If you go there will be trouble.

You decide that there's enough time for you to at least get familiar with what you can do in a safe place before you step out into a potentially lethal world. Besides, you still have a question that you really need to get answered about how magic works in this world. You expected to see a mana pool and mana costs, but instead you have a Concentration pool and Concentration costs. Is that just a renamed resource or does it act differently than standard video game mana? And, perhaps more importantly to your immediate situation, how quickly does it recover?

Now is a better time to find out those answers than when you have some monster trying to eat you, so you get to work. Fortunately, the information dump you got earlier told you exactly what you need to do in order to cast either of your spells. You walk over to a bare section of canyon wall, stand about ten feet back, and take a deep breath then exhale. You hold one hand out in front of you, make a few hand gestures, and say a word. You're not sure what word exactly it is that you say, partly because it's not in any language you know and partly because fire is now shooting out of your hand!

A thin red stream of flames blasts forward from your palm and splashes against the canyon wall. You can feel some heat, but thankfully most of it is being directed away from you at high speed. You hold your aim steady and maintain concentration on the spell while bringing up your status screen.

Alright, so far so good. Your current Concentration is exactly 25 points less than your maximum, as expected. You allow your concentration on the spell to lapse while keeping your status screen open and your eyebrows shoot up in surprise. Your Concentration recovered almost instantly! The numbers moved so fast they were practically a blur.

You cast Flame Jet a few more times, and each time as soon as the spell ends, either after five seconds or by you choosing to end it early, your Concentration refills to its maximum within a half second or less. Well, well, well. So the spellcasting resource here is not so much a pool that you you empty out and then refill over time as it is a measure of capacity. You have no way to test it currently, but your gut tells you that you can maintain concentration on multiple spells at once so long as your Concentration Attribute is high enough. Presumably, then, it's going to be relatively difficult to get an extremely high Concentration and/or buffing spells will be expensive. You wonder what happens when you try to cast a spell which costs more Concentration than you have currently available but less than your maximum, but unfortunately that's a question you just can't answer for now.

Leaving your spell experimentation for a later date, you pick up your spear from where you placed it out of the line of fire. You assume what you feel from years spent watching videos is a fighting stance and give a few tentative jabs at the air. The weapon feels awkward and ungainly in your hands and you nearly trip over your own feet when you try out a lunge. Not an auspicious start. You hope that this is just a result of lack of Skill in using spears and that it won't be hard to get the needed Skill before you need it to defend yourself. Wondering if maybe some more shadow boxing would help, you spend maybe ten minutes making a fool of yourself, but no prompts appear to announce that you've learned how to wield your spear.

Oh well. Your choice has been made so there's no sense crying about what might have been. You're just going to have to learn on fly. With that, you take another look upward and see that there's barely any light left coming from above. The only real light still visible is coming from the entrance of the canyon. While this is a safe place according to the old man, you can't stay here forever. You briefly debate staying overnight and leaving in the morning, but something tells you that you need to get moving. Taking a deep breath, you walk towards the exit and into the wider world of the Realms for the first time.