Thursday was another free day, but I’d convinced myself to not spend the entire day training my affinity, like I had before. If nothing else, the massive leap in difficulty between the misfortune curses and suffering curses meant I didn’t think I’d be able to do more than compose a single suffering spell, even if I spent the full day working on it.
I supposed that I could have created more misfortune curses, but my two basic combat spells should be a good start, and I wanted to go back and learn the theory better, master every little aspect until I was certain I could compose the appropriate misfortune curse on the fly.
The power of affinity magic was its flexibility, after all. Limiting myself to building the spells ahead of time would give me power in the short term, but stunt my flexibility, and thus, my long-term power.
I might have been tempted anyways, if I could think of a way to curse my friends to find safe books, but no matter how I twisted my brain, I couldn’t get the magic to work that way. First of all, it was too specifically oriented to a goal, and second, it wasn’t really a curse.
The final nail in the coffin was the fact I’d already agreed to meet Yushin and sell a lot of the extra stuff I’d gotten as Alastor Sinclair.
I applied my scent tincture, used a touch of false face to add an extra few wrinkles, some off-colored hairs, and other minor imperfections that a normal human might have. Then I stuffed my grimoire in my bag, waved to Salem, who was studying in the common area, then headed out to meet Yushin at the gates of the school.
When I arrived, I spotted her and her relative. He resembled her, but not completely, more like an uncle or great uncle than a father or older brother. His hair was still glossy black, but he’d cut it shorter than her, more in the style of Cendel than Shen-Long.
His scent was…
Strange.
I’d met those who practiced life enforcement before. It was common enough in the sword schools and military academies. But I’d never met one who had progressed as far as he had.
He was still human, certainly. No bloodline touched his powers, nor was there any evidence of one on his body, like Yushin’s scales.
But he didn’t smell like a human. The blood and sweat and bile scents of a true human were there only fractionally, like they’d been scrubbed clean, and the scent of whipping winds, crisp and stinging, had filled in the gap.
It was hard to tell from scent alone just how strong he was, but he was strong. Stronger than Yushin or myself, but not as strong as the Erudite or my mother.
I was confident he was a little bit weaker than Gerhard, but not so much weaker that Gerhard would be able to dismiss him as a threat. If they came to blows, Gerhard might have the upper hand, but there was still a chance this man would win.
It was no wonder Yushin’s mother was confident in sending her daughter across the ocean and into this man’s care.
It did beg the question, though: just what had Yushin’s mother done that this level of protection was both needed and available?
I felt something, probably the man’s life force senses, brush over my enshroud spell, then bounce off.
At the same time, while I was sure my bloodline hadn’t been detected, I was certain the man’s advancement had let him get a sense for my overall power. It was like putting an object in a box – he might not be able to see inside, but he was still able to get a sense of its weight and size.
“Emrys! This is my relative, Shé Rui,” Yushin said brightly in Hua-Long, not noticing the staredown going on. Her smile was wide and genuine, more than any other smile I’d seen on her face. “Uncle Rui, this is Emrys of White Sands. His Hua-Long is pretty good.”
Digging up long forgotten etiquette classes, I gave a formal bow to a superior.
“Honored to meet you, Shé Rui,” I said as formally as I could.
The actual translation was closer to ‘It is the honor of this one’s life to speak to the lord of light, Shé Rui’, but translation can be more art than science.
Shé Rui bowed back, a less formal bow to someone his lesser, then looked at Yushin.
“You will have to tell me how it is you managed to befriend someone who is as strong as you are, niece,” he said. “Is Uyer Jackson also as strong?”
“Divinities are hard for ethersight to fully understand,” Yushin responded. “But… no? Then again, if his god decides he needs the power, then he might become even stronger than you.”
“Ah. Clergymen are frustrating like that,” Shé Rui agreed. “I once saw a parish priest slay a greater demon that was as strong as I am now. Then he was simply a mortal once again.”
He smiled and nodded at us.
“Enjoy your day. I will not chaperone you, you are both adults, but I will stay within range of my whispering winds ability. Call my name if you need me.”
Winds swirled around him and he launched himself into the air, soaring away in mere moments. Yushin and I glanced up, tracing his movements, then she removed a book from her ring.
“This is my aunt’s spell guide for creating an etherius locker. If you wish to delve in the library, I understand, but I think it would be worth looking it over, so we can purchase the components while we are out.”
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“Thank you,” I said, taking it and flipping through the pages until I arrived at the material components list. I immediately winced.
There were the weights and measures for what would be roughly three hundred silver of ruby, emerald, diamond, and obsidian dust, but the real cost was the box.
The box’s size would determine the size of the locker, but it had to be crafted out of wood from a plane that was either neutral or positively disposed towards the caster.
The disposition wasn’t particularly hard. Demons wouldn’t like me, but that was true for just about everyone. The planes were infinite, but I wouldn’t have to go very far or very deep to get neutral, or even positively predisposed, wood. The elemental planes, if nothing else, didn’t tend to really care about anyone at all. They were too big.
The trouble was that I’d never even seen a scrap of extraplanar wood for sale for less than an arm and a leg. I couldn’t even blame price gouging greed, for once, because the collector had to be a powerful enough caster to enter Etherius, or live near a space where the ether was thick enough to form natural rifts that also happened to be near a forest.
“I don’t know where I’ll get the wood,” I admitted, and Yushin shook her head.
“They will sell it at many shops in the city,” she said. “My relative’s wife recommended Hex and Legend for buying components. We can get some there. First, we should sell the trinkets you do not need.”
It wasn’t the sourcing of the wood that had worried me, it had been the price, but Yushin didn’t seem to realize that, and I wasn’t about to correct her. I passed the spell guide back to Yushin, who dutifully tucked it into her ring and then we began walking.
I hadn’t spent any time in the city yet, but Yushin apparently knew the place well enough, having studied maps of the place relentlessly. The campus took up most of the cloud, but it was in the center. The city had built itself up around it, and there were thirteen large streets, each with enough shops and people to make up the central hub of a city back in White Sands, with the side streets that branched off of the thirteen main streets each being large enough to be an entire town center and main street of a large town back home, and the branches off of those being the size of village main streets.
Amidst the megacity, finding a pawn shop for non-magical goods wasn’t hard. Yushin bartered like her life depended on it, far more fiercely than I thought something like this really deserved, and even got thrown out of one of the shops.
But for all that her methods of bargaining were intense, they yielded results, and the entire lot sold for much more than I’d estimated. I did a mental tally of my money – there was this, what I’d gotten on the boat, and then the thousand from my scholarship, which put me at just over twenty-one hundred silver now. That was more money than I’d ever held since I’d left home, several times over, and I had to shove down the sudden spike of desire to have more of it.
Was that just greed? Or was it the early onset of the Creep? Ethics class was going to make me paranoid…
“To Hex and Legend?” I asked Yushin, and we headed back in the direction of the eleventh street, one that was mainly nonresidential, and catered to powerful people from across Cendel, and even the world.
Strolling down the streets, we passed a dozen sights that tried to steal my attention. There was a shop selling enchanted items, and all through its windows, glowing swords and spears and axes glimmered, dripping flames and acid and sparks of electricity.
A shop dedicated to goods for life enforcement leaked pungent herbal scents and filled the air with alchemical smells, only intensified by the potion shop next door, which had its own strange scents that were remarkably similar, and also wildly different at the same time.
We passed by a vast blacksmith’s forge that let out massive puffs of smoke, and was entirely open to the air, being manned by a massive metal construct that was twenty feet tall and had been painted bright red, and seemed to be building more constructs out of clay and metal and stone.
On its opposite side was a storefront with no windows at all, but walls that were covered in glowing runes from the size of my pinkie nail to twice the size of my body, each one glowing with subtly different colors of ether.
A woman in a cart was selling pies, but the meat smelled like monsters. Not simple, weak beasts that had been touched by Etherius, like a dire rat, but true monsters like basilisk and manticore.
A man in a tiny shop, barely the size of a broom cupboard, was reading palms. Back home I would have assumed it was a scam, but I could sense the vast currents of ether that flowed in and out of the shop, even without my ethersight active.
All this and a thousand other things caught my eye, before we finally came into view of Hex and Legend. It had a spot securely on a corner, with large glass windows that displayed stones and crystals and metals and monster bits, and other things that a mage might need as a component. It wasn’t as big as the construct forge, but it was still one of the larger shops we’d passed, and a glance at the windows on the other side showed items covered in runes, and a sign stating that they could imbue runes into products for a price.
Yushin swept inside, not bothering to look at the displays, and I hastened to follow.
The inside of the store had a slightly strange scent in the air, and had long shelves of neat glass boxes, each one labeled with components: leather strips for arcane armor, lavender for sleep, larkspur for mist cloud…
While the shelves held the common enough mundane components, the more expensive items were kept very clearly behind a large glass counter, etched with glowing runes, and presumably behind the employees only sign.
A half dozen people moved through the store, weighing components they needed or chatting with one of the attendants behind the glass counter.
Yushin marched up to a pretty young woman with dark skin and fiery red hair made of literal fire. A flame elemental bloodline, and a strong one. I followed, and Yushin ordered several pearls, five pounds of diamond dust, a pound of ether crystal dust, and a vial of living shadows, then gestured to me.
“I, ah, need a box,” I said, then flushed, feeling foolish. I hastily explained. “A box made of wood from another plane. As long as it’s not demonic or especially evil. Oh also, dust of…”
I glanced at Yushin, who reached out to produce the spell guide, but was cut off by the attendant.
“Ah, are you looking to make an etherius locker?”
At my nod, she continued.
“I can sell you the box, but I might wait until you’re in class. The first years are all provided a box from one of the planes of earth, which is about as neutral as you can get. They don’t skimp on helping first year courses, unless you’re doing something really pricey, like some of the rituals or making constructs. Second years get less help but still some, and third years get what they can get from their professors, which is either a lot or almost nothing. Given that you’re dressed still in school clothes, unlike your friend, I think you’d be better off saving your money. No offense.”
“None taken, I appreciate it,” I said brightly, and she smiled, then stuck out a hand.
“Name’s Heather. Nice to meet you.”
We introduced ourselves, and Yushin bought a few more things, then we left. As we did, Yushin glanced at me.
“Nothing? Did you not wish to cast the naiad’s kiss ritual?”
“Oh, I’ve got two rituals I’d love to complete, but I don’t have the money,” I admitted. “I’ll get some of the mundane components, like salt and iron.”
I might have the coin for the naiad’s kiss ritual, but dropping fifteen percent of my savings for a ritual that I didn’t desperately need the effects of felt foolish. Dropping half for the mental defense was more tempting, but I couldn't actually complete it without the more exotic components like demon horn.
Yushin didn’t joke, nor offer me pity money. She just nodded, and we started making our way back to campus.