“As I have said before, trial and error are both the greatest tools available to a mage and the worst ideas to ever have. On one hand, knowing the intricacies of your spell could save your life. On the other hand, you could lose it with a particularly violent error. It’s a trade-off, after all. Just remember that life will never have easy solutions to problems. Nor will magic.”
*=====*
Mori snapped the final book in the library shut with a dull thud, “That was useless,” she said. There was a single instance, across her six books, that mentioned regeneration, and it was the very mana type Jel had been using to keep the other death knights from falling apart. The only other one that was remotely close was the ‘repair’ mana type, which apparently required a vast amount of mana to use, effectively nullifying its use in large-scale combat.
No, it was not a healing or repairing type of mana that made her body as it was. She simply lived off of small amounts of mana sucked in from the air and even the magical effects of some bard songs. She was not drinking enough mana to even come close to repairing her body, so it had to be some other effect. Looking through her lich-enhanced memories, she realized that there were a few odd types out across the six books.
Of her books, two were basic, generic mana types, one was on fire, another was on earth, a third was on light, and the last was on barriers. In the last of those, there was a mana type labeled as a ‘link’ type. Its purpose was to link individual mages’ barriers into one large barrier, making mana types that reinforced those barriers take effect across the whole front line. It was mostly useless for a single caster like she was, but it gave her an idea.
[Mechanical Integration] was a Trait that linked her skeletal body to any and all mechanical additions. ‘If the ‘link’ mana could affect barriers, why could it not affect the bodies of undead?’ Mori thought, ‘So, that tentatively solves the issue of connecting the undead to armor. That only really leaves the issue of making the undead able to regenerate from anything.’
Mori had no clue where to start. On one hand, she was clueless as to how she was even able to regenerate as a lich in the first place. All liches were able to do it, but she had little idea of how it was possible. The closest idea she had was a line of reasoning that she had kept coming back to; a lich was, in essence, the physical manifestation of a soul’s ability to keep itself from unraveling. For a few moments, Mori wondered if a lich’s soul would simply reform if its crystalized cocoon was destroyed and if Kel’rk’ath did not take their souls before that happened.
She ignored her errant thought, thinking again about how she could give an undead the ability to regenerate endlessly. A few ideas came to mind, the most significant of which being the idea of which was thinking about the idea in terms of fire. As long as a fire burnt, there was no way to stop it without specifically targeting a few of its weaknesses, the two most important being the removal of oxygen and the dispersal of heat.
If she thought about their bodies as fire, she had a perfect solution to her problem. With fuel and air, fire could not be stopped without water. She wondered how, though, she would integrate fire and death manas into what she wanted, but stopped soon after.
Before she could make any undead, she needed actual dead to unkill. Slapping herself in the forehead, she sighed and pulled her notebook from the table beside her favorite chair. Just as she was about to get up to find a pen, a red appendage made entirely of slime extended from her back and latched onto a pen on the table. It drew the pen forward, placing it in her hand, “Aww… Thanks Unio,” she said as she pet the undead stuck to her back. The Connection, which she had somewhat forgotten about, flooded with happiness from the medium-sized creature. Chuckling, she returned her attention to her notebook and began writing.
There were three parts of the spell she wanted expressed; the first was the connection between undead and physical material. The second was the idea of being like a fire. And the third was being an undead in the first place.
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Part of her was content with simply slapping them all together, like she did for the death knights’ uplifting spell, and casting them as if throwing a handful of wet sand mixed with clay and dirt. A bigger, louder, and much more interesting part of her told her that she should make it the best spell she had ever made and make it enough to demolish the Hive set against them.
She listened to the second part.
The first order of business was to figure out the basic shape of the sigils. Her first foray into using fire mana to make specialized undead was wrapping fire mana in reanimation mana. The result was a savage beast that burned with hating flames and could only stand around and wait when there was no fighting. “Maybe they get like that because of my ideas of what fire is? I don’t know, maybe? Whatever.”
Instead of simply using a basic geometric design, she decided to make the core of the spell like a boiler. Fire on the bottom, fueling the important part, the reanimation, on the top. Something still felt missing, and she figured out what was after a bit of thought; there was nothing saying that the spell would simply burn the undead until nothing remained. She needed something to turn the fire from pure destruction to the engine of the whole undead’s regeneration.
After recalling the books once more, she decided on using another generic mana type, ‘fuel.’ It was normally meant to designate a part of the spell to be exclusively for fueling the continued casting of the spell it was a part of. According to the book, it was to ‘simplify the input of mana into the spell for the mage’s convenience.’ She thought that if she connected the fire with the reanimation part with the ‘fuel’ mana type, she could forgo the need of a new, more specialized mana type.
With the core of the spell made, she moved on to the outer layers of the spell. There were two parts of it, one of which she realized that she needed to acquire, that she imagined was present. She had the ‘link’ part of the spell, but she also needed something to target the armor that made up her undead’s shell. Unfortunately, there was nothing that targeted anything touching the body in the books.
Mori could not imagine why. A targeting mana type that affected the clothes someone wore would be invaluable. Something that made their clothes into armor or insulates heat or some other idea could be important to many mages’ arsenals.
The idea reminded Mori of a fact Fara had mentioned. In total, barely anything had been discovered in terms of mana types. Millions of ideas and trains of thought that, with enough dedication, could become mana types were discarded as useless. Instead of making more parts, mages mostly focused on reconfiguring the endless number that had already been created. On top of that, those who did research new mana types likely kept the ideas to themselves.
The scarcity of gravity mages was enough to prove the idea.
Thus, Mori was left to make her own mana type. After a moment of thought, she realized how important it would be to make a single mana type for the spell. Including the yet-to-be-made type, she was already up to five different mana types; any more would put more strain on her mind than she really needed.
She got to work, thinking different trains of thought through and trying to figure out which worked and which needed to be discarded. Before long, she had the pieces she needed to make the mana type, but she did not have enough time to finish it before a light knock on the door was followed by Jel and Pride walking through the door.
She turned her attention to the two and gave a smile, “Hey. Did you guys finish your meeting?”
Jel returned the smile and nodded, “We did! We have a plan or two to get them out of their shells, but… I think we need your opinion first.” Mori gave a curious expression, noting idly that Pride ignored the conversation and began collecting the books from her table, putting them back onto the shelf and taking one for himself, “Alright, here’s how it goes: First, we cook them some food,” Jel said, “Then, we have a joint training and/or combat lesson. After that, we want to… um… what was the last thing?”
Pride turned to Jel, “History lesson,” he said, turning back to his book.
“That, yeah! History lesson! After that, we’ll have fun and everyone’ll be friends!”
Mori stared at Jel for a long few moments before nodding lightly, “You know what? Sure, that’s fine. I’m staying away from it, though. You guys do that, and I’ll keep doing my thing. If they don’t want to do that stuff, don’t force them. That, and don’t hurt them too badly; they are planning on fighting in Aekan, after all.” Jel gave a happy nod and darted out of the room, leaving Mori to continue her work.