—7,673 years after the start of the game.
When I first started reading the grimoires, the headaches were so severe that I was chugging an Elixir roughly every five minutes.
As I persevered, I unlocked a bizarre skill called Magic Poisoning Resistance. Once I had it, my physical condition improved significantly, and my reading efficiency skyrocketed. By the time it evolved into Magic Poisoning Immunity, there were no longer any obstacles standing in the way of my studies.
The grimoire script had looked like nothing more than strings of incomprehensible symbols, but thanks to a translation guide for the magical language that I had looted from a treasure chest, I was able to decipher the texts.
In the end, I discovered a harsh truth: I was incapable of using ordinary magic.
To explain, the concept of magic is largely centered around elemental magic. This is what people typically think of when they talk about magic.
Elemental magic is divided into standard elements and special elements.
The standard elements comprise eight types in total: the four basic elements of fire, water, earth, and wind, and the four higher elements of ice, lightning, light, and dark. Special elements, on the other hand, serve as an umbrella term for every form of elemental magic outside of those standard eight.
Fundamentally, elemental magic—including the ability to form a contract with a grimoire—can only be acquired by those with an innate talent for it. This talent appears to be an entirely separate concept from Gifts or skills; without the capacity to contract with a grimoire, no amount of training will ever allow someone to master that magic.
Thus, since I couldn't even form a contract, acquiring elemental magic was an absolute impossibility. But did that mean these past sixty years had gone to waste? Far from it.
There was another category of magic entirely: non-elemental magic. Simply put, this involves cloaking an object or the human body in magic power to achieve a specific effect. Since it only requires the manipulation of magic power, it demands no special talent. It was a power tailor-made for me in my current state.
Furthermore, the books I had gathered from the dungeon were not limited to grimoires; they included tens of thousands of specialized academic texts. Over the course of sixty years, having read and reread them to the point of total memorization, I realized that several non-elemental spells were fundamentally inefficient.
The realization struck me while reading a medical textbook.
The human body is composed of an unfathomable number of minute components known as cells. These cells aggregate to form tissues, and those tissues combine to form organs with specialized functions—which we colloquially refer to as internal organs. The grimoires for non-elemental magic, such as Super Physical Enhancement and Super-Fast Healing, treated multiple tissues as a single, broad target for magic power infusion. But if I could channel and manipulate magic power on a far more granular level—ideally into every single individual cell—the resulting effect should be significantly more potent. That would require meticulous magic power manipulation. And if I could master that degree of control, it should even open the door to acquiring my very first ranged attack.
Of course, pulling that off would demand an amount of time and training that utterly dwarfed anything I had done before.
"This is great. Absolutely fantastic! I finally have a goal again! I can get even stronger!!"
Letting out a bizarre screech of pure delight, I threw myself into training my magic power manipulation.