Chapter 3

I could feel that both Demesne and Divide Space had improved by a decent amount due to my changes. The sense of growth pleased me, even if it wasn’t enough to push either skill to upgrade or evolve.

It would have been nice if Dia’s system tracked such data through the status screen, but it wasn’t truly necessary since the understanding was quite instinctual.

As I worked my way through the rest of my skills, I soon discovered an oddity about two of them.

Stasis and Divide Space were both marked as (Unique/Common) skills, which I hadn’t understood when I first saw the label. After a bit of testing, I discovered that the first rating applied to the skills’ use within my pocket dimension, while the second pertained to the skills’ functionality outside the space.

Rho hadn’t been exaggerating when she said that both skills would be limited outside of my demesne.

While they both worked almost like passives inside the soulbound dimension, having next to no real effort associated with their use, the opposite applied when I tried to use either skill outside of my demesne.

Even Stasis, which was a core skill, was extremely limited and took an unusually large amount of focus to use on anything outside of my demesne.

It was almost like the goddess had intentionally made the skills harder to use to balance the scales. Considering how absolutely broken Demesne was with the boon making it possible for me to physically enter, I couldn’t even be mad about it.

After testing, I determined that neither skill was all that useful outside my soulbound pocket space, even if I could technically use them both. Stasis didn’t work on anything alive, including rooted plants.

A harvested plant could be placed into stasis, but the amount of focus required to do so was far too high to make it worthwhile.

I still planned to do it, if only to push the skill to help it grow. But functionally, the skill was useless outside of my demesne without the ability to impact living creatures.

Divide Space was even more limited and was basically only useful for making temporary walls outside of the space. I could change their size, shape, and thickness, but they were a heavy drain on my focus.

Unlike Stasis, I doubted I’d put much effort into upgrading Divide Space, especially since Rho had mentioned it would likely be merged with Demesne during my first evolution. And while the skill could probably work as a barrier in a pinch, I knew I could create something better.

I decided to wait on testing Restorative Healing until my first hunt. Though it might be a bit cruel to test healing on a dungeon mob that I eventually planned to kill, I figured it was better than using myself as a test subject.

I also held off on testing Lightning Bolt since I knew I’d get sidetracked once I started experimenting with my new magic. Sure, I’d crafted with lightning before and used lightning effects in a lot of my weapons, but actually having the magic felt completely different.

When I moved on to testing Dimensional Anchor, I could sense an anchor nearby from when I’d entered my demesne. I knew that the anchor would disappear if I entered my demesne from any other location, but for now, it remained.

Focusing on the spot where the anchor hovered just under the surface of reality, I utilized the connection that I already had with space magic to fold the space between my current location and the anchor.

It was almost an instinctive action, though it took a second or two to actually manifest.

Teleportation was something I was deeply familiar with from the centuries I’d spent as a Space Mage. Even without the time spent training specifically to recover my most important skills, I would have likely had no trouble recovering the skill.

Therefore, it was no surprise when, after just a second or two more of focused effort, I managed to shift myself from my current location to the Dimensional Anchor.

[You have learned the skill: Teleportation (Common)!
Would you like to slot Teleportation (Common)?]

With a grin, I accepted the offered skill. It was the first of my primary skills I hoped to recover, and I felt pleased at how quickly I’d managed it.

I spent the next half hour or so testing the limits of my newest skill, learning that I could only teleport to an existing anchor or to a location in my line of sight.

On the bright side, slotting the skill made using it nearly instantaneous, which was a significant improvement over the three or so seconds it had taken to manually teleport myself from one location to another.

Once I felt confident that I understood the new version of my old skill sufficiently, I decided to finally focus on my new elemental seed skill.

I was pleased to discover that Lightning Bolt was an easy skill to use. I hadn’t expected it to be hard since it was literally imprinted on the core of my soul, but I was genuinely amazed at how instinctive the spell-turned-skill was to use.

The bolts themselves weren’t all that strong, but it was just a Common skill. I was sure it would improve with time, practice, and upgrades.

Even as weak as they were, a single bolt was enough to stun the low-level mobs that resided in the first room of the dungeon. A bit of channeling changed the stun into a fatal attack, which would be useful when I wanted to keep my distance.

Most of the nearby mobs were arbor squirrels, which looked very similar to the plain old gray squirrels I remembered seeing on Earth. However, these squirrels actively took care of the trees in their territory, often dealing with invasive vines or other plants that might harm their homes.

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Outside of dungeons, arbor squirrels were prey animals, just like most squirrels on Earth. However, inside the dungeon, every mob was a predator as far as delvers were concerned.

The weak creatures weren’t really a threat to me – a fact supported by the system’s built-in threat rating, which tagged them in blue.

The system’s basic identification feature only provided a very limited amount of information about the items and entities targeted. For creatures (including Dians), it included the common name of their species, any titles they might have visible, and a rough estimate of how much of a threat they are to the person using the feature. Functionally, that resulted in a short tag that was color-coded by individual threat level.

Blue implied that whatever was being inspected was a negligible threat to the person doing the inspection. Green meant they posed a slight threat but shouldn’t be much of a problem. Yellow indicated that fighting the creature would pose a modest challenge.

Orange was where things started to get dangerous. An orange tag suggested the target in question would be a significant challenge, while red warned that the user would struggle in a direct confrontation.

And black… a black tag meant that the user should probably run because it would take a miracle for them to survive the encounter if it turned violent.

Of course, the colors were based on a one-on-one confrontation with only that creature (or person), and didn’t take numbers into consideration.