No matter how powerful I was as an individual, the raging storm outside reminded me that I was still an ant compared to the actual forces of nature. A glacier could exert magnitudes more force than I could, tides could erode any rock if given enough time, and the torrential storm was stronger than the burned land, at least on the surface.

Despite my scrying construct being only partially physical, without any actual biology or anything I would regard as critical to its function, the storm was giving it a hard time. I had no idea how the weather managed to do that, the thing was essentially a clump of Astral Power shaped by my personal desire, its form largely due to a nostalgic connection to Lenore and a desire to make it function in a similar fashion to my avian friend, not because I actually needed it to be a bird. I was confident I could reshape the construct into a simple, round blob of Astral Power without any actual loss of function, though likely with lowered efficiency, so how could the storm give it trouble?

Out of curiosity, and because the storm had now progressed to a point where my influence was negligible, I changed my focus, pushing and prodding the connection to my scrying construct, trying to change its composition to a construct of pure Darkness, shedding its physical form entirely. It was quite challenging, and I quickly realised that it was a lot more difficult to hold this shape together, especially if a lightning bolt came a little too close, but at least the dark cloud was entirely immune to the raging winds and the pouring rain.

With the newly improved scrying construct, I managed to get a better look at the situation on the ground. And what I saw there, in the burned land, was quite impressive.

I had heard the expression of a poked hornet’s nest, or an overturned anthill but to observe a similar phenomenon on a much larger, and fierier, scale was somewhat intimidating. While I might have been able to count the Bitumen and other strange beasts that came boiling out of the soil, I wasn’t certain it was worth the effort. There were hundreds, maybe as many as a thousand, of them, and, by the looks of it, that number was going up as time went on and the burned land either made more of them or shifted the cores from wherever they had been to the area where they gathered now.

Even compared to the bombardment the mountain I was under had endured, their efforts to keep the burned land on fire were on another level. The sheer mass of burning goop that they were slinging around caused a massive cloud of heated steam to rise. The heated steam did what hot, moist air always did and continued on upwards, until it hit the cold clouds, where some of my magic still lingered, pushing the temperature down slightly. Not that my magic remained the primary impetus for the cooling, there was more than enough cold air to accomplish that, but my magic was mixed in, for what that was worth.

Cold air and hot steam came together and did what that combination always did, have the heated steam condense back into water and follow the inexorable call of gravity and fall back down, landing slightly deeper in the burned land, as the cycling of hot air and steam caused some fierce winds due to the pressure differentials.

“I might have overdone this a little,” I couldn’t help but mutter, despite there being nobody in my bunker to hear my whisper, but some things just needed to be said. And this was one of those things. The storm I had kicked off was getting stronger all the time as burned land kept resisting, expending energy to oppose the storm, only for physics to add that energy into the storm’s system.

By now, it wasn’t just hail and rain carried along by the fierce storm. The wind had gotten enough power from the fiery resistance and physics following their laws to pick up trees, rocks, and pretty much anything not nailed down. Or even things nailed down, if one were to find nails in the current situation, I was fairly certain I had seen an actual boulder tumble through the air, though there might have been an accidental ramp involved in the airtime it managed to get. Whatever the cause, the entire situation was quite the mess, and the fact that more and more lightning was coming down, shattering what little quiet remained, didn’t help.

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After watching the raging storm for some thirty minutes, I started to shiver just a little. The shivering had nothing to do with the temperature in my comfortable bunker; it was a purely psychosomatic effect. The storm was intense enough, and I was observing it closely enough that a part of my mind was convinced I had to be cold, so my body started to react accordingly. Being self-aware that my mind was essentially deceiving, or at least misinforming, my body was somewhat weird. Still, given that I couldn’t perfectly control my mind, I shouldn’t be overly surprised that it occasionally did odd things.

Instead of keeping my mind in the cold, so to speak, I let the link to the scrying construct drop into the background of my mind, only for the construct to dissipate when I didn’t focus enough on it. Darkness Magic proved to be quite fragile, reminding me why I had added the other elements to my scrying constructs in the first place, but that was neither here nor there. The construct was dissipated, and, for now, I should get some sleep, secure in my deeply buried bunker. The various blue boxes appearing in a small corner of my mind could be dealt with when I woke back up.

During the night, I had a few quite odd dreams, mostly of the variant that had me in the crystal forest of Neyto, with faint voices pleading for help, and me suggesting some quick spells to deal with the problems. Why couldn’t people pick up some simple Blood Magic? It wasn’t all that hard, nor was combining it with other elements to provide quicker and more encompassing healing. That way, they wouldn’t have to shout into the forest and get on my nerves.

Luckily, by the morning, those dreams had largely faded into the background, meaning I was somewhat aware of having had them but given that I had dreamed about a lot of strange things in my life, I wasn’t too bothered by them. They existed and faded in the morning, as all dreams did. Unless you made sure your dreams came true in the waking world, but that was a different and difficult process.

So, when morning came, I started to check the various notifications.

Given the massive storm I had kicked off, I had gained surprisingly little EXP, barely enough to fill up a level and push me to a hundred and twenty, the level-up coming with the usual glut of attribute points.

Those points pushed me to a hundred and twenty-five points in Intelligence, the milestone bringing with it an amusingly familiar trait. Over a year ago, when I reached twenty-five Intelligence, I received a trait called Arcane Adept, increasing my affinity to all magic. Now, at a hundred and twenty-five, I received a trait called Arcane Expert, which, as one would expect, increased my affinity to all magic greatly. If I hadn’t been so gleeful at the increased affinity to my favourite craft, I might have been annoyed with the system but as things were, I could easily accept the somewhat simplistic and almost lazy nature of the trait and simply enjoy it for what it was.

Alongside the Acrane Expert trait, I received one, though less exciting, trait for reaching ninety Intuition and even having sixty Vitality gave me a trait, though what I could only consider a minor one.

While I wondered what exactly the Intuitive Response trait meant when it told me it improved my ability to react without thinking, the Vital Rest trait I gained for my Vitality was even less obvious. It just told me it would allow me to restore my body and mind even if my rest was slightly disturbed. But did that mean I would sleep through minor things, whatever that might mean, or did it mean something else? I wasn’t sure and just a little scared to find out, though, given that it was supposedly a positive trait, I could only hope it wouldn’t harm me. But only time would tell.

Other than the traits, I also received a few skill points in the different elemental magics, in addition to some in Astral Meditation. However, none of these skill points had any major change attached to them; they just gave a slight increase to my magical abilities.

Now, I only had to find out what the storm I had wrought had done to the outside world.