Chapter 175

I had left the headmistress’ tower behind with a purpose. Since I was going to visit her again in the morning to receive another infusion of Divine Spark, I decided to spend all I had been storing for a while.

I could have gone back to my room, but after staying inside for the whole day for some fun, and some not so fun, activities, some fresh air would do good. Not to mention, I was going to absorb several times more Divine Spark than my earlier experiments. Staying away in case of an unexpected reaction was for the best.

No need to inform the headmistress about my little naughty secret.

Once again I sneaked out of Silver Spires and got away using an air elemental, but I didn’t go to one of my hideouts, not willing to hide underground in such a nice evening. Instead, I had reached a nice meadow, and after killing the beasts that used it as a resting area — a trivial effort with my power — I established a few wards that would hold for a couple of days, and sat down.

The Divine Spark was still locked in the storage I had created in my body, trying to burst out ineffectually. After my most recent studies, I could see several ways of improving the storage, not that it was necessary. Compared to what the headmistress was trying to hold, what I was holding was nothing more than a sliver, making it much easier to handle even with inefficient storage.

Of course, I would have no hope to a similar amount with the headmistress. The only reason she was able to do so was that she had achieved some kind of partial merger, aligning it with her pure mana.

With a calm expression, I crouched, letting my mana rotate, to let it dip into the storage during a part of its journey before rotating all along my body, slowly strengthening. However, I didn’t start that at first, and instead just rotated mana in the same patterns I had seen Janelor had been using whenever she had excess mana, and did my best to replicate the pattern.

[-18 Mana]

[-290 HP]

“Fuck, that hurts,” I groaned as I tasted the failure on a level I wasn’t expecting from such a little amount of mana. Luckily, I didn’t try it with something more.

I healed myself before repeating the trick, only to end up with nothing but pain again.

[-13 Mana]

[-345 HP]

And again.

[-16 Mana]

[-490 HP]

And again.

[-8 Mana]

[-550 HP]

“Okay, I surrender,” I murmured as I breathed hard, trying to ignore the unfamiliar sensation. Clearly, whatever I was doing wasn’t going to work, especially with the pattern. The more successfully I replicated her trick, the more damage it created.

Maybe I was doing something inherently wrong, or maybe it was a vain act in the first place. Maybe it was something that could only be applied by a dragon.

Pity that I couldn’t even use that as an attack, as after penetrating that deep into someone’s body, there were easier options to kill them, and that assumed I could replicate such a complicated pattern inside them with their mana trying to fight against me.

Regardless, I took a pause to heal myself and refill my mana pool once again before starting to rotate my mana, this time letting it dip into the reservoir of Divine Spark rather than relying on just my mana, and letting the small sliver I had stolen to be absorbed into my body, losing its unique properties in the process. Since it was a process I had replicated earlier, I expected it to happen easily.

Yet, there was a difference in the process. My body absorbed it at the same speed with one very important exception. One of my fingers, was the same finger I had used as the target for my experimentation. That part absorbed the divine spark much faster, yet other than that, showed no radical change.

[Level: 32 Experience: 499110 / 528000

Strength: 46 Charisma: 63

Precision: 40 Perception: 42

Agility: 40 Manipulation: 45

Speed: 39 Intelligence: 49

Endurance: 39 Wisdom: 51

HP: 6241 / 6528 Mana: 1890 / 8000 ]

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]

Master Craft [77/100]

Expert Speech [75/75]

PERKS

Mana Regeneration

Skill Share

Empowerment (0/1)

Teleportation

COMPANIONS

[Cornelia - Level 22/26]

[Helga - Level 22/26]