AuthNote : Now here’s a chapter dedicated to my constant rattling about all kinds of things from the magic system to spilling my masterplan that I actually came up with while writing this chapter without giving it much thought so a lot of things here might make pretty much no sense, or I’m actually having a pretty decent plot going here. One of the two… Either way, enjoy the read or hate me for wasting your time. It’s always one of the two… Though please don’t hate me xD
And once again I’m back with you guys! Right now, I’m mostly known as the Demon Lord, which is of course my current occupation, but I wasn’t always a constantly brooding, black castle dwelling definition of evil. Back in my days, I was actually a quite successful treasure hunter and managed to survive in such a dangerous line of work for no less than five years! Ain’t I amazing? No?? Well, I never really liked you either… Hmph! *turns around to silently cry off the pain of his pristine heart*
My hurt feelings aside, I was originally planning to skip that part of my life altogether, but thinking about those days brings up distant memories that I’m more than happy to share the adventures of my youth with you, while relieving those wonderful adventures and not as welcome misadventures that I’ve come across in my quest of collecting a certain line of ancient and ridiculously powerful items.
-------------------------------------------
After a tiresome year of search and destroy… uhm.. What I meant to say is that after spending a year roaming all around the continent and meticulously searching for all kind of information regarding our subject of interest. We have finally gathered enough to figure out the general location for all the items in my must have list and many others as a small bonus for working overtime.
With that taken care of, it is due to make some preparations to handle everything smoothly. This lesson I had to learn the hard way, but surviving alone, in a middle of a forest, for an extended period of time, more specifically, an hour. Amounts to an experience, which turns making arrangements into a compelment, reinforced by repercussions in a form of a pounding headache if I happen to overlook even the tiniest detail while putting a shopping list together.
So it’s best to play it slowly, rather than with a splitting headache. After reading up on the necessary knowledge on raiding ancient ruins and familiarizing with the concept of trap systems that were commonly employed during their era. I scratch down a list of equipment that will prove useful in the previously mention environment and passed it to my leather-bound entourage, ordering them to split up and get all the listed items with a deadline of one month.
Done with preparations, I turn my attention to a pile of books that we claimed to serve a greater purpose, my purpose. Each book in the pile is a one of a kind, priceless treasure, which contains knowledge on the aspects of magic that were deemed forbidden by society for all sorts of reason, from being unstable and destructive to simply emitting a purposeless green aura that was considered to be sinister.
Shuffling my way through the pile, I dismiss one book after another. Most of them either serve no real purpose or will take me longer than a month to master. It takes some time, but I’m finally left with two books. Now I’m in a tight spot, both of the books contain knowledge on very interesting applications of magic that I find endless appealing. Unfortunately, I only have time for one. Putting aside my own fascination over two different brands of magic that require elementary level of expertise in magic to master completely yet are so potent, unpredictable and dangerous that even I have to agree that this kind of thing should never be revealed to general public, but to someone like me this is a godsend.
Dismissing the motion of receiving support from a god for his endeavors, I struggle to take my pick. One book is dedicated to all the possible applications for “Blood Magic”, with detailed description step by step instructions for every spell. From what I understand, expertise of blood magic includes a wide array of sinister curses that require blood of the victim to active. The scary part rests in the fact that all you need is a single drop and you can have your adversary face a death so sinister that even my twisted mind has trouble reproducing the picture from the ridiculously detailed description of the process.
The second application of blood magic is briefly mentioned here and there between those detailed descriptions of all possible curses and their unreasonable effects. If not paying close attention or is simply to immersed in the potency of the curses a person would overlook the existence of the second application all together, forget about putting all the spread out pieces together to find that all those brief paragraphs put together, reveal yet another intricate description with step by step instructions. At first, I started putting the paragraphs together only mildly interested at the prospect of a forbidden magic book that is better off being called “101 unfortunate ways to die” and sort all those death in a meticulously scrutinized ranking while all of the step by step instructions for every spell in this “Magic Book” will make a perfect fit in the epilog section as an afterthought, in case someone decides that seeing is believing and kills 150 people in the process of comparing the descriptions in the book to the reactions of the dying person withering in agony under his contemplating gaze. How come 150 die with only 101 ways to die? Well, most of them will die because comparing details from the book while observing the process on a living human is not always possible, so for the sake of his experiment he will repeat the process this time concentrating on the previously overlooked moment detail that has been mentioned in the book, while the rest will die because some of the ways will definitely catch his fancy enough to make him repeated the process only to once again witness such a sight.
Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.
But enough of this, it seems that I have once again slipped away from the story in hand. What I was trying to say is that such a hideous book that seemed to be dedicated to death contains such a puzzle so simple that it was probably design by a child yet together with the distracting and alarming contents of the book it is close to impossible to come across. Though there is always a key to every puzzle and in this case the key was myself, because I neither find the contents distracting nor alarming, if anything I find them completely uninteresting, save for the magic bits, because the end result is always the same – Death.
Again I’m trailing off, so I’ll just stick to the point and keep it short. So after a while, I finish my machinations with the contents of the book. The book is a complete mess, save for the content that I chose as necessary to be preserved, limited to the few most potent and ominous curses mentioned and the third expertise of blood magic that I have put away for further inspection. Now back to my solved puzzle. Ripped out pieces of the book are spread all over my work table in chaotic manner, but I wasn’t aiming for it to look good, I needed it to make sense and now it finally did, from one ripped off paragraph to another it all makes perfect sense!
I take a second to admire my handy work with the book, before what I just read finally sinks in and saying that I was flushed with excitement what I just chanced across is pretty much saying nothing. In the oh so familiar step to step instructions it explained how to hold the “Original Sacrifice”. Yet another “godsend”. I get a bad vibe from all this but it doesn’t matter now that I have obtained the article that stood on the very top on my list yet we never managed to located it’s ware bouts which now doesn’t seem at all surprising.
What is so special about the “Original Sacrifice”, not much, really. Sacrifice is common place in our world and is mostly employed by countless overzealous cults, every single time expecting to be rewarded for their undisputable faith but nothing ever happens and everything is blamed on an unsuitable sacrifice or something along those lines, and that’s where the “Original Sacrifice” is different.
It’s not an act of killing your fellow cult members to show loyalty to a piece of stone that you consider to be some deity. The “Original Sacrifice” is a actually a very complicated spell, the pinnacle of where human had reached in their need to know everything. It’s a spell that completely drains the target of life energy and instantly converts it to raw power that the caster is free to tap on it as he wishes. Pretty crazy, all in itself, except for one small point – It’s an area-of-effect spell that can expand indefinitely so long as you provide it with energy, and that’s where the artifacts that I’m after come in to play, the ones I’m after act as vessels that can be charged with energy over time as I feed it until the thing is full. In total I need 5 of those and with that much power to feed to that insane sacrifice spell to gain the desirable effect.
----------------------------------------------
I trailed off from the story again and ended up spilling my guts. Well, stuff happen.
AuthNote: Also this chapter might have some sentences with missing words here and there. Not 100% but I do tend to conjure a perfectly fine sentence in my head and type it out without really paying attention and somehow end up skipping a word, and most of this chapter was written with my eyes looking all around the place, save for the screen of my laptop.))