※ “Containment fails most often where no one bothered to imagine an edge case.”
The little circle of bruised grass she had already worked on—her first experimental zone—looked tired now.
Half-dug soil. A few mangled roots.
It was noisy.
Too many variables. Too much history in one patch.
“Contaminated dataset,” she said. “Start over.”
She walked away from it, crossing the stone disk and stepping down into a fresh section of meadow on the opposite side of the pond. New grass. Untouched soil. No prior afflictions. Clean.
She liked clean.
She opened her interface and shifted her attention toward cantrips.
Cantrips — Slots: 1/2
Acquired: Cleaning
Available: Spark, Gust, Light, Minor Push
One slot remained.
She highlighted Spark.
Cantrip Acquired: Spark
Cantrip Slots Remaining: 0
“Good,” she murmured. “Now we can stop pretending manual agriculture is viable.”
She picked a random blade in the new area—bright, healthy, structurally innocent.
“Test four,” she said. “Version two. With fire.”
She cast Pestilence.
Pestilence applied
Stacks: 1
Duration: 300 s
Mana: 140/170
She counted under her breath.
“One… two…”
On three, she snapped Spark at the base.
A tiny pin of heat flared, clean and surgical. The stem blackened, curled, and dropped.
Target Status: Dead
Pestilence propagation triggered
+1 stack to all biological entities within 1 m
Inherited Duration: ~295 s
Mana: 139/170
She checked the neighbor immediately.
Grass (Common)
Status: Pestilence (1 stack)
Remaining Duration: 294.7 s
Vitality: 99.7%
Lisa nodded once.
“So Spark gives me near-maximum duration on propagation. Good. Very good.”
No panic. No excitement. Just the quiet click of a mechanism sliding into place.
She picked another blade inside the same one-meter circle. This one already carried one stack.
She did not recast Pestilence.
She simply lifted her hand and said, “Spark.”
Heat. Crisp. Collapse.
Target Status: Dead
Pestilence propagation triggered
+1 stack
Inherited Duration: ~290 s
Mana: 138/170
She checked a random plant nearby.
Grass (Common)
Status: Pestilence (2 stacks)
Remaining Duration: ~290 s
She did the math aloud.
“One from the first kill, one from the second. Everyone in the radius now at two stacks. All sharing roughly the same timer.”
She chose a third blade inside the same radius.
This one: two stacks, ~290 seconds.
Again, just Spark.
Target Status: Dead
Pestilence propagation triggered
+2 stacks
Inherited Duration: ~285 s
Mana: 137/170
She checked.
Grass (Common)
Status: Pestilence (4 stacks)
Remaining Duration: ~285 s
She tilted her head slightly.
“There it is.”
No need for diagrams; the pattern was obvious now.
This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
- Kill a plant with N stacks.
- Everything in range already has N stacks.
- Each kill adds N more.
- 1 → 2 → 4 → 8 → …
She picked a fourth blade, this one showing four stacks.
“Spark.”
+4 stacks, Duration: 280 s, Mana: 136/170
Another check:
Grass (Common)
Status: Pestilence (8 stacks)
Remaining Duration: ~280 s
“Eight,” she said calmly. “In four moves. With almost the full duration left.”
Her hands were already starting to get dirty again from brushing the soil around the bases, but Cleaning took care of it with a thought. Barely worth mentioning. Maintenance, not magic.
She located a blade near the edge of the affected circle.
Eight stacks.
Roughly 270–280 seconds remaining.
Still quite alive.
Just structurally doomed on a slightly longer timeline.
She cast Pestilence focused on that specific target.
Mana: 105/170
The shimmer thickened.
Stacks: 8 → 9
Duration refreshed: 300 s
Lisa’s mouth curved.
“Oh,” she murmured. “You reward redundancy. How generous.”
She killed it with another precise Spark.
+9 stacks, Duration: 295 s, Mana: 104/170
She checked a nearby blade that had previously been at 8 stacks.
Grass (Common)
Status: Pestilence (17 stacks)
Remaining Duration: ~295 s
She let out a small, considering breath.
“Seventeen stacks,” she said. “Almost full duration. And we are still in the tutorial.”
She straightened and turned slowly in place, surveying the small patch.
It wasn’t large.
Just a one-meter circle, dense with blades now carrying double-digit afflictions.
Nothing was dying yet.
Pestilence was still weak.
Resistance was still enormous.
But the structure was there.
“I don’t need you to be lethal,” she told the System. “I just need you to be scalable.”
She shifted a few steps to the left, eyes still on the numbers, not on the world.
The ground sloped gently toward the outer edge of the tutorial meadow. She didn’t think about it. She didn’t look at the faint ring that marked the border. Her attention was on the stacks, the durations, the possibilities.
She picked another blade near her foot; she didn’t notice how close it was to the limit.
Seventeen stacks now.
Plenty of duration.
Perfect.
She didn’t bother with a recast this time.
“Spark.”
+17 stacks, Duration: 285 s, Mana: 103/170
She felt, rather than saw, the pulse expand: a subtle pressure radiating outward, the way sound feels in your bones before it hits your ears.
It washed over her.
It washed through the grass.
It washed...
straight across an invisible line she hadn’t realized she was standing on.
Something rustled beyond her immediate field of view.
Lisa’s eyes flicked up.
She turned her head slightly and focused on a tuft of grass just beyond where the boundary should be.
Not inside the safe zone.
Outside.
Grass (Wild)
Status: Pestilence (17 stacks)
Remaining Duration: ~280 s
Vitality: 97.9%
She stilled.
Her thoughts didn’t speed up.
They sharpened.
Slowly, she extended one hand toward that same external tuft and said clearly:
“Pestilence.”
The System shoved back at once.
Spell Cast Denied.
Targets outside the Tutorial Safe Zone cannot be affected.
Lisa lowered her hand.
“Ah,” she said softly. “So you remembered to stop me.”
Her gaze slid back to the afflicted wild grass beyond the barrier.
“Propagation, however…”
A thin smile.
“You forgot to sandbox that.”
The blade outside the zone shimmered—seventeen stacks, obedient and illegal.
She smiled—tiny, precise, dangerous.
“So. Direct targeting blocked. Propagation unchecked. The wall applies to me,” she said, “but not to my side effects.”
She turned slowly, tracing the curve of the invisible boundary with her eyes, imagining circles overlapping, radii stacking, pulses chaining outward from a one-meter ring she barely controlled.
“Your safe zone,” she added, “is not actually safe.”
The wind skimmed across both sides of the barrier in the same calculated wave, refusing to acknowledge that any line existed at all.
Lisa flexed her fingers once.
“All right,” she said quietly. “That concludes testing.”
Her eyes returned to the grass beyond, to the barely visible shimmer of seventeen weak, persistent stacks.
“Next,” she said, “we see what happens if I stop treating this as a tutorial…”
Her voice lowered, more thoughtful than cruel.
“…and start treating it as a system failure.”
She took one small, exact step closer to the barrier,
not because she needed to.
Just to see how much the world would let her do from here.
And somewhere in the code, a dozen quiet warning flags lit up far too late.
The System would try to correct this eventually.
Most frameworks handled anomalies with suppression.
Some with rollback.
A few with brute-force deletion of the responsible entity.
Lisa considered these options calmly, then discarded them.
“You’re too slow,” she whispered.
Lisa sat down once more, closed her eyes, and dropped into the same internal corridor as before.
No urgency. Just maintenance.
Mana returned in slow, methodical increments.
When the last point settled back into place, she opened her eyes.
“Ready,” she said.
Not for the next test.
For the consequences.
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