Chương 11

Chapter 11" The enimus sewer rat is one of the only magical beasts that thrives both in the dungeon and the Asterran surface,"the book read." The rats scout for food scraps in the sewers and garbage alleys, sometimes the basements of houses, before returning to the underworld to refill their mana cores while asleep.

Multiple efforts to eradicate the rats from Asterra have been attempted and failed, until the rats were deemed ultimately harmless, and this species of magical beast continues to inhabit the connecting area between the sewers and the underworld." Another night of studying had passed as I sat on Vora's bed the next morning, reading a book called " The Enimus of Asterra". Enimus was a literal translation of magical beast. I'd learned as much about the dungeon and about magical beasts as I reasonably could.

Maps of entrances sadly didn't exist, but I was positive I could use these rats to find my own way in. I also had plenty of new spells I wanted to try out, and the rats would work as test subjects. I stuffed a change of clothes into my satchel along with a canteen and some dry food, and exited my room. Dad's head turned in surprise to see my door open. He was out of his uniform, eating breakfast.

"Well, you're up early," he said.

"Or did you stay up reading all night?"

"Just woke up," I said.

"Bakeries are already up and preparing their shelves. I'll need to match the schedule if I start working in one." Vora hadn't seen his father look this interested in a while. Dad didn't quite seem convinced of my importance to the family yet, but he watched me put my shoes on with curiosity.

"Good luck," he said. I smiled and headed out. Now, then. Sewer rats. I walked a few minutes east, away from the main streets, to a quieter garbage alley in search of a manhole. In a city with the most extensive plumbing and sewage system in the whole world—being the inventors of it—I could pick essentially any street and find a way in. In the city center, if there was a street or a house, there were sewers. A tiny bit of sunlight poked over the horizon, the sun itself hidden.

At this hour of the morning, the alleys were completely empty. I folded my coat into my satchel, not wanting to get it dirty, and tried the manhole, finding it locked. The same trick of pushing mana into the keyhole to force the latch out worked. I descended the ladder down to the sewers. I had been prepared for total darkness, but the corridor was lit with mana lamps. As far as renewable energy went, ambient mana was absolutely the best.

Not only was mana essentially free, extracting it from the area left less for monsters, further separating Asterra from dangers. The walkway was clean enough that I wouldn't need to change boots after this. Sewage water flowed in the middle, giving the place a hideous smell by association, but everything else was remarkably well cared for. The cleanliness made it less appealing for rats, but at least I'd have a more pleasant time searching for them. Hopefully I don't meet any cleaners.

I kept my core concealed, both to avoid being detected by whatever suspicious beings or humans dwelled here, and also because enimus rats had the ability to sense mana. A human-sized core would cause them to scatter every time. Magical beasts had a much wider and sharper mana sense than humans. I hoped their lesser intelligence would prevent them from identifying my concealed core as a threat. The search began. For now, the strategy to do that was to walk around.

I kept my senses open for tiny mana cores—a similar process to spotting insects on the walls, except using my sixth sense. I did spot plenty of insects, from spiders to ants, but nothing in the mana realm. I must have walked for an hour, getting used to the smell before finding anything rat related. For a city with a supposed rat problem, this is getting ridiculous. Maybe the sewers near the outskirts would have— I paused my step. Around the corner, I finally felt movement within the ambient mana.

Tiny presences, like little dots moving about in the cloud of ambient mana. I stepped as lightly as I could to turn the corner. There they were, three fat rats roughly twenty yards from me, nibbling at what looked like the carcass of an unfortunate bird. The rats radiated a subtle blue glow from under their fur, eyes entirely blue. Perfect. These rats traveled from in and out of the dungeon. I could find the way in through them.

Before casting the more complex spell to achieve that, I wanted to experiment with a few things. Mainly, mind magic. Back on earth, Mind Blast had been essentially a kill switch. I could use that spell on literally anything, from a bird to a bear, or a gun-wielding human, and with enough mana, I could harm their consciousness directly, causing the mind to self destruct. The only one who could counter that spell was Trina with her magic.

Mind Protection, gave immunity to any and all mind magic, turning Mind Blast from an instant kill switch to a completely useless waste of mana. And since I had no intention of attacking Trina, I never saw a reason to improve Mind Blast. I instead diversified the use of my mind magic into utilitarian spells. Mostly, sleep and scare spells: what was known as nightmare magic here. Problem was, every single one of those spells could be nullified with a simple coating of mana protecting the head.

Mind Protection was also one of the easiest spells to cast, and its existence made me believe that mind magic just wasn't viable against other mages. Except, after witnessing Vaela's fight against the gang members, mind magic had grown back into my number one interest. Spells to attack and break Mind Protection existed, and they seemed powerful as hell. By utilizing those, mind magic was once again unlocked to be used on opposing mages. Not my most ethical thought. Mind magic is the most feared type for a reason.

But it also offers a way to put opponents to sleep without killing them. And I couldn't think of a better place to practice than the dungeon. Unlike regular animals of flesh that didn't protect themselves with mental barriers, the book taught me that some magical beasts had even thicker barriers than most mages. This was a free opportunity to practice. That said, the rats' mental barriers were paper thin, like they had a soap bubble protecting their thoughts.

Mana was trapped inside the barrier, contained like air in a balloon. The rats' cores were so tiny that they had to expand their mana reserves by utilizing a barrier, like how squirrels stored nuts in their cheeks. An impressive way to combat the species' limitations, I suppose. I drew mana, forming the pattern for a basic Mind Blast. My Core Concealment broke apart upon casting, and my presence appeared for all to sense. The rats scattered to a run in an instant.

My spell went through a moment later, locking onto the closest rat as its target. A burst of mana shot forth like a cloud of poison. Like with all mental skills, the effect was invisible to the eye. Mana was near-impossible to outrun after a spell was locked. Within moments, the spell caught the rat, colliding against its mental barrier. The rat's bubble compressed under the pressure of foreign mana, before it pushed back. Thin as the barrier was, my mana bounced off like hitting a trampoline.

Mind Blast broke, having no effect. Wow, I thought. So even a tiny barrier is enough to stop mind magic. This was exactly what I came here to practice. I began drawing the pattern for the Barrier Breaker, only to pause recalling the exact shape of the final turn. What was the angle again? I canceled the spell, and the rat escaped out of view. Uncertainty wasn't accepted when forming spells. Forgetting even a small section could have catastrophic consequences. That was exactly why I'd brought the spellbook with me.

I opened the page for the spell I'd failed. You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story. Right, I thought. That's how it went. I needed a lot more practice. And when I could break their barriers, I needed to catch one alive for another, more complex mind spell to hopefully guide me to the underground.

Finding the next batch of rats didn't take nearly as long. The sewers were dirtier here with dimmer lights and clearly a looser maintenance schedule, which the rats absolutely loved. Sneaking close with my core concealed, I closed my eyes for clearer imagination. I drew mana, and for the first time in my life, I cast a spell that wasn't invented by me or Trina. My mana took shape, forming a spike that flew at the rat's head.

Rather sluggishly, that was, not even close to the power of what the gang member had fired at Vaela, but the tip of my attack was still sharp enough to pierce the rat's thin barrier. All of the stored mana puffed into the air, before the spike pierced through to the rat's mana core. The tiny core couldn't withstand the force, bursting into pieces. Little puffs of mana came out, as the the rat collapsed under its feet for ostensibly no reason at all.

I walked up and poked at it with my foot, finding that my little mental attack had, in fact, killed it. Well, looks like the spell works. That was the extent of the good things I could say about its current effects. The spell was good enough to obliterate a rat, but it wouldn't do much to a human barrier. It simply wasn't powerful enough. My goal also wasn't to kill rats, but to capture one alive, so it failed in that regard as well.

But as I pulled my spellbook out to study the spell, it really didn't look incompetent. The spell was just basic, formed of only three parts. Technically, the spellbook had a massive header at the start that read, " Never change any of the patterns in these spells" with three pages of text worth of warnings about what could happen if spells were modified incorrectly, from the spell not working at all to causing harm to the caster or their surroundings.

While the warnings were all valid, modifications were literally what magic was all about. Isn't modifying spells literally what magic is all about? I thought, and began the process of reverse engineering Barrier Breaker. I already fully understood the first half of the spell's functions. Its first pattern was called mind magic. That pattern instructed the spell that the mana wouldn't be shaped into the physical realm, but all effects would instead affect the minds and mana cores of targets instead.

The same pattern was shared at the start of almost all mind-related spells. The second pattern was called target closest mana core. As the name implied, it set the instruction on what my spell was actually supposed to attack. That pattern could be freely replaced, for example with, target pointing right hand, or target directly ahead. Leaving it empty would default to the spell targeting the caster's mana core instead, which was why this part especially could be risky to modify.

The final, most complex pattern, defined the effects of Barrier Breaker itself. The patterns set the spell's shape, its sharpness, and its deadliness. Or in this case, the lack of deadliness. I'll need to remove a part of its sharpness to not kill a rat, I thought. It needs to be just sharp enough to pierce the shell but not sharp enough to kill it. Additionally, if I understood how to make the spell weaker, I'd most likely also understand how to make it stronger.

Problem was, it used patterns I'd never seen before. If I wanted to understand it, I needed to reverse engineer its functions. Good thing that was exactly what I'd spent ten years on earth doing. It was time to craft a new spell.

The absolute first step in inventing a new spell was safety. Keeping Mind Protection was the most important. And even though I was working only on mental spells, I added Mana Barrier for good measure. Both slowly drained mana, putting me on a timer, but they were necessary. I couldn't count the times one of those spells had saved my life from magic that I'd accidentally fired at myself while spamming random patterns. I wouldn't be spamming random patterns today. That process took way too long.

Instead, my plan was to apply the patterns I already knew into Barrier Breaker to modify it to my liking. I drew mana and imagined the pattern for Barrier Breaker. When I got to the end, however, I removed a small part of what defined how the spell took shape, intentionally leaving the spell incomplete. I fired the spell out. Mana shot out as a spell took form. What came out was not a solid sharp mental spike, but a sluggish attack that collapsed and dissipated before it got far at all. I grinned at the result.

This was exactly what I wanted. By leaving a pattern out, I could identify what was missing from the spell. In this case, the spike did form, but it lacked the speed of a proper launch. That meant that the pattern I removed was some sort of momentum amplification pattern. Now, all I had to do was repeat the same trick with all of the other patterns I didn't understand.

Removing the next pattern turned the spell into a mere blob of mana, not sharp and not necessarily an attack either, more just a concentrated gust of wasted mana. It seemed I'd removed the pattern that gave the spell solid edges, stopping mana from leaking out. Next, I found the section that gave the spell a conical, spike-like shape. Without it, the spell fired a crystal-like ball of sharp edges. The shape wasn't sustainable, and the spell quickly broke apart.

Until finally, I found the specific branch in the pattern that created the sharp tip of the attack. Without it, the spell had a solid shape that fired quickly, but the tip wasn't needle-sharp. Removing it was like turning a real bullet into a rubber bullet. Fiddling with that pattern alone would let me weaken it and incapacitate a rat for me. But while I was in the mind of a spell wright, I decided to make a few more optimizations to turn the spell more to my own liking.

A wide smile was glued to my face. Twenty minutes and a few failed attempts later, I had a spell I understood perfectly, optimized for the specific purpose I needed it for. The spell was much faster now—the speed branch having been replaced entirely with my own preferred patterns that were not only easier to draw but more efficient and adjustable as well. I replaced the author's sharpness patterns with my own ones—the same deadly ones I used to create Boulder Missile.

My pattern could be looped many times over, directly amplifying the power of the spell at the cost of a larger pattern and a longer cast-time. Three loops seemed to be the sweet spot before diminishing returns. Most importantly, I could now adjust its effects on the spot. I could overcharge it to the max if I needed to ambush an opponent, or I could remove sharpness altogether if all I needed to do was capture a rat. That was exactly what I did. I found another blue-glowing enimus rat.

I drew my pattern, and my optimized spell launched like a homing missile aimed at the rat's brain, its sharp tip dampened to reduce damage. The rat's protective bubble blew to pieces once again, and my spell crashed into its core. Mana trembled inside from impact. It once again collapsed on the spot, though this time, its core didn't break apart. After a few seconds of confusion, the rat pushed back onto its feet, but stumbled around, very nearly falling off of the platform into the sewage.

Its barrier remained thoroughly broken, and it didn't know how to bring it back right away. Perfect. That left me with an opening to form the next two spells I wanted to cast. The first one was a simple close-distance tracker spell, similar to the one the mage officers had attached to Vora the first time I woke up in his body. It would allow me to track the rat through whatever path it took out of here. Nothing complex; I cast its patterns easily from memory.

The second spell was in a completely different ballpark, enough so that I pulled out my spellbook while casting it. Spy Perspective: the spell to share the eyes of a target and see the world through their perspective. I relayed what my eyes saw on paper straight to my imagination, forming the spell on the spot. I was very much like a cook copying a recipe. Reverse engineering a spell of this scale would take much longer.

Regardless, the spell went through, and the mana invaded the rat's now destroyed barrier, affecting its consciousness directly. I flinched, feeling a connection between us. My mind was literally connected to the rat." After casting, sit down and close your eyes," the spell's description instructed. I did so. Closing my eyes, what faced me was not blackness. I was faced with a view; a rather blurry, low-quality view in an odd perspective of the ground.

A ringing appeared in my ears, like a tinnitus that shouldn't have been there. I blinked my eyes open, and vision returned. Holy shit, that's trippy. The spell worked perfectly. When my eyes were closed, I saw the world from the rat's perspective. Opening them, the view returned back to my own eyes. The effect turned blinking into a dizzying experience. The rat's steps gradually gained balance as its mana core stabilized. It scurried off where the rest of its friends had, further off into the sewers.

I watched it with my own eyes before it turned the corner. Then I closed mine and watched its path through the rat's eyes. Immediately, the strategy proved to be less effective than I had hoped. The rat's eyesight was terrible and different enough from mine that I struggled to process everything it saw. I mostly saw the ground directly ahead of it. Its ears were surprisingly clear. I could probably understand speech if someone spoke near it. Now, show me a way underground.

I couldn't imagine the rat would travel far in the sewers, especially not when its mana core was broken. To fully recover, it would need to return to the underground with high concentrations of mana. If that logic made any sense, it should lead me to a way to the underground. I was right. The rat stuffed itself into a small crack within a dark section of the walls. The blue glow of its eyes lit a tiny crawlspace. A few other rats were in there, nibbling on some food. My rat excused itself past, and descended down.

A vast cavern opened up. My rat paused at the entrance. Good, I thought. The tunnel wasn't too long. My plan was to open up the crawlspace by force and set up a secret entrance big enough for me to enter. Something large shifted within." The fuck?

"I heard a tinging, barely recognizable voice say." Is that a tracker on that rat?" Someone was already inside the cavern.