Months went by fast. Darius had holed himself in the lab with Elvira, and they had developed a routine of doing alchemy and discussing different topics on magic. Darius had already sorted through many magic books, and Elvira had helped him understand magic theories. They had spent half of the time on the spell equations, albeit it was too early for Darius to think about spell models. He needed to learn the basics first. This included learning rune symbols, mathematics, and basic equations used in spells. Elvira was shocked by the speed at that Darius drank the information, like it would be fitted into an existing logical place in his mind. He made mistakes but always needed only minor corrections to know what to change and fix. They also made considerable advances in the quality of potion production. Now that Darius had spent even more magic stones for alchemy tools and had access to more information, they could attempt all potions. Lord Lumbert was deliriously happy about the potions' quality but constantly asked for more.

Despite Darius giving Lord Lumbert only a few higher-grade potions per week, Darius got hundreds of gold from it, sometimes even nearly two thousand gold. But the problem was the gold itself. What Darius wanted most was to trade with magic stones and be able to supply mages. But for that end, he would have to invest even more magic stones for magically enchanted alchemy tools.

To make more potions Darius was renovating a new lab in the merchant district, but it would need a considerable amount of time to build enough furnaces and buy, order, and transport all the needed equipment. He would need to fish out more alchemy slaves during the build-up of the lab, but there seemed to be always new slaves available. When Darius had asked Mr. Trader about the slaves, he had been told that making slaves was illegal. Still, mages could slave other mages based on debts, or the academies could wage private wars and slave people from other academies during these wars. The bigger academies were sometimes at war with foreign academies or kingdoms. Still, proper mage slaves would cost fortunes of magic stones, and only what Darius could get was the failures and lab experiments that were thrown out from the academy to the mercy of other slavers. Still, to raise potion amount and quality, Darius needed more acolyte slaves, but only seldom were these slaves offered for gold.

The building projects were doing fine, and he had bought over fifty more slaves and organized them into groups by professions and skills. The biggest groups of ten slaves went for weeklong material gathering trips. Despite all equipment and horses having costed several fortunes worth, these assignments were starting to provide Darius with more materials. Things were working well, and he could regain the investment in a few months. But Darius was low on magic stones, so there was no chance to buy acolyte slaves or magic books. Also, the building wasn’t even nearly finished, and he could not do all the experiments in the storage room of the tavern. He had to find a better place for his experiments and meditation. After talking with Elvira about meditation, it seemed that the place and drawn spell formations could help, but the place would have to be saturated with the primary particles. For Darius, that would be negative particles. From descriptions of varied places, he could gather that sewer was one of those places. But he did not like the idea, and anyone could try to kill him again in the sewers.

While Darius was meditating, he opened his eyes at midnight and watched his tavern room lighted by the moonlight. The nervous feeling lingered even still because fighting an acolyte had been more stressful than facing guards in battle. But Darius knew he was not an average human anymore. He did not need sleep for months, being able to use the body effectively in combat. Even his months of training for all things would not explain his strength because Darius was not mainly training with his body. The only thing he had done was to destroy his body muscles in dangerous missions and cover all flesh wounds with healing potions. Repeating these difficult moments made him realize the biggest benefit of mages, the basic body effects of meditation. For knights, perhaps their meditations and practices were even more impactful for the body, but for mages, it seemed to be more extensive. As Elvira had explained how the body of the mage was the holder of particles, and therefore, mages had much more control over their bodies through saturation of the particles. It explained at least partially how Darius had survived despite taking many risks and not knowing the proper ways to use weaponry. The meditation affected the speed of thinking, planning, body reflexes, healing, and taking advantage of fast situations. Sometimes, it felt like everyone was hitting with slow sluggish movements in combat. But not with the acolyte at sewers. That had been pure dumbass luck, and this aspect frightened Darius the most. Despite being able to use his body as an advantage and as a surprise in normal combat, he could not rely on it to work with mages or real knights. The only possibility was to grow his capabilities in magic.

While sighing, Darius glanced again outside and saw the moon. Then he thought about the light's whiteness glowing in a bone colour against whitewashed walls.

*Dead unhappy people. Cemetery.*

Darius started to smirk at the pale moon and thanked it. Next, he packed his back bag full and left towards the nobility area. Sometimes he had to wait for guards to go elsewhere, and he continued towards the nobility area cemetery. He had few choices. The city was so large that it had several cemeteries, but only the nobility area had a complete sewer system. This meant that he could learn the ways of that location and travel underground from his new building at night to meditate in the cemetery. He could also avoid all the guards and hassle by accessing this place through sewers and hiding his activities from others.

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After a while of searching, Darius noticed large stone garden walls and relic symbols all over the place dedicated to hundreds of gods. After several jumps and coordinated drops, he was in the cemetery. After wandering about, Darius noticed several larger sewer hatches in the middle parts of the cemetery, but he needed the old recluse part where nobody went anymore. The cemetery was like a small city inside of the city made of varied stone materials. There were typical graves and various parts where increasingly majestic mausoleums reached the skies to compete on the importance scale. Darius chuckled at the thought. To him, life was all that mattered when people died; they went back into the mud. That was all. No amount of polished stone structures could change this certainty of human life.

Darius noticed that the district where he was walking had only smashed and partially replaced flagstones. It was the perfect start. He went longer all the way, almost to the outer wall. There were countless mausoleums, half broken and forgotten by time. Some wines were outgrowing them. Darius stopped at the sight of large three covering the old white polished mausoleum's entrance with broken statues and signs. The three had grown at the entrance, almost blocking it by its sheer size. Darius squeezed behind the three and started working on the stone slab door. After a few minutes, Darius broke the hinges and made it look natural. He tilted the door slab and managed to force an opening. Carefully ensuring he didn’t hear anyone nearby, Darius opened the slab further and went inside.

The air was dry and a bit cold. The mausoleum was cramped with several tens of broken-in coffins, and it looked like the mortal graves were already robbed hundred years ago. Only white bones greeted the passer while going forward inside. It seemed that the mausoleum was not finished in time. The back wall was just partially collapsed earth without any bricks. Also, the floor seemed to be half full of sand and rocks on top of the flagstones. Only the lack of water had kept the place from outgrowing. After several rows of stone shelves and broken coffins and bones, bricks just ended, and stones and dirt started. At the very end stood a grey stone statue without a head, and the head had rolled on the far right corner of the cave-like end of the mausoleum. Darius removed one coffin and put his bulky bag on the stone shelve. He had a lot of work to do.

First, Darius cleaned the floor and patched all the holes with some slabs taken from the coffin shelves. He dug a sizeable hole in the middle of the ending part of the mausoleum and fitted some stone slabs on top of it. Then he meditated for a while to get a feel of the place. The difference was noticeable. Darius could not measure it by any means, but the effects of the meditation started to loosen the halted progress that had ended in the home cave. It seemed that the right place and right setting could work wonders. But Darius was not done quite yet.

He started dragging the loose and broken coffins one by one and downed the remains of the corpses into the hole in the ground. He followed basic guidelines expressed in a black magic book on the formation. The centre of the formation had to be agitated dead human remains. Darius did not have much in terms of options. Still, he figured that maybe generally unhappy proud noble family remains could generate even more negative particles if he just dumped them into the same hole from the privacy that the corpses had enjoyed for decades or centuries. After placing most of the bones, he had to stomp them a bit to make room for more. In the darkness, he saw his boots crushing dry human bones while wondering if the formation would work. After finishing all 17 coffins' skeleton remains, Darius didn’t sadly find anything valuable. But he did not let this bother him. He lifted stone slabs on top of the crushed and mangled bones and formed a stone square on the floor. After breaking a few more stone shelves, the surface was big enough. He carefully brushed all the dust and dirt away and ensured every crack was fixed with sand and the whole surface was as stable as possible. Then he opened the bag and ate one sandwich while drawing chalk symbols on the slabs while following the basic negative particle formation model. He had to make precise adjustments with chalk to add lines that would otherwise be uneven. After covering all the sand parts and cracks, he focused on the central line and activated it by releasing himself on the remains underneath the formation. Albeit very questionable formation, it seemed the do the trick. *Agitation of mangled remains, eh*

The chalk first glowed on the floor marking each symbol separately, and when each corner symbol glowed, the sudden fire started to burn in the central line of the formation. Darius cut his palm open and leaked blood while retaining contact with the cornerstone connected to the formation. While his blood was running into the formation, each part of the symbols, one by one, caught on fire. Darius felt something exiting his body. He was losing the particles at a rapid rate. Darius opened the first green bottle and drank the entire content. Next, he opened the red bottle and downed its content to renew healing while keeping his wound open. The blood was the makeshift catalyst because he could not do formal magic yet. His only option was to use blood with the formation and keep his particle balance by drinking continuously negative particle potions or shadow-suffering potions, as Elvira had told him. The usual cold sweat and pain started, and Darius felt more pain with each potion. After six potions, the flames turned into a green glow and disappeared completely.