Stygian Mage

With a stroke of luck, Soren had found an egg of a Magic Insect. Although he didn’t know which Rank 1 Initiator in Eastwood had it or how they had found it, he didn’t care about it. Even if that person knew what they had in their Storage Pearl and had plans for it, it didn’t matter as it ultimately became Soren’s.

Now strolling through the market for some daily supplies, Soren only had one thought in his mind; the method for hatching the egg. If Soren had to explain the whole thing in one word, it would probably be ‘bloody’. This was because the method for hatching this egg actually needed blood from the Initiators.

Only after reading about this in the book did Soren understand the reason why Garlon had two vials of Initiators’ blood in his Storage Pearl. According to the book, this method of using Initiators’ blood was actually not exclusive to hatching a Crystal Albarose’s egg; in fact, the same method could be used to hatch other Beasts’ or Insects’ eggs.

After thinking about it, Soren also realized that the other items that Garlon had requested back in the trade meeting were actually all Magic Insects’ eggs which were ranked in the ranking list of the brown book; Garlon had actually requested the eggs of the Magic Insects that were in the top 5 of the ranking list. It was clear from this that Garlon was planning to use the method written in the book to hatch a Magic Insect’s egg. And he would have succeeded in getting a Crystal Albarose’s egg if only he was able to kill Soren that night. 

……..

The time was afternoon and the temperature of the town had risen a little bit. But even though the winter sun tried its hardest to warm up the earth, the chilly wind blowing from time to time kept destroying all its efforts and chilled everyone in its path to their core. Even Argus who was used to living in the snow snuggled tightly in Soren’s inner pocket after getting a hit from the chilly wind. Of course, some of it was just Argus acting like a spoiled child; after all, he was just a few months old.

Soren had already bought all the supplies that he needed and was now walking towards a restaurant to have his lunch. Even though it was possible for the Initiators to support their life on just Mana after reaching a certain level, Soren wasn’t there yet; he could live just on Mana for some time, but he would have to eat after a while. Of course, even if he could survive purely on Mana, he would still want to eat food from time to time. After all, he liked eating food; especially spicy food.

Walking around in the area before, Soren had noticed that the atmosphere of the town was very normal; it was like the Beast Tide happening outside the walls was just a dream. It was the same in the restaurant too that Soren just walked into. People in groups were sitting around their table and were just enjoying their normal lunchtime. From this, he could easily guess that Captain Hans probably had something to do with this; maybe he had blocked the information and these people knew nothing about the intensity of the Beast Tide slowly increasing. Of course, all of this had nothing to do with Soren as he couldn’t care less about what Captain Hans was doing. He had already rejected to protect the wall, so all of this was irrelevant to him now.

Seeing Soren walk in, the waiter quickly came forward and led him to an empty table. This table was a little closer to the window, so the view could be considered somewhat good; at least compared to the tables that were in the corner of the hall. Ordering the food and drinks that he and Argus liked, Soren sat down on the wooden chair in silence and let Argus out of his jacket and onto the table.

“Grandpa, are we really born from a tree?” Just as Soren was about to mentally cut all the sound from around him, he heard a young boy sitting beside his table ask a question to his old grandfather.

“Who told you that? Don’t believe such things; it’s just a bunch of nonsense.” The grandpa, clearly getting agitated upon hearing his grandson’s words, retorted while thinking of the person who might have told these things to the young boy.

“But mama said that the Tree of Life created us all.” This time, it was the young girl sitting beside the boy who repeated what her mother had told them.

“That whore. I really have to teach her a lesson this time. Teaching these rubbish things to the kids,” The old grandfather murmured in a barely audible voice which only Soren could hear with his <Elemental Sense>; it had already become a habit of his at this point to use <Elemental Sense> to scan his surroundings from time to time.

“Do you guys remember what I taught you last time?” Temporarily stifling the thought of punishing his daughter-in-law, the old grandfather gently asked his lovely grandchildren.

“Yes, grandpa!” Both children said together in unison after they heard their grandfather’s question.

“Good. Remember, it was God who created us all. Don’t listen to what your mother says anymore, understood?”

“Okay,” Once again, the children said together with a similar tone.

…..

While waiting for his food to arrive, Soren started thinking about the topic of ‘God’ and the ‘Tree of Life’; this conversation between the grandfather and his grandchildren had reminded him of that.

From all the information and knowledge that Soren had gathered so far, he knew that the concept of ‘God’ had only circulated in Astara in the recent millenniums. As for the ‘Tree of Life’ that the young girl had mentioned, it was actually the other name for the ‘Abarethien’ that many Initiators knew about; it was an Enfari word which meant ‘Tree of Origin’.

For many people, it was quite ridiculous to believe that their kind had been born from a tree. And with the passage of time, this notion of disbelief slowly turned into the denial of the standing facts related to the ‘Abarethien’. This rejection from the masses then gave way to the concept of god, and thus, created the current situation. Of course, this rejection only came from the people who were unable to become an Initiator or forever stayed at a lower layer; after all, many of them needed to believe in an almighty entity to support their fragile mind.

While many Initiators also didn’t know the whole truth behind the ‘Abarethien’, they at least knew that it existed and that it was very intimately connected to the system of Initiators.

According to what Soren knew, the war that had messed up the whole universe had happened because of this ‘Tree of Origin’. After getting out of Eastwood, Soren had gathered a lot more information in the towns that he had visited; the topic of this war was also included in there. This war that had destroyed many worlds and had caused many worlds to become a Barren World had actually divided the Asadiens into groups. As for how many groups there were or what they were called, Soren didn’t know; none of the towns that he had gone to so far had that information.

Apart from that, Soren had also obtained more detailed information on how the concept of Major, Minor, and Barren World came to be. Apparently, this classification had to do with a World Core’s capacity to retain Mana. A World Core was basically the core of a planet that the whole ecosystem relied upon. Not only that, but this World Core was also responsible for retaining the Mana coming in from outside the planet. And based on this ability to retain Mana, the World Core was divided into grades; Major Grade, Minor Grade, and Barren Grade.

Consecutively, the planet with a certain grade of World Core was noted as that grade; a planet with a Major Grade World Core was called Major World, so on and so forth.

Before the time of war, this way of classification was very loosely applied to the worlds and barely had any use. That was because, at that time, most of the worlds were above the minimum standard for a Major World; basically, most of them had a Major Grade World Core. Only after the war did this classification become widespread and turned into the norm for dividing the worlds accordingly. This was because a large number of World Cores were damaged in that war and thus, had turned from Major Grade into Minor or even Barren Grade.

This was the general history of the war that many Initiators knew about. As for how much of it was true, Soren could not tell as he did not have anything else for comparison.

….

Food arrived as Soren came out of his thoughts and helped the waiter arrange the plates on the table. By the time he was done, Argus was already jumping up and down with his stomach constantly letting out growling sounds.

Enjoying the moment with Argus, Soren forgot what he was thinking about before and just focused on the food.

After they were done stuffing their stomach, Soren paid the bill with the Mana Card and went out to go back to his room. They were supposed to go to the jungle the next day, so he still had one more day to spend. Given that he still needed to deal with the Crystal Albarose’s egg, Soren decided to use this time to continue with that. As for the simulations of the spell formations of his defensive spell and his cultivation technique, he was going to start doing that again after he was done with this.

Reaching the room, Soren first changed into comfortable clothes and then started working on the method for hatching the egg.

The reason why this method needed the Initiators’ blood to work was that their blood contained the required vital life energy; the eggs of Magic Beasts’ or Magic Insects’ needed that energy to hatch. And the method written in the book was about using a specific spell formation to burn the blood of the Initiators and then turn them into life energy; transferring all that into the egg. Of course, Beasts of the same rank had more life energy than the Initiators. At the same time, though, their energy was also very aggressive in nature and would do more harm than good to the eggs. This was why it was mentioned in the book to not use a Beast’s blood for this method; after all, the method written in the book was not the natural way of hatching the eggs.

As for the spell formation needed for this method, it was something that Soren was somewhat familiar with. The reason for that was that this spell formation actually had a similar structure to one of the spell formations that were used in Potioneering; the similar part of both the spell formations was basically for temperature control. Soren had already practiced with such a spell formation a few times before and had a basic mastery over it; he had practiced it before when he was trying to use Mana to do simple things. To be on the safe side, though, Soren did not directly start using the method. Instead, he first practiced controlling the spell formation again and again, and only when he thought that he was good enough did he decide to continue; as a bonus, he was also able to master the ability to use just his Mana to control temperature during this.

Finally deciding to give it a go, Soren started preparing for using the method mentioned in the book. Setting up the spell formation was pretty easy; Soren was already used to it by now. Taking some time to do things perfectly, Soren created the spell formation again on the floor with his dagger; of course, he cared not one bit about damaging the hotel’s property. Done with that, he then took out the crystal egg and placed it in the center groove of the spell formation. After that, he took out one of the two vials of blood that Garlon had gathered and opened its cork. He then carefully and slowly poured all of its content over the spell formation while making sure not to get any of it on the egg.

After that was done, Soren threw away the empty vial aside and focused on using the spell formation. Given that he was already able to use his Mana to manipulate temperature, Soren was easily able to control the spell formation and start the process to burn the Initiator’s blood.

But as the blood started burning, it released a strong stench that permeated the whole room; it smelled very similar to burnt hair, just intensified multiple times.

Wan!

Wan!

With the stench assaulting his nose, Argus was finally unable to bear it anymore as he started barking; trying to get Soren’s attention. His nose was extremely sensitive, so this was simply torture for him. Seemingly, this was a unique characteristic of the spell formation which was also used as an identifier to know that things were going smoothly.

Seeing Argus reacting like that, Soren could not help but divide his mind and create a barrier around Argus made purely of Mana; this was also one of the simple uses of Mana that he had learned. This barrier was basically useless against any form of physical attack, but it could be used in situations like these; to prevent the smell or minute particles from getting inside the protected area.

Only after he did that, did Argus relax and lay down beside Soren, watching all his actions with his beady eyes.

……

It took some time for the whole process to finish but Soren was able to finish the whole thing without a hitch. However, even after the process was over, the egg did not change in any visible way. And if Soren did not have <Elemental Sense> which allowed him to see the flickering signs of life in the egg, he would have certainly thought that the process was a failure.

Now knowing that the method worked, Soren finally gained a bit of hope in being able to hatch this egg. He didn’t know how long it would take but he was certain that he would be able to do it one day.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------XXXXX-----------------------------------------------------------------------------