Tweety - Raveena

On the ride home, my regret turned into determination. I almost wasn't there for Levi when he needed me. What if I couldn't protect him the next time? What if my family was in danger? I had to become stronger.

Living as I did in my past life, I greatly appreciated all my advantages in this one. I was born with both silver and golden spoon in mouth. Additionally, there was magic. If I didn't take advantage of all my privilege, I'd never forgive myself.

By this stream of thought, I recalled how I'd performed healing magic earlier. Each type of magic had its own feeling when performed that allowed me to define them as their own category. I knew of the four basic elements and now this new type. By its shiny, golden appearance, I classified it as light magic but did that mean there was dark magic too? And what would dark magic do, curses?

I got excited thinking about the possibilities but dark magic had a bad rap in lots of stories so I'd leave it for now. On the other hand, this idea of additional elements was exciting. Could there be lightning magic? I was a bit of an Azula simp in my past life so I'd definitely try it out.

A combination of extreme determination and excitement was exactly the kind of encouragement I needed. By the time I'd returned to my room for the night, I was too excited to sleep but that was perfect, I'd be cultivating anyway.

—

A lot can change in ten years. For one, I was now sixteen while Levi should be nearing nineteen. Unfortunately, I hadn't been able to see Levi often during this time due to increasingly more powerful beasts appearing in the spirit lands. Travel became limited because of the risk involved in leaving established areas.

It wasn't very noticeable at first, but around a decade ago, beasts started roaming outside of their usual territories in the centre of the spirit lands. The inner spirit lands aren't often explored because of this reason so no one is really sure what happened to cause the change. I personally suspected that whoever's mana sense I'd stumbled into at the party all that time ago was responsible but then again, why would they? If they were the leader of the beasts, then why would they start attacking settlements?

The population in the spirit lands is almost entirely along the coast. Humans reside in the northeast while elves take the south and southeastern sides. In the west, there are reports of another civilization but both humans and elves know little about them due to their land borders being surrounded by beast land and their sea borders having extremely turbulent weather, enough to destroy most ships. Due to the high death rate associated with crossing these borders, the west is largely unknown. What is known, is that there are humanoid beings in the west that exhibit animal characteristics.

Sadly, most reports about the area are ramblings of people who have gone insane from trauma and as such, range from descriptions of demon-like organisms to cat people. Maybe both of these descriptions are accurate but if I had to pick one, I'd like for there to be cat people... for personal reasons.

Outside of the spirit lands, political turmoil was coming to a climax as many people suspected that war would break out between the Soarva and Jansana empire. The cause of the turmoil was both the increasing value of the spirit lands' resources and the coronation of the new Jansanan emperor.

The new emperor was an over-ambitious warmonger that had something to prove. After ascending the throne, the Jansanan army began to gather near the western coast of Deokya, nearest to Paloma. This was quite concerning for the people of the Republic of Korinth who were about to witness a war between the world superpowers over possession of their resources. Albeit concerned, the republic couldn't do much but wait for the war to start since neither empire would or could back down. If one did, the other would grow strong enough to conquer the world.

Not long ago, the extended Byron family, including the lord, left Paloma and headed to the spirit lands to seek refuge from the conflict as many others did. Anyone with enough wealth and the sense to leave had come to the spirit lands which caused a massive influx in population. Luckily, the human settlements had grown rapidly in the past decade and were able to accommodate such an increase. The only problem with the extra people, is that many humans who had arrived in the spirit lands didn't respect the elves' sovereignty over their land. What were currently isolated cases of aggression, were escalating and becoming a growing problem.

In terms of individual development, I had improved quite a lot. My mana core had passed yellow stage after orange, as well as most of green and I was now in the final stages of what I assumed preceded blue. With this, my personal mana capacity increased greatly as well as my control over mana in its many forms. The now known forms included: fire, water, earth, air, light.

For a while, I had tried to create lightning by imagining it as a new form of magic, different from all others but seeing as how that didn't provide results, I thought back to my "prior knowledge". "Lightning is a part of firebending so maybe it's the same here?" I thought. Sure enough, this worked and it looked super cool.

Just as lightning was a facet of fire magic, the other basic elements also had respective sub elements. I wasn't very creative with my experimentation though so most of my "discoveries" are based off my atla (avatar the last airbender) knowledge. I had successfully performed blood, metal, lightning (of course) and sound magic. Sound magic was of my own design and was basically just making loud noises. It doesn't sound very cool but I made it myself after the incident with Levi in the hills so I was proud of it regardless.

These sub techniques were more difficult to control than the basic elements but they were worth the work as they were very effective. Blood magic was a bit icky to use but I wasn't gonna go all crazy with it so I figured it'd be fine. It was a quick method that I could use to kill many weak things at once by removing their blood which sounds bad and looked horrendous. This technique didn't work on stronger creatures for whatever reason so I couldn't use it to KO a big monster although I was able to kill larger creatures with practice. As a side note, I'm not a sociopath, I only use blood magic when hunting, not on small defenceless creatures. The largest creature I could kill in this way was a rat-like creature, about the size of a house cat.

Lightning and sound magic both had the affect of stunning an opponent with a shock wave but while sound didn't do much physical damage, lightning was a high power strike that could KO most creatures found in the forest. It was very noisy though so I tried not to use it, even though it looked really cool.

And lastly, this world wasn't at the stage where metal would be common so I couldn't use it as much as I'd like but it was great for fortifying tools. Swords in this world were still made by forging and the like but with metal magic, I could fortify and sharpen a sword to scary extents, as well as arrow heads and other metal equipment. Metal magic came in handy with my skills in archery and swordsmanship which were also near mastery.

Altogether, I was basically a one man army in this world where magic was unknown. This was limited to human armies and my imagination but I was confident in my ability. I'd been approved to venture into the forest by myself some time ago when I was able to show these skills but my parents were still taking their time when deciding to treat me like an adult. Although I looked like a young adult due to the increased growth rate from cultivation, my parents still coddle me. I'm their only child but still, stop it.

During the same time period, I was taught the knowledge I'd need as a noble which included advanced etiquette, economics, history, how to play an instrument which was basically a piano, dancing and a bunch of other things that I detested. Yeah, dancing was cool and I enjoyed music but when I reincarnated I didn't think I'd have to do math. At least not to this extent. Secondly, I was being taught hundreds of years of history. And for what? For what reason do I need to know this much information? Am I going to be playing trivial pursuit later?

Either way, I was proud of my progress but I hadn't gotten a lot of return on my investment. Sighing, I decided that I'd look forward to seeing Levi on his birthday in a week. He was my unofficial boyfriend—I don't actually know if "boyfriend" is a thing here—and It wasn't often that we got to see each other so I was excited.