Chương 19: Consumption

Aaron was distraught at the sight of the flaccid hearts on the table. He had been so focused on controlling his power that he failed to see how grey and worn out they'd become. He had no idea where he went wrong. Finneas pulled his glasses into alignment with his eyes and leant close to one of the hearts, squinting. You could almost hear his thoughts as he examined it.

"They have been stressed too much and the integrity of the flesh has been ruined," he said. Too much, Aaron thought. If this had been June's heart, what would have happened? He dared not think too much about it. He could not risk making this mistake with a person. There is no way he would allow the loss of the little girl's life to become his fault. He imagined a thousand things Harrold might do if she died, many of which involved Aaron suffering a lot of pain.

Aaron continued to practise with the hearts for the rest of the afternoon, stopping after a few hours only due to sheer exhaustion. He focused on moving the hearts in synchrony and asynchronously, applying as little magic as possible to get the job done. He figured this was the trick to not overstressing them. The puddles of blood beneath the hearts merged into one by the end of the day. He managed to raise his Heart Mastery to rank 4, but hit a wall after that. It was as if he was missing something to progress.

Aaron retired for dinner after the sun set, dining on a table in the Umber mansion much less covered in blood. Perhaps if he wasn't so hungry, he would have been put off pork by now, but the succulent chops went down a treat. Harrold and Thomas didn't join him that night; only another nameless guard standing in the corner. Aaron had tried to speak to him a few times, but never got a reply. As he finished up his meal, Harrold entered the room with Finneas following shortly behind.

"Aaron." He chirped, "How is my favourite necromancer? I have heard good things about you today." Aaron had a face stuffed full of pork and potato, but made the effort to smile back at Harrold and put a thumbs up.

"Finneas tells me that we might need to shake things up a bit to rank you some more. I have an idea!" Aaron only managed to let out a muffled, "mmhm?" Harrold seemed to understand. He was chewing the remaining ball of gristle in his mouth as quickly as possible now so he could actually make meaningful conversation. Finneas walked over and pushed the side plate of mashed potato aside to make room for a sheet of parchment. It was a diary entry from an apprentice.

The page was stained with a light brown substance as if a drink had been spilled on it. The edges were torn and rolled back from age. It described her experience with an ability called Soul Remnant Absorption. I have discovered a way to tap into soul remnants. Creatures' souls emit mana which can be called upon to cast spells. It is a finite resource which gets used up when performing feats of the soul and slowly replenished.

Unused mana emits into the area around mages as it overflows and dissipates back into the land and the air. Some of this gets embedded into the body, stuck like splinters of wood. I call these shards "soul remnants." I have found them in living and deceased creatures. Beings of greater power contain more ambient mana. I have developed a technique to harvest this ambient mana to replenish my strength and grow my skills. It is highly effective on deceased bodies.

I theorise that it can be used on living humans but I am yet to try. There were a series of runes afterwards, some of which Aaron recognised as "mana" and "necros." Presumably, they were instructions to cast the spell. He was intrigued. If he solved his mana issues, it would surely accelerate his training. Harrold turned to Aaron, "What do you think? Let's give it a try, shall we?" Aaron barely finished his mouthful in time to reply before Harrold ushered for his guard to come over.

"Here, try it on Nickos." The guard knelt down in front of Aaron, his jaw was broad and defined and his eyes were small, but intense. It was surprising he didn't protest. He must have known the spell could be dangerous. Perhaps he feared Harrold more.

"I don't think we should do this on a person yet, how do we know it's safe?" Aaron cautioned. He noticed Harrold's mood shift. He clearly didn't like it when people said no to him.

"Don't worry, this is what I pay them for." Harrold's usually bubbly tone was dampened. Aaron sensed he was losing his patience.

"We should try it on a corpse first, perhaps a rat or possum?" Aaron desperately tried to divert Harrold away from experimenting on his guard. It was wrong to force a dangerous experiment spell on someone. It went against all of his healer instincts. The man appeared to be indifferent, but Aaron had rarely seen an expression on the guards other than neutrality. And who knows what punishment he would get if he refused. Harrold gritted his teeth. A vein popped up on his temple.

"Aaron, I must insist. My daughter is sick upstairs and I need you as strong as possible." Aaron was used to dealing with grieving parents at the infirmary. But he'd never met anyone obsessed like Harrold.

"I understand, Harrold. It must be so difficult for you and I am committed to helping you, but we need to do this the right way. I won't risk another man's safety for this."

"DAMN IT AARON!" Harrold picked up the plate of mashed potato and threw it against the wall. The plate shattered and crashed in pieces across the floor. He followed up by slamming his fists on the table repeatedly, his face red with anger. The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings. Aaron looked down at the guard in awkwardness. He was looking up at him now. His eyebrows were scrunched up and his eyes wide as if he was begging Aaron to just try the spell. Harrold calmed himself.

He brushed his hair back neatly with his hand and took a couple of slow deep breaths.

"Aaron, I've been nice to you. I've given you everything you need. I need you to do this for me now." He looked at Harrold who was staring at him with deep piercing eyes. He could feel the rage behind them; he looked like he was about to explode. Aaron gulped a mouthful of saliva and reluctantly agreed. He picked up the parchment in one hand and started to picture the runes in his mind's eye. He felt the power flow through him immediately.

His practice with Manipulate and Osteokinesis must have carried over to other low tier spells; he could immediately tell that the spell was going to work. But he didn't want it to work. He intentionally stopped picturing one of the runes to sabotage the spell. The frost in his chest fizzled out. He put his hand on the man's chest. It wasn't difficult to pretend to cast a spell. He felt like he was straining so hard, his face was turning red and veins were beginning to bulge out of his neck.

But that worked in his favour to sell the illusion. Aaron released the tension and let out a long sigh.

"It felt so close," he said, panting convincingly.

"With some practice, I think I could do it." Finneas and Harrold looked at him. Aaron prayed that they didn't have any sort of magic sensing abilities. If they did, it would have been obvious that he wasn't using any mana.

"Let's get you those rats, but we will do this again tomorrow," Harrold grumbled. Aaron let out an internal sigh of relief. He had never been good at lying, but was really glad he managed to convince Harrold when it counted. He'd potentially saved that guard's life today. Aaron thought about Thomas' warning. Don't make them angry. He had only experienced a kind, maybe slightly mad version of the duke before that evening, but this angry outburst raised some alarm bells in his mind.

There was still some bitterness between him and Tim the following morning, but he didn't have the time to stop and resolve it. He had too much on his mind; he didn't need Tim's concerns weighing down on him as well. The carriage was waiting for him outside the house as it had done the day before. He waved to the driver and guard, but their unimpressed looks didn't falter. Nor did he get a wave or grunt back in acknowledgement. But he didn't expect any different.

The short journey felt like it took forever as Aaron considered whether he had made the right decision to help Harrold. When he arrived, Finneas and Harrold took him straight through to the same dining room as yesterday, except a fresh sheet was laid out on the table and a large pig was sprawled out across it with its heart cut from its chest. It looked stiff and cold with mottled grey discolouration on its skin. Aaron suspected it had been dead for a day or so. Any longer and the smell would have been unbearable.

The trio made little time for small talk this morning. Aaron suspected their patience was running thin and they expected results. Without as much as a word, Finneas pulled out the paper with the Soul Remnant Absorption spell and handed it to Aaron. Aaron didn't bother learning across the table to put his hand on the pig. He was confident that he didn't need physical contact anymore to cast his spells, and there was an oily layer on his skin he really didn't want to touch.

It probably would have made his hand smell of dead pig for a few days. He started to read out the runes in his mind's eye, imagining carving them in the air with an invisible quill. He had no problem casting this spell. His chest began to burn. Not with heat, but with cold, like touching snow with his bare hand. A constellation of glowing particles spiralled out of the pig and into Aaron's hand. It was faint, but bright enough for everyone in the room to see. Harrold's face glowed blue in its light.

Aaron sensed that he and Finneas were impressed. The spell made Aaron feel powerful, almost intoxicatingly so. He felt as if he could pump pig's hearts all day. He had never felt so much mana flowing through him before, even when he was at his strongest as a Spirit Healer. After around thirty heartbeats, the spell fizzled out. The spiral of faintly glowing particles dimmed until none remained. Aaron thought it should have felt good when his chest returned to its normal warmth, but he barely noticed the difference.

The chill he felt in his chest wasn't natural; it was magical in nature and came from his soul. At least that's what he suspected. [New skill discovered] Spell Name: Absorb Remnant Spell school: Consumption Spell class: Necromancer Level: 1 * [Consumption talent unlocked] Corpse Draining: rank 1 The notifications startled him. Not only did his tome register the new ability, it also unlocked a whole new school of magic. As he looked up, he saw the pig's mottled carcass, except it looked like it had aged three weeks.

The flesh was practically falling off the bones, saggy and rotting. He noticed the guard at the back of the room grimacing. Pausing for a moment, he suspected there was a pattern in the spell schools he could access. Spirit healers learn soul healing, whereas necromancers had the opposite; Somatomancy. Where healers mended the soul, necromancers could mend the body. Last year in the infirmary, he was trying to learn a spell called Lesser Spirit Nourishment, which was part of the Soul Transfusion school of magic.

This school was entirely based around using the caster's mana to give power to another's soul. It seemed like his magic was entirely opposite to that. Rather than nourishing a soul, he was consuming it!

"HAHA! Fantastic!" Harrold beat his fist in the air.

"How do you feel?" Aaron felt more alert and energised than ever. But giving away too much might have prompted Harrold to get him to drain the guard again. And based on the pig's rotting carcass, he suspected it would hurt him, or worse.

"I feel good, as if my mana has been replenished." He tried his best to undersell it. Aaron felt a strange sensation in his mind's eye, like an itch. It was unbearable to leave it alone. His soul's potential mana was overflowing and it had to go somewhere. He was familiar with this sensation; it meant he was ready to invest in a new talent. It was unheard of to progress this fast. It took months of spirit coalescence as a Spirit Healer before his soul was powerful enough for this.

But then again, he never had the ability to directly drain mana and transfer it to his soul. No one had. Aaron shifted his weight from foot to foot uncomfortably.

"My book is trying to tell me I need to do something with this mana, I need to invest it in a talent." He tugged at his tunic to try and loosen it. Everything felt so hot and constricting. Finneas spoke for the first time today, "fascinating." Aaron looked at him impatiently, begrudged that he was dallying on his words.

"Traditionally, mages have to gain power through spirit coalescence, but it appears you can tap into ambient mana directly by stealing it from the bodies of others." The word stealing didn't sit well with Aaron, he wasn't a thief.

"Mages can channel stored mana into their abilities to permanently bolster their power," Finneas continued, "The tomes guide the gifted into a natural progression of power and help them invest the mana efficiently." Aaron tingled with excitement at the thought of increasing his abilities. It was one step closer to helping Tim! By the time Finneas had finished speaking, he had already opened his bag and pulled out the black tome. He opened it on the Somatomancy page, showing the tree of connected boxes.

Where they were once grey and empty, some now contained glowing words.