Frostbitten Wayfarer

Zoe sat on her bed in her cave after getting back from one of her expeditions, her final one with people she didn’t know. One of the first people who pestered her for help had begun taking over some of the responsibility, and Zoe was happy to be able to let it rest after so long.

Fred had taken the Cold Wizard class for his first class, which was one of the best first classes Zoe had heard somebody have other than herself. And after hearing about the Elemental Archmage class that Zoe shared had made it his life’s passion to get it for himself.

Just a few months prior he managed to get the final wizard class for himself — Earth Wizard, and easily reached the one thousand intelligence required for the feat to combine them together. Another few months on Moaning Point and he was more than capable of keeping a group alive on the lower levels, which was most of what people needed anyway. He struggled once the groups of mages came out, but so few who wanted an escort on Moaning Point ever made it up that far anyway.

Unlike Zoe’s generosity however, Fred did require payment. Not in the form of coin, but information. He had a passion for the system and all of its workings so if somebody wanted an escort through Moaning Point they needed to share information about any classes they got as a result of his help. Fred had even taken a lie detecting skill in one of his classes just to make sure the information he got was as accurate as it could be.

But that was Fred’s business now, and while the odd person would likely still pester Zoe for her help due to her much greater power and reputation, in time Fred’s reputation would grow and she’d fall to the wayside. One benefit of being an immortal, Zoe supposed. If you wanted to be forgotten about, you could wait a few years until nobody remembered you. Or just wait until everybody died.

Zoe had made plans with Joe and Emma to take them to Moaning Point in a few weeks, and the excitement ate away at her. Kenzie and Sue were both moving out of Joe’s inn after all these long years, getting their own place near Peter and Lauren. Joe wanted to help out with the move and make sure they were fine, and then he intended to shut down the inn for a while to come see what Zoe’s life was all about.

And Emma had been wanting to check out Moaning Point for quite a while but was saddled with the responsibility of her cats. Even if she could find somebody she trusted to watch them, leaving them without her for months at a time gave her a great deal of anxiety. But with her new class, Gafoda wouldn’t be that far away. As long as she had the mana for it, distance was a small obstacle.

Over the last two years since she got the class, Emma had been putting all of her points into a mix of Intelligence and Wisdom to bolster her mana regeneration, as well as even worked on Meditation. In a moment, Mana had gone from something that she sometimes needed a bit of to a means of transportation. And that made a big difference to how eager she was to invest time and resources into it.

It made Zoe more than a little envious. Emma warped around wherever she needed to go as freely as one would float in salt water. One moment she’d be preparing food in the kitchen, and the next she’d be in Joe’s inn borrowing some sugar she forgot, and then the next she was back in the kitchen like she’d never even left.

And even with Emma’s far improved mana regeneration, it didn’t hold a candle to Zoe’s. After all of her time taking people up Moaning Point, Zoe made it up to level one hundred nine, with most of her points put into Intelligence. She had ninety nine thousand mana, with enough wisdom to recover more mana than she could even comprehend. Iff she drained her entire pool, it would fill back up in seconds, even without Meditation.

If Emma with her mediocre mana was capable of such conveniences, what could Zoe do with a similar class? Could she walk to Gafoda in seconds? Travel to Korna for an afternoon lunch? Visit the Ijun empire and be back in time for dinner?

Zoe already had a time aligned class, so maybe her next goal someday would be getting a very good space aligned third class. Maybe a space enchanting class, and then she could start making her own storage items, too. That would be pretty cool, Zoe thought.

But how would she get a space class? Time was simple enough, all she did was get thrown into another world at a convenient time for massive benefits. But could she get hurled into space and end up with a Spacial Decider feat? It didn’t seem all that realistic to her.

Emma got her space class through upgrading her warrior class through the tiers and pushing it towards space aligned effects. Zoe had, for better or worse rather stagnated with her Seasoned classes. Zoe laid down on her comfortable bed and stretched out across, her feet just dangling off the edge for a moment before she pulled them back.

The Seasoned classes were comfortable. She knew what they were capable of, she enjoyed the effects they provided. Massive bonuses to her regeneration, incredible amounts of stats per level. They were powerful classes that time and time again she fell back onto. But they were hurting her now that she had Seasoned Persistence.

Maybe she could combine them together and get another Seasoned Persistence — and maybe having two of them would even do something new. But was that something she wanted to pursue? Not really, not yet. There was no reason to think that two Seasoned Persistence classes would combine into a greater. Maybe if she had four of them, but that was so far removed from what Zoe considered possible that it was little more than a silly thought.

She’d have to stop taking the Seasoned classes, then. Her enchanting class was competent enough, but for her fourth class she needed to find something better than Seasoned Gales.

And what better time for that, than when she was going to be taking her friends up the lower levels of Moaning Point anyway?

Zoe turned her attention inwards and looked through her class options. The list was staggering at this point, hundreds if not thousands of different classes available to her. Zoe used to wonder why some of the lower tier classes weren’t removed when the higher tier classes were unlocked. If she had access to Master Swordsman, why did she still need to see she could take Apprentice Swordsman?

But now, she assumed it was probably a toss up between whether it was intentional so people could still make the combination classes or just the creator of the system being far lazier than they should be. She filtered out all of the nonsense classes with low requirements and looked through the more interesting ones before she smacked herself for being so dumb.

She hadn’t even realized the pitfall she’d fallen into all these years. Every time she looked through her class selection, she would do the same thing. Ignore all of the classes with low requirements and focus on the ones that seemed powerful with more powerful requirements. Strong feats, high skill levels and the like.

But that’s not what she needed. She was young, only just about fifty years old at this point. She had centuries, even millenia ahead of her. If nothing terrible happened, even whatever the next marker was. Was there even a word for ten thousand years?

Eon was a million years, millenium was a thousand. But was there a word for anything in between? Deca millenium?

Zoe had all the time in the world left, and so far had spent the last twenty years of her life focusing on what she was good at. Classes with high requirements would never be something new, they would expand on what she was already good at. A class that required level one fifty in the Fire skill would never give her space magic, even if it would be a powerful fire class.

If the only thing that Zoe had that was at all relevant to space magic was the space resistance, then she’d never get a dedicated space class with high requirements. She just didn’t have the achievements necessary for it, she didn’t have any space feats or high level space skills or powerful space classes to build upon. And who knows what other magics and class alignments she wasn’t even aware of yet!

Instead, Zoe shifted her attention as she looked through her classes. Rather than looking for classes with high requirements she looked for classes that had low requirements and no matching class of a higher tier. Apprentice Fire Mage had low requirements, but since she had access to Master Fire Mage, it didn’t matter.

What Zoe wanted were classes that helped her do things she was bad at. Capitalized on her abilities that she never achieved anything in. A potter class, or even a sinkhole wizard would provide her greater variety than yet another class that would give her Alacrity.

There were a lot that fit the bill. Zoe had many skills that were still stuck at a low level — Alchemy, Pottery, Smithing, Mining and Fishing were all still below twenty five which tended to be a threshold for many classes. And each had a dozen classes of different varieties to go with them. An Apprentice Mystic Potter requiring some intelligence along with the skill or an Apprentice Earthcarver that required both the Earth and Mining skills.

Most were classes that Zoe had seen before and just ignored because they were so simple, but they were all helping her with things she was bad at. Which was exactly what she wanted, because she was very bad at space magic.

The issue was deciding which of the classes was most likely to at some point lead to some space aligned class unlocks. A mining class may get a storage skill for all of the rubble they clear out of their tunnel, a potter might get storage for their clay. Maybe a fisher would have storage for their tackle or the fish they catch.

Really the problem wasn’t which class could, but which path Zoe wanted to try first. Maybe she could follow in Emma’s footsteps and take a magic warrior combination class and hope for some kind of weapon storage.

Ultimately, Zoe settled in on one of the alchemy classes — she had a bunch that required different elements or seemed to have some fancy effects. But she chose the simplest, least interesting Alchemy class she found.

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

Effects:

- Apprentice Alchemist: Gain seven stat points and two intelligence for each level in this class.

- Eager Learner: Gain increased experience when learning from those with more experience.

- Alchemy: Combine the natural mana within your ingredients to create magical effects.

Available Skills:

- Mana Affinity: Increased Mana affinity

- Mana Manipulation: Manipulate the raw mana of the world to your will.

- Mana Imbuing: Fill an object with unattuned mana.

- Object Examine: Derive additional information about an object’s properties.

- Preservation: Preserve an object.

- Alchemical Scouring: Remove dirt and grime from objects.

The class was mediocre at best, and a bit of an eye opener for Zoe. This was what most people’s first class would be like? Even when she first got Seasoned Frost it was night and day compared to whatever this was. If Zoe had to be saddled with something so horrible for her first class… She shuddered at the thought.

It was so bad that she found it hard to commit to keeping it, but she needed to. It would give her a paltry quantity of stats, and absolutely no effects that were actually useful to her. Eager Learner? Maybe she could give Jeffrey a visit and learn a bit, but getting this class to whatever her cap would be was going to be quite an experience. She’d have almost no stats by then, too. But she’d get a better class, and could do it all over again with something a little more relevant to herself.

And while the effects sucked, the skills were at least somewhat interesting. Mana Manipulation was unnecessary, which meant she had a permanent cleaning skill she could slot in. At least until she replaced the class with something much better.

Object Examine was the first that Zoe tried out, and it didn’t do an awful lot. On most things she used it on, the skill did nothing at all. Until she tried it on a klir leaf and the skill gave her a vague feeling of mana and poison. It was very slight, and from just the skill she had no idea how poisonous it would be. But it was interesting.

As an enchantment though, the skill shone. If she enchanted something with the skill then she could make the enchantment only activate if certain objects were close. Unfortunately even as an enchantment, it didn’t do a great job of getting the specifics right so any klir leaf would count as a key. Maybe if she levelled it up she could make proper keys, but it was still an interesting enchantment anyway.

Preservation was boring. If Zoe didn’t have storage items then it might have been a fantastic skill that she used every day. But she did have storage items, and quite a few of them at that. If she needed to preserve something, leaving it in her storage items and forgetting about the disaster that was in there with them was a much better solution.

But Mana Imbuing was quite interesting, since it was almost like enchanting but very different on a fundamental level. With enchanting, Zoe had to flood an object with her own mana. But Mana Imbuing cost much more mana to do a similar thing but by instead forcing the ambient mana into the object. It left the object utterly unusable to her Enchanting skill, but oozing with mana she could use for alchemy.

As an enchantment, the skill worked almost identically to Mana Storage. It created a pocket of mana that the enchantment could draw from to power itself with the only difference being that Zoe was unable to fill the pocket herself without the use of Mana Imbuing. But for the purposes of what she used the enchantment for, it was plenty good enough.

It was an odd feeling for Zoe, looking through the class. It was by far the weakest class she’d ever taken. And yet she felt like she’d made more progress in the last twenty minutes than she had in the last two years because of it.