One of the greatest disappointments I got after studying for years at the academy was that the only classes related to Soul were given at the healing ward for those who wanted to become healers. I literally had only learned from two teachers who used soul magic in the academy, and one was Alatea. And the other wasn’t even a person, but a book.
It made sense that there weren’t classes for such an uncommon element, same as with Void, Space, and Time. If none had it, there was no reason to teach it. As a matter of fact, there were currently no void mage teachers (also called voidwalkers) in the academy. I doubted there even were students with such affinity. Yet the lack of specialized tutors didn’t mean I wasn’t visiting Alatea now and then to have a deeper insight into her investigation.
Technically speaking, I was already a greater soul mage than Alatea, thanks to my plentiful soul. But she was a better mystic than I. Not even considering I only was on the verge of the tenth star whilst she had achieved that step a long time ago, but also her healing prowess was far superior to mine’s. On the other hand, she was a scholar and healer, not a combatant like many mages. Meaning her spells and instruction tended to be on the more practical side of things.
“So, what you are saying is that you are ready to make the leap.” Alatea debriefed my explanation over a cup of tea.
“Yes, I have sidelined my studies of the arcane to further my soul investigations.” I added.
“That’s what surprises me about you, Edrie.” She left the teacup with care on the table. “You are a nine-star mage on two elements at the age of thirty-two, where people triple your age have yet to arrive.”
“What can I say, I’m a studious person.” I shrugged.
“Yes, I been conscious of that fact for a while.” Alatea sighed half-heartedly. “But there’s more to that. Knowledge and skill only get a person so far. I have seen your friend Marissa, she’s brilliant, having achieved nine-star spellcasting and only being one year older than you, yet you double her on achievements after all. By all means, it shouldn’t be possible to achieve a such level at your age whilst dual-wielding.”
Ah, I know where this was going. This was going to happen one day or another, and it actually happened pretty late. She needed a bit more clues to solve the puzzle, and now she got them after years of consulting.
“There’s only one logical explanation about your progress so far. You are lying to me about your elemental affinity.” Alatea guessed.
“Sure.” I nonchalantly responded.
“What?” She exclaimed in astonishment. “Are you not going to deny it?”
“Not really. What use is to deny a fact when you are already made up your mind on it.” I told her.
“So… it’s true.” Alatea spoke slowly and her voice was feeble, no matter my confirmation, she was still processing the realization of her hypothesis.
“I mean, I do study a lot, I do practice a lot, and I am good at magic, but as you said, knowledge and skill can only get me so far,” I spoke with sincerity. “So, yeah. I’ve lied to you about my elemental affinity.”
“Can I ask you what tier it is?” Rather than being angered for being lied to for a decade, Alatea only expressed academic curiosity trying to guess which level of affinity made me so proficient at magic.
“You can.” Alatea responded to my quirky quip with a penetrating gaze. “Alright, alright, gimme a second before.”
We were at Alatea’s office, a perfectly hermetic place, yet mage’s paranoia (a totally real affliction) won over me. I placed two types of wards, one arcane and the other spiritual. The arcane ward obfuscated the infiltration of mana from the outside, impeding external spellcasting.
Yes, I finally learned how to perform actual defensive magic instead of spellcasting a Mana Void (or now Mana Nullness with my nine-star wizardry) to prevent magic in my surroundings. The spiritual ward was simpler, it just caused a mild headache and an intense desire to die to whoever crossed it with their body, soul, or mind. A bit overkill, but you couldn’t be always sure about these things.
“Okay, now you can ask.” I was struggling to hold my laugh. I left her waiting for a pair of minutes after my quip which I found pretty amusing once I pondered over it.
Alatea sighed in defeat. “What’s your affinity, Edrie?”
“On both elements?” I asked for her confirmation, and she answered with a nod. “Superb.”
My tone and expression were dead serious, Alatea didn’t even consider if I was joking or not. She seemed to have analyzed my soul, scrying my words for the truth. Then, she stood there meditating over my words. I stayed for a few minutes in silence drinking my tea while she was making her own conclusions.
“It makes now sense.” She finally talked, a visage so stern and stoic you may have thought she was a statue. “I have never seen a person practice a lower affinity more than their main one, and you were progressing too far for someone with High affinity. Having a dual Superb affinity, while logic-defying, is the only explanation.”
Don’t misunderstand me, there was amazement in her tone, but her scholarly behavior prevailed. Analytical coldness fueled her train of thought.
“Now I can understand your double warding. This is a very serious matter.” Alatea said after her scholar fervor had calmed down. “But a dual Superb user, incredible. Now I can almost understand the impossible goals you set yourself, and that you want to be a ten-star mage without even being four decades old.”
“Well, I do have impossible quests to confront, so impossible goals seem like the right thing,” I recalled telling Marissa a decade ago about my foolish endeavor to take down the violet sky. “I have almost mastered all the eleven spells required to cast Mystic’s Dominion.”
“Even though I understand you're intrigued with the spell, I can’t get behind casting such an abomination of nature.” She lectured me. “I should have forbidden you from reading that book when I had the chance.”
“Oh, come on,” I exclaimed. “It isn’t that bad. Sure, Possession and Charm are bad spells by all means, but Mystic’s Dominion has more uses than that.”
“I know, but if you are thinking of useful applications like healing, there are a myriad of spells a whole lot more effective than that.” Alatea didn’t express much passion toward the ten-star spell. “I wholeheartedly believe soul magic, especially psychimancy, should only be used for the greater good. And that spell, Edrie, doesn’t fall under that category.”
“I may not use the spell as it is, but it’s the most well-documented ten-star spell I have seen, it’s a free pass for tenth-tier sorcery.” Whoever wrote the book wanted more people to reach the ten-star mark on the Soul element. “I’m surprised you haven’t used it, it would have been a far easier way than to make your own healing spells.”
“Edrie, there’s a reason I haven’t used that spell to get to the ten-star, and instead delved myself into a research study to craft the world’s most complex soul-healing spell.” Alatea’s expression was serious yet caring as a mother. “It’s because I have all the time in the world. I’m young, you are young, and we have centuries in front of us to learn all magic we want. Why are you in such a hurry?”
Alatea spoke solemnly the truth. Ellari lived for four centuries on average, but my biggest secret held me all this time. I still thought of myself as a human, I wasn’t happy with losing time and doing nothing. My fellow students weren’t stupid or less competent than me, they just followed their longevous nature.
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Time was precious for the short human life. But for an ellari? Not so much. At the very minimum, human time was five times as expensive as ellari time. It took me time to truly a lot of time to assimilate it.
All my life I had been treating my time as gold when, in reality, it was silver.
**********
“Let me get this right, ya’ want me to watch so ya’ don’t kill yourself?” Adrian was sitting on my bed with his legs crossed. I had invited him to my room to have someone look over me as I readied myself to cast the most dangerous spell I had ever seen.
“A bit too abridged, but yes, that’s the idea.” I told him.
Adrian had grown a lot more musculature in the last years, making him the most buffed ellari I had ever seen. Even more than how he was in the first year of the academy. While not the constitution of those bodybuilders stuck in my memory, as ellari were scrawny by default, a glance at his muscles would tell you Adrian looked strong. He was now thirty-six, making him the oldest in the group.
And I was one hundred percent certain that he could break through a low-powered barrier with his fist alone. I couldn’t help but shudder at the image of an Adrian that had Body affinity instead of Wind.
“I don’t know what problem Marissa and you have with learning new tiers of magic at the first chance you see.” Adrian shrugged. “I’m pretty comfy myself at the eight-star.”
“But you have your swordsmanship,” I commented. “And Monica has her spellcrafting. While Marissa and I focus only on our investigations.”
One of the many developments of our time in the academy was Monica’s success with spellcrafting. I remember when she still had problems with Spellcraft in her first year. And it seemed that her difficulty on the subject had transformed into a pursuit of knowledge. She became quite proficient in the art of making her own spells and then engraving them on runes. More or less like the crystalomancers you heard about in ellari child-book stories, except she used all types of materials for spell engraving. Good for her, honestly.
“I’m down for it.” Adrian said after a few seconds of dubious pondering. “Though I don’t find it very sensible.”
“If I’m honest, my neither.” I didn’t hide the stupidity of what I was going to do. “But I do believe I can pull it off without any mishap.”
“In case it goes wrong, does it affect me?” Thanks for caring about your friend and ex-roommate.
“No,” I responded. “In theory.”
“Eh, works by me.” Adrian said with a carefree attitude. And that’s why I had him watching over me. Alatea would have bickered with me too much if I asked her for help. So, that’s why I only asked her for confirmation.
Mystic’s Dominion wasn’t a complicated ritual that required being in touch with the beyond or something along those lines, but it did require a high degree of introspection of one’s soul.
Some of the eleven required spells were known or easy to cast like: Charm, Soul Shatter, Concealment, and Possession. Some of them just were components of the spell itself fragmented into lower starred spells, so it was easier to learn. Concealment was also the lowest-tiered spell of the bunch, though, even when taking into account the simplified components.
My favorite of them all was an upgrade from a spell that I liked a lot. Astral Self was the superior spell to Astral Projection. Besides having the typical upgrades like enhanced power, range, and whatever, Astral Self added the option to return to the spiritual world.
Once Astral Projection interacted with the physical world, it would ‘stay’ there, forever anchored until dispelled. Astral Self, however, could phase in and back without problems, solving the only weakness of its previous iteration.
“Well, are ya’ going to do it or not?” Adrian asked impatiently.
“Sorry, sorry. My mind wandered away.” I apologized and focused again.
Mystic’s Dominion was the biggest spell that I was going to cast up to date. Not only the difficulty, that was a given, but in the sheer scope. The dominion was a multi-faceted spell with lots of variations, made so the caster could adapt the spell to the situation. Like a Swiss knife, except that I didn’t know what Swiss meant in this context.
The mana consumption was outrageous, half of my soul pool. And my spiritual reserves were already double my physical mana pool, as of the increasing arcane corruption in my soul I no longer needed to equilibrate mana pools, but to lean more on my soul pool. So this monstrous consumption meant I would be left without mana instantly if I decided to use my physical mana pool.
I needed to cast the spell slowly, it was such an obscene amount of mana to liberate in one sweep, that it would hurt my very soul if I did so. My mind reminded me of when I was learning soul magic for the first time with Alatea and how she said that soul magic was cheaper than any magic in mana cost by a wide margin. I was afraid of the price of an arcane ten-star spell now. The backlash of such expenditure needed to be mitigated.
That was why I found myself casting the ten-star spell in my soulspace instead of the outside. It reminded me of the first time I had ever casted soul magic in the form of Soul Touch. A spell purely on a metaphysical level.
I used my soul to weave the threads of soul mana that phased through my soulspace. It was an arduous and tedious process, but dangerous enough that kept me on edge at all times.
This wasn’t a simple one spell cast, but multiple ones being weaved together. Nine-star spells already needed a minute at best to be conjured at my current level, no matter if it was the fast-paced sorcery or the meticulous wizardry. And I was casting a handful of them simultaneously.
Honestly, such a feat couldn’t be described as sorcery anymore. This conjuration was magnitudes of times more complex than any wizardry I had performed until now.
The endless void that was my soulspace had transformed into a cornucopia of chaos, littered by the countless strings of mana being tied to each other. I didn’t let the noise inside of my spirit distract me. The cacophony appeared familiar to me, though instead of pain, it beckoned destruction.
It was complicated. I felt like I was losing control, too many variables, too many conjurations. Drawing an hendecagram of distinct spells was an endeavor that I had underestimated.
I segmented parts of my soul to make the casting easier. This way I got anchors to hold the spell in place and tap into extra mana from multiple parts of my soul simultaneously. I shouldn’t be doing this, and it shouldn’t be needed, I could have stopped, but I kept going forward.
This was clearly not the intended way to perform the cast.
What I ended up creating in my soulspace was a recreation of my minefield magic but in my soul. My soul bisected into hundred parts, working as separate units, yet contributing to the greater whole. It served as a great scaffolding for the complex magical formation. Though it pained me, both literally and metaphorically.
I was used to pain.
Once I felt all pieces falling into place, I opened my eyes to leave the soulspace. Adrian looked at me weirdly and it was obvious why. A maelstrom of visible white mana had formed around me. Not dense enough that it was opaque, but it was worrying to an outside viewer. The fact that an untrained mystic could see the commonly invisible soul mana already said a lot about the magnitude of the powers I was dealing with.
I didn’t bother in telling him that everything was fine. The hardest part may have been achieved, but I wouldn’t risk it in the end. I knew fate always played the worst for those who spoke beforehand.
The mana vortex spiraled faster and faster as it concentrated in my body, returning to me. I could feel the influx of energy, the aura that was generating around me. An accumulation of mana, alike Mana Pond. Only that it was made of soul mana, instead of arcane. A leyline of the spirits.
I had complete control over the framework, now, I only needed to unleash it.
My body felt lighter than ever, the room got colder. My soul felt more powerful than ever, my mind free of any fog that may have once occluded it, yet my body felt lifeless. The coldness and the lack of life reminded me of the river. As if I was its emissary on the world of the living.
“Mystic’s Dominion.” My mouth crackled the sound as the magic was realized. It was totally unnecessary, but I had the impossible need to do so. My soul etched runes into my words, as I realized I had done an unconscious use of Xenoglossia.
The spell had been empowered.
I could sense everything. My soul, Adrian’s, all the people at the dormitory, and beyond. The spell had more range than I had ever imagined, an impossibly big soul-detecting extension, far more of what I had been used to, and I was in control of everything inside of it.
Everyone was in MY domain.
“Are ya’ alright?” The soul in front of me asked. No, it wasn’t any soul, it was Adrian’s. Not quite, not just a soul, the full being of Adrian.
“Oh, yeah. Perfectly.” I responded a bit stunned as I looked at my hand and saw a soul, not an arm. “The casting was a resounding success.”
“Fine, then.” He spoke, agitation in his voice, yet no gestures out of the ordinary. He was unable to see what I saw. What I commanded. “You had a creepy smile on your face for a moment. I suppose you are happy to finally be a ten-star mage.”
“Yeah, that’s it.” I dismissed it with a nervous giggle.
I wasn’t so sure about that. Mystic’s Dominion was a powerful spell but needed further testing. I looked at the walls and observed plentiful sparkling dots in the distance. Plenty of souls surrounded us. Not as many as the river, yet considerable.
Most shone in whites and blacks, a grey-scale exclusive to the dead. But if one focused their gaze, they could see smaller dots in the sea of spirits. A myriad of colors, just hidden. Mostly purple or some variation of it. Others had a small transparent omnidirectional spot that I could see through regardless of the perspective. I supposed that was Force affinity, as most force spells tended to be invisible.
Yes, even when the dead lacked colors in their souls, the living were tainted by their affinities. When you looked at the souls, mostly white would be observed. If not, grey; and less so black.
Yet when I looked at my soul, mostly purple was seen.
And around the purple, small tethers connected me to the other souls littering the world. They felt so fragile, so… destructible. It would be easy to subjugate them.
I looked upwards, not with my soul, but with my eyes, to see an unfazed yet slightly perturbed Adrian.
“Yes, I’m happy about my promotion.” The corners of my mouth rose.
Mystic’s Domain definitely needed more testing.
More mental testing than magical one, though.