Morgan found he couldn't help but grin as he accepted the prompt and glanced over the options. It was the most excited he had ever been as far as he could remember, though his horrendous memory and generally dreadful demeanour did make that a rather short list. His newly acquired trait was also working its magic. It wasn't like he had a super healing factor, the change wasn't even outwardly noticeable. However he did feel like more of his strength had returned as he stretched beneath his tree. With a flick of his wrist the spell book shimmered in existence, Morgan decided to indulge himself in a bite of bread and a sip of water as he considered his choices.

  Morgan looked over them and sighed, indulging in his exhaustion for a brief moment. They were all useful, but he already knew he would pick . sounded pretty universally useful and

  would likely help offset his natural clumsiness. Depending on the duration it could end up being something he benefitted from all day. Morgan stretched his back against the olive tree, trying to position his legs and take advantage of the soft grass creeping around the trees roots. He looked in the woods leading inland, his breath catching slightly as he remembered the quest description for . As amusing as he found the sardonic name of it, it left in no uncertain terms that violence was in his near future. That and the contest with the Gods of which he was now a champion and thus, participant in. Somehow Morgan doubted he would be getting through that without a scuffle or two. No, he needed something more than a fancy book to slap things with if he was going to survive, he just had to hope the other options would come around again in another quest reward. Morgan mentally accepted and felt and odd sensation of energy moving between him and his spell book. For a brief moment it seemed to grow heavier and the Morgan felt the tether between him and the grimoire grow stronger before the the feeling faded. Morgan flipped the book open, its' black pages lighting up with the index page and sure enough one new spell was there. As his excitement grew the pages flipped past, responding to his intent. The silvery ink resolved into a number of paragraphs, broken up by glyph circles layered with meaning he could decipher. Part of him had hoped it might just be uploaded into his head or something but he had no such luck. That was fine though Morgan thought, if there was anything he could immerse himself in, it was learning magic. Another fine feature was that despite the fact he normally needed his glasses to read, the writing on the pages was still in perfect focus for him. Each word and symbol felt like it echoed in his mind as he read. The initial introduction for the spell described its effect and the manner of casting. The effect was simple enough, it would imbue a single attack with supernatural force and accuracy, both factors would vary depending on the power of the caster. The casting however, was not entirely what he had expected. Morgan expected some prescribed movements and an incantation of sorts. Instead, it simply suggested a series of mental exercises to create the appropriate thoughtform. He would then need to employ spell-craft to create an internal leyline that would act as a pathway for the spell to be conjured into reality. The world around him slowly slipped away as he read, the words echoing in his mind with a growing intensity until the words stuck inside his head as if someone had used a generous dose of gorilla glue and stuck them there. Slowly, Morgan begun to understand. The thoughtforms were guidelines to forming some rough approximation of the spell in his mind. He didn't need to work from scratch, the concept of the spell was already out there beyond the stricter confines of the physical world and all he needed was to give it something to connect to. The glyph, a mix of words, runes and geometry took that concept and transformed it. Some part of Morgan new that even with magic, reality demanded structure was structure and the glyph gathered the disparate notions of the spell and organised them into something a little more solid. Magic needed an inroad to reality, pure potential distilled and refined by a system of rules and whatever that glyph was, it was those rules. Morgan still didn't know what all those rules were, who made them and why they resembled the mystic mumbo-jumbo typical of the fantasy genre but he was in no position to get answers so he would have to put those queries aside for the moment.

  Morgan groaned as he was caught between the excitement of almost levelling, the exhilaration of learning actual magic and the the frustration of almost levelling up. Seriously 1xp short? Morgan thought as he audibly exhaled his frustration, trying to clear the negativity from his thoughts. This was a good thing. He closer to seeing what a level up was like, Morgan chuckled to himself as he wondered whether he would get some shiny special effects when he levelled up. Hell maybe he would even get a cool sound effect, maybe a bit of his own personal theme music? The thought brought him back up to a lighter mood. Morgan pushed himself up in a stumble, stretching as a few of his joints cracked. It didn't look like anyone was coming up the beach and the sun looked to have an hour at best before it ducked behind the storm and the myriad colours painting the sky would dim to darkness, lit only by the soft light of the moon and stars. Morgan wanted to test out his new spell because he was excited to have real, actual magic-it was still cool and he was not over that. On the more practical side of things he also wanted to test it to make sure it was real, make sure it worked. The thought of getting into a fight with some large and angry creature and having to bet his life on an untested power was not something that appealed to him. Morgan double check the cost. He would need 3 points of to activate the spell and so far he only had <4/15> left. The fact he had regained 1 point in the time it took him to learn the spell was reassuring at least, even if he didn't know exactly how long that was. Normally checking the time was something he dreaded, either it meant dragging himself off to do something he despised or reminding himself of how much time he had wasted being unproductive or doing nothing. In this particular moment however, Morgan really wished he had a watch. With a sigh of resignation Morgan knew he had to keep going. He couldn't go back to Argo, if he went back to that cabin the comfort of it would smother the meager drive that hat lit up inside him and he didn't know if he when or if he could find the energy to reignite it. He couldn't wait here either. He was growing fond of the gnarled olive tree with its thick trunk that looked to have grown over itself several times over, but out here he was exposed to the winds sweeping swipes stinging against his skin and howled in his ears. It was also getting a little bit chilly too. There was only one path forward and he wouldn't be doing himself any good trying to put it off.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Looking inland the small amount of of shrubland quickly gave way to a vast forest. Morgan felt some familiarity to it, the trees bore some similarities to the native ones of Australia but were still noticeably unfamiliar. The trees were tall with course plates of thick bark, with high branches forming a canopy of small leaves that blurred into a pale mass of green that soaked up the sun. The few low hanging branches he would need to navigate around were mostly bereft of leaves. What little patches of light made it through to the forest floor were crowded with shrubs, bushes and long strands of thin grass. At this distance Morgan couldn't make out any finer details such as nuts or berries, the occasion blurry spot of colours other than green and brown told him their were a few wild flowers out. He probably shouldn't trust anything he found anyway, he was not a botanist had no survival training. In short his knowledge of flora was sparser than his hair. He could at least make out a path in at least. Weaving in-between all of the bushes were small but noticeable paths working through the forest that weaved inwards until the distant trees overlapped one another in the growing darkness. Morgan settled on walking those paths while staying close to the rocky grey slope that looked to become a cliff somewhere in the distance. It would at least provide a some sense of direction which he sorely lacked. With no more reasons to delay Morgan pushed himself onwards, his footfalls heavy dry twigs and dead leaves crunching underfoot as he made his way through the shrubland and into the shelter of the trees.

  Morgan trudged on ducking under the occasional bare branch. The sight of nature had made him to a sombre, the area was similar enough to remind him of the walks he used to take with his dad. Before he passed away he always tried to cheer him up, help him appreciate the little things in life. It made a certain amount of sense that it was something he should be able to do anyway. Morgan was an artist after all, emphasis on the past-tense of was. It was a little difficult to honestly call himself one when he hadn't done more than a dozen sketches in the past five years. No, an artist would look at the trees, the symphony of birds going to roost for the night, the screeching of nocturnal creatures waking for the night shift amidst the creaking branches and rustling leaves. An artist would breathe in the faint odor of petrichor, the scent of the ocean carried by the wind and they would use it to paint their mind with the beauty around them. They would know techniques to get the beauty in their mind and draw it out into something real. But Morgan's mind was quiet. He always made a token effort to look around, observe the details of the world around him, try to imagine how he would sketch them, how he could bring their colours to life on a page. He tried to pull at the fraying threads of knowledge from when he had studied architecture and managed to remember learning things but not what it was he had learnt beyond a few token bits of information he had pulled out in conversations over the years to prove he had in fact, learnt something. Deciding that leaving himself to his own thoughts wasn't going to get him anywhere Morgan turned his focus to his . There were a number of things he saw there that he didn't have any information on beyond the names. Since he was just trudging along at the moment, he thought it would be a good time to clear things up first. He started with the status effects. Most of them while not surprising still weren't good so he may as well get them out of the way. Focusing on the status effects Morgan felt resistance, like pressure building in his mind. He worried for a moment it would take more to force the system to cough up more information but luckily the pressure gave way after a moment revealing more information.

  "Cool, somehow I made my soul depressed too" Morgan groaned out with a long-suffering sigh, pinching the bridge of his nose as he pushed back the encroaching headache. He was a little surprised about the impaired hearing, he didn't know anything was wrong but then again, it was only minor. He was also thankful the unfocused status effect probably wouldn't affect him if he got into a fight. Inspired... was not all too surprising when he thought about it. Even he would be hard pressed not to feel a little giddy after getting divine assistance from a mythical goddess. The inspired status was temporary, so Morgan resolved to make the best of it while it lasted. From the description it probably didn't do all that much to improve the mundane side of things aside from improving his ability to learn. He was a little curious about what that entailed. Was it improving memory retention, neuroplasticity, pattern recognition and all that science-y stuff or did he just have a magical gremlin etching knowledge into his brain? Morgan huffed out a silent laugh at the thought, he was leaning towards the former-recent events may have shattered his perception of what was possible but he wasn't ready to abandon science to dive off the mystic deep end quite yet. His inspection of the interface was cut short as he nearly tripped over a stray root. The light had rapidly faded at some point he wasn't paying attention to and almost dropped his sack of supplies. He had managed to shift them all into the one sack and heft it over his shoulder, but the weight of it was leaving him unbalanced. He had tried alternating which shoulder he heft the sack over but now both of his arms were getting tired, his muscles aching in protest. Morgan looked around and found a small clearing nearby, the stump of a fallen tree was lit by a ray of moonlight shining through the break in the canopy. Morgan paced over with an unsteady gait and dropped down with all the grace of a brick.

  "I knew I should have done stretches before getting teleported to a mystic island" Morgan muttered to the sky. It was pretty, the moon was far larger in the sky than he was used to, the dark blue canvas around it was clear of clouds and filled with the glittering of stars more numerous than he had ever seen before in his life. There in that clearing, he felt an ache in his heart and a longing he could not quite place. Morgan swallowed the lump in his throat, he still had to find out what all his features did. But moments of not just calm, but genuine peace were are rare thing for him. He would not begrudge himself indulging in it for a moment longer. The wind had been tempered to a pleasant breeze here, the otherwise warm night balancing out its chill. His cloak provided a comforting weight around his shoulders as he allowed himself to practice some breathing technique which was the only thing he remembered from some employability training course over half a decade ago. As he thought about the system and the things he was going to look over he started to feel the things the system showed him. It was like the indistinct shapes you get when you close your eyes after staring into a bright light. They started to swirl and shift as he kept his minds eye on them and for a moment he started to see patterns in the flow, pathways layered with meaning that sat at the tip of his tongue. A high pitch squeal, follow by some panicked shouting interrupted his tranquility as two figures charged into the clearing, an irate boar hot on their trail. Morgan sat dumbfounded as the mental whiplash of the situation hit him, a rave of thoughts and observations scrambling over each other for his attention.

  "People?People! I FINALLY FOUND PEOPLE! Wait is that a dwarf holding a torch? Wait is dwarf the proper term? Pretty sure midget is a slur is midget a slur I should look that up but I don't have a phone-and is that a boarOH SHIT THAT IS A BOAR!! Why does it have arrows-oh wait that girl has a bow... Why is she dressed like a school-wait why is she shouting in German? Boars are larger than I expected-isitlookingatmeIthinkit'sloo-"

  The last thing Morgan heard as the boar barreled towards him was the dwarf's voice shouting with a funny accent he could not quite place.

  "LOOOOOK OUUT!"