-7- The Mage's Path

With the greatest survival crisis resolved, Yvette, who had been anxious before, suddenly relaxed. She felt a calmness she had never known before, to the point that even time seemed somewhat worthless.

In fact, considering that the original owner had lived for at least three hundred years as an ageless being, time might truly be the least significant thing to her.

Of course, this presupposed that she was truly immortal and ageless, not merely resistant to hunger.

Finding a metal chair that hadn’t completely fallen apart, Yvette sat down and gazed at the pile of mysterious monster bones scattered on the ground, lost in thought.

“Based on the clues from the dream, the original owner was likely a patient of the Metamorphosis Project, a fact that can be confirmed by many details from those six months of life…”

“Later, the original owner seemed to possess traits of immortality and agelessness. Could it be that these special abilities originated from the Metamorphosis Project or some experimental program by Black Tower Pharmaceuticals?”

“However, what’s puzzling is that after such a long time, even with meditation, she should have accumulated considerable magical power. Why, besides immortality and resistance to hunger, did the original owner remain otherwise ordinary?”

“Could it be due to experimental constraints, fearing she might escape control, deliberately forbidding her from acquiring power, and then the apocalypse suddenly erupted, destroying the base, thus leaving her in this accidental state…”

Unable to solve the mystery and lacking relevant clues, Yvette could only maintain this tentative conclusion.

Soon after, many details about the meditation technique surfaced in her mind.

Indeed, with no worries about survival, ample time, and nothing else to do, using meditation to enhance her strength was undoubtedly her best chance to escape the ruined base at present.

“It’s slow, but fortunately, time is the one thing I’m not lacking,” she murmured, then closed her eyes and entered a meditative state.

The room fell silent, with only the faint glow rhythmically flowing beneath the surface of the magical vine, as if it would never change.

…

In the endless stillness and darkness outside the ruins, days passed with the rising and setting of the sun and moon, and before she realized it, a year had slipped by.

Over the course of that year, Yvette had fully adapted to life in the ruined base. Most of her time was spent in intense meditation, absorbing the magical elements floating in the air. During her free moments, she wandered through the various floors, tidying up and sorting the collected scraps into useful, useless, and uncertain categories.

Sometimes, she would secretly open the small exit door on the water platform but wouldn’t approach the lake’s edge. Instead, she would quietly sit at the doorway, gazing at the clear blue sky or the star-studded heavens, reminiscing about her family on Earth.

At other times, she would sit on the steps inside the exit tunnel, reading by the sunlight streaming in. She started with "Detailed Explanation of Inner and Outer Magic," then moved on to "Runic Siphon Effect," all reference books related to magic that she found in the library.

The "Detailed Explanation of Inner and Outer Magic" discussed how, on this planet called Origin Star, all magical creatures including humans possessed two types of magical power: inner magic stored within the body and outer magic drawn from the environment.

Thus, the more a spell depended on inner magic, the easier it was to control; conversely, the more it relied on outer magic, the less stable it became.

The "Runic Siphon Effect" explained something akin to magical gravity, describing how the attraction of high-density runic magic fields prevents the loss of magical elements into the cosmos.

All in all, they were excellent books.

…

Though somewhat challenging for a beginner, it took her several months to digest them, during which she also learned some rare technical terms in the Black Tide language.

By the time she finished "Runic Siphon Effect," it was late afternoon near the end of the first year.

In the winter chill, fine snowflakes drifted like willow catkins, dusting the once-black water platform with a shimmering frost. The nearby lake was calm, the monsters appeared to be asleep, and only a few lonely bird calls echoed across the desolate mountain basin.

Closing her book, Yvette stood at the doorway, lost in thought until a snowflake landed on her nose, making her sneeze.

…

Due to wind pressure, cold drafts often blew through the ventilation ducts in winter. On the base’s tenth underground level, Yvette gathered all the small debris she could find to craft a simple windproof and insulating layer.

Huddled here to keep warm, she wore the same white dress and stockings she had donned a year ago.

She noticed her skin neither grew oily nor flaky, and her clothes rarely got dirty, so she seldom needed to wash them.

Now, after a year of practice, she planned to test her magical power and assess her progress.

Recalling data provided by the AI, an entry-level spellcaster standard was a magic value of 10, requiring over seven years of meditation training.

So, the normal pace of meditation advancement was roughly 1.5 magic points per year?

Was that too slow?

Yet, despite this, Yvette nurtured a faint hope.

After all, the calculation was based on an average person’s meditation efficiency, but was she an average person? Certainly not. Not only wasn’t she, she might be a chosen one!

Could the slow meditation method be different for her?

Then…

Reciting an entry-level spell from "Basic Magic Theory" used specifically for self-testing magic capacity, after some waiting, she was shocked to find her result barely over two points—considering she neither ate nor drank and practiced daily, her actual efficiency equated to that of an ordinary person.

“So, I am just a mortal…”

After such long anticipation, this result shattered her heart, making the world seem bleak.

But fortunately, she could endure.

For someone suspected to be immortal and ageless, nothing was truly insurmountable! If talent could not grant her power, then she would make up for it with diligence.

…

And so it went.

Spring passed to autumn, time flowed on, and in the daily cycle of meditation and study, five years quietly slipped away.

During these five years, besides meditating to increase her magic, Yvette compiled a collection of specialized magical books she had scavenged from various floors. Though most of the texts delved into advanced topics, often leaving her bewildered, persistent study still yielded some gains.

For example, she gleaned simple rune arrangements from certain case templates, learned foundational structures, and deduced basic runic formulas.

It was worth mentioning that incantations were not essential to spellcasting, nor were they equivalent to runes.

In the study of human civilization on Origin Star—abbreviated as "Origin Civilization"—the known number of runes already exceeded ten thousand. These runes, when combined, could create substances and elements vastly different in nature.

Hence, for beginners, merely distinguishing among these thousands of runes was an immense challenge.

To ensure spellcasting was possible without memorizing runes, "incantations" were developed.

They functioned somewhat like encrypted translations of runes with slight embellishments, making the incantations smooth and easy to remember. If one knew the rune forms, a mental pass-through could cast spells silently; if not, chanting the incantation with spiritual focus could still bring magic to life.

For a beginner like Yvette, using incantations was obviously much easier than memorizing tens of thousands of abstract symbols.

“Breath of the cold mist, soul’s sorrowful tears, snowstorm binding form, guided by will, Niflheim, heed my call!”

Standing on the water platform, Yvette chanted the incantation, her pale palms reaching forward. Soon, an ice crystal about a meter in diameter formed on the metal wall before her.

After casting, estimating the magic consumed, Yvette roughly concluded that this simple "Frost Spell" used about 3 magic points—while her total magic capacity was around 9 points. This small spell consumed one-third of her power.

“My magic is too little…” she sighed.

Six years into her mage training, giving her all, she could only cast four small spells—a growth rate that was truly disheartening.

Thankfully, she was a survival expert; an ordinary person might have given up long ago.

Without any other thoughts, Yvette was about to turn and leave.

But at the moment she turned, her peripheral vision caught the ice crystal she had just created on the wall, causing her to pause slightly.

Unsure if it was an illusion, within the crystal’s refraction, she felt her appearance seemed to have grown a little.