At last, I managed to get out of the castle. I could have sneaked out, but I felt it was not worth defying the lord's orders over something like this.
It was summer now, and the weather was clear, but the temperature was not warm. It felt more like autumn. I guessed it was around 10 to 15 degrees Celsius, a little cold, but that was summer in the North.
Since I wanted to hunt and test my magic today, I bought a decent shortbow and twenty arrows with wrought-iron heads.
The arrowheads were broadheads meant for hunting. They were not steel, so they could not fully penetrate armor, but they could pierce and kill medium-sized beasts. For protection, I also had a sword, a dagger, and several throwing knives. I spent three gold dragons on these weapons.
It took me an hour to walk to Farmer's Village, a small village on the edge of the Wolfswood.
I bought some provisions in the village. I had left the castle at first light, and when I arrived here, I guessed it was about six in the morning. The sun set at seven in the evening, so I had to leave here by six at the latest. That gave me twelve hours.
Before I tried hunting, I wanted to test all my new magic, especially the locating spells. I thought they would make me a lot of money.
Thanks to the Promoheba (Locate Plants) spell, if I remembered seeing a plant directly with my own eyes, without any intermediary, I could use this spell to find it. I intended to search for every valuable and useful medicinal herb I could think of.
For example, ginkgo trees could slow cognitive decline, help with diabetes, and affect bone healing, or turmeric could be used as an anti-inflammatory to treat arthritis, and it was delicious, or evening primrose oil and cajeput had good anti-inflammatory properties, or echinacea could be used to shorten the symptoms of the common cold because it contained antibiotics, or lavender and chamomile had good anti-anxiety properties when used as tea. Herbal medicine in this world lagged behind even medieval Earth. They did not even know the effects of lavender or chamomile. Perhaps it was because this world had no tea culture, so they did not try brewing tea from various plants.
So I cast the spell. "Promoheba (Locate Plants), ginkgo tree." As I spoke those words, I felt something like a huge wave spreading out from me in every direction. Apart from losing some mana and feeling that wave, there was no other reaction, but then I felt a pull from somewhere. I could also see a glowing effect, so there were ginkgo trees here.
It took me a little while to reach one of the locations, but this was definitely a ginkgo tree. There were ten here. I did not think this was their native habitat.
I thought they must have come from somewhere with more rain than snow, like the Riverlands or the Reach, but ginkgo trees were very cold-resistant. They could survive at minus forty degrees Celsius.
The Wolfswood consisted mainly of oaks, evergreens, and blackthorn, along with sentinel trees, soldier pines, hawthorn, beech, ash, chestnut, ironwood, fir, and others, meaning there was an abundance of timber and stone here.
I gathered enough leaves for myself without harming the trees. This forest was really big. I meant enormous. I thought it covered about eight hundred square kilometers.
"Promoheba (Locate Plants), turmeric." But nothing happened. I lost no mana, nor did I feel a wave. So this spell had a cooldown. I would try the other spells while I waited.
"Quersumby (Oak Shield)." When the casting was complete, my right arm began itching madly. Then I felt something growing beneath my clothes. I hurriedly pulled my shirt open and saw a wooden-looking bracer around my right forearm.
It looked as though it was made of oak bark, but when touched, it did not feel like wood. It was too hard.
I was curious how hard it was, but I was not going to hack at my arm with a sword. It looked three centimeters thick. So I laid my forearm across a large rock, so that I would not cut or slash my arm, drew the dagger from my waist, and began applying some force to my bark armor.
The dagger did not pierce it, but I had not used all my strength either. When I lifted the dagger, there was no hole or dent in the armor, but there was a white mark.
This time, I cast "volhen gryves (Aspect of the Bear)." I placed the dagger against the edge of the armor and used all my strength to try to break it. When that failed, I pulled the dagger in a slicing motion.
Screech!
The sound it made was not what steel striking wood should have sounded like. It sounded more like steel striking steel, but there was a scratch several millimeters deep in the armor.
I checked my dagger to see whether the armor had damaged its edge, but it was not damaged. It still had a sharp edge, but it was not as sharp as the edge on the other side. It had become a little dull.
I did not intend to carry out any more dangerous experiments on my arm. So I decided to try it on an animal I caught. This spell lasted one hour. When the time was up, it turned into a piece of rotten bark and fell off my arm.
The next spell I would use was Vocadyni (Summon Beast). To use this spell, I had left Erebus in Winterfell, not because I wanted a little peace and quiet, but for the experiment.
So if the spell succeeded, it would mean I had enough mana. I knew its range was twenty kilometers, but I did not know how much mana it required. This spell had no specific mana cost.
"Vocadyni (Summon Beast), Erebus." I felt the space beside me begin to bend and spin, and then a black vortex appeared. The vortex began shaking, and the next second, Erebus flew to my side, and the vortex disappeared. At a distance of five kilometers, I had used fifteen mana points. Following that logic, at twenty kilometers, I should use about sixty mana points.
If I wanted to prove my hypothesis about Vocadyni (Summon Beast), I had to summon one of my familiars from at least six kilometers away and see whether the mana cost increased with distance. For that reason, I told Erebus to fly back to Winterfell.
He grumbled for a while, but still obeyed me and flew toward Winterfell. After a few minutes, he disappeared over the horizon.
In this world, ravens were the fastest means of communication. To see the limits of their speed and range, I had conducted an experiment with ravens under my control and my familiars to see whether there was a difference, and verified it.
I had some ordinary ravens and my familiars fly around Winterfell until they could fly no farther.
The results were interesting. Ordinary ravens had an average speed of fifty kilometers per hour and could only fly a hundred kilometers a day.
Let us assume the ravens Maester Luwin used were somewhat special, since I still could not control his ravens. Let us say they were at least fifty percent faster than ordinary ravens and had fifty percent more endurance, because I had tried chasing them with ordinary ravens, but they could not catch up at all. Yet Bo and Erebus could catch them easily, and they always tired before my familiars did.
So they had to be slower than my familiars and have less endurance as well. Bo's average speed was a hundred kilometers per hour, and she could fly a hundred and fifty kilometers a day. Erebus was slower, but had greater endurance. His average speed was eighty-five kilometers per hour, and he could fly two hundred kilometers a day.
So I thought the ravens Maester Luwin used probably flew at between sixty and seventy-five kilometers per hour, and they could fly a hundred to a hundred and forty kilometers a day.
I tried casting "Promoheba (Locate Plants), turmeric," and the spell succeeded. I thought it probably had a thirty-minute cooldown.
The wave of energy left me, and I waited for a pulling sensation, but it never came. So there was no turmeric within at least one kilometer of me.
I could not test any more magic unless I meditated or slept for at least six hours, because I only had five mana points left. So I sat on a rock and tried to sense the mana around me, trying to control and perceive it better, while Bo and her murder squad of crows and ravens served as my scouts so that predators or bandits would not ambush me.
By the time I had recovered all my mana, it was past noon. I was very hungry, so I had to eat something. I decided I would not just eat the bread and cheese the villagers had given me. I wanted some meat too.
So I cast "Promodynes (Locate Animals), rabbit." After the wave of energy, I felt pulling sensations from every direction. There were at least sixty to seventy locations, the closest about twenty meters away. I climbed a tree and looked toward that spot. Thanks to my enhanced vision, I could see as though I had a pair of binoculars. I could not see the rabbit, but I could see the tall grass moving.
I climbed a little farther so I could find better footing between two large branches, then leaned against the trunk, drew an arrow from my quiver, and nocked it.
I took a deep breath, drew the bowstring taut, held my breath, and steadied my aim. I was aiming directly at the place the sensation came from. When I was ready, I released the arrow, and it vanished into the tall grass, but the location shown by the magic was no longer there, if the other locations had disappeared too.
I had thought the duration had ended, but the other locations were still there. Only this one had disappeared.
I thought that meant the rabbit was dead. I jumped down from the tree and ran over. When I arrived, I began searching through the tall grass and found a brown rabbit with an arrow in its chest.
I cleared a patch of ground, arranged some stones in a circle, and made a campfire, then gathered enough dry wood to roast the rabbit, but before that, I had to skin and clean it. It felt a little strange, the animal's soft innards, and I really did hack it to pieces.
It was cut into several pieces. Unless they were starving, no one would pay for this rabbit. Its meat had many knife marks, and its fur was useless too. It had been skinned in many little pieces, when I could have taken the hide off in one piece.
This was my first time skinning and cleaning an animal. It did not look very good, but it was edible. So I lit the fire with a flick of my finger, put the pieces of rabbit meat on some sticks, and planted them in the ground beside the fire. It took some time, and tasted a little bland because I had not bought any seasonings, but the North did not have much in the way of seasonings anyway.
I sliced the bread down the middle, deboned half the rabbit, and put it inside with some cheese. It tasted good, but lacked seasoning. I really missed black pepper and red chilies. Because the soil here was close to freezing, chilies could not grow here and had to be imported from Essos or the Reach.