Chương 132: Chapter 137: Snake for dinner

I opened my status again, noticing how cluttered it was becoming with all the skills and titles, not to mention the various conditions. The minor curses I was currently under were getting quickly demolished by my aura, but they were still listed in the status anyway. I had many skill evolutions to consider. But first, I put on the Oracle's Blindfold, one of the items I got from the shop. Free from the curse, it would give me more insight into these decisions. ──────────── Congratulations!

Your Arcane Dart skill has reached Level 25 and is now ready for Evolution. Please select an evolution. • Phantom Volley Your darts split mid-flight, striking multiple targets with reduced power. • Unstable Lance Form a volatile lance of mixed energies. Higher instability greatly increases damage and penetration, but risks backlash. • Piercing Thread Condense your attack into a thin beam that ignores a portion of the target defenses. Congratulations!

Your Arcane Blast skill has reached Level 25 and is now ready for Evolution. Please select an evolution. • Arcane Collapse Compress energy into a dense core before release, dealing extreme damage in a small radius. • Curse Detonation Consume active curses to trigger a high-scaling explosion based on their strength and number. • Shockwave Burst Release a wide blast that pushes enemies back and disrupts formations. Congratulations! Your Hex skill has reached Level 10 and is now ready for Evolution.

Please select an evolution. • Binding Hex Restricts movement and increases vulnerability to control effects. • Reactive Hex Your hexes changes their nature to better bypass enemies defences. • Virulent Hex Applies a primary curse that propagates weaker versions to nearby targets. Congratulations! Your Malign Intensification skill has reached Level 10 and is now ready for Evolution. Please select an evolution. • Focused Malice Greatly amplify a single curse at the cost of others.

• Malignant Threshold Push a curse past its limit, causing mutation and possible interaction with other effects. • Malignant Feeding Channel energy into curses, gradually grow their strenght permanently. Congratulations! Your Drain the Accursed skill has reached Level 10 and is now ready for Evolution. Please select an evolution. This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience. • Execution Drain Greatly increases effectiveness against weakened targets.

• Feast on the Ruined Siphon both life-force and magical energies. • Harvest the Accursed Slowly drains cursed enemies of life-force within your aura. Congratulations! Your Multi-Casting skill has reached Level 10 and is now ready for Evolution. Please select an evolution. • Staggered Invocation Queued spells release sequentially with increasing strength, but interruption cancels the remaining casts. • Rapid Sequencing Reduce delay between consecutive casts.

• Passive Casting Maintain and cast simultaneously in the background with reduced focus. Congratulations! Your Curse Rebinding skill has reached Level 10 and is now ready for Evolution. Please select an evolution. • Curse Duplication Recreate a removed curse while leaving the original tied to their source. • Curse Assimilation Link curses into your aura, increasing its strength, while greatly reducing their direct impact. • Curse Lock Prevents enemies from removing or cleansing active curses. Congratulations!

Your Arcane Infusion skill has reached Level 10 and is now ready for Evolution. Please select an evolution. • Resonant Infusion Infused effects gain slight amplification when used in sequence. • Corruptive Infusion Infusions carry latent curse fragments, reducing the target structural integrity. • Reinforced Infusion Increase stability, durability and potency of infused beings or construct. Congratulations! Your Marionette of Regret skill has reached Level 10 and is now ready for Evolution.

Please select an evolution. • Shadow Anchor Hide the curse within the target's shadow, making it harder to detect or remove. • Veiled Marionette Implant a persistent thought. Consume it to force one decisive action. • Extended Control Increase duration and complexity of direct control. ──────────── Oh yeah, that's what I'm talking about! Not evolving these skills finally paid off. If only I had more time to train them up…

No matter, these were juicy evolutions, and I could already see many ways of making my skills interact with each other, amplifying their power significantly. Like Unstable Lance, if I paired it with Reinforced Infusion, I could not only increase its power but decrease the instability too. That skill should have come from the fact that I mixed more than once lifeforce and mana, aura too, to create a powerful attack.

While Vix suggested that I use that skill as a bridge to hex my enemies, usually the enemies hit by that kind of attack didn't need to be hexed. I was still thinking the same as at the beginning, I should keep a single attack that is made purely for power and nothing else. And Reinforced Infusion could be applied to my aura too, hell, even on myself if needed… I went back to analyze all the possible combinations, and there were some really interesting ones.

But the one that caught my eye as the most effective to cover one of my weaknesses was Virulent Hex. Given the names of the Hex skill evolutions, I could tell that I didn't put that much effort into training that skill like I did for others. But actually, hexes were not as powerful as curses. I used them to drain my enemies and apply debuffs for others to kill. If I could just cast a bunch of different hexes and then have them spread by themselves to every monster in the vicinity…

then I could just drain them easily, or just make them go ka-boom. Curse Detonation would be perfect for that, and I'm not even using Arcane Blast that much right now. I could transform it into a more deadly skill, but the question was, would I lose the ability to create blasts and shockwaves at will? But at the same time, I could do it with my aura now… Drain the Accursed. Now that was a skill that saved my life, and others before. It needed the right upgrade.

I already managed to increase the number of targets and the distance. Now with the aura tether it would improve even more, but the options were interesting. Mainly Feast and Harvest. The former allowed me to steal magical energies too, something that currently I couldn't do at all. Replenishing mana would be a gigantic boon, and other kinds of energies too, depending on the enemy. The skill, after all, said magical energies, not just mana. But the latter was very good too.

I could spread my aura far, and every enemy in it would get drained… Less effective against a single powerful target, but… still something to consider. Of one thing I was sure, I would be getting Passive Casting. Keeping focus all the time was something I was becoming used to, but if I could keep my skills active all the time without controlling them… it was a quality-of-life skill that was incredible in its own right. It probably had more to it than its simple description implied too.

And compared to the others, it was the one that resonated most with me. Curse Rebinding, though. I could manage my curses with my grimoire, it was made for that, so duplicating them was not in my interest right now. The lock, though, was something I could see myself using, but the Assimilation evolution… that one could be a game changer, especially given how my aura already increased in power the more curses I dealt with.

If I could actively increase it, or even use it for upgrading my trait, I didn't want to pass on it. Last one, Marionette of Regret. The skill was awesome already, but if I could nudge people where I wanted them to go, that would become incredible. And at the right moment I could still trigger it to act when needed. It was just all upsides in my opinion. I re-read all the descriptions, checked if I could somehow find better synergies between them, and tried many combinations in my mind. In the end, I decided.

I selected my evolutions, feeling the skills take hold within me. Then I removed the blindfold, feeling nothing different. Strange… Then I stripped down my ruined pants. After kicking the tree, the right pant leg was shredded. I donned my new noble attire. The ensemble shifted to a more modern look while still retaining a certain class. It was dark blue with silvery swirls and glyphs on the rims, while the coat was a lighter shade of blue outside and something like vantablack inside.

I put on the pendant, the bracelet, and the two rings I was already wearing on my left hand. Being right-handed made the choice natural. I didn't want to accidentally damage them if it came to a fight. I put on my belt and boots, all in black. The high boots were strange at first, but I'd get used to them. They were really comfortable. I adjusted everything to fit snugly on me. As a last thing, I took the overcoat and put it around my shoulders. There was a clasp there to prevent it from sliding down.

Moving normally wouldn't let anything slip, but if I accelerated a bit, the overcoat would shed some ash onto the floor. How all of it worked, I had no idea, but I could feel the effects of the items on me. They told me not to get items with the same effect, otherwise they would badly interact with each other, the magic trying to do the same thing and competing for it, creating flaws and instabilities.

So my clothes now made me more resistant to damage, reinforced my elemental and magical resistance, and the coat especially allowed me to partly absorb spells thrown at me to release them back later on. Fantastic. Walking back, I used the boots not for their intended purpose, which was to make me harder to move by others, but to help me move faster without flying around, with a quick activation of the boots as I pushed on the ground.

It felt like I was much heavier, or really, it felt like stepping from a sprinter's block when I angled my feet right, allowing me to push harder without going too high. In the meantime, I started playing with my new skills while my grimoire flew around me. It was chock-full of curses and ready to be deployed. Let's start with checking my new status, then a bit of practice, and after that… snake for dinner?