Chapter 334: Thera's Perspective

Chapter 334: Thera's Perspective

As had become all too common, Thera awoke from the sounds above her, cracking open her eyes to see the numerous spirits filling her room as a cheer went up amongst them when they noticed her eyes flutter open.

“Princess!”

“The princess is up!”

“Hello again princess!”

Dozens of them, all speaking up at once to her left Thera wanting nothing more than to close her eyes again, even if she resisted the impulse as she held out her hand.

“Alright, I’m sure you all know this by now so one by one.”

The massive boost to her total mana and regeneration rate with awakening two skills meant she could use her spirit empowering more often without worry so she had no problem with doing it for them all, but the greeting was taking a mental toll. Gaining the title had been bad enough, but when the first group of them showed up afterwards, only to immediately call her that, she thought she was going to have a heart attack.

“Also, can you all please, please call me anything else?” She tried for what must have been the dozenth time, only to be greeted with the same confusion they displayed each time she asked.

“But what else would we call you?”

“Thera, earthkin, anything really?”

Despite what she’d initially expected, Aso hadn’t joined up with anyone else to form a party yet. She was starting to mingle with others at the guild, but unlike Thera, her work at the clinic was coming first for the time being, meaning it would be inconvenient for anyone she joined to have to work around her schedule.

Because of that, when Thera couldn’t go with her she was doing safer quests by herself, only venturing deeper into the woods when she wasn’t alone to get whatever practice she could.

Of course, there were issues with that as well. Thera was no teacher, she didn’t know how to guide Aso to greater heights, especially since they didn’t share any magics. Instead, their time together out in the woods was more geared towards Aso figuring out what worked best for herself as Thera worked to ensure the other girl didn’t fall into any danger she couldn’t deal with while offering what few pointers she could.

It might not have been the most efficient way of doing things, but they both felt like it worked for them, and it gave them each some company in their practice as they went.

As they walked, every now and then Thera would stop to touch one of the trees they passed, working to practice both of her awakened skills by using the same spell that had pushed them over that edge to begin with, though in a completely different way then she had the first time.

When she cast her petrification, she was trying to be so much more selective of it than she had been before, and luckily for the forest, she was succeeding. Instead of each tree she touched turning to stone, it was only a few leaves and branches changing as she pushed the limits of her control. It still wasn’t the fastest and she doubted she’d be able to use it from too much of a distance, at least without the risk of getting other things caught up in the effect as well, but being able to see her improvement so clearly was thrilling in ways she found hard to properly express.

And it wasn’t just that spell she was getting comfortable using. As Aso began searching the area for the herbs that her quest required, Thera activated another to be on the safe side. Earth healing. A spell that imbued a given area with a basic life spell that would improve the healing rate of anything in it for a length of time varying depending on how much mana went into it. Ordinarily, it was far from effective, with the spell really only having any worth to the few people in the world that had either an awakened earth or life magic, but by having both along with her huge mana pool, Thera could cast the spell over a field and have it run for over an hour with relative ease. It was something she’d started practicing when she’d begun hunting with Aso as an extra precaution for the girl's safety, and with all of that done she let herself relax just a little.

Let’s see, so what should I do to pass the time now? She wondered, not sure how she should be training her magics. Working on improving her control was always a big thing, but the question usually came down to how. A question that was answered by a feeling above her, compelling her to look up just as a stone ape threw itself from a treetop, aiming for exactly where she would have been if she hadn’t detected it and moved.

To its poor luck though, she had sensed it, and in seconds it wasn’t just a creature with a stone skin, but solid stone as it was petrified.

When she figured out what the skill was for after gaining it from awakening her earth magic, Thera had to admit that she wasn’t impressed. It gave her a natural understanding of where stone and earth was around her, but the answer was usually a simple ‘down’. That quick exchange however had managed to show her that there was some utility to the skill that she hadn’t been seeing.

As Aso ran up to her to check if everything was alright, Thera waved her off, telling her to get back to her quest as she looked at what was now a statue in front of her. Undoing petrification was supposedly significantly harder than it was to petrify something in the first place, something she was sure to fail at, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t make for some good practice in the meantime.