Spending My Retirement In A Game

And as such did they raise their child, for a mere year, before they passed away through an accident, leaving the young girl all alone. She had no other relatives, so she ended up living in a small orphanage. The house mother there was nice and kind, and the girl didn’t miss out on anything there. She had friends, a constantly-full stomach, and the chance to get the best education she could.

The orphanage was quite close to a bookstore, and so the house mother, knowing that the girl was interested in reading at even the young age of 6, allowed the girl to go to the bookstore once every month to buy any new book that she wanted.

There, the girl encountered the name of her father for the first time outside of official hearings related to her custody or the inheritence. Of course, she was interested in what this man that she never really knew created, so she decided to get one of his books on a whim.

And from that day on, for the next one to two years, she only chose to buy books that her father had written. Incidentally, she was able to get some old notebooks that her father kept, and there was a lot of information in each one surrounding each story, far above what any regular reader could know. And the highest focus was always on one thing, Magic.

Like that, the girl began to love the concept of magic and became nearly too obsessed with it. She began reading stories about it online once she got her first smartphone, and she loved watching movies related to magic. And not only that, the girl even began to read up on where the concept of magic came from, and what kind of magic was said to be real in the world in different civilizations.

Taking that as her base, she began to study mythology and learned everything about magic, but she was never able to see real, undisputable magic.

Until the day that Jasmin Charles became Xenia.

Of course, she didn’t tell all of this to the other originals that were surrounding her as she began to tell her story, but she simply had to think of all of these things when it was her turn to tell her story. After all, that past was the most influential part of her journey so far.

On the first day that she began to play "World of Magic," she found herself on a beach not too far from the town. She was able to see it in the distance since the weather around here was usually quite clear, and the landscape was pretty flat, so obviously she immediately made her way there.

As she looked around, she had no choice but to smile brightly and excitedly made her way toward that town, before she noticed the air in this apparently tropical region suddenly grow colder, before seeing someone, or something, standing on top of entirely frozen sand. At first glance, he looked quite a lot like a human, but many things about him were obviously inhuman.

Judging from the backpack and jacket lying next to him, it was a person though, since a monster surely wouldn’t have items like that. But that wasn’t what Xenia was thinking about then. What she was thinking about was the ice that he was standing on.

"Is that magic?" She muttered out without even thinking, before the man turned around in surprise, immediately trying to cover himself up to hide his inhuman bodyparts.

"S-Sorry, what..?" He asked, before Xenia took a step closer, staring at the man’s feet, where brown fur was peaking out underneath the legs of his pants. Thinking that there was another person that thought of him to be a monster, he took a step back. Or at least he wanted to but was instead pushed away by Xenia as she took a closer look at the ice underneath the man.

"Is this magic? Like, Ice magic or something?" Xenia asked excitedly before the man nodded. "Y-Yeah, it is... it’s Frost Magic... Erm, who are you?"

The man asked, and Xenia stood up with a smile. "My name is Xenia nice to meet you. And you are?"

"Nice to meet you too... I’m Dien." He responded, simply surprised at the woman in front of him that didn’t seem to be interested in the fact that he was utterly malformed.

And that was how Xenia met the person that unlocked her racial skills and titles, and who realized that she had lost her experience, as well as who guided her through the town and along her path of magic.

Of course, after she had learned the basics, she didn’t actually need any help anymore since Xenia could somehow use magic intuitively like a well-trained mage, and she had knowledge that far surpassed what someone that had supposedly lost their memories could have.

It was precisely that talent in mastering various magic-based skills and spells, is what got her to be accepted to the Mage’s Guild quite quickly, where she researched and experimented on as many types of magic that she could find so far. She even wrote a book about the theories that she managed to confirm overall, and after she completed it, the Guild began to send different copies of the book out to different cities, as Xenia started to use more magic actively.

Initially, she began fighting monsters in the immediate vicinity of the town, until she had gained enough experience and a high enough level to enter the Dungeon directly next to the city. There, she brought her experience level to a point where she didn’t have any issues with her Mana anymore before a few problems had started to arise in the city.

Close to town, some adventurers found an incredibly weird item.

It was utterly black crystalized mana. Apparently, the adventurers found it in the nest of some ape-like monsters, and these monsters seemed to had evolved weirdly due to the presence of the black crystalized mana since then. They weren’t at a high rank, but they were far more aggressive and vicious than before, while at the same time having a far higher control over mana than usual.

Xenia wanted to research that Crystal a bit, and as such she called in an owed favor with the Guild Master of the Mage’s Guild to be able to take a look at the crystal at least. It was when she was currently on her way to the place where the crystalized mana was being kept that the Guild Master tried to change Xenia’s mind once more.

"Are you sure you don’t just want to omit your payments for your research for a week? I know that I owe you one, but this is something on the level that can mess with the town’s security, you know?" The Guildmaster, an elderly human, exclaimed before Xenia simply smirked.

"Exactly, that’s why I want to see it. Why would something like that be in the nest of some Rank 2 monsters?" She asked, before the Guildmaster simply stayed silent for a while, not knowing what to say. "I just want to take a look at the type of mana, nothing else." She explained, before the Guild Master slowly nodded, knowing that he couldn’t stop her anymore.

However, he didn’t even need to worry, since she wasn’t going to see it anyway. The moment they entered the room, they saw an ape monster that had been mutated by that crystalized mana before — being just a few levels higher than usual. It was nearly three meters tall and had layers upon layers of thick dirt and rock covering its whole body as it grasped the crystalized mana in its hand.

It was apparently startled when Xenia and the Guildmaster entered the room so that the giant ape disappeared out through the hole in the wall that it had probably created before.

"What the fuck?" Xenia yelled out intuitively as she saw this all happen, while the Guildmaster immediately freaked out and called for the guards. They didn’t see them at first, but the guards that were supposed to protect the crystalized mana were buried in the bricks of the walls after being attacked by the monster, unable to even defend themselves.

As soon as the situation was explained to the masters of the other guilds with combat experience in town, especially the Adventurer’s Guild moved out and called for the rapid extermination of such a dangerous monster.

Witnesses reported that the giant ape-monster climbed over the walls again and was now hiding somewhere nearby, so all the warriors made their way there as quickly as possible. Of course, Xenia was amongst them.

"Are you sure you should do this? It’s a pretty strong monster, you know?" Dien told her, nervous about Xenia dying or hurting herself in the fight, but the High-Elf simply shook her head.

"Don’t worry about it, you wuss. I’m not going to get hurt. Now, are you coming with me, or are you going to hide behind the big, strong men protecting the city?" She asked, obviously just trying to provoke Dien into coming along. It did indeed work, and he ended up being part of the fight, although he outwardly couldn’t do much, although ’much’ was already more than the majority of people.

The Rank 5 monster that the ape had turned into before wouldn’t have been a huge issue, it was surely quite dangerous, but that wasn’t what made the fight dangerous.

"That monster was mutating while we looked at it. The crystalized mana was affecting it more than it should have, I think. Who knows what it turned into at this point? We can’t just let it do what it wants, so all of us need to help out in defeating it." She told Dien, who couldn’t do anything but accept her decision.

But what the ape turned into was something that nobody could have expected. Directly in front of the small army that gathered to defeat it, it swallowed the crystalized mana whole, before the ’actual’ change happened to it.

As if in a murderous rage, it began banging its fists against the wall of the cliff behind it as its body morphed and grew, absorbing the rock of the cliff at the same time.

Or rather, it would have maybe been more accurate to say that the cliff wall absorbed the monster. Once it did, cracks formed all over the cliff, and an even more enormous version of the ape simply stepped out from it after it evolved into a Rank 7 monster.

That was when the real fight began. Especially the mages worked as hard as they could to fight against this monstrosity, and Xenia created some of the largest, incredibly complex magic circles that she could. In the commercial trailer, it all looked like she managed to create things like meteorites instantly, but it actually took a whole 20 minutes to draw the relevant magic circles, and she nearly ran out of mana while she was at it.

But in the end, the giant meteorite managed to do quite a bit of damage to the giant rock-ape, but the fight continued for quite a while longer.

The warriors of the town were able to exterminate the monster in the end, and it gave everyone that participated in the event a good amount of experience as well. Xenia especially benefitted from this, as she was able to collect a lot of proficiency in her low-ranked skills.

About one in-game week later a festival was going on, and it was quite a bit bigger this time around than usual because everyone was in a great mood after slaying an incredibly dangerous monster.

And so, Xenia chose to raise the mood a little more, creating fireworks with her magic that enchanted the citizens of the whole town with their light. But that wasn’t the only thing that the High-Elf did to end up being acknowledged to such an extent by everyone in the city. She even accomplished many other things, by simply helping out here and there when she could although most of the time, she did turn some non-magic related stuff into something that involved quite a lot of magic.

But nobody blamed her since that’s just how Xenia was.