I spent the next few days playing with my new Skill. I had never gotten a skill from a local System before, so I had no idea what to expect. The results were quite interesting. The first thing I discovered was that I couldn't find the Skill using my essence senses. When I used my essence sense to look for anything bound to me or attached to me, all I found was emptiness. The System didn't seem to have stuck a packet of information into my brain, or attached a spell to my soul, or anything of the sort. After the System had absorbed the [Ice Mage] Spark, it seemed to have vanished into thin air.

That didn't mean the {Ice Manipulation} spell was fake, though. Even though the skill was only at level zero when I focused my thoughts on wanting to manipulate ice in the world around me, I got a strong feeling that I could do it. It required that I spend essence from my mana pool - which, in this world, was a mix of my manifestation and binding essence. As long as I spent local mana, it felt as if my senses and my brain expanded, allowing me to touch nearby ice or snow with my mind. I could even detect minute particles of water in the air around me - though, interestingly enough, I couldn't detect blood or any other fluids inside of the human body. Out of curiosity, I tried spitting, and the moment my saliva exited my mouth, I could detect it just fine - but not while it was inside of my mouth. I had no idea why the skill differentiated those two states, but it was good to know.

The actual effects of {Ice Manipulation} were equally interesting. Contrary to my expectations, even at rank 0 I could still do something with the skill, even if it wasn't very powerful. Of course, since this wasn't even a basic-grade skill, the effects were very weak - but I could still use mana to manipulating ice in my surroundings, even if my control and speed were quite bad. My absurd stats let me somewhat sidestep this issue, but it still felt like I was wearing thick oven mitts - I simply didn't have the dexterity and control that I was used to when I used other spells I had created myself.

After some experimentation, I confirmed that I could probably control about 5 kilograms of ice if I burned all of my mana at once. It would cost much more if the ice were scattered, cost even more to condense water into ice, and the speed at which I could launch ice and turn it into icicles or ice walls was fairly slow - nearly three seconds of hard work to get a decent weapon or defense set up. Not exactly peak battlefield efficiency. Still, I was having fun messing with the magic system, even if I wasn't exactly counting on these skills to bail me out of a dangerous situation anytime soon. At the very least, I still had some level of offensive power - I could launch an ice bullet at high enough speeds to kill an ordinary person, even if pushing one projectile to appropriate speeds would drain nearly a third of my mana.

Of greater interest to me was the other benefit the local System gave me. Normally, upgrading a skill was down to insight - no matter how much someone practiced, they could easily get stuck at one of the thresholds between one stage of a skill and the next. Talent and mental acuity were insurmountable barriers if someone wasn't good enough at advancing. The four of us had experienced the exact same problem while attempting to advance our skills and abilities to higher realms in previous worlds.

That was no longer the case in this world. Due to the local System's effect, every time I used {Ice Manipulation}, I could feel something actively aiding me as I tried to understand how to manipulate and use ice magic. It was almost like a teacher sitting off to the side and occasionally offering me random tips. Some of the little insights the System gave me were useless - they could be repeat bits of information, or something I had already figured out. However, the fact that I could get tiny little bits and pieces of information just from mindlessly practicing was fascinating. It meant that if I tried hard enough and practiced long enough, I would probably eventually build up enough insights to advance my skill by another grade, no matter how good or bad my talent was. This meant that I had a huge amount of untapped potential in this world - and so did everything else in this dimension.

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After I realized how useful the local insights from a System skill were, I couldn't help but wish that my class was more in-line with my usual fighting style. If I had gotten a spatial mage type class, or a proper healing type Class, I might have been able to drag a skill related to one of my keyword abilities all the way up to heroic grade in this world. I had no idea what would happen if I did that, but I suspected it would have given me a huge edge in the fight for more lives. It also made me wonder if I could somehow get access to a spark outside of our town's seven sparks. Each ember could only produce a few specific types of sparks, but the [Priest] hadn't said I was limited to those seven. Was it possible to trade sparks between towns and villages? It was an idea to look into later.

Apart from working on my newly acquired ice magic, I spent time working on my third rune. Just as I had originally planned to do, I used Felix's {Brand of Miria} to copy my first and second runes… but not my third or above. I could copy all of my previous life's runes the moment I wanted to, but first, I wanted to swap out my third rune. After all, my third rune last world had been largely focused on item creation, because that was what had made sense at the time. I felt quite good about my decision back then, since it had let us create the artificial sun. The artificial sun had definitely been worth the ridiculous amount of time, effort, and resources we had poured into it. However, in this world, I saw no real advantage to having a third rune ability focused on item creation - and I also didn't think that was what the group needed from me. When we got back to the Market, we were going to fight for more lives. That meant I needed something that boosted my combat abilities.

I decided that meant I should focus on my support abilities. Anise was already heading towards working as our heavy hitter, big-damage mage. Sallia was our front line. Felix could design items and also use those items effectively in combat, and was also starting to get used to making artificial limbs and augments that could bump up his physical stats. That made him some kind of strange mix between a front-liner and a utility focused addition to the team. I figured the best thing I could do to help the group out was to focus on my two biggest strengths - supporting my allies and weakening our enemies.

After some thinking, I decided to focus more on strengthening my allies with my third rune. I already had extinguish and Eldritch storm to weaken enemies, so what was missing right now was a way to directly strengthen my allies besides healing magic. Any abilities I made using my absorption essence runes needed to be based on space and water, which made that much harder to conceive. Still, after some thinking, I came up with a good idea.

One of the most useful items I had access to right now was my {Lake-Gazer's Dress}. It allowed me to survive plenty of attacks that I normally wouldn't be able to, and it was effectively armor - but it weighed nearly nothing, so it didn't hamper my agility. It also had exceptional resistance against most types of attack, since having a literal lake folded up using spatial magic made it very hard for most physical attacks to get through my dress. The only real dangers were when monsters hit parts of my body that weren't covered by the dress, or when they had spatial magic or other ways to get around the dress's defensive mechanism. I decided to make a spell that could create knockoff versions of the {Lake-Gazer's Dress} for my friends as my third rune ability. That would be exceptionally useful against most monsters we might fight for more lives, and it was also very useful against plenty of other kinds of monsters.

Of course, it would take a while to rebuild my third rune, but I thought the idea had a fair amount of potential. So I spent time working on my third rune and playing with ice magic as I get the hang of this new world.

On the fifth day after I got my spark, I felt the giant beast we were riding on start to slow down. I paused, before I remembered the priest saying something about the ember preparing to stop soon. I frowned, and left the hut I shared with my father, before I looked outside. True to my suspicions, the ember was visibly slowing down with every second that passed. As the ember slowed, the walking towns following it also started to slow to a stop.

A moment later, I felt my father grab my shoulder and drag me back into the house.

"Inside, Miria," he said, as he gave me a worried look. "We're stopping. That means monsters. Don't leave the house until I come back and get you, okay? I don't want to lose you the same way I lost your mother." Before I had time to blink in surprise, my father closed the door, leapt out of the house, and started running for the side of the village bearing beast.

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