Newly Summoned Demoness - Chapter 12 - Self Development (Patreon)

Two crimson orbs mirrored back at Elania, her reflection painted a vibrant shade of red within the water’s surface. She traced the contours of her face with slender fingers, her eyes not leaving the sight of her own reflection staring back at her. The tanned hue of her skin had been replaced by a pale color that looked like she’d never been embraced by the sun before.

Her hair, once a tangled mess stained with blood and debris, now flowed freely around her in fiery waves. The wash had stripped it clean but left behind an unexpected, vibrant hue. Hidden near the roots, patches of its original black peeked through like tiny shadows amidst a sea of red.

It was sort of a vampire-ish look, and she wasn’t sure how she felt about that.

There wasn’t any brush or soap at hand, but that didn’t stop her from finding the deepest pool of water and submerging herself in it.

After a careful check to make sure there wasn’t anything in it, of course. It was crystal clear and looked, and tasted, as fresh as could be, so it wasn’t that big of a question to find a spot to bathe alone with no hidden water-things to eat her.

If anyone had told her she’d be skinny dipping in an underground fantasy world, she’d have laughed at them. If they had told her she’d come face to face with her own death after fighting off a literal demon, she’d probably have thought about calling the police on them. Or at least getting the heck out of there.

Unfortunately, it looked like she was going to have to get used to new normals or go batshit crazy. She glanced at her mana shard. “Right, Mr. Rock?”

The stone continued to shine in silence, sitting on the rocky steam bank. It wasn’t quite as shiny as when she had collected it from the cultists, making her wonder what had caused the change. She checked her [Status] for the fourth time since setting it down.

[Power: 102/128]

A thrill of excitement ran through her. Her guess after waking up had been right.

When she’d regained consciousness, her Power had overflowed again, and she’d been in a mild panic about reducing the overload. When she had finally removed her tattered mess of an outfit and left the mana shard inside of it, she had realized that the excess power had begun to bleed off.

It was hard to determine the exact rate of discharge with no way to tell time, but her best guess was it took about an hour for one point of [Power] to drain without the stone. That was with [Demonic Aura] and [Darkvision] still stuck permanently on. That included [Regeneration] as well, but she hadn’t really accrued any new injuries.

Although how far [Regeneration]was going to restore her was… a question. Elania looked back down at her reflection. Standing up carefully, she turned around and looked at her rear. Her birthmark was completely gone. So were all the blemishes and scars she’d ever acquired.

The [Perk] didn’t seem content to just heal her injuries, but had really gone and restored her to her body’s original intended state. Or at least the [Lesser Demon] version of her body.

It had even restored her…

Her cheeks heated, and she sat back down in the water.

Taking one of the clean scraps of cloth she had left and using it to scrub her skin. Even if she didn’t have a brush or soap, the rough cloth worked well enough. Even if she scrubbed extra hard, [Regeneration] was there to the rescue to keep her skin from feeling scraped raw.

It didn’t seem like she needed to eat or drink, either. [Power] seemed to take care of that, although she’d drank from the stream just because it tasted good and the cool water down her throat was nice. She wasn’t sure [Regeneration] would work against illness or viruses, but she suspected it would.

She had never played a game that didn’t have two sets of numbers for ‘Hit Points’ and ‘Mana’, but that didn’t mean there hadn’t ever been one. It didn’t seem normal to her, though, to have everything combined into one single [Power] stat.

Not needing to eat or drink still needed a bit more testing, but if her theory that she was consuming [Power]to sustain herself somehow… what did it mean if she ran out? There was a constant passive draw on her [Power]that she had found, and other than the stone, she didn’t know how to get more.

She glanced at it and frowned; the white glow pulsated ever so slowly. It had gotten dimmer than when she had first found it; she was sure of it. Now the reason the cultists had offered so many of them to her made a lot more sense. Her stomach knotted slightly at the thought of what would have happened if she hadn’t snatched one to take with her.

How many times was she going to narrowly avoid getting killed?

Elania let out a sigh and stood up, letting the water flow off of her in rivulets. The streams didn’t have fish, so there wasn’t really anything to eat even if she had wanted to. Why couldn’t there be some stupid fish? A nicely roasted fish would have been perfect. Maybe a blanket of steamed rice and some sushi?

Shaking her head, she threw away the mental image. She needed to keep it together. She wasn’t out of danger yet, and she needed to be better prepared.

Somehow the flare of power hadn’t set the glow moss on fire, but she didn’t want to trust that to happen again.

She’d need equipment and a better weapon than her dagger.

She thoroughly soaked what she had recovered from her spare robe she’d been using as a pillow; it was a tattered mess. At least half of what she had was separate cuts she’d salvaged. The robe she’d been wearing had fared slightly better, but it too had multiple slashes and badly needed tailoring.

The blood had been hard to wash out, and they were definitely stained, but the black color wasn’t that disturbed by it. Not that she thought there would be anyone caring about if her torn cultist robes were stained.

Gathering everything along the stream up she carried it back to her makeshift camp in the ruins. She’d selected the only other building that had a semi-intact roof. She needed to dry everything, though. Running around in a damp robe was about as appealing as running around in the open, butt-naked.

She needed something to dry the things on. Looking around, she spotted the blood-spattered path into the ruin with the Bone Demon’s corpse. That was going to be a problem.

Setting her things on the stone she’d designated as her camp; she hesitantly approached the chamber in which she had nearly died. Before anything else, she needed to discard the corpse, preferably somewhere far away from the camp. Maybe then consider cleaning up the blood, although that was much lower priority.

It had mostly dried already, anyway.

The corpse, though, would start to decompose, and that would stink and attract scavengers, if there were any. There probably would be knowing her luck, and she didn’t want them to come anywhere near her camp if she was inside it.

The corpse was still where she’d left it. She winced as she noticed the gunk that had flowed out of the thing’s bisected skull. Elania wiped her face with her forearm, then suppressed a gag. Good thing she’d not put any clothes back on, because she was going to need a second skinny dip and wash after dealing with the corpse.

She grabbed an ankle and much to her surprise, a [System] message popped up.

[Absorb the lingering Power from Bone Eater - Lesser Demon - Level 57?]

She didn’t really feel any kind of kinship with the thing, so it wasn’t really cannibalism, was it?

“Why not?” Elania asked, confirming her choice.

The corpse began to glow before exploding into a mist of glowing dust that seemed to evaporate into the air. Some of it flowed away and up into the ceiling before disappearing, but most of it suddenly redirected itself into her chest. Almost immediately, she felt her core temperature spike, and a sheen of sweat appeared on her forehead.

Her skin and breath felt like it was on fire, and the reason was clear.

[You have absorbed 115 Power!]

[Your body has reached the limit of its capacity for Power!]

[Find a stronger body or reduce your current Power!]

[Your body has exceeded the limit of its capacity for Power!]

[Your body is experiencing thermal degradation!]

[Your body is slightly adapting.]

[Due to your high Power, [Regeneration] is enhanced!]

[Power: 211/134]

Some mental math told her the percentage she was over her maximum power was the highest it had ever been, but somehow it didn’t have quite as bad a deteriorating effect on her. [Regeneration] reported it had been enhanced, so… was it actually actively healing her from the damage being over her maximum power did?

Her maximum capacity kept going up when she went over, so if she kept the cycle up, it was a bit like power leveling, wasn’t it? And she didn’t see any reason to not maximize her [Power]capacity. Actually, it was probably a very good idea to do so, even if it caused some discomfort.

She returned to her camp and used her dagger to cut some long thing strips from the destroyed robe and made a long line from them. She tied it off in the chamber and then hung up the rest of her cloth to dry.

Finding a spot in the corner with a clean stone to sit on, she sat crossed legged and pulled up her full [Status] so she could inspect the changes.

[Status: Elania Reyes]

[Level 11 Lesser Demon (Summoned Potency 9999+)]

[Karma: 12345]

[Power: 210/134]

[Perks: (Summoned from Another World!) (Regeneration)]

[Class: Survivor]

[Skill Slots: 3]

[Slotted Skills: Improvised Combat (Rank D), Stealth (Rank E), Survival Crafting (Rank E)]

[Affinities: (Demonic), (Mana)]

[Magical: Demonic Aura (Rank B) (Activated), Mana Manipulation (Rank C)]

[Physical: Darkvision (Rank B) (Activated)]

[Mundane: Identify (Rank E), Universal Speech (Rank S), Reading (Rank A), Writing (Rank B), Crisis Management (Rank E)]

Her [Improvised Combat] skill had gone up, but she wasn’t sure it did anything. It certainly didn’t feel like it during the fight, and if one thing was certain at all, it was that she needed to learn to defend herself. The other thing was that she needed to keep practicing with her [Mana Manipulation] skill because it seemed like it was her most potent offensive ability.

It’d allowed her to slay the Bone Demon in one blow, albeit at a heavy cost to herself. [Regeneration]synergized well with that, though she really didn’t want to go about incinerating parts of her body in order to do damage.

Maybe if she practiced, she’d be able to channel the [Power] into a weapon? She glanced at the steel dagger sitting nearby beside her mana shard. Magic weapon power-up, maybe?

Elania spent a while trying to figure out the rest of her skill and how to toggle her [Demonic Aura] off, but still didn’t manage it. Eventually she wandered out to inspect the nearby [Fungal Wood] she had spotted nearby. Using her dagger, she was able to cut off some long strips of the very soft wood that she thought might be useful.

She sat the shafts against the wall in the corner, then scoured the entire chamber, cleaning it and removing any sign of glow moss. It was the best she could do, but she needed a space to train her skills safely.

It took a few hours, but she mastered the trick of creating sparks with her fingers. More importantly, she learned how to control their movement after they left her hand, at least until they dissipated. Sending sparks out with her fingers wasn’t the most useful of abilities, but that led to her trying to power up her dagger; and that worked extremely well.

Almost too well.

The weapon heated rapidly until it was glowing a dull red and too hot to hold. She dropped it on the rock to cool before nursing her burned fingers. They healed rapidly, but it still hurt a lot.

The experience had probably ruined the heat treatment of the blade, too.

Ruining her only metal tool hadn’t been her intention, but at least she had gained a bit of information: she could dump mana into items to heat them up.

Maybe if she figured out how to level the skill further, she’d be able to surround them with power without actually melting whatever it was? Like a barrier or shield?

By the time her clothes had finished drying, she was ready for a nap. With the mana shard nestled away in the corner, but not touching her skin, she went to sleep.

When she woke up, she wasn’t melting from being over her [Power] limit, and in her mind that pretty much confirmed the mana shard had been slowly trickling the power to her when she kept it close to her skin.

Not wanting to leave the safety of her camp, she spent the rest of the day practicing [Mana Manipulation] while thinking about how to do something with the fungal wood and her tattered robes.

By the end of the training session, she was able to control sending her [Power] to different parts of her body without actually killing herself. It didn’t actually block anything; when she’d poked herself with her dagger, it had drawn blood before beginning to absorb the heat. Anyone grabbing or grappling with her was going to be in a world of hurt, though.

It also seemed to improve her muscle strength in the area, which was a nice, notable benefit. She’d practiced picking up a massive stone block that easily weighed twice as much as her by channeling the power throughout her entire body.

The [System]seemed satisfied as well by the time she was finished and she was greeted with a pleasant message.

[You have gained a Rank in Mana Manipulation!]

She wasn’t sure how good Rank B was on the scale of such things, but it was definitely better than what she had started with. It also gave her an idea of how the skill leveling worked. It wasn’t just about making the skill better, but actually knowing how to use the skill in different ways seemed to be what caused the rank up changes.

Whether it was just her getting better at using the skill, or some invisible number going up while she worked at the skill giving her the new abilities, she was unsure. She wasn’t even sure how it really mattered other than: use skill, get better at it and rank up.

The next skill to work on was [Survival Crafting] and she had thought long and hard on how she’d deal with the [Fungal Wood] shafts. Javelins seemed the way to go. They’d give her a ranged attack and could be used up close in a pinch, with a lot more reach than her dagger.

She used the metal to shape the tip into a point and called it done.

It was certainly primitive.

She also didn’t get a level for it, which sort of made sense.

Her work was total crap.

There was no one to complain to, so she decided to try to pick up some sort of throwing skill, and went outside. While looking for something to use for a target, she had a sudden idea of how to work her [Demonic Aura] from what she’d learned from using [Mana Manipulation].

Closing her eyes and picturing her energy flowing around her as a big bubble, she did the opposite of what she normally did when channeling her [Power]. Instead of forcing it out from her core, she pulled the visualization of the dispersed bubble around her inward.

[Demonic Aura (Rank B) (Deactivated)]

Elania smiled. It worked!

Almost immediately, the silence of the cavern was broken, sending her heart pounding. The melody of insects mingled with a series of loud cries from some kind of creature.

Before anything could spot her, she ran back to her camp in the ruins.