I found Alvaro sitting in a chair by the fire, flipping through a book, when I arrived. He’d neatly stacked the copies I’d requested onto the table alongside three slender spell guides, the smallest of which was just a scroll. I put down the pair of spells I was carrying on the other side, so I would remember to make copies. Hopefully.
“Here you go,” Alvaro said, gesturing to the pile. “Mana Meditation, Seven League Step, and, well, I know that you said a list of every hudau spell that we had, but since there were only three, I just brought them out for you to peruse. And…”
He held up his hand and presented a slender wooden card, embossed with the seal of the library, my name, and their motto in the strange ancient language. This time, the seal was a rich blue color.
“And… Tada!”
I took the card and sent it into the alchemy room, on the shelf with my meager collection of books.
“Thank you!” I said.
“Course. Anything else I can help with?”
I pointed to the pair of life extending spells I’d picked out.
“I’m gonna copy those, but I can do that at the front desk. I think that’s all, unless you had any requests for me.”
“Not that I know of,” Alvaro said, shaking his head. “You’re more than welcome to look at the stuff we need someone to do, though.”
I made a noncommittal humming noise, and Alvaro’s book vanished away into a spatial ring.
“Well, if you need anything else, I’ll be around, you know where to find me,” he said. “But I’m happy for you.”
“Thank you,” I said. “If anything that would be well suited to me comes up, just let me know. I’ll be here a few weeks, then I’m off to Port Ruby in Crysite.”
Alvaro arched an eyebrow.
“Really? Then maybe there is something that you can do after all. We’ve got a couple of Crysite related contracts, might be worth checking them out.”
I nodded my agreement, and Alvaro walked away.
Before I started that, though, I looked over the selection of spells and my new mana meditation. The third layer of the Depths of Starry Night was… interesting. There were three different portions, one for whichever quest you’d chosen. Since I’d chosen constellations, the Depths technique shifted to increasingly pound into the soil of my foundation in tight bands that were focused around my spells, though many of the surging motions remained similar to the first two layers.
The motions I had to make were different too, slower, more precise, with long, sweeping arcs, holding a pose for a long moment, then slowly lowering into the next position, almost like some sort of isometric stretch or exercise.
Interestingly, once I mastered the meditation, I’d need to choose a spell, much like how I’d needed to choose a path during the second layer. I wondered if this might be related to root development in some regard, since those did interact with spells in some way. The spell I chose, interestingly enough, had to be focused on utility, healing, or general quality of life, and it warned that the larger the spell I selected, the less effective the technique would be.
That put out my usual pick of reinforcing my full-gate spells by targeting their intersection point, but that was alright. Besides, it was still some time before I’d master this new technique, so there would be plenty of time to think about it.
I finished skimming it and sent it onto the bookshelf, then picked up the guide for Seven League Step.
Its spell was… weird.
It was large, probably enough to take a proportional amount of power to an Analyze spell, just in my third gate, rather than my first, but that wasn’t so bad.
No, what made it weird was that it was… Segmented. It was like eleven spells had all been bound up into one, larger spell, and each of the eleven was markedly different from any other spell I’d seen. It looked more different than just the shift in regional styles that I’d seen in Elohi, Kijani, or Daocheng’s spellcraft, it was just… weird.
The few portions I could make out almost reminded me of Enhance Plant Life, but not really, and that just made me even more confused than I’d been before.
Reading the notes wasn’t especially illuminating, but it was useful. The text was designed to be purely practical, discussing the limitations and uses of the spell, rather than its theory, but those were important to know.
The spell was called Seven League Step, because it could transport someone seven leagues with them only needing to take a single step. That probably meant that it wouldn’t trigger my Harvest Distance, but that was fine. Getting use out of it with Foxstep only worked because Foxstep treated my body as if I’d physically moved that far, after all.
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
Annoyingly, the spell didn’t tell me how far seven leagues actually was, and I had to go find a reference text of useful mathematical numbers to figure it out – it was roughly twenty-one miles.
It could be oriented in any of the four cardinal directions, based on the lines of the weave of space, which pointed to and from the poles, or it could target a spatial anchor. If a full teleportation platform of at least third gate strength was set up, it could double that relative distance, requiring you to take two steps and moving fourteen leagues, and though that did increase the mana cost to half again what casting it once would be, it was still cheaper than casting it twice, and it was faster.
Because time was important.
The spell didn’t describe how or why, but if mastered, the spell still took ten minutes to cast, as each of the ten internal segments needed a minute to complete, with the eleventh – the function that tied all of it together into a single coherent spell – only taking moments.
If you took the time to orient the direction and pre-cast all ten of the segments and tie each of them to their own spatial anchor, you could leave the spell lingering there. Then, when you went to cast the spell in that spot, each segment was several times faster to finish completing, since it was almost entirely able to use what had already happened, only needing a bit of time to adapt to the constantly shifting weave of space.
That, most likely, had been what the thief Travis Enigma had done. He’d pre-cast the spell, left it anchored on the roof, and then only needed to adapt to the changing conditions in the Idyll-Flume.
Finally, the spell guide described the ingrained effect, and I got a little bit excited. It wasn’t in and of itself a particularly remarkable ability, but it was the kind of passive that could really shine.
Casting teleportation spells, forming teleportation platforms, and other teleportation related effects required less mana.
Decreasing the cost of a mana intense spell like Seven League Step was nice. Better yet, it would certainly interact with my Foxstep, which was already a cheap spell. But best of all, it might help with the mana cost that was needed to open Dusk’s portals from afar. I hadn’t tried to open one to the tree at the Sanctuary yet, since I didn't want to accidentally get stuck in Delitone, but I was certain that moving that far wouldn’t be cheap, at least not for a third gate mage.
I happily tucked that away on my shelf as well, and then turned to the papers about the Hudau spells that Alvaro had been able to find.
The first spell was called E-7B5-3L1. That was a terrible name, so I promptly renamed it to Hudau’s Harvest.
The array came from a spell designer that had created the spell as a part of their thesis on creating new harvesting spells. The spell had never been deeply studied, since there wasn’t anyone with the relevant mana type. It did work, an enchantment had proven that, but its full scope in the spirit had never been proven.
I wasn’t sure if that would be worth taking the spell over whatever spell Edgar was planning to teach me, but I decided that it was at least worth making a copy. Harvesting spells were always useful, after all, and getting one for my beastgate might be worth it. Plus, if nothing else, I could bring it to Edgar and see what he made of it.
The second spell was a third gate spell called Empower.
I frowned.
What was it with these spells and calling themselves terrible things? A string of letters and numbers was awful, but so was a one word description that didn’t even properly describe what the spell did. After skimming the spell, I decided to rename it to Empower Magery.
It was a meta spell that could be used to enhance any other spell a little bit, which was… fine. Such a general meta spell was only marginally better than cramming more power into the spell you were already casting, and required you to focus on another spell.
But where it differed from something like Enhance Forging was that Enhance Magery wasn’t limited to being directed to a specific other spell, but rather, was an aura that the user emitted, empowering their magic, as well as everyone else around them. Shaping the aura took a bit of mana manipulation, but I was confident I could manage it with my skills.
I did fight alongside Dusk a lot, and Kene was frequently around me, so–
My train of thought was cut off as Dawn sent me a pulse of thought.
Improvident.
She wasn’t fully sapient, so it was hard to parse her meaning, but I got the sense that it would be wasteful.
Dawn could, one day, do something similar, and the overlap would not be multiplicative, but instead be more like trying to pour two buckets worth of water into a single bucket.
Still, the idea pulsed in my head, and I shook it after a moment. Well, if Dawn thought it was a bad idea, I wasn’t going to argue with her. I pushed that spell aside to be reshelved, then thought better of it, pushing it to make a copy, just in case Edgar might want it, then picked up the thin scroll.
The scroll was sparse on details, but it called itself the Curse of the Wild Spirit, and from what I could tell, it pushed the hudau power into my hand – or perhaps my tail? – and from there, it would enter the spirit of whatever I touched. Once it was inside them, the incompatible aspects would begin twisting into barbs and spines and knots of magic, temporarily forcing the person to spend effort shunting the power from their mana garden as it went wild, or else lose mana as it was caught in the spiritual wilderness.
It somewhat reminded me of what happened when Dusk passed her mana into me, and I was able to absorb part of it, but then had to break down the rest and send it into my body. Only, where that was a raw pulse of mana, and didn’t do anything more than distract me, this would actually inhibit some of their spellcasting.
Though this was purely speculation on my part, I expected that it would work best on humans and elementals. A beast’s mana would have multiple aspects, and thus, more of the spell would be able to find a home. It might have limited or no use against someone with all fourteen mana types.
But there were still plenty of humans in the world, and I considered it as I brought all of the guides to the desk, had them copied, and sent them into my alchemy lab’s bookshelf.
Was the Curse of the Wild Spirit worth losing my currently only free slot in my beastgate? It fit well, but it was somewhat situational. Then again, all tools were, and this paired well with my style of disabling. It also seemed to be a spirit spell, going off of the name and brief description. Spirits were beings of pure mana, and even the power in my mana-garden was mixed with energy now, so it was far from pure energy. That might make it more effective, but it also might make it less effective, and I really didn’t know which.
I’d show it to Edgar regardless, but… Did I actually want it?