Chapter 513 – Boulders

‘Straight to Refined, huh? Not bad!’ Micky thought, pressing his excitement down before it showed on his host’s expression by mistake. The last thing Marnok needed was to have to explain to his crewmates why he was the only one thrilled to be starving on a deserted island.

Thinking back to the spell, Micky had to admit that he wasn’t all that surprised by its classification. The new field of magiscript that he had just invented had an extremely high barrier of entry. In fact, he wasn’t sure that his latest Spectral Art was easier to cast than his Instantaneous Formation, and his Status had listed that one as Masterful.

At the same time, he understood that Phoebe’s Decree took several things into consideration when registering a new spell. Complexity was an important factor for sure, but so was potency. Viewed from that angle, the powerful formation that he had used to bring down one of Thess’kala’s most talented disciples was worlds apart from his latest trick.

Internal Runecrafting demanded his undivided attention for a prolonged period of time and didn’t even give him that much in return. Right now, the best he could manage was to replicate the effect of a cheap concealment bandage – something that even a novice enchanter could prepare with ease.

‘Oh well… it’s still proof of concept that my idea has merit. Every new field has to start somewhere,’ he consoled himself.

All things considered, Micky did have a vague plan on how he was going to upgrade his boosting art. Ideally, it would serve as a direct improvement over the original Dance of the Savage Gods – not the Carnival, the Symbel, or the Symphony. Those were even more powerful, but they were tailored to Micky’s unique combination of cores, affinities, and other abilities.

He didn’t want to create the new spell merely for his own sake. His ancestors on Huehue had originally intended to elevate the technique further, though Rhaziel and his goons had prevented them from ever completing their project.

‘I’ll do it for them. And for Remior too.’

Micky wanted to pick up where the gods had left off, creating a spell that worked for every affinity, just like Circulation and the Dance. The latter already provided a person with enough mana capacity and regeneration to touch upon the next grade, but the boost was temporary and incomplete.

The next step would be to truly compress the mana to the next grade, which Micky guessed would bring about a much deeper physical enhancement, extending one’s lifespan like a regular promotion.

His recent ventures in potionmaking had already given him a blueprint to follow. Conveniently, his spherical cauldron was shaped just like a mana core, so many of the key details would hopefully translate quite well from one application to the other.

‘Mana cores are complex and delicate organs though,’ he reminded himself. ‘I’ll need to be careful to avoid any injuries and make sure that the core still works properly afterwards.’

Normally, mana cores couldn’t compress or support mana of the next grade. The whole point of drinking elixirs was to cleanse them until they could. Micky would have to use runes to pick up the slack. He’d also have to make the organs gather and compress mana automatically, otherwise his grade would drop the moment he stopped paying attention.

Finally, he doubted that he would be able to force more than a single artificial advancement. Much like his cauldron was currently limited to potions just two grades higher, Micky knew that he wouldn’t be able to strengthen the organs endlessly with magiscript alone.

This meant that he’d have to continue cleansing his cores the good old way, drinking Aurora Dew multiple times per day – working towards his next natural promotion. And he didn’t want to keep removing and reapplying the runes, so he’d have to design them in a way that didn’t interfere with beast mana.

‘There are several major problems that I’ll have to solve,’ Micky thought.

He’d have to plan the enchantments out and buy whatever books he was missing from the Vault. He’d also have to get countless times better at drawing them, because struggling to keep a single rune active inside his core just wouldn’t cut it.

More importantly, he’d have to find a way of making the enchantments permanent, since he couldn’t afford to actively maintain them. One option would be to use solid mana types. Between Crystallization and ice mana, his bodies already technically had the means to craft permanent enchantments inside his own cores, but that went against his hopes of making the spell usable by every affinity.

‘I wonder whether a mortal can learn to craft solid seals like Metatron’s…’ he thought, creasing his host’s brow.

The spatial seal that the titan had sold him was made entirely out of space mana, and Micky was pretty sure that wasn’t normally a solid mana type. If he could copy the god’s methods, he’d have the means to turn every single affinity into a solid material to forge his enchantments out of.

Pondering over this some more, Micky felt that it was a viable approach, though it created a bunch of new issues. Leaving aside whether he was even capable of learning Metatron’s technique, he had no idea whether the titan would be willing to sell him the information.

‘I’ll have to look into this the next time I’m there. If I can’t buy it with credits, maybe I can claim it from the reward pools after clearing the sixth wave of the challenges.’

If it wasn’t in the Red or Orange pools, it might be in the Yellow or Green ones. Gabe had even managed to get a demigod’s soul mana that way, so Micky felt good about his odds. And even if the information wasn’t in the system, he could still try trading Metatron something for it.

Once he had everything he needed from the Vault, it would be time to essentially perform alchemy inside his cores. The thought of treating his own body like a cauldron was quite scary, but it should be safe as long as he approached it with sufficient caution. As soon as he had something that worked, he would need to solve the issue with the elixirs too.

‘I suppose that I can’t keep relying on the Scribing trait forever either, otherwise the spell won’t be useable by other people.’

That wasn’t a priority of course. It was already going to be extremely difficult to reach his goal with the trait’s help, let alone without it, so Micky wasn’t in a rush to get rid of his spectral crutches just yet.

Even so, he was happy with the plan. It would admittedly involve a lot of challenging steps, but Micky didn’t see any of them as insurmountable. He’d just have to tackle them one at a time – which wasn’t anything new to him.

‘Most of those things can wait until later anyway. Right now, the best use of my time is to help Marnok while getting better with Internal Runecrafting.’

Micky was about to resume working on his spell, when he noticed that something had changed in the outside world. The sailors had stopped walking at some point, having probably reached the spot along the coastline closest to their destination. They’d gathered up, staring at the jungle ahead while discussing how to proceed.

Some wanted to do things more cautiously – to get in, find something edible, and immediately return to the beach. They weren’t necessarily against heading toward the Saint’s tomb eventually, but they wanted to take their sweet time preparing for it. They didn’t want to risk it until everyone was fully fed and rested, and they had slowly mapped out the area.

Others disagreed, insisting on going straight for the treasure. Apparently, their information already gave them a good idea of where it was located, and they reasoned that it was best to spend as little time inside the jungle as possible. Caution was good, but not if it meant giving the monsters dwelling in the depths of the island more chances to ambush them.

Micky didn’t much care what the sailors ended up choosing, his attention shifting to his host’s surroundings. The beach wasn’t as empty anymore – at some point, a few boulders of various sizes had appeared, jutting out of the sand. They were sleek and pitch black, most of them sporting irregular shapes that left no doubt that they had been formed naturally.

He keenly noticed a few with oddly canonical shapes, however, giving him a weird feeling. Micky wouldn’t call them half-spherical exactly, and their texture didn’t look any different from the regular boulders, but he thought that they appeared a little too similar to one another.

Scanning them with Mana Sense, he came up empty. No wonder the other sailors hadn’t thought much of the objects. Was he really just imagining things?

Wanting to be sure, he searched inside his spatial seal, finding a tiny piece of his scythe that he’d managed to salvage earlier. It was barely as long as his index finger, and he didn’t have a single drop of phantom mana left to repair it. Even if he tried to forcefully feed air mana into the adaptive runes, he guessed that they would distort the construct’s shape into something unrecognizable long before he managed to regrow the weapon.

The scythe wasn’t the point, however.

Quietly summoning the object to his host’s hand, he clenched his fist, shattering the construct. Micky ignored the grey powder trickling through the gaps in his fingers. He couldn’t un-crystallize his mana, but his reinforced weapons contained traces of soft mana as well.

There wasn’t much, though he was able to send a tiny amount to his host’s eyes, activating Soul Vision. The magical sense only flashed for a fraction of a second before fizzling out, yet it was just about long enough to give Micky a better glimpse into the strange rocks.

The sight that had unfolded before him sent a chill down his borrowed spine – a silver silhouette burned patiently inside each of the oddly-shaped boulders!

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A/N: Book 1 is live on Amazon and Audible later today!

I'll post a dedicated announcement for it soon, and you can expect the first bonus chapter to drop some time later, so keep your eyes open for it xD