Blake stared at his newest totem in frustration. This was his third one after he had discovered how important symbolism was. He had made no improvements. That wasn’t wholly true. The painting had become more precise, and his paint colors were better, but his Talent didn’t provide much more information for such small improvements.

  At this point, Blake had to decide whether to once again delay his research into old magic to go on a den-clearing spree. His original plan would have had him leaving after the first totem, so he had already delayed by a week.

  If his third spirit stat had been growing at a consistent rate, Blake probably would have set out without a second thought, but the significantly diminishing returns on his stat growth soured the idea to him. Another option was scouting out a high-density region.

  High-density regions did not have the dens of medium and peak-density regions. Instead, the monsters of the region would be spread out evenly across the area, similar to the format of low regions.

  Scouting, therefore, meant checking what type of monsters he would be facing as well as how big a group they traveled in. Peak and high-density regions had a different monster type than the medium and low-density regions. Typically, the monsters were more pack-oriented and traveled in groups, which added an extra level of difficulty to the whole thing.

  Blake thought about his options for only a moment before deciding to stay and work on his totems. Magic would be a game-changer for him. Right now, should he fail to take out a sub-boss with his first two javelin throws, the ensuing fight would leave him badly injured.

  With magic, Blake could overcome his range deficiency. He could imagine it now. He would walk into a boss room and start blasting out with fire and lighting, laying waste to everything that stood in his path. The sub-bosses wouldn’t stand a chance.

  Apparently, his dreams of being a powerful mage combatant weren’t as dead as Blake had believed. The only difference now was he was casting through the use of tools rather than free form. He could live with that.

  Looking at his most recent creation, Blake decided to try something else to increase the symbolism. Right now, the horn of the rabbicorn was little better than a nub due to the limited size of the log he had carved it out of.

  Knife in hand, Blake carved the nub out of the wooden rabbicorn, leaving a hole in its head. He then took an actual rabbicorn horn and stuck it in the hole along with some glue. He held it there while the adhesive set, then painted over any glue that leaked out the sides to try and keep everything consistent.

  There, now, the recreation had a proper horn. Blake smiled widely as his Talent activated. It had worked. The horn had tipped the creation over the edge into a working totem. It wasn’t just that the horn was there but also that it was an actual rabbicorn horn and wooden recreation.

  Blake could better see now that the final missing link was just that, a link. The carving had looked like a rabbicorn, and he understood it to be a rabbicorn, but it didn’t have any actual link to what a rabbicorn was. The horn acted as that connection.

  The totem did not yet do anything. It had to be activated through a ritual. Unfortunately, Blake did not know what that ritual entailed exactly. When the skill component of his Talent activated, he was not given information on what he needed to do for the activation ritual.

  This was different from Blake’s typical skill gain. For weapons and tools, Blake gained muscle memory and theoretical knowledge on how to most efficiently move to create his desired effect. There were, of course, different styles of combat that existed, but his Talent focused on the fundamental principles that let him utilize those styles, assuming he knew any.

  For the activation ritual, Blake was not given any muscle memory or instruction on how to complete the desired effect. Instead, his Talent interacted with his Affinity to teach him what to look for when creating the ritual. This didn’t directly grow his Affinity but was more of a different way to view and use it.

  The theoretical component told Blake what his goal was. The rabbicorn horn acted as an anchor for the totem, but it was yet fully linked to the concept of a rabbicorn. The activation created that link while also guiding what effect the totem would have.

  Due to both the low quality of the totem and Blake’s lack of understanding of old magic, he would be limited to weak, passive effects within range of the totem. Guiding the exact effect was beyond his means for now, but Blake could at least guide it away from passively enhancing all rabbicorns in the area.

  Instead, Blake wanted some form of physical enhancement. Using his Affinity, he needed to seek out items that aligned with that concept. Already, Blake could feel feedback from items all around him. He had never succeeded in using his spiritual sense to detect anything but energy density and natural treasures, but now he could get a faint sense of what an object could symbolize in a ritual.

  The specifics were limited to rabbicorn totems, but now that he knew how to make a functional totem, Blake could make more for different types of symbols. For now, though, he wanted to activate his first totem.

  Walking around, Blake picked up one object after another, focusing on his spiritual sense to detect any resonance it might have with his new totem. Rabbicorn bones and horns, as well as bladed weapons, all had some level of resonance. He didn’t have any fresh rabbicorn corpses; otherwise, he suspected every part of the body would work, too.

  The horns and blades didn’t give Blake a sense that they would help align the totem to a body enhancement effect, so he left those, but he spent time collecting discarded bones. Since that wasn’t going to be enough by itself, so he went to the den’s entrance and cleared out any rabbicorns that had gathered.

  Blake expertly harvested their bodies, splitting them up into separate components that he could use in the ritual. He was surprised blood had a distinct resonance from other components such as muscle, heart, and brain.

  Rabbicorn heart, blood, muscle, and bones were all gathered together for the ritual. There, Blake paused. He had picked out what he wanted in the ritual, but… now what? It took a decent amount of time delving into his Talent-granted activation ritual skill for him to come up with a direction to go next.

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  In the dirt surrounding the totem, Blake drew a circle. It was no more than three meters across, but he had to redo it a few times until it was perfect. The circle wasn’t necessary, but it helped him position the ritual ingredients correctly, which did have to be in a circle.

  Blake evenly spaced them out, not caring to place them in any particular order. Once placed, he felt out with his spiritual sense again, checking for anything out of place. There was nothing immediately wrong with it, but there was a sense of discord across the circle.

  This puzzled Blake as he didn’t know what could cause such a thing. The key to the ritual was resonance, which was why he had picked the ingredients he had, so discord could not be a good thing. Focusing on his Affinity harder didn’t make any difference, so he fell back on trial and error.

  Grabbing two ingredients, Blake swapped their positions in the circle. The discord got worse, but that was a good sign, as it meant he was on the right track. The position mattered, and he just had to figure out what went where.

  Sometime later, the discord was fully silenced, leaving only a harmonic balance between ingredients and totem. There was still one problem. Blake could sense what direction the totem’s effect was leaning with this ritual, and it was heavily in favor of a rabbicorn-specific effect.

  That made sense, given only rabbicorn parts had been used, but nothing else had resonated correctly. Blake wasn’t sure what to do. If there were other types of monsters in the region, he might have been able to hunt them down for parts, but there were only rabbicorns.

  Pacing back and forth, Blake thought through the problem. He needed an ingredient that could represent the body without feeding further into the rabbicorn theme. Looking down at himself, he had a stroke of inspiration.

  He needed something from an animal, and the only animal here outside the rabbicorns was himself. Now, he wasn’t going to use his organs and/or muscles for the ritual; he didn’t want to die, but his blood was easily replenished. It would also create a connection between him and the totem that wouldn’t be possible with any old animal parts.

  Blake dragged a knife across the palm of his hand and then squeezed it into a fist, causing blood to drop down onto the ritual circle below. Since he wanted his blood to be just as important as the rabbicorn ingredients, Blake walked around the circle to cover all of it.

  By the time he was done, Blake was beginning to feel a little woozy. His Constitution didn’t give him more blood it, at best, let him regenerate it faster, so losing so much blood so fast left him feeling ill.

  Despite wanting to begin the ritual immediately now that he had all the components in place, Blake had to take a moment to sit down and recover. The enhanced healing factor that was the spirit realm on top of his Constitution meant he was back on his feet soon enough.

  He regretted cutting his palm for the blood. Media always made it seem like the correct way to draw blood outside of proper needles, but all it did was leave him with a hand that he couldn’t use. A small cut on his arm would have been so much easier as long as he avoided any veins.

  Blake circled the ritual circle one final time, feeling out the resonance for any instabilities. Not finding anything wrong, he activated the ritual. Activating the ritual was both simple and complex at the same time. To activate it, Blake reached out with his will and sort of urged it forward.

  It was easy and simple since Blake knew how to do it thanks to his Talent, but without it, he would have been completely lost on what to do. Even a verbal explanation would have been insufficient as it required manipulating a part of himself he had never used before.

  It was the spiritual part of himself that Blake could feel growing whenever his Will and Affinity stats developed. The fact that it wasn’t only Will and Affinity made him excited. Was this related to the third spirit stat?

  Blake was proven right only a moment later when he felt the third stat grow. It was only slightly, as he hadn’t done anything that he found difficult, but having the first signs of what the stat could be was monumental to him. It was even more exciting that the stat was related to magic. Would reaching the first threshold with the stat give him access to more direct forms of magic?

  There was no time to contemplate it further as the ritual took place, drawing Blake’s attention away. The ritual ingredients around the circle glowed lightly for a moment before dissolving into nothing. It was a strange visual effect that made it look like they just ceased to exist rather than having been turned to ash or some other natural effect.

  Nothing seemed to happen for a moment until Blake’s Talent activated, flooding his mind with more information about his new totem. He was interested to find that while he had gained insight into totems after completing the wooden figure, it wasn’t until activating it that the information was complete.

  He hadn’t even realized the information was so incomplete. There had been small gaps he had noticed, but he had just taken that for magical phenomena that his Talent refused to expound on like with alchemy. Now he knew that while some of it was indeed magic, he couldn’t sense there was more to it.

  For whatever reason, Blake’s Talent was willing to give him information on mana. As far as he had been aware, mana and magic were interchangeable words for the same thing, but his understanding was clearly wrong or, at least, incomplete.

  Blake now knew that the totem passively drew in mana to power its effect. Once the mana was inside the totem, it was transformed through a process that he couldn’t fully grasp. This was the part of magic that his Talent couldn’t help him with. All he knew was that something was either added to the mana or it was changed in some way to make it usable for the totem.

  The mana was then spread back out in a spherical shape, giving off a passive effect. The passive effect was tied to Blake both through his blood as well as a more ephemeral connection that was once again obscured from him. This meant that he was the only one to benefit from its effects, even if others were within range.

  The passive effect itself was quite useful, if a bit limited. While within ten meters of the totem, Blake would see a boost to his endurance. This covered everything from being able to workout longer to needing less sleep. The boost was small at only five percent, but this was his first successful use of magic.

  Blake’s mind raced with ideas. As it stood, the totem was only useful while he resided within his base, but if he could find a way to extend the range, it could make a big difference when it came time to explore a high-density region. He would just have to set up a totem at the border of the region in that case.

  And then there was the variety of effects that he could potentially get just from a rabbicorn totem. Blake still wouldn’t be able to specify exactly what he wanted to happen, but the extra information he got from activating the totem gave him a better idea of what was possible.

  Every aspect of the physical stats could be boosted with a rabbicorn totem. The buff wouldn’t extend to an entire stat, but it would be things like the endurance boost, which could be considered a sub-stat of Constitution. It wasn’t a stat developed independently, but its exact effects could be measured out separately when something external came into play, like a totem.

  Mental stats were a no-go, as were Will and Affinity, but there was some resonance with his third spirit stat. Likely because he didn’t know what it was, yet his Talent didn’t provide any information on how it could be improved, but he did get more confirmation that it was related to magic.

  Such an effect would likely rely on using a magic sub-boss’s horn, and he wasn’t willing to experiment on an unknown quantity at this time, but it had interesting implications for the future. The question was, what should he do next? Did he experiment more with totems to make their range longer with more powerful effects, or did he make one last push with rabbicorn sub-bosses before moving onto a high-density region?

  It was a difficult decision, but one Blake knew the answer to. He just didn’t want to accept it. Despite the potential of the totems, they would not provide him with the quick powerup he had wanted. He needed to turn back to his stat advancement and make a push for ascension.

  The totems hadn’t helped with alchemy either, which had been his hope. Using magic for alchemy might have made an immediate impact. For now, it was back to clearing dens.

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