The unending heat and monotony of the sky had finally begun to annoy Bokan. Mists that burned to touch hovered around the sky and sometimes the ground, moving slowly yet still dangerous. The sky itself was a mixture of white, grey and red, yet somehow gave the impression of being utterly featureless, as though there was nothing worth seeing up there.
The lands were just unending hot rocks, mostly red with some jagged, black rocks, though they were no less hot than the red rocks. No matter what changes Bokan made to the landscape itself, it would revert to its original form at around midnight every day, not that the sky changed to display the difference between night and day, in a flash of blue light. To Bokan's keen magical perception, this was similar to being hit by a flashbang at regular 24 hour intervals.
The lizards were annoyingly fast and tasted terrible raw. The taste might not have been life threatening but it annoyed Bokan's fine palate even more than the lizards, he had been a noble in both his previous and current life, and he was used to good food. This change had been exceedingly sudden and entirely unpleasant.
Still, he estimated he likely had only 35 years left to get back to his planet and enact his revenge if he wanted to do it while his enemies were still living. He had no idea how to do that, or if it was even in the same universe as he was currently in, however his will was implacable. To turn back was unthinkable, to soften his heart unbearable, he remembered his mother's broken eyes, his father taking his own life, vengeance was necessary, no matter the cost.
For that, however, he would need to grow stronger. Fortunately, he had.
Name: Fabien
Race: Human (tier 2, +2 to every stat every year)
Class: Dark mage (necromancer) (1) (+5 to all magic stats every level) (The ultimate magic archetype, grow by creating a powerful undead army.)
Profession: novice enchanter (5) (+1 to all magic stats every level)
Level: 5=>10=>0
Intelligence: 45=>50=>60 (You are barely adequate to be a novice magic user.)
Wisdom: 35=>45 (In comparison to a normal human, your wisdom is considerable. In comparison to a normal mage, it would be better described as foolishness.)
Willpower: 35=>45 (Your willpower would allow you to work until your flesh falls off and your bones turn to dust, but it still won't help you if someone casts a fireball your way.)
Strength: 20=>25(My grandma's stronger than that!)
Dexterity:20=>25(You are more dexterous than any humans who have never been reinforced by magic)
Stamina:20=>25(You would make a great punching bag, for grandma's maybe!)
Charisma:20=>25(Peak human charisma. Still less than that scaly car salesman, I'm convinced he was an alien.)
Manipulation:20=>25(For humans unreinforced by mana, your manipulation borders on mind control.)
Poise:25=>30=>25(Peak human poise, the super human element being so insignificant it isn't worth mentioning)
Skills:
Fine magic control (level 5)(MAX)
Spells:
Display status (level 5)(MAX)
Masteries:
Wraith's wrath (initiate) +5 wisdom, +5 willpower, +5 intelligence
Available skill points: 10
Available spell points: 0
Available attribute points: 15
Updates:
Level up! Through killing an opponent and absorbing their remnant, you have levelled up!
Level up! Through killing several lizards and absorbing their remnants, you have levelled up!
Level up! By reaching max level in your status page spell, you have levelled up!
Level up! By reaching max level in your fine magic control skill, you have levelled up!
Level up! You have grown your magic reserved through repetition and pain, and have levelled up!
Note: You have unlocked your class and now have access to the first tier skills of that class. Choose wisely! Remember, the fewer class specific skills you choose, the more you can level them up!
Due to your newly unlocked class clashing with a previously discovered mastery, it has been altered to "Wraith's rage"
Skill shop:
Death bolt: Select a target and activate the skill, they will immediately receive damage proportional to the skill level and mana used (Cost: 10+ mana Damage: (10+ 1/2 mana spent)*skill level
Death aura: Both passive and active options. Passively, it will deal damage only to those harboring evil intentions against you proportional to the skill level. Actively, it would deal damage proportional to both your skill level and invested mana to all living things in a radius of your choice (Passive: Cost: 0 mana Damage: 1*skill level Active: Cost: 1 mana per target or 5 death mana total Damage: 10+1.5*skill level Active/Passive Range: 1+1*skill level meter radius)
Grimoire: Stores memories that will then slowly be absorbed into your long term memory over time (The rate of knowledge acquisition is exponentially linked to the skill level)
Death magic conversion: Changes your mana into death mana (Cost: 10 starting mana, 5 mana per second after that Efficiency: 1+0.5*skill level death mana per mana channeled after initial cost)
Summon skeleton: Uses a remnant of a recently defeated mind to summon a skeleton. The skeleton can do a range of tasks but cannot improve in any way, and required you to be continually controlling it. (Cost: 10 mana and 1 mana per day sustain Summon power: 10 points in physical stats, 0 in all the rest)
Summon ghoul: Uses a remnant of a recently defeated mind to summon a ghoul. The ghoul can only be used for combat oriented tasks, however it does not need you to continually control it (Cost: 10 death mana and 1 death mana per day sustain Summon power: 30 points in physical stats, 15 points in intelligence)
Raise dead: This skill opens the road to learning how to raise the bodies of recently slain foes, even allowing for growing undead if you use death mana. (Cost: dependent upon body, undead and potential Summon power: dependent upon body and undead)
Bokan slowly breathed out, calming his own beating heart. He had known that his chance of avenging his mother was nearly entirely dependent upon the potential of the class he unlocked, and he had been fairly confident when he had seen he had no subclass options, however now it was confirmed.
There were possible incarnations of the epitome of magic, the Radiant mage, the Astral mage and the Dark mage.
Which one the epitome of magic awakened as depended upon the mind of the epitome in question, as did the particular specification of that incarnation.
For instance, the Dark mage had 3 possible specifications, one focusing on becoming death incarnate, one focused on becoming attuned to the very nature of death magic itself, and the final one focused on dominating the universe through an endless tide of undead.
This was manifested in the form of the 3 pairs of skills/spells that were offered at the start. Death bolt and aura were aligned to the first, for instance, and any Dark Mage archetype would have access to those. However, what set one version of the Dark Mage apart from another was the 7th option that was made available only to the epitome of magic, epitome of body or epitome of leadership.
As Bokan had awakened as the necromancer specification of the Dark Mage, he had access to the "raise dead" skill. Initially useless, the potential that would give far outshone any other skill available, with the possible exception of "Death magic conversion", which had great utility as a support skill depending on the number of other skills and spells he had.
The reason it was so powerful was because it would allow for raising growing undead, which were initially weak but allowed an advantage that only the dragons could normally boast: endless unrelenting growth. Undead did not tire, did not sleep, and unless they were killed they did not die. A growing undead that started out as a basic skeleton could become more powerful than a ghoul with enough training, whereas the 2 basic summon creature skills he got did not offer that potential.
The disadvantages were obvious also. The time had come to make a decision, either to prioritize becoming as powerful as possible, or to put everything into trying to escape the trap that he had fallen into from the moment he successfully cast his status page skill for the first time.
Truth be told, he had already made the decision a long time ago, however he was going to have to face the stark reality now. Perhaps, if he had been a Radiant mage, things could have been different. However, in his current situation, he could either lose his freedom, unacceptable, weaken his potential, unacceptable, or accept his class fully.
He knew his answer, and so he distributed his points.
Congratulations! You have learned Raise Dead (1)
Congratulations! You have learned Death magic conversion (1)
Available attribute points: 15=>0
Intelligence: 60=>70
Wisdom: 45=>50 (Your wisdom allows you an extremely basic degree of control over your magic)
Every point of intelligence is worth 1 point of mana, however at certain key stat levels, a stat will get a certain boost, and this will be reflected in the stat description.
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For instance, he could see that the description for his wisdom stat had changed when it had reached 50. The result of that was a slight % boost to the effect that each stat he had in wisdom was.
Most classes invested a disproportionate amount of stats into one stat every level. For example, a class focused on using strength may give 3 points to strength and 1 point to the other two physical stats per level, making it much more worth while to invest available attribute points into strength, in order to reach the significant thresholds.
However, the magic epitome archetype class offered 5 stat points in each of the magic focused stats. Another thing that was worth noting was that each set of 3 stats could also receive a synergy bonus, not only in how well they supported one another, but also in the fact that, for example, 50 in each of them might give a significant overall improvement to all of them, in recognition of how much harder that was to attain than 50 in just one of them.
That being said, 150 in one of them would still give a more significant boost to that specific stat, and there is no synergy bonus for stats from the other 2 fields, body and leadership.
One significant disadvantage of the raise dead skill was the fact that growing undead could only be produced from creatures with a certain level of sentience that was almost exclusively possessed by the 4 fundamental races, as Bokan had learned during his 5 years of study in his second childhood home.
Had he of chosen death magic conversion and summon ghoul, for instance, Bokan could have slowly raised up several ghouls from the lizards he slew over time, and then eventually tried to take over this bottom floor or threaten or in other way coerce his way through the floor without being enslaved by the mind control of the rulers on this floor. However, those ghouls would eventually become totally useless, and in the end it would not contribute to his most powerful self.
Another option would be to invest into death bolts and death aura, however Bokan had a strong feeling that those things would be possible simply by improving his control over death mana and mana in general. Perhaps he could learn a magic bolt spell himself and adapt it to use death mana, and a similar thing could likely be done for death aura. More importantly, these were only the skills being offered at the first breakthrough into his class, and he needed to not have rocky fundamentals. Raise dead and death magic conversion would be useful for the entirety of the foreseeable future, whereas the other skills would only be useful in the short term.
Grimoire was a tempting offer, however it could be replaced by a bit of effort that would likely lead to a far greater understanding of what he was learning, and also allow him to avoid becoming restricted by the assumptions and false beliefs of others. After all, the epitome of magic archetype was not necessarily restricted in the same way normal magic classes were.
One of the reasons Bokan had slightly suspected he would not have a normal class was his entry to this world, he had been suddenly killed and reincarnated with his full mind and soul into a newly conceived infant, certainly not a typical experience. Considering the power demonstrated by the tower, which was effectively just an improvised magic school made by a few runaways from a far grander empire, it was highly likely that he had been whisked away to here due to his class.
In the meantime, it was time to practice some new skills. Bokan began to try and use his "death magic conversion" skill, the pain building up in his mind in an instant.
All the same, he managed to persevere, knowing his limit should be going for 12 seconds currently.
At 6 seconds, he felt the pain in his mind become significantly sharper.
At 9 seconds, a grinding began, crushing his mind alongside the feeling of being rapidly stabbed with shards of glass.
At 10 seconds, the feeling of being on fire joined the mix, and a scream rang out from his throat.
At 12 seconds, he remembered the fate of his mother, and he stopped screaming.
At 15 seconds, he kept going in silence.
At 18 seconds, his control over his magic began to slip, and he persevered through sheer willpower, forcing his intent upon his magic.
At 25 seconds, he finally collapsed on the edge of unconsciousness, barely aware of the rocks causing his skin to burn and blister. After a few hours of rest, he cast his status ritual again, and was glad to see that his "death magic conversion" had levelled up. Normally, using all his magic for it one time would be no where near enough to level it up, however due to going significantly over his limits, using both his wisdom and willpower to the utmost of his current capacity (although still not perfectly) to extend his magical endurance, he had gained exponentially more experience from it than usual.
Another thing was the death mana he now had. Examining it, he found it was significantly more difficult to move than usual mana, and appeared more like a void to his mana senses than usual mana did, as though it was something else. Trying different ways of moving it, he eventually managed to take it and push it out of his skin, only in clouds rather than in tendrils like he could with normal mana. After a few more hours of practice, he crawled his way back to his little, slightly less blistering alcove and rested.
Another month passed, and during this time Bokan managed to reach level 5 in death magic conversion, feeding himself in the same way as before. As a result, he now was a level 5 necromancer, giving him 95 intelligence, 75 wisdom and 70 willpower, alongside 15 available attribute points and 13 available skill points. He used the attribute points to give himself 100 intelligence, 80 wisdom and 75 willpower, as well as investing the 2 required skill points to upgrade his death magic conversion, resetting its level to 1 but increasing its maximum level to 10.
Upgrading a skill isn't a totally simple matter, it actually gave a qualitative increase to the skill itself. Its name changed from "death magic conversion" to "initiate death magic conversion", and each level would now count twice as much as before, meaning by level 3 it would already be more powerful than it previously had been at level 5.
Every time a skill was upgraded, the cost of upgrading it doubled, and the effectiveness of the levels in it doubled. For two skills/spells, this was easily worth it, however if Bokan had selected all 7 available skills/spells, it would have been a significant problem.
This was a large part of why it was useful to try and get just a few fundamental things extremely powerful, thus allowing for versatility in abilities, rather than trying to become a jack of all trades and significantly limiting one's own power.
One's profession could also be upgraded using skill points, and doing so could help improve the statistics of a person significantly, however it also took away from their special abilities somewhat. Lower level skill upgrades were not significant, but a skill at level 100 typically was enough to ignore a massive stat difference between two opponents.
For Bokan, it was crucial to be able to raise growing undead using death mana. He could a huge amount of time and effort trying to get one of the stupid lizard remnants to turn into a skeleton or ghoul, however it would be a waste since ultimately his goal was to have an entire empire of growing undead. At his core, Bokan was still a noble, only now he would not need to worry about betrayal from his population, his undead forces were going to become his citizens and his army. A couple ghouls might sound tempting right now, but in the grand scheme of things they would be useless. Bokan was level 5 in his class and although it was true that he was a special case, he still had cumulatively 410 stat points, the 30 total stat points of the basic skeleton did not impress him in the slightest. If his stats were focused on his body, he would already have enough power to kill thousands of the basic skeletons without any danger being posed to him.
The next crucial step, however, was to get an acceptably sentient corpse of a slain foe upon which to work. Bokan had a rough idea of what to do when he got one from the raise dead skill, but he still needed to experiment to learn more. Fortunately, he knew where to find such a thing.
Retracing his steps through the unchanging landscape, it took him about 4 days to get back to the entrance of the tower, after which he took the path that Egro had seemingly wanted him to follow him on over 2 months ago. During that time, he trained his death magic conversion, and managed to reach level 2 with it. Furthermore, he unlocked a new skill called "death mana manipulation", through his repeated experiments and training with it. It was still much harder to work with than normal mana, but he was slowly getting better.
It was about a 3 hour walk from the entrance to get to, what was supposed to be, a new tower mage's first introduction to the tower. The path, which had been going fairly straight past various cliffs, while having a layer of sand on it that slightly reduced the heat burning Bokan's feet, suddenly went sharply down into what appeared to be a massive cave in the middle of a "field" of stone. All around, a wall of rock extended in the form of cliffs, making it harder to find this location without following the path to reach it, a path which had often been disguised by cliffs on either side. A circular "clearing" with a radius of about 20 meters had a gaping hole on the side closest to the path, which went straight down into it. The hole was 5 meters in radius and seemed pitch black.
Bokan moved the death mana he controlled up to his eyes, which immediately became accustomed to the darkness, even to the point that the darkness itself was what gave him sight, as opposed to light. Walking assuredly down the path, Bokan began to notice more signs of human habitation, an occasional lamp which seemed to radiate darkness as opposed to light to his death-attuned eyes, and slightly more carved walls. After 10 minutes of descending into the ground, the temperature strangely decreasing as he went further and further into the depths, he found himself watching a wooden door, surrounded on both sides by a tall wooden palisade. The whole thing felt profoundly out of place, as though the humans were intruders to a place they didn't belong and that they needed to leave, quickly.
Bokan needed no more motivation to seriously attempt at moving up the floors, he needed to get past the geas enforced on floor one and then continue moving up faster than anyone could catch him, climbing up through the tower and relying upon the lack of information exchange across floors in order to protect himself until he could become strong enough to no longer fear the rulers.
For now, however, he needed a corpse. Fortunately, he also knew about something the humans residing behind that door needed: food. He had no doubt that nothing would grow in this terrible place, certainly not down in the darkness, not unless the floor was uncharacteristically kind in the extreme and provided them with underground farms. No, rather someone would need to come up to hunt the little lizards or possible some creatures with more meat on their bones, not that Bokan had seen any up here yet, for food.
So, as his first day of waiting came to an end, a familiar person came out, a haughty expression on their face. It was Egro, evidently he had annoyed someone important to keep being sent up to the hellish surface on errands, or maybe it was just a coincidence.
Whatever the cause, the satisfaction it brought Bokan, who still remembered nearly signing effectively a slave contract at the behest of Egro, was immense, and for that he was grateful regardless of the origin.
He was also grateful it was someone he already disliked who would be his first target. Obviously he had killed men in the past, in war and in carrying out punishment for particularly vicious criminals, however he had never done it in cold blood. Always there had been someone else he was protecting. Women from rapists, his citizens from invaders, children from predators, innocents from murderers. What he was about to do went beyond all of that, but when he considered giving up, he saw once again his mother's broken eyes in his mind. An ocean of blood would not quench the rage that burned within him at the mere thought of what had been done to her, and so Egro had to die.
Something Egro clearly did not have, was a spell to deal with the darkness of the tunnel. Rather than bringing a hot torch, he seemed content to stumble up the slope towards the exit to the cave, no doubt feeling invincible with whatever spells he had.
If Bokan was working with normal mana, Egro would have doubtless noticed it instantly with his mana sense and attacked, however death mana was different. If he hadn't of known it was there, Bokan may not have ever noticed it within himself even after casting death magic conversion.
Concentrating the death magic on the tips of 3 of his fingers on his right hand, Bokan waited in silence as Egro gradually stumbled closer, cursing in the darkness. His death-attuned sight was so clear, he could even see mist from Egro's breath, the strange rules of the underground meaning that this far down was cold.
Eventually, after what felt like hours but was in fact closer to 1 minute, Bokan exploded into action, moving with speed, strength and precision that was impossible for any non-magically reinforced human to achieve by training. Faster than the eye could track, he had embedded his hand half way into Egro's skull, between the eyes, his pinky and thumb shoved into one eye respectively.
Egro, too, was super human, however his heart was still one unaccustomed to danger, so used was he to eating the scraps from his master's table that he had forgotten the speed with which death could take him. Had he of been even slightly on his guard, he would have easily reacted to Bokan's movement, though he still would likely have taken some damage from the death mana.
Surprised at how easy it was, Bokan dragged the body slightly to the side and began to work. 10 minutes later, he was entirely out of death mana, however he had managed to at the very least improve Egro somewhat. He had started with his maximum capacity of death mana, which was a tenth of the size of his mana pool, and had had 70% of it remaining to invest into his first undead by the time he had slain Egro. However, there were things he could do before raising his first minion to improve his raise dead skill proficiency, namely improving the corpse and investing into its "potential".
Egro had been surprised, but he had also only been on the first floor of the tower. He was weak, and unless Bokan improved his capacity to grow, he would continue to be weak.
To create a true growing undead would require knowledge and power far beyond Bokan's current capabilities. However, creating an inferior growing undead, one with a set limit he could increase by shoving a bunch of death magic into it before raising it, was perfectly within his capabilities. His status ritual confirmed this, showing that he had gained 1 level in the raise dead skill.
A thought then struck Bokan. There was only a certain amount he could improve Egro's potential this way, however if he killed another, he could raise his skill proficiency this way again, and then he could raise one after the other, giving him the maximum power per death efficiency.
His mind began moving rapidly, thinking up plans within plans as he prepared himself for the task ahead.