It was still pretty early in the day, noontime at most, so after checking out the spell-books in his room for a while, Felix headed outside to the training ground Scarlet was using before, and sat down next to a nearby tree. Being outside and on the dirt (Well there was a bit of grass, but ignore that.) would slightly boost his construction speed of earth spells, since the earth element wouldn't have to travel through the floor of the manor.
Felix was determined to finally finish the Talc Skin spell today. He had been working on it on and off for what felt like ages at this point, and passive defense would always be welcome. Everyone liked staying alive.
So, Felix sat down and began absorbing the element of the earth, and constructing earth nodes in his spell space. After a couple of hours, a slave brought some food and drink to him and sat them down passively next to him without disturbing him.
Four hours later, Felix finally finished constructing the Talc Skin spell - or, rather, he finished adding on the Talc Skin spell on top of the Stone Skin spell. Felix activated it immediately, and the tone of his skin very slightly and subtly changed to have a small whitish-gray to green tint to it. Felix grabbed a knife from the food which had been brought out to him, and tried to stab his hand as viciously as he could - it didn't even leave a white mark or an indent, let alone break the skin. Felix smiled, quite satisfied. He took a break and ate the food which was brought out to him, and relaxed against the tree for a moment, reflecting on the day's events.
Not truly related to the Belrose family... Did that mean one of his ancestors got cuckolded?!? Who would dare to cuckold the second most prominent dark magic family in the entire human kingdom?!? The only two answers Felix could think of to that question were either that they were a suicidal fool, perhaps blinded by love or something... Or they were from an even more powerful family than the Belrose family.
Felix frowned. Although there were families more powerful than the Belrose family, they definitely did not number more than a dozen, if that, and most of them would be capital-class noble households at the level of another Earldom at the very least.
Felix shook his head and looked around. He saw Scarlet walk out of the manor. She waved to him and walked over.
"Sorry I left you alone..." Scarlet said. "I hadn't seen my aunt Mara for a while." she added.
Felix shook his head again. "It's fine, I finally found some peace and quiet to work on my magic, without an unruly tomboy bothering me." he said with a smile.
Scarlet pouted and punched his shoulder, then winced and shook her hand. "What the heck? It feels like I tried to punch a house or something." she said, looking at Felix.
"Well, I am an earth mage first and foremost, remember? I just finished constructing a new passive defense spell, Talc Skin. Thanks for agreeing to test it for me." Felix said, giving Scarlet a grin.
Scarlet's expression darkened. "Turn off the spell and accept your punishment." she said, glaring at him.
Felix sighed and deactivated Talc Skin, his skin tone changing back to normal. Scarlet punched him on the shoulder again, knocking him backwards. He swore his shoulder nearly got dislocated, and he rubbed his shoulder tenderly as he got up. "Jeez, are you trying to kill me, your poor beloved cousin?" he asked her, turning his Talc Skin back on.
"Hmph! I could definitely disable and detain you if I wanted to still, but I doubt even I could kill you right now unless I did something brutal like stabbing your eyes out before you managed to close them. You're a dumb stinky cockroach who's nearly impossible for me to kill now." Scarlet said, crossing her arms and pouting. Felix could only smile wryly in response.
"Oh right, Scarlet, this was just an idle thought I had, but, is there a place with a great amount of darkness element on the property somewhere? Since it is a dark household and all." Felix asked, with a thought.
"There is. We have a very extensive crypt on the west side of the property. Slaves die all the time, and we don't waste the bodies, we use them to nurture a strong darkness area, and they act as another source of income for us, as well as fodder for experimentation with dark magic. Due to how many slaves we run through year-round, we probably have more corpses and bodies than anyone else in the kingdom, at least that I know of. They're slaves so they're not buried particularly ceremoniously, they're pretty much just stacked on top of each other in big old rooms, and last I heard, the crypt is two kilometers deep, of nothing but corpses stacked on top of each other. Obviously, I don't go over there very often..." Scarlet said.
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"Can I trouble you to show me to the area with the most concentrated darkness?" Felix asked.
"I reaaaaaally don't want to go down to the bottom of the crypts with you, but I guess I will, since this is important." Scarlet said with a grimace.
"Thank you Scarlet." Felix said with a smile. Scarlet sighed and began to lead him to the west side of the manor. After a brief walk, they came upon a granite mausoleum, sculpted with a scene of the dead's souls ascending to the heavens. Scarlet opened the door, and there was a staircase inside. Scarlet sighed again, and walked down it, with Felix following. Surprisingly, there was a wooden lift only a little ways in, with a muscular slave on standby, and the whole place was lit with gothic looking oil lanterns. Scarlet walked on to the lift, with Felix following. "Bottom floor." she said to the slave. The slave saluted Scarlet, and unhooked a chain made of some kind of dark blue metal, which he controlled to slowly lower them into the depths.
"There's a slave who does nothing but sit underground and wait to bring people into the crypts?" Felix asked incredulously.
"How often do you think we need to inter new bodies? We have slave morticians on standby, diggers, miners, engineers... There's probably at least thirty living slaves down here in the crypts at any given time. The lift slave probably has to do this journey down to the bottom and back up at least three times a day. We had to build a very advanced system of levers and pulleys, and the chain we're using is cast out of mithril alloy to support it's own weight." Scarlet said passively.
The ride down to the bottom of the crypts took a very long time, during which Scarlet started looking bored out of her skull quickly, so she started doing exercises right there on the lift. Felix sat down and began to continue work on Hex: Spirit Disruption. The dark and earth elements were thick in this place, but the lower they went into the earth, the thicker the dark element became. Finally, after an entire hour, they finally reached the bottom.
"Bottom floor." said the lift slave, with a bow.
"Stay put, he's going to want to stay down here, but I'm not spending my night hugging the dead." Scarlet said blandly. "When you want to call the lift slave down, you pull on that chain over there, and it will ring a bell at the top." Scarlet explained, pointing to a dark blue chain separated from the rest of the lift chains.
As they stepped out through a carved out doorway, they reached a large main hall, with many branching hallways leading out of it. Peeking inside one, Felix saw stacks and stacks of bodies, rather unceremoniously piled in various rooms. There were a couple of slaves in the room who were dragging a body. They bowed deeply when they saw Scarlet, who waved her hand at them dismissively, to which they picked up where they left off and continued to drag off the body to the end of the room.
"Why doesn't this place smell like a rotten bog? I don't really smell much of anything down here besides your perfume." Felix asked.
"We cast spells to preserve the bodies for a long time. They barely rot at all. The corpses in the topmost floor which were interred thousands of years ago probably aren't even decayed by five percent at this point, let alone these fresh corpses. That and we have ventilation shafts dug out, of course." Scarlet explained, looking glum.
Scarlet led Felix to the end of the main hall, where there was a stone door with the Belrose family crest (A thorn-vine strangled rose) on it. Scarlet opened the door, and inside was a small, and very dark room. The light from the surrounding lanterns felt like it was being eaten, and could only penetrate a couple of feet into the room.
"The crypts are designed in such a way that all of the dark energy from the entire crypt is funneled to this point. We have to build a new room like this about once every three hundred years or so when we have to excavate a new level of the crypt, and it grows stronger every single time from the new level of corpses above it. As you can see, the darkness here is incredibly thick, even though it's still late afternoon. At midnight... I wouldn't dare to be in here, it would be terrifying." Scarlet said, looking clearly uncomfortable.
Felix was pleasantly surprised. Although the darkness here was only one percent at best the concentration of what it was in the dark cave where he had met Arboro, it was still by far the most powerful source of dark energy he had found anywhere outside of that.
"This place is very good. I think I'd like to train here for at least a week, actually, to get a feel for it." Felix said happily.
Scarlet looked at Felix like he was crazy, but then shrugged her shoulders. "As you wish. I'll head back to the surface and send a slave regularly with fresh food and drink for you." she said with a sigh.
"Now if you don't mind, I don't want to spend even another minute down here, this place gives me the creeps." Scarlet said with a shudder. Felix gave her a hug, which surprised her. She looked like she wanted to resist for a moment, but let it happen, and then she turned and left, walking back to the lift. Felix walked in to the small chamber and closed the door, then extinguished the gas lanterns. Suddenly the darkness felt even more oppressive than before, as if he was kidnapped, and then locked into the basement of a basement. It was stifling... or it would be, were Felix not an earth and darkness mage. Frankly, Felix felt right at home, as if this small room were designed by an architect who had exactly Felix's temperament in mind. He sat in the very center of the room (guided by his Night Eye spell), where the darkness concentrated to, and he continued to work on Hex: Spirit Disruption. The speed at which he was able to construct it was three times as fast here as it was in his room at night, and that was when it was still in the afternoon. Slowly, it turned to night in the world above, and the darkness continued to rise. When Felix estimated it was midnight, he was working five times as quickly as in his room, as the darkness pressed down on him with an almost physical presence.
It felt quite snug and comfortable, if you asked him.