time and space, passing through countless worlds before he was finally born in the Faerûn World—with a very fortunate start in life.

And after his experience in the currents of time and space, Ryan's soul had undergone a transformation. His logical thinking had improved enormously, and he remembered everything from his previous life with perfect clarity. He had also awakened an ability he named "System." Most importantly, during his journey through time and space, he had come upon a stroke of fortune—and that was what gave him the confidence to return home.

Calling it a system was a bit of a stretch. Its main function was little more than that of a massive portable memo pad, equipped with a simple-minded AI that could only recognize basic commands. It could record Ryan's inspirations and spell notes whenever he wanted, and occasionally serve as a diary. The blocky characters on its screen, which didn't exist on Faerûn, were probably Ryan's way of expressing his longing for his former life in this other world.

As a longtime reader who had devoured web novels in his previous life, Ryan had adapted to transmigration fairly well. The only thing he couldn't get over was how useless his cheat was. He had wanted a system that could assign quests and give out rewards, or perhaps a "Deep Blue" stat-boosting device that could raise his Intelligence with a single command. Alas, the Creator had played a joke on him and given him a portable notebook instead.

Still, after all these years, Ryan had gradually come to terms with it. Something was better than nothing. Besides, as a mage, the only thing he could truly trust was his own wisdom. Thanks to the comprehensive education he had received in his previous life, along with the scientific mindset he had developed as an excellent research-and-development wage slave, Ryan had a considerable advantage when it came to learning spells.

He thought that advancing from a mage apprentice to an intermediate mage worthy of being called a "mage" in just six years was pretty good. He had also earned his mentor's favor and been taken on as a formal student, which was why he had his own room in the mage tower.

Even so, Ryan still felt that he hadn't mastered enough spells. The path of magic was endless, and he was still far too weak. Of course, if his peers—who were still struggling to become junior mages despite being at the same level as him—heard him thinking this, they would probably want to kill him.

As a devoted magic enthusiast, Ryan had always been especially fond of mage characters in his previous life, whether in role-playing games like WoW or competitive games like LoL. He had often fantasized about wielding a Fireball in one hand and an ice spell in the other, then opening a portal to travel all over the world. He had always been a closet chuuni. Now that he had truly arrived in a world of swords and magic and could experience the wonders of magic firsthand, how could he not be obsessed with its mysteries?

"System, bring up my character sheet."

[Ryan's Character Sheet

Constitution: 13

Strength: 12

Dexterity: 13

Intelligence: 18

Wisdom: 14

Charisma: 18

(In Faerûn, each additional point multiplies the original value by five.)

Spell Feats:

Empower Spell—Spell effects are increased by one level of intensity.

Eschew Materials—After completing a spell action, you can cast a spell without expending its material components.

Rapid Recall—Allows you to quickly memorize Spell Slots.

Persistent Spell—Your spells last five times longer than expected.

Ryan's Spellbook for Today;

Cantrips (0th Circle)

Light Spell—An extra-large flashlight, essential for walking at night. Great for drawing monsters after dark.

Read Magic—Knowledge is power!

Mage Hand—It can only lift five pounds, but it's so convenient. A must-have trick for the lazy.

Prestidigitation—Mom, I can do magic too! I can go on the Spring Festival Gala!

...

1st Circle

Sleep—It works wonders on both monsters and people. Who wouldn't want the power to hypnotize someone?

Magic Missile—Low damage, high humiliation.

Grease—Controlling the battlefield is what matters. You're asking about damage? Are the bruisers on the team just for show?

Magic Alarm—Safety first, life above all. Master the art of staying alive, and you can travel all over Faerûn without fear.

2nd Circle

Rope Trick—An essential life-saving spell for the whole team. You can only deal damage if you're alive.

Stone Pellet—Who says my slingshot is no good? Come try my stone pellet attack!

Darkvision—Doesn't everyone know how important visibility is? Drop a ward, you clueless support!

3rd Circle

Fireball—Fireball, the eternal god!

Fly—Bet you didn't see that coming. I can fly.

Ryan's Analytical Magic (casting outside the Weave)

Simplified Magic Missile—An even more simplified version of Magic Missile. Its power is reduced, but the difficulty of casting it is greatly lowered.

Identify—Information is valuable. Identifying magic items is a great source of income.

Comprehend Languages—What a desperate feeling it must be to be in another world and unable to understand the language.

Summon Undead I—Skeletons are actually pretty nice-looking, right?

Ray of Weakness—Necromancy is actually quite useful. It's just that the teacher doesn't like it. Sigh.

Feather Fall—Mom, I'm not afraid of heights anymore!

See Invisibility—I hate rogues, whether they're pirates or plagiarists.

Fly—Flying is one of humanity's great dreams.

Fireball—Explosions are art.]

Looking at the notes he had added, Ryan seemed to recall the happy times in college when he and his roommates and classmates had teamed up for games, watched anime, and traded memes. He grinned foolishly for a while, reminisced about the anime and games of his previous life, then closed the character sheet.

"It's time to get down to business." Ryan quietly collected himself and opened the file in the system titled "Third Optimization of the Magical Nodes for Roland's Lesser Fireball." "Thanks to the extraordinary genius of Archmage Roland, he invented Roland's Lesser Fireball, which added Empower Spell and spell penetration to a spell whose casting difficulty remained at the third-circle level. The awful thing is that the academy is so stingy. They only sell the original version, and the simplified version costs extra. Damn it, with that money, I might as well simplify it myself!"

As he muttered curses in his mind at the academy's greedy misers, wishing they would run into spatial turbulence every time they teleported and suffer a spell explosion every time they conducted an experiment, Ryan smoothly used Riemann integration from higher mathematics to model and analyze the spell's magical nodes.

"Thank goodness, thank goodness. Luckily, spells are magical enough; otherwise, I might have entered the ranks of the strong too soon. I can't believe I still have to worry about losing my hair in another world. This is so damn awful. Wuwu."