As he walked down the street and prepared to cut into the forest to find his clearing-turned-ritual site, Zeth glanced over the requirements to conduct Demonic Covenant.

[Strength of sacrifice required: Moderate

Required ritual circle diameter: 8.81 feet (originally 10 feet)

Time required to draw: 4.41 hours (originally 5 hours)

Upkeep time required each day: 3.52 hours (originally 4 hours)]

They were pretty strange. To begin with, the required strength of sacrifice needed to activate it was the highest he’d seen—Empowerment Ritual had only recently risen up from ‘Low’ to ‘Moderately Low,’ and even that was getting difficult to manage at this point. So something all the way up to what he assumed was the next level, ‘Moderate,’ was almost certainly going to take quite a lot to activate.

On top of that, the diameter was also gigantic. Once again, when compared to Empowerment Ritual’s now-4.41 foot requirement, Demonic Covenant doubled the size of the circle. At least the smaller time requirement was nice—though, four and a half hours still wasn’t exactly a breeze. The strangest part of it all, though, was the upkeep time requirement.

Zeth finally understood precisely what it meant—the circle would effectively undo that many hours of his work each day, meaning he’d need to spend that much time repairing it if he wanted to keep it ready for activation from one day to the next. For all of his other rituals, that upkeep time was always a small fraction of the total time needed to draw the circle. But here, it was almost fully equal to the initial requirement.

Effectively, this meant that, unlike a Hellfire Ritual, he wouldn’t be able to do something like draw a few of these and keep them prepared for when they’d be needed in the future. Rather, if he wanted to summon a demon, he was likely going to be drawing the entire circle that very day. Which meant it would be basically impossible to summon a demon on short notice. And, with its massive diameter requirement, he wouldn’t be able to carry something like this around with him to activate whenever he needed to. At least, not unless he could reduce the diameter of his circles by an insane amount. Maybe that would happen eventually.

For now, though, he just needed to draw the circle, and he needed to acquire a sacrifice to activate it. The circle was simple enough; he’d just need to draw new rings of Hellfire Rituals that would be wide enough to protect him while he drew the larger circle. But before he could do that, he’d need to acquire a sacrifice. With Demonic Covenant’s extreme upkeep cost, he wanted to be sure he had a sacrifice secured before he did all the work that may have been erased if he took too long finding one.

And that sacrifice was the harder requirement by far. He doubted he could rely on a strong enough monster just coming to him. Instead, he’d need to go out in search of something, and harvest its blood.

A part of Zeth’s consciousness wandered to what he’d read in the library back when he was researching the Blood Mage Class. It had said that the Class Leveled Up far more quickly when its victims were humans, rather than anything else. He was willing to bet that meant humans worked more efficiently for all rituals, not just to Level Up. It was likely his own blood was an exception to that, with how quickly it fell off in usefulness, but anyone else—especially anyone with a Class of their own—would almost certainly work wonders in powering his magic.

Only, acquiring human blood would provide an entire suite of its own problems. Legally, of course, breaking into someone’s house, dragging them out into the middle of the woods, and tearing their gut open to spill their blood onto the soil sounded like it might break one or two laws. But also, Zeth wasn’t about to do something like that even if he knew he could get away with it.

His vendetta was with only a few people: the Blood Mage, Garon, and the Wicked thralls that killed his father. He’d certainly be killing them and harvesting their bodies for all they were worth. But the rest of the people in this town did nothing wrong, and slaughtering innocents just to get to the people who actually wronged him wasn’t a line he wanted to cross. Not to mention the risks of accidentally committing an act unforgivable enough that he’d be stuck with the Wicked Skill. Not all murders would land you with it, but if even you didn’t think what you were doing was right, there was a good chance the System would agree.

But then, other than human beings, his only option would be to hope he came across a monster in the forest powerful enough to work as a sacrifice. Or maybe kill a large amount of weaker ones and pile them all up in the circle. Either one sounded like it’d take far longer than he preferred. And be more dangerous than he’d like, too.

It was one thing to stay in a defensible position in the clearing that could easily fend off a monster or two while he worked—it was a whole other to actively go looking for them. While Zeth could take his ritual circles around with him, something a normal Blood Mage wouldn’t be able to do, he knew from the fight with the fleshtaker that making physical contact with a monster using those circles was harder than it sounded. And when he wouldn’t even know what he’d be going up against, it sounded like a great way to get killed.

Really, he almost liked his chances more against law enforcement. Maybe he could find some way to harvest a person’s blood without killing or hurting them? Or find someone he could feasibly get blood out of that he was okay with hurting a bit? Or…

He frowned, stopping dead in his tracks halfway down the road. There was a person who would be easier to get some blood out of, and also was definitely not a morally upstanding citizen.

Turning right back around, he headed up the road toward his home. Or, more specifically, toward his shed.

Zeth hid out in the tall grass, spying on the shed that contained the Wicked thrall woman impaled through the gut by a metal rod. He wouldn’t even need to do anything to her in order to obtain her blood; it was already splattered across the floor. Only problem was, out of every single person in this entire town, she was probably the individual under the most surveillance.

But there was one thing working for him. The shed had a drain built into its floor to let out all the blood leaking from butchered animals into a bucket out back. And, considering how intense her injuries were, he was certain it’d be full. This woman, impaled by a spear going all the way through her body, would be pouring blood out onto the floor, and from the quick peek he’d gotten at her, he knew she was positioned above that sloped section of floor that would let the blood run out the hole in the wall and into the drainage bucket. If he could just get to that, he could grab it and run without having to alert the woman contained inside.

He just needed to get them away from the shed for a little bit. Right now, they weren’t exactly expecting to have to stop any intruders, so they were mainly just standing around and talking. But even if it was possible for Zeth to reach the back wall of the shed without anyone seeing him, even one stray glance, one person walking around back to stretch their legs, would mean failure. He had to play things safe. Which, ironically, meant playing things a little dangerous.

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First, he looped around to the pig pen, where he’d previously gotten animals to slaughter. It was out of sight of the shed and the farmhouse, so he wouldn’t need to worry about being seen. And it was there that he enacted his plan.

To begin with, as most of his plans began with these days, he sank to the ground and began drawing. Some of the pigs sniffed him curiously, but they didn’t bother him as he drew up his circle. Zeth kept his ears out for footsteps the entire time he drew, ready to dash off if it sounded like someone was headed his way, but he was left undisturbed by the time he finished fifty minutes later. This was technically eating into precious time he wanted to use summoning demons, but he needed that blood.

After he was done, he set up the scene, drawing up a few half-complete mock circles across the field. These he didn’t put near as much time or effort into as the real one—he just dragged his finger across the grass until he had something that would look like a functioning ritual circle to someone who didn’t know any better. Once he had a few, he returned to the real one, beckoning a nearby pig to come over to him.

It waddled across the field toward him after some encouragement, and he pulled out his knife, staring down at it. “Sorry, buddy, but you were probably gonna end up becoming bacon anyway.”

After situating it to stand over the Hellfire Ritual circle, he tackled it to the ground and cut its gut open, watching the blood spill out over the painted red lines. It squealed and kicked Zeth away, and he tumbled away from the wounded animal. But before it could get up and run, the circle received its full necessary sacrifice, lighting up and letting out a crackling flash of electricity before igniting the pig with a tall, roaring flame.

Instantly, shouts came from the other side of the farm, and Zeth sprinted off to avoid detection. He dashed into a field of tall crops and began making his way over to the shed as he listened to a group of metal boots clanking over to the site of the ritual magic in a hurry.

“It’s a Fire Ritual!” one of them shouted, and Zeth heard the boots come to a sudden halt. “Men, we need to approach carefully. There may be more armed traps lying around. Probably put down by that woman before she got caught in the shed.”

The voices faded out as he saw the roof of the shed come into view above the tall grass, and risked standing up to catch a glimpse of it. It was all but deserted—they’d left two soldiers behind to guard the woman while everyone else went to go check out the disturbance. And the two left behind were standing attentively right by the entrance—opposite the side that the blood would be draining out of. Perfect.

As carefully yet quickly as he could, Zeth crept up to the back wall of the shed, where he found the bucket of blood resting innocently in the grass, a spout coming from inside dripping the occasional droplet into the pool of liquid.

He grabbed it, taking care not to make any noise, and hurried off, away from the building.

It was only once he got to his typical ritual site in the forest clearing that Zeth’s heartbeat steadied. Walking around with a bucket of human blood in his hands wasn’t very good for his attempts to look inconspicuous, so he was forced to sneak into the forest and run through there, hoping the smell wouldn’t attract any monsters.

Once there, he fell to his knees and began preparing according to plan—first, expand the protection of his Hellfire Ritual circles, then get to work on the massive Demonic Covenant circle.

Zeth wasn’t sure what to expect from the ritual, if he was being honest with himself. He knew demons were powerful, to the point that he’d heard tales of them single-handedly taking down massive swaths of soldiers in the past. However, his information was extremely limited. Who knew if only certain demons had capabilities that incredible—maybe he’d just get some random weakling. Not that anything that came from a realm as deep as the Thirteenth would be truly weak, but still.

Looking at the description as he worked, he tried to glean as much as he could.

[Demonic Covenant - Cost: 15 Skill Points

Uses a ritual circle to attempt to summon a demon from the Thirteenth Realm. The demon will be bound to the caster’s word, and can be dismissed at will.]

The phrase ‘attempt to summon’ made him worry. Could the attempt fail? Would he need to do something to ensure it would succeed? He hoped the effort and resources he sank into this wouldn’t be wasted. At the very least, though, he did feel like, in the case he did successfully summon a demon, he’d be safe. The Skill seemed to give him two safety valves to use against the demon—he could make them do whatever he wanted, and could get rid of them if necessary. At the very least, it was unlikely that summoning a demon would carry with it true danger. Worst-case, it would just be a waste of time.

Though, even in that worst-case scenario where it ended up failing, Zeth still wouldn’t have gained nothing from the ritual. After all, there was more than one reason he wanted to use this Wicked thrall woman’s blood to conduct it.

Supposedly, she had stated to the guards that she was a Blood Mage. And supposedly, that information was reliable because they had tricked her into saying it. However, Zeth wasn’t convinced at all that she was the Blood Mage he was looking for. In fact, he was all but certain she wasn’t the one. But that didn’t necessarily mean what she had said was total falsehood. There was still a possibility that this woman was a Blood Mage.

The only way to actually read a person’s full Status was locked behind a specific Skill exclusive to the Inquisitor Class, and a group as powerful as the Inquisitors would have no reason to stick around these parts, so Zeth wouldn’t be able to do something like genuinely confirming her Class for himself. But what he could do was use her blood in this ritual and see what the System called it.

If it was ‘weak’ human blood, then chances were she didn’t have a Class. But if it called her blood ‘strong?’ It wouldn’t mean for certain that she truly was a Blood Mage, but it at least meant she had some sort of Class. And if it turned out there really were more Blood Mages crawling around this town than just the one he’d scuffled with, chances were they were connected. And if they were connected, then that meant all Zeth needed to do would be to catch a single one of these Blood Mages, and that one would lead him straight to the one he wanted.

Thinking of these other Blood Mages, his mind wandered to the question of whether this Demonic Covenant Skill was different from what a normal Blood Mage would get. It seemed like they had a Skill called ‘Fire Ritual’ instead of his own Hellfire Ritual, and he knew his Ritual Circle Mastery Skill was different from theirs, too, since it let him move his circles around while theirs had to stay stationary. So then, how was Covenant different? Was it just cheaper and easier to obtain? Or was there some key difference—a limitation built into theirs that he didn’t have to deal with?

Once I find the Blood Mage, I’ll have to ask them all about it while I beat them to death, he thought with a smile.

Once he was finished with his hellfire circles, Zeth crouched down at the edge of the ten-foot section of ground he’d cleared out. It was time to cross the point of no return. He took a breath, staring at his sum of Points and his list of available Skills.

[UNLOCKED CLASS-EXCLUSIVE SKILLS

Otherworldly Excellence - Cost: 17

Resonant Whispers - Cost: 9

Demonic Covenant - Cost: 15

Secure Rites - Cost: 12

Speedy Rites - Cost: 12

Compact Rites - Cost: 12

Forbidden Knowledge - Cost: 25

Unholy Strength - Cost: 18]

Now was his last chance to decide to save up and purchase Otherworldly Excellence instead of Demonic Covenant. Or he could’ve gotten almost any other of the Skills offered to him. Though, he was still notably far off from being able to afford Forbidden Knowledge—if he even wanted it. Still, he had plenty of options. Was Covenant really the correct one?

He took another breath. I need a demon. Something that can help me kill my enemies and collect blood. Not a few extra Stats, or a discount on the requirements of my rituals. I’ll be coming for those soon enough, but right now, I’ve had enough of being worried for my life. It’s time to get access to an otherworldly warrior.

After the moment of hesitation, he placed his finger on the ground and prepared to start drawing.

[You have purchased Blood Magus Skill: Demonic Covenant.

-15 Skill Points. You have 1 Skill Point.]

Alright. Time to summon this thing.