LIGHTNOVELONLINE 106 – It’s a Research and Development Montage
A short time later, as she sat in the window, smoking Arrha and looking out over the docks, she found that she couldn’t call Barzai out. Looking to its system readout, the spirit’s status had gone from Fully Nourished to Exhausted - Cogniphagic Metamorphosis in Progress. Barzai became available again the next day, making itself known to Krahe just as she was cooking herself lunch while casually reading through Secrets of the Atropal. When she looked inward towards the raven spirit, its natural form shifted to a poorly-defined image of how she had imagined the Daemon Core. It then sent her a mental demand to be fed, and so, she did.
Time continued to pass. Krahe continued her investigation by day while studying and practicing theurgy by night. It quickly became a habit of Casus’s to stop by for dinner. The man often returned exhausted and covered in blood not his own, and as it turned out, it was due to the fact he was going out of his way to hunt down Hashem Family members; a direct investigation style that by its very nature often turned violent.
“Many of them have done nothing to deserve death, but I shan’t spare traffickers and drug-pushers. Not in a million turns of the Wheel,” he said.
Meanwhile, in her own investigations, Barzai became a second pair of eyes for Krahe. It gradually built up an understanding of the Daemon Core, and only when she was already four days into the process did Krahe read deeply enough to learn that this was a common practice for allowing a True Eidolon to manifest in more than its natural form. It seemed that the longer a True Eidolon was attached to someone, the stronger it grew and the more forms it could take.
While Barzai’s growth was something that would merely take time, conceiving of her own Theurgy was something wholly contingent on active effort.
At first, she experimented with trying to simply translate her keystone Thaumaturgies directly to an eidolon level of power output… And found that it just didn’t really work that way. All the disparate actions of carrying out the Thaumaturgy were muscle memory by now; by comparison, finagling an eidolon into carrying out the task was as different from doing it herself as doing a somersault versus programming a robot to do a somersault. Krahe had done something of the sort before, and she could do it again, it was only a matter of time. From her study of the discipline, she quickly learned that Theurgy wasn’t by any means analogous to programming, but she hadn’t expected it to be. That was just her closest point of comparison.
Several more days passed, and Krahe gained a stronger grasp on the intricacies of Theurgy, allowing her to translate some of her own skills. She reached ever closer to achieving what she had said she would do back in the underground gymnasium. Eidolons, as it turned out, very much liked to act through vessels, rather than directly - instead of an absurdly powerful beam, a short-lived construct would be given form to deliver that power. The power of an Eidolon was produced neither by thauma-burning nor thaumic fusion, but some vaguely understood third process; the only part that mattered, however, was that anathemists were known for achieving eidolon-like levels of output, and that, in turn, occultists were known for replicating the feats of anathemists in a safe manner using eidolons. From these writings, combined with various well-known theurgies, Krahe concluded that what she wanted to do was perfectly achievable.
After yet more days of effort, she arrived at a hybrid application that would benefit from her left arm’s unique properties as a living casting conduit as well as the advantages of dregshot. This meant that she had to source dregshot bullets, that was true, but Garvesh made that a non-issue, and even gave her a discount in his vengeance-stricken state. Her delivery method would be a construct-missile partially formed through her own power, adding an Entropy and effort cost to the theurgy in exchange for allowing it to be even more powerful and efficient. It would be purposely less powerful than a Bloody Reaper, due to a single-target design, allowing her to get more shots out of one eidolon - she wasn't sure how many, but she hoped for three per Chthonian Eel, so that she could have a full six-round clip.
With her nascent understanding of occultism, Krahe ended up using a crude method of refining her dregshot: embedding the occult pattern in writing. She would roll up the talisman so it rested against the walls of the casing and partly protruded outward around the bullet, crimping it inward and gluing it in place with an occult glue made using her own blood, the so-called “Unguent of Nug-Soth”. Leaving a baking dish full of the stuff overnight in the moonlight had the whole of the safehouse filled with stench, but such was the procedure laid out by Ibn Ghazi Barzai. All the remaining free space inside the bullet, she filled with Thaumine Powder that she had ground down into ultra-fine grains.
Out of this whole process, the talisman would be the hardest part. She started with a stack of talisman papers, and began the rite for embedding eidolon instructions into writing, focusing her mind on particular aspects of what the eidolon was to do as she meditated according to the guidelines, trying to commune with one of her own eidolons. A hard-to-perceive visual element would float by the edge of her awareness, ephemeral like the memory of a dream, and she would try to replicate it on the paper before it vanished from thought. Sometimes, even when she successfully drew the sigil, looking at it made her realize that the eidolon had misunderstood her, and so she would have to try again. She dug deep not only into her own objective understanding, but, according to the guidelines of the texts, she also dug up emotions to better communicate with the spirit.
As Krahe understood it, it was infinitely easier to make an eidolon understand hatred and murderous intent for an individual than it was to convey how a guided missile found its target through trigonometry and knowing where it was or wasn’t at any given moment. It was equally unsurprising and inconvenient that occult spirits worked on occult rules.
And so, with the glassing of Oasis being fresh in her mind, she dug into that hatred, and found the guidance portion coming out with remarkable ease.
There were supposedly more direct, faster methods, but they were, unsurprisingly, both advanced and kept closely guarded by those who knew them.
It took several hours, dozens of talisman papers, and an eye watering sum in magical ink to work out the full pattern… But it was done. Casus returned as Krahe was finishing the third copy, with the first and second framed up above the writing desk for reference, one for each side.
