Millennium Witch.

Chapter 7-7- The Mage's Cultivation
With the biggest survival crisis resolved, Yvette, who had been anxious, suddenly relaxed. She felt more at peace than ever before, and even time seemed to have become less valuable.

In fact, considering that the original owner was an ageless monster who had lived for at least three hundred years, time was probably the least important thing to her.

Of course, this is on the premise that she can truly live without aging or dying, and that it's not just about being able to withstand hunger.

Yvette found a metal chair that hadn't fallen apart yet and sat down. Looking at the pile of bones left by an unknown, mysterious monster on the ground, she fell into thought.

"Based on the clues provided by the dream, the original owner should indeed be a patient of the Metamorphosis Project, which can be confirmed by many details of those six months of life..."

"Later, the original owner possessed the characteristics of what appeared to be immortality. Does this mean that the original owner's special abilities originated from the Metamorphosis Project, or some experimental projects of Black Tower Medicine?"

"What's puzzling is that over such a long period of time, even with meditation, one should have accumulated considerable magical power. Why is it that, apart from being ageless and resistant to hunger, the original owner was just like an ordinary person in every other aspect?"

"Could it be because of the limitations of the experiment, fearing that the original owner would escape control, that the original owner was deliberately prevented from gaining power, and then the apocalypse suddenly broke out, the base was destroyed, and that's how things unexpectedly turned out the way they are now..."

Completely baffled and unable to gather any relevant clues, Yvette could only maintain this conclusion for the time being.

Soon after, many details about meditation came to mind.

Yes, with no worries about survival, plenty of time, and nothing else to do, using meditation to improve her strength is undoubtedly the best idea for her to escape the ruined base.

"It's a bit slow, but it's okay. The last thing I lack right now is time," she said softly, then closed her eyes and entered a meditative state.

The room fell silent, with only a faint light still flowing rhythmically beneath the surface of the magic vine, as if it would never change.

……

In the boundless stillness and darkness, the world outside the ruins saw the sun rise and set, and before anyone knew it, a year had passed.

Over the course of the year, Yvette had fully adapted to life in the ruins base. She spent most of her time meditating, absorbing the magical elements floating in the air. In her spare time, she would wander around the different floors, tidy up, and sort the junk she found into three categories: useful, useless, and uncertain.

Sometimes, she would secretly open the small door to the exit of the water platform, but she would not go near the lake. She would just sit quietly at the door, looking at the clear blue sky or the starry sky outside, and then miss her loved ones on Earth.

Sometimes, she would sit on the steps inside the exit tunnel and read by the sunlight streaming in from outside. At first, it was "A Detailed Explanation of Inner and Outer Magic," and later it was "The Rune Siphon Effect," all of which were magic-related reference books that she found in the library.

The book "Detailed Explanation of Inner and Outer Magic" explains that on this planet called "Origin Star," the magic power of all magical creatures, including humans, is divided into two types: inner magic power stored within the body and outer magic power obtained by utilizing the external environment.

Therefore, the more internal magic power a spell relies on, the easier it is to control; conversely, the less internal magic power a spell relies on, the more unstable it becomes.

"The Rune Siphon Effect" is similar to gravity in the magical realm, explaining why magical elements on a planet do not leak into the universe by describing the attraction of a high-density rune magic field.

Well, they're all good books.

It's a bit difficult for beginners to understand; it took her several months, and she also learned some relatively rare proper nouns in the Black Tide language.

Then, when she finished reading the second book, "The Rune Siphon Effect," it happened to be an afternoon at the end of the first year.

In the winter chill, fine, still snowflakes fell like willow catkins, covering the originally black water platform with a layer of silver frost. The lake surface not far away was calm, the monsters seemed to be asleep, and only a few lonely bird calls echoed in the desolate and vast mountain basin.

Closing the book, Yvette stood at the doorway, lost in thought, until a snowflake landed on her nose, making her sneeze.

……

Due to wind pressure, the ventilation ducts often have cold air in winter. On the tenth basement level, Yvette collected all the small pieces of trash she could find that could block the wind and made a simple windproof and heat-insulating layer.

Having sought refuge here from the cold, Yvette was still wearing the same white dress and white tights she had worn a year ago.

She discovered that her skin was neither oily nor flaky, and her clothes were rarely dirty, so she rarely needed to wash them.

At this point, she had been cultivating for a year, so she planned to test her magic power in a while to see how her cultivation "success" was.

Recalling the data provided by the AI, the standard for an entry-level spellcaster is 10 mana points, and using meditation requires more than seven years of training. So, essentially, the normal efficiency of meditation is 1.5 per year?

Is this too slow?

but……

Even so, Yvette still harbored some unnecessary expectations.

Well, according to the calculation, it's 1.5 times the efficiency per year, but that's the meditation efficiency of an ordinary person. Is she an ordinary person? Absolutely not, right? Not only is she not, she might even be the chosen one!
What might be an inefficient meditation method for others, could it be different for her?
then……

She recited the beginner-level spell she had read in "Basic Theory of Magic," which was specifically for self-testing magic power. After waiting for a while, she was shocked to find that her test result was only slightly over two points. Considering that she didn't eat, drink, or go to work, and spent even more time cultivating every day, her actual efficiency was that of an ordinary person.

"So I was just a mortal after all..."

After waiting for so long, this was the result. Yvette was heartbroken and felt as if the world had turned gray.

Fortunately, she can still hold on.

For someone who seems to be immortal, there's nothing she can't overcome! What talent can't grant her, she'll make up for with hard work!
So, that's it.

Spring comes and autumn goes, time flows by, and five years have passed quietly in the daily meditation and research.

Over the past five years, in addition to meditating to enhance her magical power, Yvette also compiled a series of professional books related to magic that she had collected from various floors. Although most of the books touched on high-end fields and the content was so specialized that she was completely lost, she still managed to gain something from studying them diligently.

For example, you can obtain some simple rune arrangements from a case template, or learn the basic architecture and deduce simple rune formulas from it.

It is worth mentioning that chanting incantations is not actually a necessity for casting spells, and incantations are not even the same as runes.

In the study of the human civilization on the Origin Star—referred to as the "Origin Civilization"—the number of known runes alone exceeds ten thousand. These runes, when combined, can create "matter" and "elements" with vastly different properties.

Therefore, for beginners, just distinguishing these tens of thousands of runes is a major challenge.

Thus, in order to ensure that spells could be cast even without remembering the runes, "spells" were born.

It's somewhat like an encrypted translation of runes, with slight modifications to make the incantation smoother and easier to remember. If you know the rune's form, you can cast spells without chanting once you've thought of it in your mind. But if you don't know the rune, you can still cast magic by chanting this translated scale and using your mental power.

For Yvette, who was still a beginner, using spells was obviously much easier than memorizing tens of thousands of abstract symbols.

"The breath of cold mist, the weeping of spirits, the binding of blizzards, the guiding force of the mind, Niflheim, heed my command!"

Standing on the water platform, Yvette chanted a spell, her fair hand reaching forward in a grasping motion. Soon after, an ice crystal about one meter in diameter condensed on the metal wall in front of her.

After casting the spell, Yvette estimated the amount of magic power she had lost. She roughly determined that this simple "Frost Spell" had used up 3 points of magic power—and her current total magic power was only about 9 points. This small spell had used up one-third of it.

"There's too little magic..." she sighed.

The mage has been training for six years, and even with all his might, he can only use four small spells. This rate of growth is truly unsettling.

Luckily, she's incredibly resilient; most people would have died long ago.

With no other thoughts in mind, Yvette turned to leave.

But as she turned around, a glimpse of the ice crystals that had just been created on the wall made her pause slightly.

Whether it was her imagination or not, she felt that she looked a little older as the ice crystals refracted the light.

(End of this chapter)