Chapter 123

Another elemental conjuration later, I was freely flying on the sky, ready to visit Titania to test the limits of the Divine Spark injection. The repair of my soul space was already completed thanks to the latest stat increase from the —likely misleading— an achievement I had received earlier, which increased my capabilities significantly. Even in my current extreme stat spread, five points of stats across the board was not something to snuff at. Most people failed to gather that much in their whole life.

Since I didn’t want to waste the traveling time, I decided to experiment with the divine light node resting in my fake soul space. Integrating it into my own soul space was out of the question, naturally. Even if my System wouldn’t have devoured it immediately, it still didn’t remove the requirement of tricking the headmistress.

Instead, I decided to use it as a focus, similar to an external magical item. A simple push of featureless mana later, created a bright explosion of light, even sharper than I expected.

“Not bad,” I murmured as I repeated it a couple of times, to understand the effect. Essentially, it worked as a static converter, adding an overwhelming light element to mana, though devouring some of the mana in the process. It took a while to get a better understanding of how to arrange the portions.

Then, I focused on testing natured mana. The elemental mana resulted in some rather volatile results, forcing me to stop that track rather early. It wasn’t impossible, but it required a more suitable location —and maybe a few wards to prevent dangerous accidents. Still, I wanted to experiment on that, excited about just how much damage a light-infused fireball could inflict on a pack of bone dragons.

Arcana worked better. It didn’t create any synergy in terms of damage like infusing it with other elements, but it allowed me to use the light element in a more nimble way. It wasn’t as cost-effective as casting it directly, of course, but if there was one thing I wasn’t currently lacking, that was mana.

Things started to get interesting when I started to use it in conjunction with Biomancy. It didn’t work with healing magic, on the contrary, turning it into an unstable mess, too sharp to heal, but too soft to hurt anyone. The energy I termed as life energy, the kind I used to detect and destroy undead, however, mashed with the light magic perfectly.

To lack of a better term, the life energy was as soft as healing energy, making it difficult to deliver it in range, both in terms of detection and damaging undead. I had circumvented the first part by dumping an ungodly amount of mana to it, and the second application was viable because of the excessive weakness of the undead. Still, life energy wasn’t the most viable energy for weaponizing.

Mixing it with light mana worked perfectly. The light worked as a delivery mechanism, carrying the light energy to the distance without losing its shape and energy, increasing its ranged viability several times, both in terms of damage delivery and detection.

Enough to make me tempted to find Zokras the Eternal and his death knights, to see whether I could turn his title to an obsolete piece of history.

As I continued to play with the life magic and light magic, trying to find the best mixture for different purposes, I suddenly felt a muffled reaction, barely noticeable even to my sharp senses. With a frown, I repeated the detection magic, but this time as an actual spell rather than idle experimentation.

[-641 Mana]

With the increase of power, several dark presences popped into my detection range, making my eyes widen in surprise by the sheer amount. None of the groups I had detected was particularly strong, but the sheer number of small pockets I had detected in the range surprised me. Their presence was muffled, indicating that they were behind some innovative wards to hide their presence. Not to mention, they were quite deep in the ground, likely reached their position from an underground tunnel.

I would have been surprised, but considering the huge underground roads that connected the necromancer base with the various access points, established without anyone being aware of, establishing some small undead pockets wasn’t too challenging.

After quickly destroying the detected ones, I started circling the school, creating huge circles, destroying every detected one immediately. As I destroyed them, I started cataloging the result.

The first important detail was their strength, or more accurately, a lack of it. None of them were particularly strong. Most of the pockets had an average of Class Five power or lower, with the occasional stronger one barely reaching Class 8. Still, considering there were hundreds of those little pockets, they were still a dangerous threat.

There were far too many to be placed around during the last month, not without being detected even with the assistance of their spies in the faculty. Most likely, even a year wasn’t enough, proving that the plan to take down the school had been going on for a long time.

I continued to destroy those pockets, despite the fact that I wasn’t expecting them to attack the school immediately.

Their strategy clearly changed from an overwhelming ambush to an extended siege, forcing Silver Spires to either lose the surrounding towns to weaken it permanently —both in terms of logistics and reputation— before they launched a final attack from all directions, using the undead packets they had created.

Endurance: 39 Wisdom: 51

HP: 6324 / 6324 Mana: 6841/ 7595 ]

SKILLS

Master Melee [100/100]

Master Tantric [100/100]

Master Biomancy [100/100]

Master Elemental [100/100]

Master Arcana [100/100]

Master Subterfuge [100/100]

Expert Speech [75/75]

Expert Craft [59/75]

PERKS

Mana Regeneration

Skill Share

Empowerment (1/1)

Teleportation

COMPANIONS

[Cornelia - Level 21/25]

[Helga - Level 17/21]