When we got back to the house, my father was very careful when handling the book. It was as if the book was more precious than gold.

I realized that the [Priest] had extended quite a bit of trust to me when he had given me this book - or perhaps more accurately, he had extended a lot of trust to my father. As someone who wasn't even three yet, I wasn't qualified to receive this kind of trust from authority figures in the village, but clearly, my father's standing in this community wasn't bad.

The first thing he did after shutting the door to the house was give me a stern look.

"This book is very precious, Miria. Paper is hard to make. You can't have anything wet or anything that might damage the book in the same room as the book. Do you understand?"

I nodded. "I understand, dad. I'll treat the book very carefully."

My father relaxed, and gave me a quick hug. "That's my girl. All right, let's take a look at the different Sparks our ember can produce, and we'll plan out what you want to do with your future."

True to the [Priest]'s words, our ember could produce a total of seven different sparks. On top of that, there were a little over a hundred different combinations of sparks that could be taken at different steps, each of which had its own unique advantages and paths for further growth.

However, I quickly noticed that most compound sparks were very similar to their components - and there were also several warnings stating that our clan discovered new sparks all the time. In other words, this book wasn't a comprehensive list of every single possible combination - it was a guide to paths people had already walked in the past. Several of the compound sparks listed were even noted to be a bit lackluster - they were still stronger than a 'normal' spark, but they were far from the strongest sparks around. The book also mentioned that while our clan hadn't discovered any compound sparks that incorporated other compound sparks into it as an ingredient, they were known to exist. Other clans that we had bartered with in the past had discovered a few compound sparks that were entirely comprised of other compound sparks - and people who could travel from one plane to another were often people who had gone through the process of combining compound sparks several times.

The mention of planar travellers was enough to pique my interest, but sadly, the book didn't go into further detail - which left me wondering whether every plane connected to this one was also a frozen tundra filled with giant glowing bonfires, or whether they had other, completely different ways of interacting with the System. Based on my knowledge of how dimensions worked, there should be no way for so many different dimensions to have totally similar laws of physics and reality. On the other hand, the brief mentions of history from the book in my hands directly contradicted my knowledge of the multiverse, so I had no idea what to think.

For now, I could only put my thoughts aside and focus on my future path. I was too weak to explore other connected planes on my own, anyway - so for now I could only dream of hte future.

Since our clan had explicitly noted that new compound sparks were discovered all the time, I decided to focus on the base sparks that interested me the most, instead of zeroing in on one compound spark. After looking over what options I had, only two options really appealed to me. The first option was [Apothecary], and the second option was [Ice Mage]. I also felt some vague interest in [Fire Mage], but I found myself less drawn to it than the first two. The other four classes were too focused on melee combat and support - and while I was usually happy to be a support-focused mage and boost my friends, I felt that the support-based sparks from the clan's ember weren't quite what I needed.

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The first option, [Apothecary], would boost my ability to take plants and mix them together into poultices, healing brews, and various other forms of healing. It was kind of like a mixture of an alchemy-focused spark and a medic. In most of our previous worlds, I had eventually ended up working as a healer for whatever society I lived in. A big part of that was because of how powerful my Renewal spell was - when I used renewal, almost every kind of wound could be treated, as long as the damage wasn't soul related. I could even regenerate lost limbs, if the patient had the patience and I had enough essence to work at it for a while. I also genuinely enjoyed healing people. Healing others, contributing to societies that I liked, and saving lives was incredibly rewarding.

On the other hand, while [Apothecary] was also a type of healer, I wasn't actually sure how much use I would get out of the Spark for it. The problem was that [Apothecary] was mostly focused on using herbs, poultices, and external resources. The spark had very few direct links to magical abilities or healing, and I was still abysmal at manipulating binding essence - and apothecary was probably deeply related to binding essence. I also wasn't sure how useful any abilities derived from this spark would be in the future. From every ability we had gathered over the course of our many lifetimes, we had confirmed that whatever rewards we got were always linked to the abilities we used to accomplish great feats. Apothecary did not seem to work very well with the other abilities I had gathered since joining the Market.

On the other hand, if I took [Ice Mage] or [Fire Mage], I would at least get boosts that matched the rest of my skill set. The best offensive skills I had mastered so far were extinguish and the Eldritch Storm spell that I had created during the centuries of relative peace last world. Extinguish was still one of my most powerful attacks, and it was incredibly useful at cursing powerful enemies or totally wiping out weaker enemies who had low life force but troublesome or dangerous abilities. Extinguish was also horrendously inefficient though, so it wasn't a good 'baseline' attack. Eldritch Storm focused on creating a battlefield wipeout attack using a mix of spatial threads, eldritch manipulation, and portals, was great at cursing enemies and dealing with large hordes of weaker enemies. It was much more essence efficient than Extinguish, but it was rather bad at harming a single enemy. In short, it was a support spell and a way to deal with lots of weak enemies. Both spells were very focused on a mixture of damage and curses - which meant that they were great for contributing to fights with my friends, but not so great at allowing me to fight on my own or focus on raw damage, if that was needed. Based on the descriptions in the book, [Ice Mage] and [Fire Mage], at least early on, were both focused on casting spells that could quickly kill weaker enemies. They would perfectly patch out this weakness of mine, and at higher levels they could potentially give me incredibly essence-efficent single target spells.

After I finished working out my own thoughts on my class, I went to my father to ask for more advice. My biggest concern when it came to taking one of the two Mage classes was how to actually grow a Class - I had no idea how to level up in this world.

According to my father, there were two ways to grow a class. The first way was through accomplishing great acts with the powers given by a certain Class - in other words, it was the same way we would probably try to farm Achievement later on. It was also possible to steal sparks from monsters. Monsters didn't exactly have the same types of sparks that humans did - but apparently, they had a somewhat similar, parallel system, which ran off of inheritance from their parents instead of the embers our towns followed. Monsters could further enhance themselves by stealing and devouring embers - which was one of the many reasons monsters attacked humans. We could, in turn, steal sparks from their corpses and feed them to our sparks to level up and gain new, unique sparks.

Since monsters were everywhere in this world, I decided to totally ignore [Apothecary]. It was just a question of which type of mage to become.

However, I found that the answer to that question was surprisingly simple.

Thus far, I had focused pretty heavily on water, space, and eldritch forms of magic, with a bit of healing and curses mixed in. Water was probably quite compatible with ice, meaning I might be able to find interesting and potent synergies between different abilities if I took [Ice Mage] as my first spark. On top of that, I had a strong suspicion that Anise would end up taking [Fire Mage], and it was probably a good idea to have some differentiation in our group - that way, we would have an easier time compensating for each other's weaknesses. With that, I had made up my mind.

With my first spark, I would become an [Ice Mage].

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