After they cheered for a few minutes, or, at least Velvet, they put up to work.
Velvet rested for a bit, recovering from drawing those symbols, while Hyde broke them down.
Then, Hyde rested for a bit, and Velvet started reading the books that Gertine gave her.
Lust magic dealt with emotions, and ways to manipulate them. It was also the one with more affinity for plant magic. Remembering Baraviodos’ root-like appearance, it was expected.
The spells ranged from some truth charms, to some plant fertilizers, to some for… private activities. There was even a charm to transfer someone’s voice!
The truth ones were good; still, the difference in paradigms might make them a bit unusable against others mages.
The plant ones could be sold in villages, were she to travel. Also, they were useful to keep Sinoe’s Baslard well fed.
The sexual ones, well, also good for selling!
Now, to the knowledge book.
Baraviodos had kind of cheated her with those. She knew most of them already, which, since they had been traveling together for a while, was very obviously on purpose.
He had put the damned exploding paper figurines in the first page! It WAS on purpose.
Think of the thousand auris Velvet… They were worth it…
“Well, and the idea of using Their names on the dream also was because of them, so I can forgive it a bit…” She said in a low voice, not forgiving at all. “So shameless, I almost died there!”
“If we meet again, I'll eat him!”
“You will grow roots then.” Hyde weakly dissuaded.
“I’m no longer eating him. But I will have my revenge.”
The things she ended up learning from the knowledge book were less than the lust book.
“He added variables and Ifs…”
It wasn’t fully useless, since two spells were actually good. One of them was called 'Same as Puppet'. Using someone's blood, hair or nails, the magician could make a paper puppet connected to the material’s donor, becoming able to hurt them at a distance. The paper puppet cost three paper dolls, but it was useful if she managed to get the materials needed to form a connection.
The other was called 'I know what you don't'. This one was great for Velvet at this moment. It allowed the mage to cover a spell, preventing it from being copied or stolen, as long as the enemy didn't know about it beforehand. She wanted to use it on the symbols that came from the dream.
She still needed to try them. After all, her Esca was only opened a quarter, and using spells over her level might fasten the miasma accumulation.
Her almost loss of control had made it accumulate quite a bit. Still, she wanted to wait for a few days until she could purify herself. The damage Cornelius did to her hand hadn’t healed yet, but Irsen Kartal did put some medicine on it, telling her that in three days or so it would be healed.
Day two until being healed was almost done, so she could wait.
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Velvet picked the bottle filled with her corrupted blood. The dark blue liquid seemed alive, swirling on its own, with some golden specks that, looking closer, formed and deformed letters and symbols.
What if she were to do a charm with that blood and the dream sigils? Well, first she wanted to do them with the normal ink that she had made with herbs.
But the difference was notable. Her ink had very low magic quality, and it needed magic to be applied before making a charm. The results were low quality charms.
Corrupted blood, on the other hand… It was no longer blood, becoming water from the Primeval Sea. Velvet would barely need to apply magic to activate it, which… was a problem. It meant that she couldn’t keep the charms stored for more than one hour, or they would go off on their own. Unless she obtained a spell to keep them still, which usually were from the Sloth Paradigm, the charms made with Primeval Sea water should be done before a conflict.
Maybe she could find some other use for it that wasn't charms.
“...”
“Hyde, what happens if I draw strengthening sigils on the paper figurines with this?”
The spider turned to look at her. He still hadn’t gone back to his pocket dimension, too immersed in the drawings.
“They might become influenced by the Primeval Sea, and get stronger for a bit… Add it to the things we have to try.”
“Mmm… the list thickens.” Velvet put the bottle back in her suitcase. “How are you going?”
“Some of them are repetitions with variations. If, IF,” He reiterated. “This is a sealing formation, it makes sense to have repeating parts. Like wrapping something in capes.”
“Onion Formation.”
“More or less. As I said, you only mapped a very small part of Andras’ magic formation. We don’t know what the Others might have done. We can even be mistaken, and He didn’t take part in the sealing, but in another thing. Once we try some of these sigils, we may have some answers.”
“Once you get healed and purified, we should start making experiments and conjectures.”
“My, didn’t you get pushy and talkative all of sudden? Did seeing your daddy’s magic get you acting unwise?”
Hyde didn’t feel offended nor ashamed. “I am a Demon of Knowledge. It’s good you didn’t get one from a higher rank, or they might have lost their minds seeing this. Only Ars Chryses should have knowledge about something like this.”
The hell do you mean you didn’t lose your mind? You look like a crazy scientist, moving so many legs over the papers…
Velvet remembered that name, it was the devil that ruled over the piece of hell where Hyde lived.
“Mm… You’re not gonna open my head while I sleep, right? Don’t kill the chicken that lays the golden eggs and all that.”
“Your brain is normal, I did check it the first time you asked me about the dream. Whatever your connection to that place is, it can’t be seen or felt for anyone.”
Velvet thought about that time, when she looked towards the man in the mountain. If her brain wasn’t, what about her eyes?
She asked Hyde that.
Hyde looked straight to Velvet. Velvet looked straight to Hyde. They looked at each other for a minute.
“I don’t feel anything.”
“Do you think a higher rank demon or a devil might see something?”
“Not really, we demons don’t see the world like humans do, and corruption, curses, blessings, sickness and other things are easy to notice for us.”
Well, there were tales of demons making unfair deals because they knew when a person was filled with despair, or had an incurable illness.
They were kind of opportunists.
“If your dream is connected to Them,” Hyde continued. “Only Them might notice something.”
Velvet thought about the possibility of calling Lothrigern to her position. But His name didn’t do anything in the dream.
Still, she didn’t know if it was because He didn’t care about sealing the chained man, or if He was against it, or if He was in favor, but was either occupied with something else, or wasn’t needed.
Velvet wasn’t suicidal, so she wasn’t going to even try.
“How many symbols did you get?”
“Some are too high level for you, but there’s two that you can use and I want to try first.”