Explorer of Edregon

“Why do we fall so-!” Scule’s scream was cut off as they all landed in a tumble of limbs among the darkness. The sudden drop and short fall had been rather disorienting, and Vin struggled to extract himself from both the branches Shia had reflexively thrown out and Alka who he had landed on. His sole focus had been on twisting his body to ensure he didn’t land on Scule and Reginald in his pocket, meaning he’d inadvertently tugged Alka under him.

Which was unfortunate, as her golem body covered in darthsteel made for a rather uncomfortable landing.

“Everyone alright?” Vin asked, doing his best to take stock with Tremorsense, which he’d actually managed to maintain despite the unexpected fall.

“Still in one piece,” Shia responded, getting to her feet and attempting to help Lumel up, only to offer a hand in the entirely wrong direction.

“What the hells was that?” Scule asked. “We fell, what, like thirty feet? Forty?”

“My Mental Map confirms it was around there,” Vin nodded, already forgetting everyone else was functionally blind. “Not long enough for me to actually get a spell out.”

“Yeah, it wasn’t that far,” Alka confirmed before raising a foot and kicking him off her as she got up. “Though we didn’t stumble off a cliff this time around. I’ve spent enough time with Alice to recognize a pitfall trap when I step in one.”

“How often do you walk into pitfall traps?” Shia asked, having finally found Lumel and helped her up.

“More often than you’d think,” Alka snorted. “Anyway, a pitfall means we’re dealing with either the people living within this fragment, or a monster with an alarming level of cunning. Regardless of which one, I’d say keep your eyes open, but that wouldn’t really do us any good.”

“Should I just warp us back to the surface?” Lumel asked. “Maybe we could lower down a rope and pull Alka up afterward?”

“We could do that… Or, we could go the Curash method,” Shia said. “Remember how we purposefully tripped his pitfall trap knowing that he’d come running? If it’s a race of people who are keeping the rankers from going through this fragment, we want to meet them, right?”

“Counter point, if it’s a monster that is keeping the rankers from heading on through, we’re currently sitting on its dinner plate,” Scule shot back. “Couldn’t we wait for whoever dug this trap up there on the surface?”

“If they have some method of seeing through this darkness, we might not want to scare them off by sitting around the opening of their trap,” Vin pointed out. “My Tremorsense doesn’t reach out that far, and they’d probably be far more comfortable chatting with us while we’re down here.”

“So that’s the plan? We just sit around down here until someone shows up and pours boiling oil over us?” Scule asked, shaking his head. “Guess I’m taking that nap after all. Wake me when we start dying.”

Ignoring Scule’s pessimism, Vin turned toward the rest of his friends. The pitfall they’d fallen into was surprisingly large at nearly twenty feet wide, so they had plenty of space to not be crowding one another. “Is everyone alright with that plan? Waiting around a bit to see if anyone comes for us?”

“I think Scule may have had a point,” Lumel admitted quietly. “We can’t see what’s going on above us, so we should at least put something over our heads to protect ourselves.”

“I’ll grow a dense branch layer overhead. It should be more than enough to stop anything coming down, and it will even give Alka something to climb when we’re on our way out of here,” Shia smiled. “The tree will also warn me if anything tries to slip past its branches, so there’s that at least.”

“Who knew talking to plants was so useful,” Alka snorted, walking over to the side of the trap and taking a seat. “I’ll be here, chatting with Epli. Wake me when things need to start dying.”

While Shia headed to the center of the hole they were lounging within and began growing a new plant, Lumel turned to him. “What are you planning to do?”

“Like I said just a bit ago, I think I should get started on an upgraded version of Tremorsense.If nobody comes for us and we go back to blindly stumbling our way across the surface of this fragment, being able to see everything and not just things that are moving would probably be rather helpful.”

“You’ve never directly upgraded a spell before, right?” Lumel asked, sounding concerned. “Will your title and passive help with that? I’d imagine it’s a different process than making a new spell.”

“I don’t think my title will… but the passive should,” he said slowly, trying to feel out their influences within him. “Though I actually have a reference right here I was planning to ask about the process.”

Smiling at the confusion on Lumel’s face, Vin turned to look at Shia, who was currently casting Rapid Growth and growing a rather large, sprawling tree right in front of them with branches that stretched from one side of the tunnel to the next. “Hey, Shia, any tips you can give me for upgrading a spell? It’s been a while, but I still remember how you managed to improve upon your Entangle spell during our training with Alka.”

“That was more of a fluke than anything,” she admitted, tapping her chin as her tree grew and she lost herself in thought. “Entangle and Rapid Growth are both incredibly similar spells, and two of my most used ones, so I have a remarkably deep understanding of both runic formations. The System didn’t count Entangling Thorns as me crafting a new spell for that very reason. I didn’t combine entirely unique spells from different affinities like you’ve been doing.”

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“So you’re saying you basically just took the runic formation for Entangle and tweaked a few bits here and there,” Vin surmised.

“I did more than ‘tweak’ a few parts,” she snorted. “Going from a tier 1 to a tier 2 spell requires a good bit more runework. What made it easy is that I was functionally able to just copy the portions from Rapid Growth I wanted. Like I said, similar spells and identical affinities made the whole process far easier than it should have been. Hence I haven’t tried doing something like that again since. My master made the risks of creating entirely new spells very clear to me, so even if I hadn’t heard about you blowing yourself up repeatedly during your own spell creation attempts, I wouldn’t risk it.”

“Guess improving Tremorsense isn’t going to be quite as simple as I thought,” Vin muttered.

“Maybe not, but I imagine it’s still possible,” Lumel said, taking a seat and motioning for him to do the same. “Want to walk me through your thoughts? What does the spell currently do, and what do you want the improved version of it to do?”

“Currently, the spell sends out rapid-fire pulses of mana that detect active vibrations,” he explained, feeling out his bouncing mana as the spell worked even now. “Just like my empowered sensing spells, except constantly and at a much lower scale.”

“Okay. And what do you want it to do?” she repeated.

“I want it to function the same, except I want to be able to see everything that my mana covers, not just what’s actively vibrating.”

“In that case, it sounds to me like you need to do the same thing Shia did,” Lumel smiled. “Rapid Growth is the creation spell tied to nature magic, right? All it’s doing is pumping out nature mana and directing it. If you want your spell to see everything, you need to not only be detecting vibrations, but pumping them out as well.”

“So you’re saying to start with learning the creation spell for vibration magic?” Vin asked, slowly nodding along. Just about all magical affinities followed the same two building blocks. A tier 0 sensing spell, and a tier 1 creation spell. Regardless of their tier, all other spells built off of one of those two building blocks, or sometimes even both.

“If you learn some form of ‘create vibration’ spell, you should be able to use that to directly upgrade Tremorsense,” Lumel explained. “I think it’s your best bet.”

“Man it’s nice having so many intelligent mages here to help me bumble my way through magic,” Vin grinned, chuckling at the embarrassment on her face. He couldn’t see her blushing through the grainy Tremorsense image he was receiving, but he could picture it easily enough. “Thanks for your help, Lumel, I’m going to give it a shot.”

“Of course! Let me know if you need to talk through anything else,” she said, blindly reaching out to give his hand a squeeze before carefully making her way off to the side of the tunnel and beginning to meditate herself.

Alright, let’s get started. Letting go of his active spell, Vin delved into Introspection and threw together a couple different runic formations to look at their structures. At this point, he had the tier 1 creation building blocks for a good number of affinities. Renewal, Light, Summon Stone, Create Water, Decay, Create Flame, and Create Air were all pure creation spells, meaning they did little more than transform his mana into a specific affinity, which often had different effects. Renewal’s life mana, for example, would naturally close wounds, while Create Flame’s fire mana would cause an actual flame to erupt in the palm of his hand.

Walking between all the inert formations he was keeping his mana from filling, he analyzed their runes and gradually began to piece together the parts they all had in common. With so many different creation spells floating side by side and all the experience he had with crafting spells at this point, it was honestly rather simple to work out what he needed to do.

Nodding to himself, he got to work. Despite working a bit more carefully than he often tended to, it felt like no time at all had passed before he had his potential runic formation up and ready to go. All he’d had to do was functionally remove the affinity from each of his creation spells, before adding on the vibration affinity to finish out the spell. That second part was a tad trickier, but he did have Sense Vibrations and Tremorsense to work off of at the very least. Having two different vibration-aligned spells allowed him to figure out more easily what the vibration affinity runes looked like, and he recreated them simply enough.

Alright, moment of truth… Holding his breath, Vin flooded his newest spell with mana, crossing his fingers and hoping he wasn’t about to blow himself up again. Despite knowing that this simple tier 1 spell was a far cry from Fireball, he couldn’t help but be wary.

Thankfully, his careful work paid off.

New spell learned! Tier 1 Vibration Spell (Vibrate). 5,000 exp gained.

Huh, he thought, slipping out of Introspection and reading his newest notification. Somehow the System interface was still visible through the magical darkness, which messed with his mind a bit. That was… easier than I thought it would be. I guess I’m at the point where I could do that with pretty much any of the creation spells I’m lacking.

Holding that thought, he held up his flesh and blood hand and tried casting Vibrate on it, grinning as his hand began rapidly vibrating back and forth far faster than he could hope to try and shake it himself. The ability to make things vibrate didn’t seem all that useful compared to a lot of his spells, but as was often the case, it wasn’t the spell itself he was interested in but what he could potentially build from it. Now that he had the tier 1 creation spell for vibration magic, he could follow Lumel’s idea and potentially upgrade Tremorsense similar to how Shia had upgraded Entangle. All it would take was time.

And seeing as they were currently all lounging around within the bottom of a hole waiting for someone to come to them, time was something he had in spades.

Let’s get to it then, he decided, slipping back into Introspection and throwing together the runic formation for Tremorsense. After all, navigating the fragment of magical darkness would be a hell of a lot easier once he was able to actually see where he was going.