Chapter 14: Equip Magic

The Magic page had a diagram of a Tree of Life with four empty boxes layered over the roots. He had no skills unlocked and two starter options were available when he pressed the empty boxes.

Pressing his finger on the first one, he found 'Spell Scroll: Summon Fire'. The other spell was 'Spell Scroll: Heal'. Hugh immediately equipped both. When nothing visual happened, he turned to Dex and waited on the requisite tutorial.

Dex chuckled at Hugh's lackluster reaction, but obliged. "Tech has two modes—off and on. It's tied to physical items which make them easier to acquire and even easier to use. Magic doesn't work the same way. New spells level up the more you use them. Right now, your spells are level one, which means they'll be difficult to trigger. That's just enough fire to start a campfire and enough healing to mend a stubbed toe.

You need three things to activate a spell. First, you equip the scroll, which you've done. Second, you have to give the spell form and direction. For that, use your imagination. An example would be chanting something like 'summon sparks to dance on the tinder in this fireplace.' If you can manage to make it rhyme, the spell costs ten percent less magical stamina. If the system can't understand your intentions because your summons doesn't make sense, the spell will fail.

The last thing you need is enough magical stamina to feed the spell while it works. The cost is listed on the scroll. When you run out of magical stamina, spells will start to eat at your health. Be careful with channeling spells since those can potentially kill you. And you should know spells will allow you to set shortcuts once you've leveled them high enough. By shortcuts, I mean motions or word combinations to trigger them faster. Are you with me so far?"

Hugh nodded and Dex continued, "Now, as for the skill tree—it's pretty simple. You have four root spells. Those are the only things you can manually switch. A pair of root spells make a combination spell, two combo spells will automatically merge into an ultimate spell, and ultimate spells then blossom out into variant branches. Right now, all you have is Fire and Heal. Those combined to give you the spell Fever, which could be used to kill or cure depending on how you use the spell. You'll need two more root spells before you'll be able to unlock a second combo spell and the rest of your tree. Any questions?"

Hugh shook his head. The explanation seemed pretty straight forward, although he had a feeling he'd understand better when he tried to use the spells. He was tempted to try out the fire one to see how it worked. Only his fear of accidentally starting a forest fire stopped him. He was willing to wait until the time was right—probably once they traveled to the ruins Dex had promised they'd explore.