Congratulations! You have earned the Level One skill Tilling.

  Tilling (Level One): This bathroom looks great! All this tiling worked out in the end, didn’t it? Oh, tilling? Sure. All stats +5.

  Theo hadn’t expected it to take the entire day to get that skill, but it had all been worth it in the end. He was black with dirt and dead tired, so the moment the skill made itself known to him, he inched his way to the field’s edge and fell to the dirty green grass next to it, landing firmly on his back. His chest heaved and his muscles ached. He looked at his dark brown hands and saw part of skin through all the soil clinging to him, finding it red with blisters from his firm grip on the hoe.

  Wen had been gracious enough to simply stand there and watch, keeping herself clean and cheering them on from the sidelines. Thankfully, she handed Theo some water from a water skin brought with one of the settlers. He sucked it dry of its delicious contents, though he wished it was his own newly created water he drank rather than the mostly clean lake water. It quenched his thirst, though, which was more important.

  After a good rest, Theo was asked to help with moving the larger rocks littering the two fields as the ground had proved to be rather rocky below the clean grassy surface. Willam said it would be fine, but he might have to fill in some soil from elsewhere. After moving the heavy, dense rocks, Theo provided an alternative to simply moving dirt around. He checked the lingering mana of his boon, which hadn’t killed him yet, luckily, and found he had exactly 150 mana left. He had been wanting to create more dirt so he could get closer to that sweet, sweet earth affinity skill, so this was a win-win situation for both.

  Accepting the offer, Willam pointed Theo to the places most sorely needing some more filling and stepped back to watch the man perform his magic. It was the first time Theo didn’t see the need to hide it, so he was actually feeling a bit nervous about it. There was quite a bit of dirt needed for two even fields, so Theo might have to spend all his remaining mana.

  Before deciding to spend all that mana for simple dirt, though, Theo decided to check through the World Primer again, skipping past the pages which described the various symbols he could weave and instead jumped right to the more complex pages. There were symbols everywhere, with thin, sometimes jagged, sometimes circular, othertimes straight lines going between, underneath, around or otherwise through up to several sigils at a time.

  Like the increasing complexity of the first pages, so too did these pages show a steady increase in difficulty of comprehension and likely of function. Skipping a few pages too far ahead was a dizzying experience and he was far from ready to understand those arcane scribbles.

  Not far from where he’d found the underbracket, however, were plenty of familiar sigils with rather basic compositions and structures. What Theo was looking for was a combination of the ‘Create’ sigil and another elemental sigil, perhaps with one additional symbol or two. If there was a sigil to increase the amount he created, that would be great, especially if it just cost an additional five mana for a doubling. That would give him twice the amount for an additional 50% increase in cost, a bargain if he ever saw one.

  The book wasn’t all that easy to decipher, however. There was no text he could read, no real description of any sort except the drawings. He needed to understand the functions of the symbols in order to understand the function of the symbols. It was circular, but he had found a surefire way to get there; try it and hope it didn’t explode him.

  At last, he stumbled on something that seemed relevant to what he was looking for. It was one symbol placed in front of the combination for ‘Create Water’ with two additional small lines more resembling commas following the first symbol. The reason this general combination had proved difficult to find was that it was right next, even slightly overlapping with, the nearly mirrored combination of the same three sigils. The second combination showed ‘Create Water’, then the identical symbol previously placed first, then the two commas. It had taken Theo more than just a quick browse to realise it wasn’t one very long line, but rather two similar ones put so close together. The overlapping of these two functions might not be accidental, but he would have to ask the author of the book itself, which might or might not either be the world itself, or a goddess. It wouldn’t be easy.

  Still, it wasn’t hard for Theo to replace the ‘Water’ sigil for the ‘Earth’ sigil, so he could try both and see how they worked. He had 150 mana to spend after all.

  He tried the first combination first. He felt the familiar sensation of opening his mana channel and letting his mana flow through his finger’s ‘mana blaster’, a term Theo was slowly getting not just used to, but one he had started to rather enjoy the playfulness of. He created the first, half-circle line of the new sigil, then was rudely interrupted by the crude, hearty laugh of Wen, which had a small spattering of Willam’s careful laugh interspersed with it. Theo turned to face them with a questioning and a bit annoyed expression. Wen was clutching her stomach and laughing from the bottom of the deepest of wells.

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  “What?” Theo asked. He had expected them to be in awe of his magic, not fully laughing before he had even done anything.

  “It’s… It’s…” Wen attempted, though couldn’t find room for words in between her quickly breath-reducing tittering.

  “Your… Your…” Willam unhelpfully added as his own hand was clasped in front of his mouth, dirtying his face even more while he was attempting to restrain his own laughter.

  “What?” Theo asked again, this time with his stern voice. It didn’t seem to help matters much. “Fine. Don’t interrupt me,” he then said, turning back around to start weaving again.

  The moment his mana was flushed out of his finger, forming a gentle, curved line of glittery sparks in the air, Wen howled again, once more breaking Theo’s concentration. This time he stopped weaving the magical symbol intentionally so he wouldn’t waste five or more mana on a half-finished sigil. He sighed and turned, finding Wen now rolling on the green grass.

  “What?” he tried again, this time with a truly irritated voice. He hadn’t bothered her back in Brook Town when she was working, so why-

  “Your ears,” she laughed as she kicked into the air. “Your ears are glowing!”

  Theo instantly grabbed hold of his own ears, feeling them for anything out of the ordinary. He couldn’t sense anything. His heart skipped beats as he dashed over to his friends in a slight panic, though Willam said they had been, but weren’t glowing anymore. Theo attempted to channel his magic once more, and Wen’s now breathy, silent laughter increased its fervour once more. Willam seemed more worried of actually hurting his friend’s feelings, so he managed to calm himself this time. Theo appreciated that.

  “It just started again, didn’t it?” Theo asked. Willam nodded. Why were his ears… Oh! Right… He remembered now. He had gotten the trait ‘Magical ears’ after his ears had suffered from Bulb… With a sigh, Theo turned back from his friends and headed into the field once more. Now that he knew what it was, he’d manage to ignore Wen’s rude laugh.

  Just as Wen had managed to calm herself, or rather gotten used to her friend’s ears glowing, Theo finished the three-sigil combination with the odd additional commas, underscoring it with a bracket to finish it off, utilising every ounce of knowledge he had accrued about sigil weaving up until that point. It wasn’t much, to be fair, but the underbracket wasn’t actually drawn onto the function he was copying, so he was soaring high on that prideful feeling he was feeling.

  The sigils chimed and hummed, now a choir rather than a solemn duet. Theo eyed the remaining mana he had, excited to see if it was a five mana increase per additional sigil, or if it maybe was a doubling. Five mana left him, then five more, then five more. Success. As the ‘Create Earth’ sigil combination crumbled into a few kilograms of soil, ten more mana was withdrawn from Theo. The two broken and dusted sigils of ‘Create Earth’ then remade themselves with some assistance from the most recently attempted sigil, hummed together along with it again, then everything crumbled into a million pieces of mana remnants as more soil fell to the ground.

  Theo was at a loss for words. He’d stumbled upon a loop function of some sort! But it wasn’t at all positive! It had simply saved him the time of weaving the two sigils again, though the time spent drawing that new sigil and the two commas was practically equal! He had gotten twenty mana worth of dirt for the very measurable cost of twenty-five mana! He had been robbed!

  He raised his hands to his head and pulled at his own hair, angry more than anything that the World Primer provided so little information. He growled a low, upset growl which unknowingly kept Wen and Willam from approaching him.

  The world traveller then managed to calm himself. He had to try the second alternative. It didn’t matter if he wasted more mana, it was all on loan anyway. What he needed to gain from this was understanding. What did the symbol mean, and what difference did putting it behind the ‘Create Earth’ sigils do? Why were both written down so close to each other?

  He rose to stand firmly upright and opened the valve of his mana network with a determination he had rarely felt. His vengeance against the world for wasting five of his experimentation mana would be sweet, indeed. He skillfully weaved ‘Create Earth’, hesitated for barely an instant before adding the third symbol which had proved so wasteful just a minute earlier. Two commas followed it and everything was then wrapped inside a bracket from below. The deed was done. The air resounded. Five mana had gone. Five more. Five again. He was down to a hundred and ten mana. ‘Create Earth’ flashed brightly. Earth fell to Theo’s feet. More mana was drained as more dirt cometed to the ground. Then all three sigils were gone, their shattered pieces flowing in the wind. He had made two more small mounds of soil. His remaining mana… One hundred. And nine.