The months flew by, and at some point, the hag left her home, finally starting to instruct myself again as I showed her my new spell, and she helped me analyze it.

  It was nice to see her again, her role having shifted to something of a mother figure to me over the last year.

  “So, you got a piece of the deep one inside you, if I understand that correctly?”

  She asked one day as we sat in her house and drank tea, looking at me with that same suspiciously friendly smile as she did when she first decided to take me in.

  “Yeah, do you think I am safe from the ritual on new years yet?”

  I reciprocated with a question, leaving her to contemplate.

  “What you did destabilized the space inside my house for quite some time, and I can’t quite get the remaining corruption outside. If we can somehow inflict this corruption on the temple building, we can probably change the whole thing to fuel your power instead, you’ll just have to slaughter the abominations yourself when that happens.”

  With an offer like that, no somewhat sane boy my age could reject.

  As our deal was made, she asked me to complete a solo elemental tier 1 spell for every Arcana, and thus I did.

  Dim bright opacity was the first I made, and testing it out simply changed me in the weirdest way.

  It reduced my opacity while I was illuminated, which also worked with flames, basically turning things a weird mixture of black and see through as long as they were illuminated.

  The second spell was Open move close, and it was horrible. It was a spell that created a portal on a closed object of my choosing, expelling everyone who touched it on the other side, and only disappearing after eighteen seconds or cast my counter spell on it.

  It was then that I had a horribly good idea, the kind you usually get after the second liter of Vodka-E or when you're out with friends after 3 am.

  It was the brain damage level of Idea that one did out of boredom and because you can.

  For a simple test, I combined Gather and condense, creating a small field where highly concentrated water was gathered, drying the surrounding air and creating a ball of water at my fingertip.

  Next, I used the close rune on it, the structure turning weirdly ball like in my hand. A quick cast of ‘condense projectile’ made it smaller and harder, which I repeated until the water was a single drop of highly condensed water.

  It took a total of twenty seconds, in which I constantly had to recast the close rune, until I made the close projectile spell.

  This one held six seconds instead of a runes two, but also made the condensing harder.

  The cast was a flurry of colors as space was bend and water gathered, the final product being what I had hoped for.

  I had a soul tier of five, which meant I could easily hold a total of five runes at once, with most others struggling to multicast at all.

  Finally, I created the pour move spell, which brought the ball into a whirring state, until I felt the projectile almost explode in my hand.

  This spell was a combination of tier zero spells and runes, technically making it the lowest tier of spell I could make, but it had become a mass of twisted reality with water holding it together.

  My teacher opened the door, so I could throw the spell at Hannibal, and as one would expect of him, he stood perfectly to be hit, and thus I gave it a determined flick in his direction.

  As the rune ball impacted him, the spells slowly unraveled, first among them being the gather and hold spells. Only a fraction of a second, we were hit by strong winds and the sonic boom.

  Immediately, it became about a liter of water, expanding the small hole it had punched in the hogs skin into an actually ugly wound. Pour movement had infused it with potential energy, and the flick had given it a direction to move in.

  Only now did I realize that my finger looked not like it usually did, no longer bending to my will as it is supposed to do, before the pain of broken bones hit my head.

  Quickly, the hag healed the wound, ginning madly as she observed the whole spectacle.

  “Congratulations on your first step into true casting, where we look at what the system gives us and combine those spells. It’s what differentiates real casters and morons with some magical power.”

  Of course, I immediately opened the note feature and made another list, the systems features seemingly endless.

  The author had loved puns, and as I made that spell, I could not have thought how often it would come to save me. It is everything one could want of a spell without access to fire, a splashy explosion, and the loudest boom you could think of.

  It was a good spell to fall unconscious to, and one that would wash away all the blood that would be left when others used it.