Aurelian slammed back onto the ground with a pained wheeze, and his sword clattered down beside him.
He heaved for breath as his sweat-beaded torso—his shirt long-since discarded—rose and fell with exertion, and the desperate need for oxygen.
Tarixi hovered nearby, suspended in the air with her arms folded, with a pitiless gaze.
“That was better, Aurelian, but not nearly good enough. You barely managed to defeat your enemy, and you’re useless for at least the next minute. How are you planning on facing the source of the Undead if this is your best?”
“I just defeated three Initiate-tier undead!” he wheezed.
“And you did so only because they were being remarkably stupid in their approach. Had they even once worked with proper coordination to attack, you’d have been dead.”
“None of the undead so far have—”
“So far.” she stressed. “That is correct. That does not mean none of them ever will! We have spoken about this.”
Aurelian grunted at her more than fair rebuttal and sighed as he reached up to rub his face, and took a moment to review his sheet after the latest round of training.
Name: Aurelian Lucis Imperius
Temper: Untempered Novice
Core: Calamity Core (Ignition Stage)
Level: 18 | Race: Elysean (L) | Origin: Nephilim (L) | Gender: Male | Zodiac: Dragon (L)
Health: 560 | Mana: 186 | Stamina: 137
STR: 58 | AGI: 43 | DEX: 42 | VIT: 56 | END: 27 | INT: 40 | PER: 23 | WIL: 66 | CHA: 24
Mind Skills: Revelate (E) 9 | Linguistics (UC) 1 | Philology (R) 5 | Exploration (UC) 6 | Investigation (UC) 7 | Iron Will (R) 19 | Tactician (R) 7 | Deception (UC) 3
Body Skills: Pain Tolerance (UC) 23 | Longsword Mastery (C) 23 | Running (C) 19 | Dodge (C) 20 | Durable (UC) 18 | Brawling (C) 13 | Fire Resistance (UC) 11 | Lightning Resistance 8 (UC) | Ice Resistance 4 (UC) | Breath Control (UC) 12 | Acrobatics (UC) 9
Spirit Skills: Mana Control (R) 15 | Firebolt (UC) 13 | Shockbolt (UC) 8
Traits: Fast Learner (E)
Titles: Elysean Reclaimer (U) | Survivor (R)
Languages: Common | Elysean | Draconic
62% to Level 19
You have 18 Skill Points Available!
You have 3 Skill Evolution Points Available!
Strength, Agility, Dexterity, and Endurance had all improved by at least two levels—or six in case of endurance—and pushed him towards a higher capacity of power in combat. He had also gained several new skills thanks to the various nightmares he had been subjected to, and the amount of times he had been forced to lie about not being angry at those same nightmares in a convincing manner.
He still wanted to grumble when he thought about receiving the Deception skill notification. It made him feel almost dirty, and yet he suspected Tarixi had wanted him to develop it.
There were plenty of possible reasons, but he hadn’t bothered to ask.
She’d tell him when she was ready, as she had made abundantly clear.
As for his Attribute improvements, well, there were by no means any massive leaps outside of Endurance, and even that was more due to Tarixi pushing him until he collapsed repeatedly with neither remorse nor restraint.
Aurelian sighed, and with a flick of eyes stole a quick glance at the new clock installed at the top of his HUD, which happily told him it had been almost sixteen hours since they had started his three-day training montage.
Even with all his improvements, and indeed there were many; Aurelian was somewhat biassed as to his perspective on which qualified as a true breakthrough. In his opinion? It was undoubtedly the fact he had finally been able to start learning proper magic.
Aurelian couldn’t help but grin at the memory of its apotheosis.
“You must focus!” Tarixi had all but growled at him as he’d lost control of his mana for the literal umpteenth time, and the spell he’d attempted to form had fizzled into nothingness.
“I am focusing—!”
“No, you are not. You are thinking about the result instead of looking at the journey. Magic is not a ‘snap of the fingers’ discipline. It is a process, one that was refined to an artform in the time of the Empire. Start again from the top, and speak the process aloud while you move through it.”
Aurelian had given Tarixi a frustration-fuelled glare when she’d ordered him to start again, but had not argued. His eagerness to learn magic, and lingering guilt from the realisation of his various faux pas statements to the Echo, had gone a long way to smother his instinctive desire to snap back at her due to his own frustrations.
He had closed his eyes instead, and attempted to centre himself like she’d instructed, while immersing himself in a darkness of his own mental creation.
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Then he’d started to weave.
It was a process that was hard to describe in any other way.
He had reached inside of himself and, with great care, identified and taken hold of the ‘threads’ of mana flowing within his channels. These he had started to ‘guide’ towards the many spider webbing routes throughout his interior self that led to various different ‘paths’ of his physical anatomy.
Tarixi had, at the beginning of their training, enlightened him to the concept of ‘mana gates’ inside of his body, and only after several attempts at reworking the explanation in a myriad of forms had Aurelian realised that it had been Chakras of which she spoke.
Fucking Chakras.
It had felt as if he had been preparing for that realisation his entire adult life, given his obsession with LitRPG and Cultivation—and he had dove into his body to find his ‘Root’ chakra at the base of his spine with gusto.
Thus, as he gripped and guided the ‘threads’ of mana, he moved them in a controlled circulation throughout his body and towards the still-clogged ‘knot’ that was his root chakra. It was not that the knot prevented chakra flowing through, as Tarixi had explained, but instead that its state meant he could not take advantage of its ‘compression’ and ‘purification’ features.
Mana in its bodily state was ‘unfiltered’, as Tarixi had told him, and required ‘filtering’ through the gates of the body to achieve a higher potency. For every knotted gate he unravelled, his mana would not only flow faster to its designated points—thus increasing the speed of his spellcasting—but would also flow more efficiently, which in turn would result in a net increase in the amount of mana compressed into a spell and thus a higher level of power with each casting.
Additionally, each unlocked gate would boost his Mana Capacity by 25%.
That, if nothing else, had made him immensely enthusiastic.
With all this in mind, Aurelian had carefully funnelled the mana through his root chakra and upwards into the Sacral Chakra below his navel.
Each time the mana he actively controlled had passed through a Chakra, the effort to hold onto it had become noticeably harder. Tarixi had explained it was due to the knotted and closed gates in his body, which instead of balancing and affirming the flow of his mana, actively warped it; not unlike a large boulder in a riverbed.
The water—or mana in his case—would eventually flow around the impediment, but the result would be a destabilising alteration in the density and consistency of the flow.
With each gate he had guided the mana through, his resulting control had become less firm and more tenuous until by time he had shifted, cajoled, and shoved the mana towards the crown chakra at the centre and top of his skull; his physical body had been covered in sweat from the sheer effort of controlling the mana.
It had been small comfort when Tarixi had happily informed him that opening even one chakra would have made the effort monumentally easier, as each one essentially added ten percent more control.
In the case of knotted gates, they conversely detracted almost seventy percent of his control by time the mana had flowed through from the first to the seventh chakra. He had just barely and by the sheer force of his Iron Will skill been able to hold control of his mana, and in that moment had done as Tarixi instructed and ‘plunged’ it into his spine.
The energy had then raced through his wide, rushing spinal pathway like a sudden torrent of power. He had sat up straighter at the feeling, and it had felt like soothing warmth and relaxing cool surging through his spine and nervous system.
At the moment the onrushing tide had met the targeted branch points, Aurelian had forced it apart and towards one of the other ‘main’ pathways from his spine to his shoulders and down his arms. His eyes had snapped open and, as Tarixi had painstakingly instructed, he had given the ready mana form and fixture by incanting his desire with a flare of Soulforce and an application of Intent.
“Firebolt!”
The small streak of flame that had erupted from his outstretched hands had blazed forward nearly eight metres before guttering out, and had left his mana drained down by a sixth. It had also resulted in an onset of vertigo and accompanying lethargy that had forced him down onto his back, unable to do anything more than listen as Tarixi lectured him on the correlation between chakra-locked spellcasting, mana shock, and stamina erosion.
It had been a long lecture.
“Aurelian!” Tarixi chided with a tone he’d come to identify as ‘long-suffering teacher’. “Are you daydreaming again? Your stamina is almost fully recharged, by my calculations! It’s time for another round.”
Aurelian sighed and closed his eyes for one more drawn-out, precious moment in order to reconcile his thoughts… and then pressed his now-calloused palms against the granite floor and pushed himself up and to a sitting position. His stamina, at a quick glance, was in fact restoring at a rapid rate—but it was not full, and he had no intention of granting Tarixi the satisfaction of simply launching to his feet on command.
Small rebellions. Small victories. It was all he had, really.
He studiously ignored the spectral Goblin’s glare and turned to pick up his sword, which he promptly used as leverage to push himself off the floor and onto his feet in full. As innocent a smile as he could manage was directed towards Tarixi, and then he settled into a set of rote and useful stretches she had taught him that helped with relaxing the muscles.
They were admittedly very good at doing exactly that.
Aurelian turned his eyes next towards the actual source of his pain instead of the floating Echo, and narrowed in his focus on a new addition to the otherwise plain chamber within which Bael’tharax’s monumentous bulk—no longer quite as terrifying—lay suspended: a stone plinth topped by a humming blue crystal, with Tarixi’s Memory Gem inserted at the base of the crystal’s mount.
The Simulacrum Generator was, in essence, a mana-weaving construct that crafted enemies of specified difficulty and number as high as Adept-level and in as many as a full squad of ten. He doubted he would ever need to test the device’s maximum limits in the near or less-than-near future, but knowing its capabilities was certainly helpful.
He had also found something else that had lifted his spirits when he’d used Revelate on the plinth.
Name: Simulacrum Generator
Type: Mana-Weaving Construct
Quality: Epic
Description: This Simulacrum Generator was one of the premier tools of training and advancement for the younger and less capable members of Elysean society. It possesses the ability to create and grant limited autonomy to up to ten Mana Constructs simulated at anywhere from Level 1 Beginner to Level 74 High Adept Tier.
Special Effects: All Attributes and Skills Advance 10% faster when training against this Simulacrum’s Mana Constructs.
The additional ten percent experience had been, in a phrase, game changing for his ability to advance his skills without breaking himself on ludicrously high levelled constructs. As it was, Tarixi—having taken direct control of the Simulacrum—had ensured that while the constructs wouldn’t kill or permanently cripple him, they would do everything just shy of both.
It had resulted in him being beaten, kicked, stabbed, clawed, punched, burned, shocked, paralysed, and repeatedly knocked down to near the point of death.
Due to the fact that he wasn’t in actual lethal danger, however, none of it had triggered any kind of reward or achievement from the System. That in and of itself was a point of simmering and continuous frustration, as Aurelian had grown quite used to the odd and wonderful ways the System rewarded his less than stellar record for self-preservation.
Oh god. He suddenly realised with alarm. I really am going full Murderhobo.
“So, what’s next?” he asked Tarixi out loud to distract himself, while practising swinging his Runesword through the air.
“Another test of your mana endurance,” she declared with only a little smug satisfaction. “The same rules as the last few times: you may only use Firebolt or Shockbolt, and may only use one of each on a target. They will have the same vulnerabilities as you might expect actual Undead to possess, and will attempt to close distance with you. If you engage with your Runesword, you will lose.”
Aurelian nodded when she finished clarifying the rules once again, and took a steadying breath in while shaking out his arms, while also shifting from foot to foot in a standard warm-up exercise. Blood pumping as it was, it might have seemed pointless to a common observer; but Tarixi had told him the importance of such things, and he was not one to needlessly question a multi-thousand-year-old battle mage war veteran.
At least not about the truly, blatantly beneficial things.
“This will be the last projection before you must refill the mana well again,” she warned. “Are you ready, Aurelian?”
His awareness shifted to his health, mana, and stamina and confirmed they all showed full.
Then he nodded.
“Begin,” Tarixi said without pageantry, and catalysed the creation of ten rapidly materialising silhouettes of blue light.