Frostbitten Wayfarer

Korna had quite a number of libraries, none of which quite as magnificent as Kaira library had been. Though, that was a bit of a theme with Korna in general. Flester was mystical and wondrous, while Korna had a lot of restraint when it came to casual displays of magic. There were no libraries with incredible floating platforms that let you walk through the tree roots, no floating crystal balls that were larger on the inside, just well maintained white buildings with hints of magic drifting across the entrance.

Zoe didn’t mind it, the mysticism was fun and exciting but Korna’s lack of excitement was a nice change of pace. It made the city feel safe somehow, like it had been around long enough to develop its own style, or maybe even a proper building code. It was its own mark on the world, rather than an agglomerate of many people’s marks on the world, and it felt nice.

But, despite the libraries not being quite as magnificent, they were just as packed full of information. Korna was built above a ruin dungeon called The Pit. A gaping hole in the world that stretched down into the depths, filled with caverns and tunnels dug by a civilization long forgotten and defended by creatures that call the cold darkness their home.

Zoe had checked it out a number of times, there was a bit of a theme park set up at the top of the hole with some small pop up restaurants and even a handful of games to play. Zoe’s favourite was a game with a fishing rod, where you tried to ‘catch’ treasure that lurked at the bottom of a hole somebody dug into the ground. The treasure was always some cute accessory — a pink frilly bow for her hair, or some fun colourful ribbons and the like.

The dungeon itself was more like what Zoe had expected when she first heard of them in this world. A hole about twelve meters in diameter that cut straight down into the ground, with a creaky wooden staircase that spiralled around the edge and led down to a mass of damaged mining tunnels. Rotting wooden supports creaked and groaned as the earth pressed down into them, and in some places new supports had even been put in.

Rather than the aimless tunnels that Zoe found below her home back near Flester, these were organized and planned. Larger main tunnels with much more sturdy supports with the smaller less sturdy tunnels branching off of them, and the smaller tunnels even had small holes dug into the walls at uneven spacing.

The main tunnels connected to bigger rooms full of damaged wooden chests that may once have been full of loot, before the people of Korna had raided it for all it was worth. Zoe had heard rumours and talk of unexplored regions even deeper down, but treasure wasn’t what she was here for anyway.

What she cared about were the shadows that stretched along the rock, and crept behind the wooden supports near a flickering flame. The shadows that came to life and grasped at her body like a vine that wanted to pull her into the ground.

Without any light, they didn’t seem to bother her. Denizens of the darkness were friends to the shadows, she supposed. But with light, they jumped out from behind every crack and crevice and swarmed her. Fire was quite effective against them, flooding the cavern with flames and blotting out all the shadows killed them all and left her gasping for oxygen she could quickly replace with her Wind skill.

Eliza had returned from one of her jobs and Zoe spent some time with her trying to study the Space skill some more, and without her Mana Sight, it was a completely different process. Rather than seeing the mana itself twisting and warping as it was shunted through space, she felt the mana pressing into her. She felt her foot touching her ear, her shoulder touching her knee.

It was different without her enchanting class. Maybe with enough time, and something more simple, she could figure it out. But with something as complicated as Space, Zoe felt like she was wandering through a maze blind and dizzy.

She found another inn after bleeding another dozen gold on Oaniga and it’s associated businesses. A much smaller inn attached to a tavern called The Weary Rest. The room was quite nice with enough space for Zoe to even get some work or exercise in if she wanted in the mornings. The bed was quite comfortable, the food was tasty and far more diverse than she had expected it to be. And all for the much more reasonable price of forty copper per night at that.

And yet, with the recent comparison to the luxury that was Oaniga, The Weary Rest felt almost squalid. The food was bland in comparison and didn’t give her any regenerative buffs — not that she needed one anyway, it was just nice. The bed may as well have been rough gravel ground that ate into her back compared to the incredible bed at Oaniga. And the blankets only wrapped around her twice instead of six times.

It was all quite nice, she had to remind herself every now and then. It was only when she would unfairly compare it to Oaniga that it would seem lacking. For the price — which was what she could afford she reminded herself, The Weary Rest was a lovely inn that she’d recommend to anybody. Comparing it to something that cost almost ten times as much just wasn’t fair.

She sat on one of the wooden chairs at a small round table eating her grilled cheese and looking through her stat sheet. In the past few months, she’d spent almost all of her spare time down in The Pit and had reached level one twenty two, which started to scare her. She reset quite a few times for a low starting point on her third Seasoned class, but it was looking more and more like she’d gotten a high roll this time.

Five hundred points each were put into Vitality, Intelligence and Endurance with two hundred each into Strength and Dexterity and the remaining two hundred ninety dumped straight into Wisdom. And the two she got from her birthday went into Vitality to bring it to a nice even eight hundred.

It wasn’t the most optimal stat distribution, but it was enough for what she was doing and if things went well she’d be reset back down to twenty two soon anyway. Or maybe even eight. How did merging a class into your first class work anyway?

Very little of the research she had done on merging classes had shown anything concrete on that. Whatever she found tended to be mere confirmation that it was possible rather than any specifics on how it worked. Though she did find one elemental mage combination that gave her a lot of confidence in her own plan.

There were four elemental wizard classes — Cold, Heat, Earth and Water. If you had all four of them, and the Archmage feat, then you would combine them into an Elemental Archmage class.

The class itself didn’t interest Zoe very much, her Seasoned class would give her much the same benefits that the archmage class likely would and she’d rather focus on something to do with enchanting going forward.

But, what was far more interesting was that the book she read it in mentioned that the class had undiluted magical diversity. Zoe spent some time researching what that meant, hoping it was a standardized definition for something and she could just find a book on it but ended up needing to research related topics and hope she found information on it.

There were a few names for the phenomenon, if it could even be called that. Some called it diluted magical diversity, others called it regulated elemental power. But they all meant the same thing, most classes that involved multiple elements did so at the cost of power.

Zoe’s understanding of it was that each class tier had a certain amount of elemental power allocated to it. Like tokens that could be spent in a shop of class selections. Increasing the power of one element was rather cheap, and so classes that focused on only one element had a lot of power to throw around.

Whereas on the other side, increasing the number of elements available was quite expensive. Which meant that most of the time, there was a tradeoff you had to make when you chose a class. You could either get the very powerful, single element class. Or you could take the more versatile but notably weaker class with multiple elements.

But, in some cases — like the Elemental Archmage, there was no tradeoff to be made. You got the versatility of multiple elements but without the cost that would normally come. The power was undiluted. And the theory made sense to Zoe, when she took Elemental Master the one thing that she noticed was how much weaker it was than Seasoned Frost. It had control over so many more elements, but the skills felt so lacking.

And if things went well, then it meant her combined seasoned class would also be undiluted. Able to wield the full power of each of the individual classes without making any sacrifices.

Elements was rather confusing as a term as well, Zoe found. There seemed to be two definitions. One was fire, water, earth and air, or at least a group of four roughly similar to those in theme. Those were elements, and most of the time when a class had elemental in its name, it was referring to something like those four.

Zoe did find one strange Elemental Destroyer class that had a focus on Gravity, Space, Time and Lightning though, which was a bit of an outlier. Unfortunately, the author who wrote the book with it had only met somebody with the class and they weren’t willing to share the specifics about how to acquire it.

And the other definition of elements was any type of damage or magic. Physical was an element, as it had an affinity which meant it could be magical in nature, supposedly. Or maybe just because it could do damage, she wasn’t sure. Just as Disintegration or Flora would be. The more she learned about the system, the more she thought it was poorly designed, if it really was designed.

There were inconsistencies everywhere, weird bits that didn’t make sense. Even the descriptions on many of her skills seemed to be pointless fluff more than actual descriptors of what they were capable of. But it only really broke once for her, and even that seemed to be a consistent problem if Richard was to be believed. The system worked, it was just odd in so many ways.

Korna’s passion for clothes had infected Zoe and become something of a hobby for her in the months she’d spent working on her levels. Once she learned to be more specific with her wants, the clothes started to be a lot nicer for her. She added a couple of nice frilly dresses with rainbow patterns on them to her collection, along with an assortment of brightly coloured pants made from a wonderful soft fabric that she loved.

She had even bought a few outfits to bring back for Joe and Emma, a few that she thought they’d enjoy and a couple for both of them that were a little more outlandish.

Word of the little village that sprung up around Zoe’s home had even spread all the way to Korna. Or at least she assumed it was, since people talked about a place called Foizo north of Flester’s ruins that was currently looking for new settlers to come and help build up the new town.

Zoe smiled at the name when she first realized it was her home. Foizo wasn’t her favourite name, and if she was involved she would have much preferred something referencing the hill it set up next to. But she wasn’t super invested in it at any rate, and knowing that the village she left behind had grown so much that they had a proper name and people were talking about it so far away made her a little happy.

There was a lake just to the east of Korna appropriately called Korna Lake that Zoe had enjoyed relaxing at a few times, when she could spare a few minutes. The lake had just barely frozen over with a layer of icy slush on the surface over the winter, but as spring came the ice melted and Zoe found herself hopping in for a swim more and more often. The chilly water in the early spring was pleasant with all of her resistances — rather than the shock she first expected when she hopped in, and floating around in the water was calming for her.

Levels had started to slow down a little as she got higher and higher, which she had expected. Zoe wasn’t sure how experience — if that was even what was involved, was supposed to work in the system. Killing things got her levels faster than just waiting around or using her skills, but it wasn’t by an awful lot if she was being honest. She did some research on the topic, but nobody seemed to have a definitive formula for it either.

Killing things higher level than you gave you more progress towards your next level, having more classes made you level much slower, but other than that nobody seemed to really understand exactly how levels worked. How much experience did a zombie from Moaning Point give, compared to a shadow from The Pit? As far as Zoe saw, there was no real, reasonable way to measure that. Maybe if somebody without a class that gave experience bonuses spent years or even decades they could get some numbers. But who would dedicate so much of their life to something so relatively pointless?

At level one twenty two, she was getting only one or sometimes two levels every day. Worst case scenario, it could be a month or maybe a little more before she got her final Seasoned class. And then she’d have to spend probably another month or two levelling up to a basic standard of confidence for herself before she could travel back to Foizo and share her progress.

Zoe leaned back in her wooden chair and stretched. If she pushed herself just a little bit more, she should be able to get everything done and even make it back to Flester before the harsh winters. Or, Foizo now she supposed.