World Seed

Author’s Corner: As promised, here is an extra chapter to celebrate the first 100 followers! As an added bonus, many questions should be answered in this chapter, assuming I don’t get super sidetracked.

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The rest of the day continued much like when I was learning Earth Affinity. Slowly… After a few hours, Wind Affinity increased to 3%, and I noticed an increased intake of wind mana just like I had done with earth. At one point, my concentration broke on the wind funnel, and noticed the familiar weights on my shoulders were gone.

In a moment of joy, I thought that Yin and Yang had willingly left, but the thought wasn’t even half formed before two blurs shot out of the forest and immediately perched themselves on my shoulders again. Well… it was nice while it lasted.

Noting the time with Celeste, I decided to log out to have dinner, or lunch, depending on how you look at time. Opening the Seed, I got out and stretched, unconsciously letting out a slight yawn. Moving downstairs to get cooking, I had no idea just how weird today was going to be.

Like before, I chose to cook my meal manually, this time I chose to make a steak. My mind and stomach were yelling to eat something other than stale bread, so a nice juicy slab of meat sounded perfect. Even the thought of a sandwich made me nauseous. Within moments I had the meat on the skillet and cooking, was getting ready to spice it and then made one of the stupidest mistakes a chef can make.

I grabbed the metal handle of the skillet with my bare hand. There was a sizzling sound coming from my hand as pain raced through me. A scream tore at my throat as I hastily let go, but the damage was already done. All along my palm and fingers were thick red burns, making me wince just looking at them. Naturally I ran some cold water over the burn, but even that hurt like hell, to the point where I did something I couldn’t explain.

I healed myself. I felt a sudden rush, and then looked at my palm since it was no longer hurting. Surprisingly, there wasn’t even a blister left, making me doubt my hand had been burnt in the first place. However, I could still smell the burnt flesh in the air, and there was still the sizzling coming from the handle of the skillet.

What just… no, that’s not… I tried to think back to what I had done, but the only thing I could think of was the Alchemic Heal spell I knew from NeoLife. I don’t care how realistic a game is, there is no way that I cast a spell in real life… right?

Even though logic told me it was impossible, the memory of the pain in my hand made me doubt it. As such, I made a conscious effort to connect with the mana in the same way I would in the game, and was stunned to find that there really was something there. For some reason, it didn’t feel quite as dense as it did in the game, but nonetheless I could feel the presence of mana in the real world. At the same time, when I retracted my senses, I saw a haze of blue lights floating in front of me, as if the mana was weaving itself into a familiar pattern. It looked like one of the notification screens from the game.