The Unknown Clue to Growth

"Hey Rina?"

"Yes?"

"Can you use magic again?"

Rina tilted her head sideways and placed a finger on her lips. "You want me make the bird again or something else?"

"Anything will do."

"Okay~"

Rina gathered her hands together and focused her mana until a thin little disproportionate water snake started flying around in the air.

Immediately, Will felt his phone appear in his pocket and vibrate. Somewhere between dumbfounded and expectant, Will took out his phone and involuntarily widened his eyes.

-

[ Skill Rank Up! ]

{Spirit Contractor (F)} -> {Spirit Contractor (E)}

You have proved yourself worthy of being a spirit contractor. More spirits are likely to gather around you now. You will be able to faintly sense the presence of the spirits. The more you use the spirits power, the more your mastery will grow. The higher the rank of this skill, the stronger and more spirits you can contract with.

Current Contract Limit: 2

Mastery (0%)

-

Will watched his new E rank skill with surprised eyes. "I... I can't believe it."

"Believe what?" Asked Rina as she hugged her adorable cartoon like water snake with a curious face. "What happened Will?"

"My Spirit Contractor skill just went up to E rank!"

Immediately, Rina's eyes went wide with shock and amazement. "The skill went to E rank already? But I heard from the others that raising the spirit contractor skills are very hard and takes months of practice and cooperation."

(A/N: Due to some IRL reason I am writing a chapter on my stupidly broken phone and my auto correct is trying to make my life miserable. Rina is beigg he e- *cough* beginning- *COUGH* being autocorrected into Roma and words are becoming things that don't make sense such as beigg he e. If you see a typo in this chapter please do notify me so I can fix that stupid son of a derogatory term mixed with a half written word and a stupid AI. Thank you~)

Will raised an eyebrow from underneath his mask. "Well it was 2% F rank before we started water magic training and now it's 0% E rank."

"Wow!" Rina shouted with a excited smile that lit up the surroundings before taking out her tiny little fingers to count. "2% to 0%.... That's like a.... one... two... three... four... nine? Eight?"

"Ninety eight percent."

"A ninety eight percent increase! A rank up in one day of water magic practice! Even my more talented seniors had to practice with their contractors for at most a month before they ranked up their skill."

"Maybe it means that you are super talented, Rina," suggested Will with a small smile.

Rina froze as she let the message sink in before giving her hands a star struck look of wonder and amazement. "I'm talented?"

"You said it yourself. You did something that your spirit seniors were unable to accomplish."

"Woah! Am I like, super talented?" Asked Rina once again seeming confirmation from Will.

"Super talented," Will nodded.

"Super super talented?"

"Future Spirit King level talented."

At that moment, Rina got so excited and happy that she melted into a little puddle on the road: "Ehehe... I'm talented!"

Will watched Rina slowly recover from her puddle like state before dancing around on the floor in pure glee and pride.

However, as comical and sweet as Rina seemed, Will was unable to fully focus on Rina as his thoughts slowly drifted away to a different subject. The unnatural growth of his {spirit contractor} skill.

Will knew from first hand experience in how hard it was to rank up a skill. His sword style and swordsmanship skills both had dawdled in the line between Rank F 99% and Rank E 0% since he was thirteen with no amount of practice or sheer will being able to break past this bottle neck. His passive skill that allowed him to affect the rain had barely grown at all over his life time and only experienced a major growth spurt after being constantly active for a solid year. His one decently high skill, which was his {Impenetrable Mind (A)} skill had only gotten to that point after many years of strengthening his mind.

So how did the {Spirit Contractor} rank up so fast?

Will has a few hypothesis's that kinda made sense. The first hypothesis was that Will was naturally inclined with spirit magic and his innate talent allowed him to leap jumps and bounds with his master of the {Spirit Contractor} skill. The second idea was that Rina and Will had a very good synergy that the skill naturally received a lot more mastery than compared to usual due to their unusual synergy. The third and last one is that something other than his talent or synergy with Rina affected his skills.

Maybe his passive rain calling skill was similar enough to spirit contracting that upon using spirit magic to summon water gave a huge boost.

Will shook his head quickly after coming up with that thought.

The progress bar for the {Spirit Contractor} skill was undoubtedly very low before Will had Rina practice magic. It only surged by an impressive amount after Rina casted her first spell at Will's orders.

The only other slightly plausible cause Will was able to think of was his {Spiritualization} skill, which he had no idea on how it operated and how it affected his skill so rapidly and immensely.

Will closed his eyes and tried to let his brain connect the elusive dots to form a solid idea or logical reason. After several minutes of assembling and disassembling ideas within his head, Will sighed in frustration and took out his phone.

Maybe something in his phone would give him a clue on why he experienced such a random increase in his skill. Will have a wry smile towards himself at his seemingly emotion driven behavior.

Although Will's unwavering focus on why his skill grew so fast seemed unreasonable to the outer eye, Will knew exactly why he was so desperate.

If he could duplicate the effects of what had happened to his spirit contractor skill, he might be able to finally break through the 99% barrier on his sword related skills.