As the luminescent moon finally eclipsed under the horizon, Julius' Mission Nightfall began.
First, he had to locate exactly where he could train. A place with weapons, preferably, a training field. A place full of dummies and training weapons, it was the perfect place to train. To do this, Julius decided to leave the house for the first time.
'My family are nobles in a medieval world of fantasy, if we don't have a training ground, I'll be surprised.' He thought to himself.
A cool and refreshing breeze of night air hit his face as he stepped out of his house for the first time since transmigrating. It didn't take him long to find the place he was looking for. As he made his way to the training field, he stomped on the ground.
'This hard ground was created from years of warriors stamping their feet on the ground as they trained rigorously, and now, I too shall honor them by doing just that!' He thought to himself as he grabbed a wooden sword from the weapon rack and walked towards a dummy.
The dummies were made of wood, and were springy, being able to counter your sword if you were to hit them too early or too late.
And so, Julius attacked the dummy, swinging from the side, his sword hit the dummy in the neck, causing it to spring backwards. Immediately after, it sprang back forwards, pushing the sword out of Julius' hands.
He was too distracted from that fact however, as he saw a bunch of random transparent screens suddenly pop up out of nowhere in front of his eyes.
'What did you say? Levels? No way... its like, a game?' He thought to himself in shock.
'Open status menu.'
On saying this, the transparent screen appeared again, this time with different contents.
[Status Menu:
Name: Julius Menthaven
Race: Human
Age: 16
Experience: 1/5
Level: 2
Health: 10/10
Strength: 2
Stamina: 11/11
Mana: --
Stat Points: 1
Skills: -- ]
'Holy... shit.' Julius was blown away by this. 'It's like a full-on game. How amazing is that!? This system is overpowered as fuck!' He was ecstatic about his new discovery.
'For now, I should focus on strengthening my body. So, I'll put it in my strength stat.'
And so, with knowledge of his new ability, Julius continued to train for almost the entirety of the night...
… 'Open status menu.' [Status Menu: Name: Julius Menthaven Race: Human Age: 16 Experience: 46/60 Level: 7 Health: 14/14 (2) Strength: 8 (3) Stamina: 13/13 (1) Mana: -- Stat Points: -- Skills: -- ] 'My progress slowed down significantly after level five, it seems that it will only get harder from here on out, however, that's still amazing progress!' He thought to himself as he looked at his stats. 'Before I head in for the night, I still need to complete stage two of Mission Nightfall. I should have probably done this before tiring myself out with training, but it still needs to be done nonetheless. For this may even be more important than the sword training.' He thought to himself as he left the training grounds. Going back into the house, Julius started to wander the halls in the dark. The sun was starting to rise by this time, he didn't have much more time left to complete his plan. Right as he was ready to give up for that night, he found the room he had been looking for. 'The library! Finally! I knew it existed in this world. No matter in what world, knowledge will always be held somewhere in some form, for knowledge is power, and power... is everything.' He thought to himself as he entered the library. Using the slight bit of sunlight that creaked through the closed blinds of the room, he found three books related to magic, and took them with him to his room. Right as he got to his room, he hid the books under the bed, and slumped onto the bed, falling fast asleep. … "How has he still not awoken at this time!? It's already evening! Has he fallen back into a coma? Young master Julius, please wake up!" Julius woke up to the sound of Karla's cries. 'Holy shit, Deja vu?' "Stop yelling! My ears!" Julius said as he sat up on his bed half asleep, forcing one of his eyes to stay open and pushing the cover off of his body. "I'm not in a coma alright. Is it not okay for a recovering patient to sleep a little!?" Julius yelled. "Young lor-" Karla was stunned at the sight of Julius' body. "What the world!? Your body. It's-" She could barely finish her sentence. "It's completely different!" "What did you say? My body?" Julius said as he looked down. Immediately, he noticed that his pale and scrawny body had completely changed. He quickly jumped out of bed and stood in front of the mirror. "What the shit..." He said quietly as he looked at his body in the mirror. He could see lean muscle and veins all over his body. It was almost as if he had turned into an athlete overnight. He didn't have a crazy amount of muscle, but he looked super healthy. 'Shit! This must be because I pumped most of my levels into strength. It looks so damn suspicious!' He quickly thought to himself. "What do you mean? I look completely normal." Julius said to Karla, quickly changing his expression from shock and disbelief to pure seriousness. Karla was surprised by Julius' stoic face. "Normal!? You looked like a pile of bones just yesterday. What in the world happened?" She said. "Oh, this? This is of course normal. I haven't done anything for ten years! Where do you think all that muscle I would have built in all those years have gone? Into thin air? No! Of course not! It was waiting for me, waiting until I awoke, so that it could finally come onto my body and make me glorious!" Julius would have gotten A+ if he was in acting class. His serious expression mixed with his pride made him seem almost believable. "Plus, we don't know what happens to people after they are cured from mana blockage. No one else has ever done it before! What if these are just the normal side effects of being cured?" He said in all seriousness. "Well... I suppose that is true." Karla said in defeat. 'Ha! That actually worked!' ... Julius spent the rest of the day inside his room reading the books that he brought the night before. "Basics to Magic." "Mana Cultivation." "Magic For Dummies." As the sun nearly set, he had finished reading all of the three books. Basics to Magic and Magic For Dummies were much less complex books. They held simple facts about the origins of magic and how it was used in the real world. From agriculture to architecture, factories, and machines, magic was used for all sorts of things in this world. The third book, Mana Cultivation was much more detailed and possessed actual explanations as to how magic was harnessed and conjured by the human race. After reading this book two entire times, Julius finally started to understand how mana and magic worked. Mana was the source of all life on the planet of Zaho. All species of things that walk, breathe, grow, and shrink has mana flowing through every vein in their body. No one knows exactly where mana originated from, but it has climbed its way to being the foundation of all living things. For a human to harness the power of mana, one must cultivate and purify the mana inside of their own bodies. To do this, humans have created a plethora of different methods, one mentioned in the book was called Mana Cultivation. Mana Cultivation allowed you to absorb mana from the atmosphere and move it to your core, a part of your body that acted like a storage area for mana. Once inside of your core, one would need to purify that mana, and once purified, the mana would turn into magic which could be used to strengthen your body and magic prowess or could simply be used for magic spells. For cultivating mana, there existed thousands of different techniques which were categorized into five tiers in terms of how effective they were. Weak. Ordinary. Great. Legendary. Supreme. Julius wanted to start cultivating mana right away, however, he did not have even a weak cultivation technique, to begin with. According to the book, cultivation techniques were extremely expensive, and any techniques ranked great or higher were incredibly hard to get your hards on. 'I really have no choice right now. It seems I will have to wait in order to use magic, but until then, I will keep researching it as I train.' Julius thought to himself.