For the last week, Villin had spent most of his time studying the supreme dark arts technique book, and he soon found out it was very different compared to the mental techniques in difficulty. If anything the supreme dark arts technique book resembled the hidden gene solution book he studied.
Some sentences would make no sense when you read them casually but when you ‘felt’ them you would understand. In this way it made sense why this book was wooden signifying its limited uses while the others were iron, he suspected it would be impossible to find a limited version of the mental techniques since reading it didn’t do anything to the book, they were just words with no intent or magic power behind them.
After studying ‘Supreme Dark Arts Technique: Embed’ for a week, Villin got a decent grasp of what exactly it was, and it was stunning.
This wasn’t just the dark arts he expected, the one most had at least heard of, it was something entirely different.
But nonetheless, it was a very dark technique. The technique didn’t show any way for a magus to become stronger. If you used it, it wouldn’t alter your web or magic power.
Yet it seemed to follow the same formula compared to the regular dark arts he knew of. Shortly after a Magus’ death, you have to go ahead and rip out a part of their web. But then, instead of adding it to your own, you would insert this web into an item.
The book only showed a few examples but they were enough. For one, you could trap a part of the killed magus’ web into a wand. Even though directly casting using the nodes of the dead mage wouldn’t be possible since the connection wasn’t clear enough, it would be very possible to spend some time to save a spell into the wand, using the dead magus’ nodes.
This didn’t sound like a big deal but it was. Let’s say you killed 2 magus in the last couple of months and connected their webs to a wand each. Each of these wands has two saved spells, and then there’s your own wand as well.
You would have a total of six saved spells you could fire off in quick succession, some of which you might not even know. You would be able to dual wield wands, even if you can only use saved spells on one of them.
One might say this was just weaker than the regular dark art but Villin disagreed. He knew it was possible those who are proficient at the dark arts can cast two spells at the same time but Villin still saw that as weaker.
For one, items can be sold or traded. If one were to sell a wand that held two powerful defensive spells that could be used whenever they wanted, the wand would be nearly priceless. Also, this technique didn’t hold a negative side effect. Even though the webs of the dead magus’ would still degrade, it wasn’t connected to his own web so he wouldn’t be affected in any way.
Other than wands you could also put these webs in certain enchanted items. The book was a bit vague but Villin got the general gist of it. For one, the webs would only be able to go into items enchanted specifically to house them. Villin looked at the runes that should be used that were depicted in the book and ruled they were relatively simple, they were simply derivatory versions of runes meant to hold magic power. Other than this you could also put on preserving enchantments so the web holds on for a longer period of time.
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As for why you would want to put a web into an item, it was quite simple. Let’s say Villin were to make an iron shield to take care of physical damage, he would obviously be worried about magical attacks that would easily destroy the item. So then he could insert a dead magus’ web. And now if that magus were to have the nodes required for Reverto or Sheldium and Villin found them. The shield would continuously have a shield around it to send back magical attacks.
The only downside was the magic power required. Villin would surely also have to insert a magic crystal holder into the shield with a sufficient number of crystals.
Overall it was an extremely interesting technique, even if Villin didn’t have a use for it currently. Once he finished everything Villin felt the intent radiating from the book’s pages was nearly entirely gone. It would probably self-destruct if someone else tried to read it at this point so he put it away safely.
The technique was very hard to pull off and Villin doubted he’d be able to properly do it at this point so he let it rest for the time being. He didn’t see why he would be around dead magus’ anytime soon. As long as things didn’t go horribly wrong that is.
When Villin saw the others seemed to be training their magic, he decided to do the same. He had a number of spells he still had to learn, and a number of books to read.
He decided to start by focusing on ‘Lanuae Magicae’ the supremely difficult teleportation spell he had gotten as the ultimate reward in the advanced tournament.
Casting a spell with thirteen nodes was already something that would be insanely difficult. When you added to it that there were three nodes within the spell that were derivatory the difficulty would increase by multiple folds.
After trying this for a while Villin gave up. The spell was simply too difficult for him right now, he decided to try it again later.
To put his mind off of the failure Villin actually took out a trainset from his interspacial bag. This was the one professor Crumb gave him. He started off by taking out the second-grade enchanting book they had gotten and he looked over the runes within it. Looking for the ones he didn’t know yet that were used on the model.
Before he ever realized it Villin jolted down pages full of notes of the workings of the train model, as he began to properly figure out how it worked.
And what he found was an answer to his question.
He recalled he got given this train model when he asked the professor what exactly the difference was between enchanting and magic arrays.
The answer was within this train model enchantments and tiny magic arrays were used all over the place. They worked together as a single thing. After spending a good about of time decyphering everything Villin looked over his notes once more. The notes that now showcased how the train moved and made sound. What runes did what and everything. Even the runes he didn’t know had notes beside them stating what they might be doing.
And when he really looked at the notes he noticed something. All the notes were there, as were their positions on the train. But he had forgotten to make a distinction between which ones were in a magic array and which one in an enchantment. Yet, it still made sense. All the runes came together to give the effect.
It was then that he realized there was no real power within enchantments, as there was no real power within magic arrays, everything came from the runes.
This might sound logical as enchantments and magic arrays wouldn’t be a thing without runes but Villin still felt incredibly enlightened when he truly realized this.
He quickly took out his enchanting pen and started drawing all sorts of runes on the floor, inspired by his findings.