Frostbitten Wayfarer

A few months later on the day of Zoe’s birthday, she was in her kitchen cooking breakfast for herself. Smouldering coals created with her Cinders burned away and heated the pan she had on the stone platform above. A small slab of boar meat sizzled away in her pan, and Zoe cracked in a ryz egg she bought on her last trip into town next to it. The egg was much larger than she was used to and filled the pan around the boar steak.

Zoe stabbed into the orange yolk with her spatula, and scrambled up the egg around the chunk of meat. Blades of earth appeared next to her and cut into the boar steak, slicing the browned meat up into small chunks and mixed it into the egg.

She summoned some cheese she had bought and dumped it into the pan as she took it off the heat. The cheese melted into the egg and Zoe pressed the pan into a block of Frost she summoned to cool it off a bit before she tipped the omelette out onto some brul she toasted.

Zoe nodded to herself as she sat down at her table and dug into her meal. Making her own food was a wonderful thing, she knew. The pride she would feel from picking the vegetables herself, from gathering the milk and making the cheese. From picking eggs up every morning from her ryz. It would be a wonderful, peaceful life.

But that was hard, and sometimes Zoe really wanted some modern luxuries. So she stored some of her favourite ingredients away in her bracelets to be used now and then. Some cheese and eggs, and even a bit of flour. Which was also called brul here, for some reason. It seemed the crop was called brul, the powder was called brul and the bread like food was called brul.

Was that how bread worked back on her old world? Was bread just the name of a crop at some point? Or was bread called the crop at some point? She wasn’t sure but didn’t think so. Bread was any grain. But rye bread was still just called rye sometimes.

Maybe there was a term for bread here, but they only had brul so that’s what they used? Zoe shrugged to herself as she finished off her breakfast.

The months were fruitful. Much of her home was tidied up, the shallow scratches were sanded away and the deeper grooves Zoe just cut holes around and filled in with new matching blocks of wood. The somewhat piecemeal look to her home had grown on her, but she still took the time to weave in icy splinters to her floors and walls then enchant them with Enchanting, Meditation and Shield-fighting to hopefully stand up to the pests next time she left.

She had found a few of the rats crawling around her cave early on. They were adorable, gray and fuzzy with long tails. The males always made her giggle when she saw them. But after the first few weeks, she never saw them inside again. Maybe one day she’d catch a few and keep them as pets. With all her skills, she could build a nice environment for them she thought. Nor would she need to worry about any diseases they may carry.

Most of her time was spent enchanting things and trying out some of her new skills. Water was a useful one, if she didn’t already live in a place with ample water. She was able to create taps that spewed water with just an inkling of mana. Perhaps one of the earliest enchantments she’d ever used coming to this world, she realized as she thought back on her desperation for a toilet early on.

Fire simply created fire, and allowed her some modicum of control over it through her enchantments. Though not as much as Earth or Wind gave her. She was able to create lanterns and torches that burned forever, as long as they were provided with mana. And she could even add simple patterns to the flames as they burned.

Cinders let her control how hot something was, and Gales provided a lightness effect when used as an enchantment. Both seemed quite useful to her in theory but in practice she hadn’t found anything interesting to do with them.

At first she thought of enchanting her kitchen tools with Cinders to cook things on, but it cost more mana than just filling her stove with Cinders. And while she didn’t need to worry much about mana anymore anyway, it also just didn’t work better. Having the hot coals below let her move the pan about and control how hot it was.

But if she just enchanted the pan with Cinders? Then the pan was just hot. There was no adjustments to be made, no hot spot or cold spot. It was just all hot, all the time.

And Gales had a similar issue. It seemed useful, in theory. Making things lighter was an incredible boon. She could lift them easier with her magic, or even with just herself. But anything that she actually wanted to move was already movable without its help. One day, making something lighter would be helpful. But around the home? Nothing was heavy enough to benefit from that enough to make it worth doing, anyway.

Maybe if she opened a store, she could enchant them with Gales so weaker people could carry her products around. Maybe if she had a horse drawn carriage she could help out her horses by enchanting the carriage to make it lighter.

All of her Seasoned Gales skills did what she expected. Tempestuous Echo was a particularly fun one for her though, and gave her a renewed motivation to manage to fit four enchantments into an object at once. Leaving behind a dusty cloud of rushing wind whenever her doors opened made her home feel so much more badass than it really was, and she wanted to make that a permanent structure if she could.

Adaptive Gales was funny, making whatever was placed on it lose its balance and fall. Even if she enchanted a flat block of stone with Adaptive Gales and then placed another flat surface onto it, somehow the object would lose balance and fall off. Zoe didn’t see many uses for it, but thought it might be funny to enchant her floors with it if she ever ended up having visitors over.

Tempestuous Arsenal had a particularly exciting change for her, however. While Frost and Cinders were both destructive, Gales was convenient. The heavy winds pushed her projectiles faster, and while the winds were much more destructive than her Wind skill was that didn’t mean they couldn’t be used safely if she was careful.

A small, brittle frost projectile enchanted with a weak Tempestuous Arsenal explosion had become one of her favourite toys to play with. The projectile itself exploded on impact with hardly enough power to cause damage to even just the trees’ bark. And the explosion of wind that radiated out did little more than blast a puff of air out around the impact.

She found herself firing the projectiles off at branches to knock down fruits rather than using her Frost or Earth to slice it off just for fun more than she would have expected. Of course, if she flooded the projectile with as much power as she could then it was just as destructive as any other Arsenal skill enchantment. But a spattering of ice or a cloud of ash just didn’t have the same pop as a burst of wind did. It felt like she was hurling small balloons around, and it sparked as much joy as she could have ever hoped for.

Moaning Point was always in the back of her mind, and she had decided on her goals for finishing off the dungeon at long last. Getting her fifth class was a possibility if it came down to that, but she wanted to give it a try without her fifth class first. Clearing a dungeon, even if it was a lodestone dungeon, was sure to be a strong achievement for her fifth class and she wanted to at least entertain the thought.

But, she did want to get as close as she could to her fifth class before she tried. There was no point in leaving power on the table. Her last class upgrade was at sixty one, which meant that her fifth class would be at least one hundred twenty two.

Zoe set that as her goal for her first attempt. She also decided that she wanted to get whatever the spring variant of the Seasoned classes would be. Something to do with water, she supposed. Would the enchantment just make things more wet? More fluid, maybe? She wasn’t sure, but wanted to find out.

Which meant that any class levels she got before spring would be pointless since she’d reset her class for Seasoned Wetness, or whatever the system called it. Instead, she focused on levelling her other skills as much as she could.

Early on, she had spent some extra time with Eliza training her resistances and studying more of her Space and Time magics. But Eliza was only around for a few weeks, and was only around at all because she had something to do. So she didn’t get much progress towards either.

Zoe’s resistances, at least the ones Eliza had access to, had all made it to at least level fifteen. With Zoe’s significantly higher health and ability to heal herself, Eliza was able to dish out much more damage than she was the first time and Zoe’s levels reflected that. And with Zoe’s new magics, she was able to return the favour for Eliza this time too.

She had also added in Klir leaves to much of her diet, and her poison resistance level had skyrocketed as a result. Zoe wasn’t sure why she hadn’t thought to do that before in her years of setting up her home, but late was better than never after all.

With the remaining months, Zoe focused on bringing up her lower level skills that had been falling behind but still seemed somewhat useful. Days spent tracking animals through the forests, and gathering all the klir she needed for her new poisonous diet. Even her Vampyric Charm was let out on full blast as she wandered through the forests, and had started levelling again.

In a strange twist of fate, Meditation had become a skill she used less and less. None of her skills were intense enough to warrant needing the extra mana regeneration these days, at least not while she was around her home. And in the midst of battle she could drain her mana away but meditating in the middle of a dangerous battle was hardly possible for her.

Maybe one day she’d come back to the skill and try to master it to that extent, but with all of her other multipliers to her mana its utility had fallen to the wayside. One of the most important skills to her early on had become so forgettable now, outside of remaining one of the most useful enchantments she had.

Zoe had tried her hand at Alchemy a few times, but with very limited tools and even less understanding of recipes she wasn’t able to make much. A few times she made a deathly looking sludge of whatever she found, but doing alchemy alone showed her perhaps the largest problem with alchemy.

How were you supposed to test what your creations really did? She had made clearly alchemical substances, mixtures that glowed and pulsed with latent energy. But was she just supposed to eat them? Even if they weren’t made from anything potent themselves, that didn’t mean it was safe to eat.

She had a flashback to one of her first jobs testing somebody’s potions. What was her name again? Lauren? Lorna? Zoe shrugged. In hindsight, that was one of the dumber things she did. Many of the things she did early on were horribly stupid.

Maybe she was still making stupid decisions, Zoe thought. But she hoped that they were less common than they used to be at least. That she had been able to reflect and grow as a person in the decade since she arrived on Abyllan.

Her Alchemy skill stagnated at level thirteen as she stopped making potential poisons that could kill her. Next time John’s was open she’d pick up a book on alchemy. Maybe she should just go visit another bookstore and grab a bunch of books on everything she might be interested in anyway. It’s not as though John was the only bookstore in Flester.

Something about him just had this unexplainable pull, though. This urge to trust and rely on him that she couldn’t understand but never ended up lingering on.

Many more months passed as Zoe continued focusing on her skills and thinking about her plan for Moaning Point.

What would the boss end up being, anyway? Eliza had offered to share, but Zoe was interested in finding out for herself. Having everything laid out for her like that was maybe smarter, maybe safer. But it was so boring. Zoe liked the thrill of it all, the excitement from seeing something.

As long as it went well. When it didn’t, it was quite unfun. But Eliza didn’t seem to be worried for Zoe, so she assumed it would be at least somewhat okay.

Spring came around, and Zoe checked on her class selection. The new variant was called Seasoned Torrents, and Zoe pushed the system to take it.

*Ding* You have unlocked the Seasoned Torrents class. Your body and soul will be adjusted to accommodate the change.

Everything looked the same as she was used to, but with water and time. Zoe took Torrent Manipulation and spent some time piecing apart the mana to get the general skill for herself.

*Ding* You have unlocked the Torrents general skill.

Zoe smiled and then settled in on her preferred setup for the seasoned class. Water and Time affinity, Torrential Echo and Arsenal, and Adaptive Torrents. The Adaptive skill was supposed to infect things with a drowning effect, for whatever that ended up meaning.

She enchanted a block of stone with Adaptive Torrents and then placed a coin on it. As soon as she did, water began to seep out of the brownish orange copper and onto her wooden floors. Zoe put the coin away and pulled the earth back, then cleaned up the water with her Water skill.

All that was left between her and the top of Moaning Point was a few more levels, and she knew of a particular Abomination that might help her get them while also getting some petty revenge on the jerks that picked on her just cause she was new.