LIGHTNOVELONLINE 130 – De Re Theurgia
The brush was soon joined by an ancient-looking bamboo-slip scroll, pulled out of a partition with at least twelve more identical scrolls. Not just in make and thickness, but the wear patterns, too.
“Ah, and take this as well.”
“What’s the catch?” Krahe asked suspiciously.
“The scroll is a collection of oft-missed fundamentals and tricks I put together for my disciples, back when I still had any, so it is quite outdated. The brush is one of my many spares; consider it an investment. Have it checked if you so wish, there are no curses or scrying tags. If you wish to pay me, suggest some good texts on this land’s counterparts to my art. Advanced or fundamental, it doesn’t matter. I will require a full understanding, including the foundations.”
Krahe stowed the brush and talisman, her eyes glazing over for a moment as she looked inward. Her inventory now contained a bookshelf’s worth of texts from those commonly found to the rare and esoteric, and she named off those which were not too rare but which she had found useful.
“Secrets of the Atropal, The Reaper and its Legacy, Hammer of the North, De Re Theurgia, Thaumshot Modification and You, and… Retracing the Path: A Re-Evaluation of Paper as a Theurgic Medium. Zachariah of the Lost Sun Society should be able to provide copies of them all. The first two may seem like sensationalist slop at first reading, but they contain a wealth of fundamentals.”
A look of pleasant surprise, Yao somewhat hesitantly asked: “I shall start with your suggestions, then. I have one last request before you leave. Feel free to reject me, as it is entirely selfish, but…”
Her eye swept over the two of them, before landing back on Krahe. A palpable tension built over the few seconds during which she was silent.
“...I am well aware of your ability to Spirit Walk, Lady Blackhand. May I see it?”
A few more seconds of tense silence passed. Without uttering a word, Krahe simply did it, seeing little reason to refuse. At that moment, when flesh gave way to a form of smoke and orange-glowing metal ribs, with only two burning eyes as the sole distinguishable facial feature, what had remained of Yao Fu’s doubts was dispelled. Certainly, she had seen incontrovertible evidence of Krahe being who Yao thought her to be, but witnessing the shape of her astral body in person was different to the detached, oftentimes fuzzy and disorienting visions granted by the Eye of Tar.
Yao watched them leave, and spent some time afterwards re-enabling her lethal defenses. This was one of the reasons she was very careful about bringing others directly to her home; in her state, it meant that she had to remove many of her defenses. Neither the many talismans nor her puppets could be disabled remotely, Yao knew better than that. Even failsafe triggers such as the one she would embed into Crescent Jezail’s order were, in effect, hard-wired. Once it was placed, there was no removing or disabling it after the fact. This caution was born from the method by which Yao had destroyed one of the most powerful talisman-specialist sects in Tiengenzhen. Having not just seen remote-control features breached and exploited, but having done it herself, Yao had permanently decided to avoid including such vulnerabilities in her own creations.
One of the downsides of that security was relative unwieldiness when restricted in the way she was at this very moment. It wouldn’t be a problem she had to deal with for too long, if things went even a bit as she hoped.
Far in the south, in the deepest swamps of the Beyond Frontier, a man slept a restless slumber. Growling and chortling, gusts of steam blasting from his nostrils, his scales itching and frills twitching.
The sage, untold hero of the Great Plague, Ibn Ghazi Barzai, twisted and turned as knowledge forbidden to him bubbled up from the depths of his mind. Steered by forces beyond reckoning, he arose from his bed and scraped an angle-web most sublime upon the bamboo floor of his home, and sacrificed his own blood in place of the appropriate unguents upon its dark lines. Dozens of lines and impossible, twisting angles, superseding anything he had ever dared to record.
He snapped out of it ere he could begin the rite. The absence of something vital precluded it from taking place; the Liminal Coil. Neither his body nor his soul held the capacity to dive wholly into the Gulf, for he had feared just this,
Deepest dread hung over him as he took his Seven Spokes talisman in hand, gripping it with such fervor its spokes dug through his wards and his scales, drawing blood.
Barzai recited a prayer to Igaria, carrying out occult gestures with his left hand. Some less-versed in the true cosmology of the world would call this borderline heresy, but those who knew, knew. The talisman came alive, the world rippling, reality reasserting itself. He was here, far from the Wheel, far from civilization, hidden by this ancient forest’s spiritual canopy… And still, They found him. The Things From the Deep. The Things From Beyond the Astral Gulf. Ever since that cursed day, he hadn’t had a single peaceful night. Once he was certain there were neither rifts nor an impending archon flash, he called out his scimitar, pouring vast arcane power into the artifact. Its metal became wreathed in blue flame, and as he traced arcane sigils in the air with it, it swam through reality just the same as a mundane blade did through water. Its edge, alighted in blue flame, reflected things halfway between the material world and the astral.
In weeks, he had not had a single peaceful night of sleep, but this was the first when things became this dire. Until today, he knew not why it was so, until his blade reflected something familiar. A messenger. A Thing From the Deep, which had latched itself to his soul decades prior, and which, in his fervent desire to rid himself of the accursed Liminal Coil, he had entrapped as the guardian of that Relic until one arrived who was able to withstand the Seal of the Great King of Terror.
