Chapter 2
Leif stretched his body, bathing in the morning sun. He started to warm up, and his finger still had a trace of ink from helping his adoptive father in his clerk job.
"I really sell myself for clerk work." Leif said, At least it got him home and food.
The noise of the bug was always so noisy, and the rushing waterfall sound wasn't the perfect music to start the day, but Leif was satisfied with the privacy of this place. He licked his lips, remembering the boy he almost drowned to claim this spot for himself.
After finishing the warm-up, he dived into the lake, just under the waterfall, feeling the rushing water massage his muscles. As he dived and found a hidden tunnel, Leif's head popped from under water, and he took a deep breath, smelling the dampness and minerals in the cave. His eyes slowly adjusted to the fluorescent light from the moss on the wall.
The floor was gray and cold; some parts were dangerous with sharp edges, while others were slippery. Water droplets kept falling from the stalactites in the cave, adding to the natural symphony created by the waterfall above him and the sounds of insects and small lizards that formed a small ecosystem within the cave. Leif shook his head and body, expelling the water that kept dripping from himself. He held the egg in his hand, and it started to glimmer, showing its uniqueness.
'Huh, I thought it only glowed under the sun.'
He sat on the underground cave floor and read the ritual that was stored in his artifact, the Grimoire. His Grimoire resided within his soul. It was a thick book with a transparent cover showing two small stars. This star contained the knowledge of the ritual for gaining magical characteristics, and the other star contained the modifications he had created using his own knowledge with the help of Grimoire's innate ability to judge magical knowledge.
After all, if the Grimoire can't judge if the knowledge related to magic, it probably has filled all useless knowledge that finds itself in the void.
His mind touched the stars, and he reread the paper to make sure he hadn't forgotten anything. The first words on the page of the ritual were
"The way to humanity's survival is sex." The first thing he thought when he read that was, "Why would I get my first magical knowledge from a pervert?" Then he continued reading and realized it wasn't the man who was perverted, but the world itself. He kept reading and said, "This guy was a genius."
In fantasy worlds, there are many half-ling creatures: half-elves, half-dwarves, and half-goblins. Guess what species they're half of? Humans. This ritual used human plasticity to accept foreign species by asking a higher power to modify their genes or bloodline as if one of their parents or ancestors had procreated with the foreign species.
"Grimoire writes: The universal rule of human beings is to have good parents." A new speck of dust appeared in the Grimoire containing this knowledge.
After rereading the knowledge, make sure everything is complete and ready. He started drawing a perfect circle using chalk.
First, the innermost circle was the symbol for the deity or higher power that would help modify his soul and body. He used his Grimoire since it was a high-level artifact capable of taking knowledge from beyond the walls that separated the worlds. The symbol was a big circle with a square inside it, divided by a vertical line in the middle, with nine stars inside the bisected square. One star was perfectly in the middle, and four were on each side of the square, connected to each other like a constellation. Leif thought it looked like a butterfly.
He then draws two triangles, one for himself and one for the ingredient, which is the Gleamwing egg.
As the receiver, he would be in the right triangle, while the egg would be in the left.
He then drew the outer circle with four small circles and placed objects symbolizing the classic four elements within this circle.
He surveyed the circle and nodded his head; he was still naked, and he stepped into the innermost circle, where the Grimoire symbol is.
He raised his hand to summon the Grimoire projection, a blue-bound book with an ancient cosmos map on the front cover depicting the sun, moon, and stars revolving around each other. The Grimoire was transparent with a blue and white tint, while the inside of the Grimoire was an empty void where knowledge was stored as dancing stars.
The Grimoire didn't have a physical body; it seemed to exist only as a concept in his soul. If he wanted to upgrade it, he would need a material that matched its essence. The Grimoire soon flew above its own symbol, and he released the egg, letting it float in the triangle opposite him.
The Grimoire flew above the circle, and he communicated with his soul artifact, commanding the ritual to start. The magic circle aligned, using the Grimoire as the center. The outermost circle symbolized the world and the universe. Now he was truly in a separate place from the world.
Magical light appeared from the Grimoire, and it spread into the circle the substance that symbolizes the four elements as the circle lit up the rock, water, literal air, and candle inside the circle, which destroyed the state of the world before it was born.
Now the inside of the circle is akin to the soup of the world before all life began. Leif started to understand the ritual and why it needed higher power help because, right now, it was only him and the egg in this ritual as his body and the egg decomposed into a pure information state while he was being decomposed.
'Yes, when he was in this state, it would be easy for the Grimoire to modify his body.'
He was sucked into the world inside the Grimoire, feeling his body devoid of pain and sensation until he felt a foreign hand injecting hundreds of needles into every part of his body, especially the part that represents his eye.
Inside the Grimoire, Leif is feeling a thousand needles inserted into his eyes; he sometimes sees forest scenery where he flies high, and he activated his power so he was capable of seeing an ant on the ground from the sky. Memory and memory kept playing in his mind while the pain kept torturing him, but he was glad for the pain because, without it, he would be submerged in the memory and start to think of himself as a Gleamwing bird.
As his body was being tortured, Leif had the weird illusion that the Grimoire was putting on boxing gloves and starting to punch him. The bird information, his pain, and the memory were molded into special symbols that looked as natural as a mountain and river, and then the Grimoire pulled the last punch, punching the symbol into his eyes.
Splat! Leif fell onto the cold cave floor, he hold his eyes, tear are falling from his eys and Leif convinced himself this a happy tear not from pain, his idea was successful, he turn the biological transformation into innate spell.
Leif groaned in pain. He touched his body, feeling a slimy liquid in his skin as if he were bathed in egg yolk. When he opened his eyes, his mind was bombarded with new information. There were so many details, lines, and colors that it made his body disoriented, and the light was so bright too that he stood up and started wobbling and swaying like a toddler before he fell into his buttocks, closed his eye with his hand, and took a controlled breath before finding that special symbol and turning it off like he turned off the light switch.
He took another controlled breath and opened his eyes, and thankfully, his vision returned to normal.
'No, there is more clarity, but not that exaggerated.' Leif didn't have eye problems previously, but he knew his eye had been enhanced even if he hadn't activated the spell.
'Maybe it's the same passive effect of the Grimoire.' Thought Leif, in this life he had better memory, almost eidetic, and this effect was the one who saved him from learning a new language of this land's common tongue.
Looking at his reflection in the water, he could see his usual warm brown eye, but when he activated this new ability, he could see more, like the dirt floating in the water or even the pores on his face and each strand of his eyebrow. His eye had changed subtly, still retaining its brown color, but it was sharper and darker, as if it were glazed with fluorescent glass.
Leif turned off his special vision. He had made a lot of modifications to the ritual, especially with such a cooperative higher power as the Grimoire. By sacrificing another ability of the Gleamwing—their flash ability—his eye changed from a biological modification to an innate spell that he could turn on and off.
Leif's reflection in the water grinned; he finally had a superpower, and he laughed and lied down in the cave.
His effort wasn't useless; every struggle he passed through and every opportunity he had finally led to this conclusion: befriending the Hunter, taking an odd job in the tavern for information, even revealing some of his earth knowledge to his adoptive brother, all finally led to this result.
He, Leif, an orphan, a nobody, finally got his supernatural power.