Chương 422: Chapter 421 – Spells and Artifacts

After leaving the Realm Breach, Damion used Portal to bring their group back to Ardnet. Visault provided access to a workshop and left Damion to work. The Iblis had to go and inform his father of the human's immense progress and how it might be possible to advance their plans more quickly than they previously believed. With a few quick prompts to the Magic System and 18, 000 credits, Damion was able to upgrade the rest of his gear to A Rank.

The pieces of gear he really cared about for the moment though, were his training bangles. Once they were upgraded and he reactivated them, the feeling of his body being weighed down returned. The constant resistance would help him to continue to further his physical training. If he wanted to reach S Rank smoothly, he would need to make sure he had a strong enough body.

Damion wanted to wait a few hours before leaving the workshop, because he felt it was best to not reveal to the Iblis his ease of upgrading artifacts, he decided to work on his spells. For a long while he had been thinking of possible spells he could make or modify but had been too busy to be able to work on any of them. Even with his current understanding of Nashto he doubted a few hours would be enough to create a new spell, but he wanted to work on one.

Mostly he wanted to see if this task would help push his Nashto that final step to mastery but being able to bond an additional familiar would be nice as well. The Iblis were being friendly, generous even, but he was not sure how long that would last. He was severely outnumbered, and he doubted Straus could be truly counted on as an ally, which left him with the task of making his own allies.

If he could modify Ice Familiar into another element and bond with another Demonic Beast, Damion felt he would have a greater survival rate. The problem he was encountering though, was what affinity to choose. Ideally his Spatial affinity, which was now EX Rank would be best, but Spatial affinity Demonic Beasts were not exactly common. That left him with three affinity choices, Fire, Earth and Shadow, each of which were at A Rank. After a bit of deliberation, Damion decided on Shadow affinity.

One familiar with him against the world would not be enough to ensure his safety. However, one familiar that no one knew about might just provide him with an opening to flee safely should his new allies turn on him. The process of modifying a spell was both easier and more complicated than creating one from scratch. Easier, because he had a final template of a working spell to go on, which, when worked on through a manipulative scan of the magic seal, let him edit and change the spell as desired.

And more complicated because, with any change to a spell, even a single glyph changing, resulted in the rest of the spell becoming gibberish. He wished he could just simply change the Ice glyphs to Shadow glyphs and have a new spell, unfortunately, it did not work that way and Damion quickly abandoned modifying his existing spell in favor of starting over.

Since he already knew what the final spell would roughly look like and work, starting from scratch was not truly what he was doing, but it was still a lot of work. After four hours, Damion felt he was nearing the halfway point for creating his Shadow Familiar spell and was eager to continue. Initially, he thought he would only put in a bit of work on the spell and then head out to see what Visault and Visneer wanted to do next, but he was making enough progress that he felt he should be able to finish.

Close to six hours later, Damion completed his Shadow Familiar spell and felt immensely satisfied when the Magic System sent him a notification. Ding {Quest Completed} This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work. [Quest: Learn a Tier 2 Magic Spell – Status: Complete – Reward: 100 Experience, 500 Store Credit.] Damion immediately pulled up the spell in the Magic System to view its information.

[Shadow Familiar - Active Permanent - (F Rank 250 Mana) You have modified the Ice Familiar spell to allow yourself to bond to a creature with a Shadow affinity. Such creatures are dangerous and vindictive, take care in your choice. As Rank increases the bond with your familiar will increase and you will be able to share more than just concepts and emotions.] Step one was a success.

However, Damion felt the next steps, finding and actually bonding with a Shadow affinity Demonic Beast, was not going to be nearly as easy. Still, there would be time to worry about that later. Since the spell was finished, he decided it was time to leave the workshop and see what his chances of returning home would entail.

"Mage Wells," Visault greeted as Damion exited the workshop.

"I trust your time was well spent."

"Yes, I was able to upgrade several of my artifacts. My auto-mapper now has a range of 100 kilometers."

"I found your auto-mapper impressive before, but that range is astonishing. My father was also impressed with it. Might we be allowed to examine it. If we could enhance our long-range detection abilities, we should be able to more efficiently move our troops around the frontline."

"I thought you all had a map of your world?"

"Having a map and having a live feed of what is actually happening are two very different things. We can detect large scale movements, but only if we focus our attention on one area, your artifact could give us a decisive military advantage."

"Well, it isn't that I don't want to help, since it seems pretty obvious the Alfar are not going to end up being my friends, but I…"

"Don't want to give something away for nothing," Visault said quickly.

"I understand. The question of course is, what do you want in return? We have many artifacts; it may even be possible to gift you an S Rank weapon artifact in exchange."

"I'm more interested in something that will help my people on Nerotath," Damion replied.

"Because of my success, we are planning to start a school and train more true mages. But there is one problem we have not solved, and that is spell memorization."

"I do not understand."

"The reason we don't have true mages is because of an artifact that pushes the affinity of a person into their core when it is still developing."

"Of this we are aware, a foolish practice. We have never determined why humans allowed this folly."

"Well, because once the affinity is in the core, it allows for magic seals to be memorized and engraved on a person's core, where the affinity would normally be. So, it makes it easier for our mages to learn and cast spells."

"I see. And since you are now properly training mages and not limiting them to a single affinity, your people will also lose this ease of casting. This problem is easily remedied, as my people developed a method long ago. In fact, the reason your people developed the method they did is likely because they were denied this method when they were exiled."

"What do you mean?" Damion asked, suddenly very interested in what Visault had to offer.

"You see, when your ancestors were banished, they were forced to leave most of their knowledge behind, including their grimoires and the ability to create them."

"Grimoire?"

"It is like a repository of spells. A grimoire is an artifact bound to a single person which stores their spells and allows them to cast any spell stored in their grimoire, provided they have the mana and the skill. This is mine." Visault raised his wrist to display a silver bracelet with glyphs carved into it. Damion had thought the bracelet was just a piece of jewelry, learning that it was actually a powerful artifact was surprising.

"Are they all bracelets?"

"Oh no, some people choose rings, or necklaces, even earrings. Different people choose to make their grimoire in different ways. Most choose to conceal it in some fashion, after all, if their grimoire is broken, then most lose access to most of their spells."

"Most?"

"Any good mage does not fully rely on their grimoire and truly memorizes a few key spells. Not to mention after years of use, most mages tend to memorize their most used spells unknowingly."

"That does make it quite the weakness," Damion said, though his thoughts were turning to the Magic System. What exactly was it? It served as a store, grimoire, and guide, but where did it come from? And once he fixed the Mother World, like it seemed to want, would it stay with him?