Nobles on Hortus are known to have a magical capacity for at least one element of magic. Many houses consider the combination of magics that would result from a mixing of bloodlines when proposing marriages. This has done wonders to reduce inbreeding, but interestingly, most children are found to be proficient in only one to two types of magic. “Tri-magi,” or those with three affinities, are unique, and the resultant magical affinity of three base affinities is usually dependent on the individual. While the sample pool is too small to bring conclusive data to bear, cases of the same base affinities resulting in different tri-magi have occurred in almost every case.

  While tri-magi are scarce, there have been no known cases of quadra magi. In one instance, there was an experienced traveler who had Fire, Water, Earth, and Wind affinities however, he was never able to combine all four into a coherent affinity.

  -Exert from a traveler’s guild report on affinity mixing on Hortus

  I wake to a numb aching pain across my body. Sleeping on a hardwood floor didn’t help all the wounds on my body. Several blinking notifications at the edge of my vision don’t make it any better.

  I know I had a battle’s worth of level-ups I’ve been ignoring, but now that I am conscious, I fight back the sleep from my nap, and it’s time to go through my messages. I’m more concerned about the throbbing pain than going through the notifications right now, and I need to understand how I’m still breathing. Concentrating on seeing the system notifications, my vision is quickly blotted out by a swarm of blue rectangles.

  My eyes go wide when I read the blood magic notification. I look at my screen to see the health hovering far too close to zero for my liking, with blinking notifications screaming at me that I have multiple bleed statuses ongoing.

  The elf archer beside me bled out. Instead of the blood pooling beneath the body, it looks as though all the blood is magnetized to me, running along the floor directly toward me. I piece together that my new blood magic has something to do with it. Then I look below me, and despite the bleed status and the blood running toward me, there’s very little blood under me.

  Somehow, I subconsciously consumed the elf and my own blood to heal myself. A part of me is kind of grossed out at consuming someone else’s blood, but at the same time, I don’t feel bad about using whatever I have to survive. Even if I could’ve consciously made the decision, I would have chosen to drink the blood if it meant I wouldn’t die.

  With another start, I see that my health regeneration has markedly improved. The base rate of recovery is now four times the normal rate. I ponder my magic affinities and wonder if I am turning into a magical vampire and what that says about my future.

  Despite how much it grosses me out, I reach out with all three affinities and pull on the blood around me. I feel warmth wherever the blood soaks into my body. It’s like when I was a kid and would swim in the cold pool, then jump in the hot tub to warm up. My mind and body become less sluggish, and all too quickly, the feeling of warmth and vitality is over.

  Without any more blood to help me recover, I turn to my stat points. I grunt as I feel an uncomfortable feeling beneath my skin; it feels like my veins are on fire. To top it off, I feel something rank being excreted from my skin, and that’s saying something too, since I’m covered in blood, and the body across from me is starting to smell after being dead a while.

  As I wait for the discomfort of stat increases to subside, I ponder how I should spend my points going forward. Is spreading my points across all my stats the best idea? With more points focused on magic or dexterity, I could capitalize on doing damage from a distance, completely avoiding fighting in close corners. In the fight to take the fort, I had to use everything I had: all my abilities. There’s not a point in the fight where I could have succeeded if I focused on one or two stats.

  I needed the strength for close corners, magic to give me an edge, and constitution to weather the arrows. Maybe one day, when I get my magic to a higher level, I might be able to become more of a glass cannon: able to do so much damage that I could risk not investing in my ability to defend or heal. The epitome of the “best defense is a good offense,” but even if I got to that point, I’m not sure I could commit. I get the feeling it would be a bad idea, since it would cripple my ability to use my blood magic, which would be a waste.

  I pull up a shortened window to only look at my resource pools and stats.

  My natural regeneration is nothing to scoff at, but with blood magic, I recover a significant chunk of my health pool. My health is still ticking down at a glacial pace, due to arrows still lodged in my arm and leg. The fact that I can recover so much while having arrows embedded in me speaks volumes to the power of my new affinity.

  Done with my introspection, I look at my surroundings and find a familiar ghostly human girl staring down at me in the middle of the wrecked dining hall. I reach for our bond and feel Morgana’s gaze laced with apathy, at least as much as she is capable of when she is without a body, but there’s something else there. Not concern for me, but a realization that she should be concerned, and an understanding that should I die, she’ll lose her only link to the material plane.

  With my mana pool close to half, I raise the elven archer, and Morgana possesses him. I feel an almost grateful feeling from her as she has some capacity to feel returned to her. I then turn to the arrows embedded in my body and start to summon the will to break them. I take deep breaths, psyching myself up to pull out the arrow shafts when I feel cold hands clamp down on my arm.

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  “Wait, Morgana, just give me a sec- argh!”

  I cry out as she snaps the arrow and pulls it out in a clean motion. My health dips slightly as I cradle the aching limb. As I am focused on the pain in my arm, she goes for my leg.

  I want to call out to her, but before I can say anything, she snaps the arrowhead off and pulls the shaft from my leg. Without a word, she finds a waterskin and slowly pours the water inside the canteen over my leg. I’m thoroughly unimpressed with her bedside treatment; she’ll be getting a scathing review on her feedback survey when this is over, but now isn’t the time to dwell on my treatment. I need to focus on my healing magic.

  I concentrate, feeling out with that mystical muscle to call on the healing spell form. I feel the wound closing, and a weird itchy feeling comes as the wound as I see it visibly heal. I gingerly stretch and flex the limb as the wound closes until only a white pinprick is evident to suggest I ever had a wound.

  I glare at Morgana, but she’s unfazed: returning a blank stare. I’m sure I see a twitch of a smile flash across her face, the sadist.

  ‘It needed to come out, and you were taking too long.’ She says in a bored monotone voice over the bond. I send out reluctant gratitude over our bond, even if I cannot summon the will to do so verbally.

  “I know I just gave you a body, but we actually need to know if there is anyone else here. If there is anybody else, I might need to run away.”

  She frowns at the thought of leaving the body. ‘I already checked. There is no one else here. They could be further in the island, but I don't have the will to go far enough to search the entire island. Even as you were nearing death, I felt myself fading too.’

  A flicker of concern flits over the elf’s face, like she’s trying to make the face but doesn’t remember how. I shiver at just how close I came to death.

  “I think it might be best if we stay in the fort to recover. The worst case is that they come back, and we can escape while they try to break in. I would rather have the vantage point of the walls to see an adversary coming than face them flat-footed in the wild. I’m lucky I fought the single archer I encountered inside the fort. Had he caught me in the wilderness, the fight would have been a very different story.”

  Morgana nods, being an attentive listener. Morgana brings another skin of water over. She tips the water skin, slowly pouring it over the wound, washing away my blood and grime. I concentrate on my magic, healing the gaping wound in my arm.

  Once the arm is healed, I get up, readying myself for the work to come. Over the next hour, we close the gate and generally clean up the fort in case we come under attack. It’s still dark and drizzling as we set about our tasks. I ask Morgana to stand on the wall and raise one of the goblins to be with her. I don’t have enough control to act in my own body and the goblin’s, but if the elf is taken out, at least Morgana will have a backup body.

  Despite my good health and level-ups, I feel sleep tugging at my mind. The lack of stress driving me forward and adrenaline crash pulls at me, as exhaustion from a full day weighs on me. I look down at my hands, cold and numb, as I feel the aftereffects of overexerting myself.

  I don’t like my chances of fighting if even one of the lizards finds me. Even with Morgana, any fight right now is too much. She said there’s no one around, but my recent brush with death has me paranoid.

  Instead of heading to one of the empty beds, I grab some blankets and hide in the supply closet as I fall asleep. I’m tempted to set an undead goblin to guard the door, but nothing would point to me hiding in the supply closet quite as strongly as an undead goblin standing in front of the door.

  Almost as soon as I close my eyes, I wake up later feeling stiff from sleeping in an awkward position for too long. Sleeping curled up in a ball in a corner doesn’t give me restful sleep, I enjoyed on Earth, but I’ll take what I can get. A sharp stench hits my nose, and I internally groan as I think back to all the bodies that have been sitting in the building the night before. Morgana sits in the corner of the room, diligently standing guard, ready to ambush anyone who opens the door to the building.

  ‘Please go check outside the building… in your ghost form, so we don’t alert anyone if they’re out there.’

  The elf sits in the corner before collapsing, as her spirit roams through the grounds. I eye the body of the elf in the corner, examining it from head to toe. As my mind clears the fog of sleep, I notice the body is doll-like in its appearance, still firmly in the uncanny valley despite once being alive. The bodies outside the closet had decayed, but the dark mana had somehow preserved the body.

  I ponder why the animated corpse didn’t decompose and how I can use this new discovery to my advantage. I reach out, gently coaxing more dark affinity mana to soak into the body. Reanimating something so big takes a lot of mana and concentration. Trying to enhance a corpse that is risen, it’s twice as difficult. I lose myself in concentrating and probing the process of how the dark mana is absorbed, so when the eyes of the elf corpse go wide, I jump, fumbling for my sword until I realize it’s just Morgana.

  ‘The room is clear.’ She sends telepathically through the bond.

  Despite the smell, I stuff down some rations and sip some water. While sitting at the table, I play with the water in my cup, and I reaffirm my desire to create a habit of using my magic whenever I have downtime. Levels are very easy to obtain for now, but I’m not sure they’ll always be this way. More importantly, I need more practice if I’m going to continue surviving in this new world. While I’m just surviving in a hostile land now, I have plans to do far more. I will be the all-powerful sorcerer I always played in video games and thrive.

  I’m tempted to cook some hot food; the thought of something warm and meaty instead of the dried rations makes my mouth water. I saw some food supplies preserved magically, or otherwise, that I can use to make a proper breakfast, but despite the ‘all clear’ from Morgana, I’m not willing to let my guard down.

  I don’t want to alert any stragglers by starting a fire. It’s possible not starting a fire would raise more flags, since I‘m not sure what normal for the base is. Maybe I should cook some breakfast, you know, just to keep my cover? Not because it would be tasty, and filling, and juicy… ok, I need to stop. I push aside my dilemma for now, but promise myself I will have some bacon and eggs before I leave.

  I munch on some of the dried-out fruits and hard bread, and as I do, I check in on Morgana through the bond. She sends back a pulse of boredom. The two emotions driving her undead form are a desire to protect me and a hatred for the elves. Without those two… she doesn’t have anything to anchor herself emotionally. An improvement from the emotionless ghost I met, but still far from being the happy farm girl I saw in my vision.

  While chewing on my lackluster breakfast, I wonder if she can taste. Having a body gave her back some emotional capacity, what else had she received? Would her taste still be the same, or would her stilled metabolism mean she desired another substance? Thoughts of her maltreatment flicker through my head. I hope that someday I’ll be able to share a nice meal with her. Give her a little bit of the peace that was stolen from her in life.

  With breakfast over, I do some stretches, a light workout to loosen up the soreness. The paranoia from the night before is slowly unclenching its grip on me. After I finish my stretches, I make my way to the dock to look out at the ocean. Aqua kinesis is one of my highest-level skills, but it’s one of the least effective as a weapon.

  Back on Earth, I heard of cases where high-pressure water is used to cut steel, but it takes all I can muster just to throw the equivalent of a magical water splash; there’s no way I’m close to the level of cutting things with pressurized water. Aquakinesis has been very useful to trip or knock opponents back, but ice is where my real combat ability will come from for the foreseeable future.

  I think back to how thoroughly that ice destroyed the elf’s throat. With that in mind, I focus on my aqua kinesis and ice manipulation. I pull water from the ocean and move my arms in a pinwheel motion, trying to imitate a water mage from a popular cartoon in my childhood. The movements don’t unlock a skill or new insights into magic. I could’ve sat in a chair and done the same exact thing, but mentally, something about the way arm movements required an ebb and flow gave me an easier time of doing the mental gymnastics to keep the water going.

  After about a half an hour of pulling the water around, I feel accomplished but have no insights into how I can use the water more effectively to take out foes. One thing I find particularly easy is spinning water around me in a circle. With some practice, I thin the water out into a sheet as I spin it, and it has some real force behind it. It might be able to knock over a goblin, but I think the ability to create a water barrier will better serve to deflect arrows.

  I’m not willing to have Morgana shoot arrows at me, despite the sadistic undead archer’s insistence that doing so would be good practice. I wonder how much of that is her wanting me to improve my skills as she grows attached to my continued survival, and how much of it might be the elf’s body’s latent desire to continue filling me with arrows.

  After training my aquakinesis, I focus on refining my creation of ice daggers. Creating sheets of water earlier actually helps me to refine my frozen weapons creations. Despite the breakthrough, I still can’t create blades of ice in still water. Choosing how the water freezes isn’t easy to direct, but I can create sheets of ice and icicles by shaping the water before I will the water to freeze. All I need to do is shape the water into something between the broad sheets of ice and the oblong shapes I can create now.

  Through the bond, I feel Morgana stir. I peer over to see the undead elf watching me from the sideline. With the elf’s vocal cords destroyed, Morgana hasn’t been able to test talking aloud.

  I look at the elf and its destroyed throat as I wonder if it’s a blessing I don’t have to hear the voice of those I killed while I’m awake.

  ‘I think it might be a good idea to go out and look for any others on the island.’

  “I guess you are right,” I reluctantly admit. “I wanted to stay quiet to surprise anyone who came here, but there’s no way of knowing if there are others out there, or if I am jumping at shadows. You should take a goblin instead, though. I think a dead goblin will cause less alarm. A smaller body and all that.”

  She nods, and though I feel some reluctance, she quickly changes to the undead goblin that I had stationed inside the main building earlier. As she heads out with the goblin corpse, I stare at the undead elf. With the undead elf standing lifeless before me, I decide to try working on my necromancy skills. When I practiced with the lizard the day before, I gave it explicit instructions.

  I attempt to use an ancient Earth practice that many of my family members have practiced when trying to show off their multitasking abilities: I have the undead pat its own head as I rub my stomach in a circle. It takes a few tries, as the commands get confused. Once I’m able to get it down, I work on a new pair of actions: tapping my foot, patting my head, and spinning my arm in a circle.

  At one point, the elf is hopping on one foot, rubbing its stomach, and patting its head while I spin my arms and spin in place. I can feel the connection stuttering under the strain of multiple tasks, and only my enhanced ability to multitask from my mind affinity makes so many actions possible. I try to flex through the bond, concentrating on sending more information through the limited connection, then a sharp headache hits me.

  In my head, I feel sudden clarity, like when your ears are stuffy and suddenly you can hear a new depth of clarity. I feel something wet dripping from my nose. I wipe away the liquid with my hand, but when I look down, my hand is covered in red.

  I pull water with my affinity, ready to heal myself. As I’m considering where to send the water to heal the damage, I look at my health pool and see that my health pool is slightly depleted, but is slowly recovering. Whatever damage I caused in my practice is almost healed. I’m a little weary about continuing to practice if it can cause brain damage. I get the subtle mental nudge and the red blinking icon that accompanies new notifications. I mentally will the new messages to open.

  I reach across the bond and feel I can control the animated body as before, but the bond has been subtly altered. I can feel that the new bond has the added ability to receive general commands. I send a mental command to sit, then stand, and the undead construct does so.

  Where before I was like a puppeteer, now I am a general commanding in broad strokes what should be done. Through trial and error, I realize that the breadth of actions I can send is limited. The undead can do no more than one action at a time, and the action needs to be simple. I can command the undead to swing a sword, though even that stretches the limit of what I can command without guiding the undead. Something as simple as attacking a tree is too vague, because it requires too much interpretation.

  While it’s not very useful right now, it’s only the beginning of what I can do. I realize that I need to practice more before I can fully utilize this new magic skill. When I’m in the middle of trying out different commands to test out the new skill, I feel an incremental change across the bond. Smaller than the one a moment ago and with none of the pain. I sense mental commands carry more fluidly across the bond, requiring less focus. I check my notifications, and sure enough, I have leveled up again.

  After sitting around for an extended time, I stretch my legs with a quick workout before digging into my stores of dried fruit and bread for lunch. Nothing I did with my magic is that intense. The commands take almost no mana. So, by the time I am done eating, my mana bar is topped off again. I focus the rest of the day on leveling up my ice manipulation, aqua kinesis, and command undead. As the sky starts to get dark, I look at my notifications to see my progress.

  I feel five skill levels for half a day’s work is great, but at the same time, my leveling is much slower than I was leveling before. Also, my aquakinesis magic skill doesn’t gain any additional levels. I wonder if I’m reaching the end of my easy leveling around level ten. Maybe I’ll need real combat experience to continue to train my skills, or a fundamental understanding breakthrough.

  With that thought, I reach out to check on Morgana. To my surprise, she jumps from the goblin's body, riding my undead link, to possess the undead elf without any of the struggle she had shown before.

  Neat, I’m not the only one growing stronger.

  “What did you find?” I ask her.

  ‘I don’t see them anywhere on this side of the island. Even with a body, I could only go so far, but there’ll always be a chance I’ll miss them. If you could read elven, maybe we can try to find some answers there, but they’re either hiding on the island somewhere secluded, or they’ve left.’

  It should bring me comfort that there are likely no enemies any longer on the island, but when we first scouted the fortress, there were a lot more goblins and elves. I think it’s likely they took the second sloop that was moored at the dock until recently. I noticed some wear and tear on the dock. I wonder where the ship is headed and what the elves will bring back with them.