I reached over the dash and tapped the central button on the spell panel’s touch screen with one finger. There was a momentary delay while the device calibrated, then I felt a slight tugging on my Chi as the yellow backlit LCD screen above it provided a readout:

Jeremy Parker

Level 1

Class: Unaffiliated

Spells: Force Barrier (Level 2), Ensnare (Level 1)

The Force Barrier spell was something I had been working on to sell to the government one day. I figured they could use it on their vehicles and possibly enchant their soldiers’ body armor with it, too. The passive protection that Force Barrier gave to the car also helped when driving through woods like this. It was like a much better version of a physical push bar, so hitting any beasts would do more damage to them than to my car.

Since these woods were a popular place to practice spellcasting, it was just possible that I would meet some dangerously enhanced beasts on the road. Trees and rocks weren’t the only things that underwent a process of change around expended mana. In fact, the most fantastical and potentially dangerous natural evolutions happened in animals.

I’d heard crazy stories about the magical evolutions that happened in some beasts. A buck—already a formidable creature on its own—might double in size and grow massive, glowing antlers with poisoned tines. That sounded bad enough, but a coyote the size of a truck or a black bear whose roar produced fireballs was a creature lifted directly from your worst nightmares. This was not fantastic or unbelievable. There were documented cases of all these things happening, and worse.

Luckily, my town wasn’t home to any cultivators of any note. The regulars who came out into the forest to practice used only a small amount of mana, so I wasn’t particularly concerned. That said, I was glad of the extra protection my spell enhancements granted all the same.

With a flick of a finger, I pulled up the Beast Detection application on my spell panel. A red and black line map of the forest and the nearby suburbs flashed onto the display as the magical radar scanned the area for beasts. It didn’t pick up anything for miles.

I nodded to myself. I could relax. The company who’d developed the beast detection system—PentaTech—was really reliable and at the forefront of many new developments in magitech.