Sacrifice Mage

I won the auction with little trouble. The combination of Ascelkos’s efforts lowering the asking price and my own funds combined to hand me the treasure without a great deal of difficulty.

Of course, that didn’t mean I went completely unchallenged. As Ascelkos advised, I waited until the end of the round of bids had settled before adding a tiny bit to it as my own bid. This kept happening a few times, where I kept bidding just a bit above the last one to ensure I was continuously in the running.

One group, a foreign one from Sinthesar according to Ascelkos, copied my tactic. Of course, it was a simple one. It wasn’t like I could pretend I had carried out this ingenious ploy and could therefore reasonably be mad at it.

Still, it was annoying at having to constantly raise my bids. In fact, finally winning the treasure was tainted by the fact that I had ended up spending over two and a half hundred thousand gold on one little treasure.

“Cheer up,” Ascelkos said, thumping me on the back. “Auctions are always like this. You always end up spending more than you think you’ll need to.”

I shook my head. “You’re right. It doesn’t matter. Not because you said it doesn’t, but because a chunk of the profit the Adventurer’s Guild is making from everything to do with the Nether Vein is going to return to my pockets.”

“Oh, so you’re double dipping in this whole business! You’re even slyer than I thought you were, Ross.”

I grinned at him.

“You should have seen the looks on their faces when the announcer revealed who it was that won the auction,” Ascelkos said, laughing heartily as we left the auction hall. “The addition of Ring Four at the end was an extremely nice touch.”

I smiled, remembering the moment fondly. So many gawking stares when the auctioneer had finished introducing me. I was sure most of the attendees had been expecting some unknown noble or something along those lines, not some random cultist from Ring Four of Zairgon.

It was nice to see Ascelkos wasn’t like so many of the sneering nobles I had met. His upbringing was vastly different.

With the auction done, I headed out and found Linak, handing the treasure over to him. I could make neither heads nor tails of the strange device. It looked somewhat like a heart but made of cogs and gears. Instead of beating, it whirred every so often, kind of like my mana core.

“This is from the Nether Vein?” Linak’s eyes were so wide, I was sure they’d pop right out of his hawklike skull.

“Yeah,” I said. “And keep it down, please. I know you’re excited, but it’s probably best not to draw too much attention.”

“True enough.” Now he was hissing so quietly, I was sure it would be drawing even more attention. I sighed. “Can I take this with me?”

“Of course. That’s why I brought it to you. Thought it might help figure out the main issue with the Starlamp. If it can generate Netherthreads, it might help you figure out how to generate supplementary mana for Protostar too.”

I told him how the auction announcer had mentioned about the device being able to generate Netherthreads. That made Linak’s eyes widen. Not in fear, but in a calculating way like he was re-evaluating a lot of his decisions within the new context of the possibility of Netherthreads.

“I don’t think it’s something we should mess with,” I said. I remembered all too well what those things were capable of within the Nether Vein. Even without it, when they had infected my mana core, they had trapped a literal malevolent spirit in there. “You’ll need to be extremely careful.”

“I will, I promise. I’m well aware of everything you went through.”

I nodded. That was the most I could ask of him anyway. It wasn’t like I could just back out of my promise to provide him with Nether Vein treasures just because I had learned there might be complications.

Although, I was honestly a little surprised there weren’t more safety checks and the like involved. Why weren’t the Councillors keeping a closer eye on this stuff? Se-Vigilance of all people would have been well aware of the dangers inherent with something that could literally produce Netherthreads, right?

I shook my head. We’d just need to proceed cautiously, just as we’d have done whether others had cautioned us to do or not.

For the rest of the day and the next, I focused on actually enjoying the last bit of the magic festival. All this time, I had been providing entertainment to the festivalgoers. It was high time I took some entertainment for myself.

To that end, I joined my friends in experiencing everything the magic festival had to offer.

I toured a lot of the other booths with my adventuring party. Cerea was frequently forced to hide her jealousy at the way different people were using different Aspects. I had never seen her stare enviously at water mages creating creatures made of liquid, at golemancers making automatons perform cartwheels, or at illusionists conjuring dreams into reality.

Admittedly, a lot of those were both powerful and intriguing. Even I wasn’t immune to the huge variety of magic on display.

I spent way too long trying to figure out how one woman was making fabric out of literally anything she got her hands on. Didn’t matter if it was earth or wood, fire or water, or just thin air. She spun strands and strings from everything. That was crazy.

Ugnash enjoyed the magical food the most. The majority of it was normal dishes somehow infused with mana. Apparently, advanced cooking Paths allowed that perfectly.

Khagnio loved the ones that were participatory. As in, the booths where the festival goers could take an active hand. Being a Gold-ranked rogue, half the time he would completely upset the poor mage’s intentions and promptly get kicked out of the booth, hooting and cackling all the while.

“No, Khagnio,” I said exasperatedly. “You can’t steal a summoner’s pet and take over their little magic show.”

The last bit had been his own words, not something I was embellishing on my own.

Khagnio just chortled with a soft hiss. Thankfully, he contained his tendencies after one too many glares from Cerea and me.

I also took the time to enjoy some of the more spectacular displays the mages of Zairgon had orchestrated. Those were grander works that any single mage would have a lot of trouble performing on their own. Things like entire magic-enhanced plays and dramas, a ten-a-side game of what felt like a weird mix of basketball and football, and even several different competitions of magic.

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After I placed first on the “lifting” tournament—a series of rounds to see how much one could lift, how high, and for how long—I was promptly shadow-banned from all the other competitions.

Ah, well.

“Wow!” Sreketh’s eyes were shining as she took in the ongoing stage play. The actors were riding magic dolphins made from ice and water, on a short adventure to defeat a pirate who could rain cannon shots from the sky. It was pretty intense. “This is incredible, Ross!”

“Yeah, it is. I wish I had popcorn…”

“What is popcorn?”

I thought about explaining but she was soon distracted as the big fight between the seaborne adventurers and the evil pirate started. My ears hurt a tiny bit when she shrilly cheered for the good guys.

Eventually though, all good things come to an end. The people attending the festival began departing, including the foreigners who had come to enjoy it. I performed one last session of Gravity-fuelled rides for the festivalgoers. A lot of them said they’d miss it. I told them to keep an eye out for it the next time the festival occurred.

A part of me was glad for the end of the festival. Things could go back to normal now. And by normal, I meant days spending training my Aspects and Attributes, learning new Augmentations and Affixes, and generally ranking up everything I possessed.

A part of me wanted to bless the fact that I wasn’t stuck in some lame nine-to-five job here on Ephemeroth just as I had been on Earth. The only things drawing on my time were the things I actually cared about, stuff I wanted to put energy into. Like the Sun Cult and all my fellow cultists. Like the friends I had made in Zairgon. They were worth it.

Good thing they hardly ever took up too much time, though. It let me focus on the new Affix idea I had gotten.

Basically, what if I could affect people being affected by my light? As in, if I summoned up some Illumination, could the light debuff them? Could I enact some more unique interactions that ended up benefiting me?

Of course, I didn’t have a free Affix slot for a new one to take its place. I’d have to wait till I hit Gold with Illumination. But it wouldn’t be long now. I’d just need to hunt for a breakthrough when the time came.

The real problem with it was that I couldn’t experiment with it on my regular test subjects like I’d have hoped to. The Scarthralls were terribly allergic to the light I summoned up, and though we had been training up their resistance to it as well as their ability to regenerate wounds, I wasn’t going to callously subject them to torture.

“We’ll be fine, Cultist Ross,” Lujean said. He did sound very convincing, but I wasn’t going to be fooled so easily.

“Nope,” I said. “No way. I’ll figure it out on my own.”

That said, I had other things I wanted to train with the Scarthralls, and the rest of the cultists too. Everyone on Ring Four was on a bit of cloud nine after the fun of the festival. It reminded me of the importance of things like that.

People needed rest and relaxation. They needed entertainment. Things to take the edge and stress off their daily lives.

I couldn’t figure out what to do about that. Not on the same lines. The idea of setting up a permanent Gravity-fuelled ride in Ring Four was silly. Most people would just grow tired of it after the first week. Instead, I looked to what I was actually capable of. I looked to Ritual.

Of course, I couldn’t force people to relax. Instilling the idea of taking breaks, of taking some time off to maybe do something for nothing but fun, wasn’t something I could do in one day. Most people didn’t even get what I was talking about at first. The idea of proper work-life balance was a bit too… Earth-coded for me to explain easily. Too much baggage.

Instead, I tried talking about it in terms of just taking it easy. Of the need for having everything in its proper time and place.

“You’re already doing it,” I pointed out to the Scarthralls. “What do you guys do when you aren’t training with me or are busy with cult stuff?”

Lujean and Jalais looked at each other.

“Depends on what we’re in the mood for,” Jalais said. “And what we each like.”

“Jalais likes reading children’s books,” Lujean said.

His companion glared at him. “I’m just trying to… revise the things they taught us! Even Cultist Ross said that being educated was important.”

The other Scarthralls snickered. I hadn’t taken Jalais as someone who liked reading, but it fit, now that I thought about it.

Everyone else reported things of a similar nature. Atholaine, Lujean, and Vandre all liked to take strolls to the outer edges of Ring Four and wonder what it would be like to travel beyond the city limits. Sigrouen just slept. But essentially, they all had their own ways of relaxing.

“And that’s what we’re going to focus on,” I said. “We’re going to slowly make relaxing a part of our routine, and once we do, it’ll become ritualistic. It’ll become something we can say is an actual tradition that we follow.”

I was a little dubious whether it would work. We also had to experiment with what sort of signs and ritualistic actions would actually signal to the Weave that we were performing a proper Ritual even when we were just relaxing. It wasn’t going to happen in one day, nor was it something desperately urgent, so I didn’t push it too much.

“We can train with your Illumination too, Cultist,” Vandre insisted later, when we were sparring together. The Scarthralls were still a little hung up about the fact that I was reluctant to train my new Illumination Affix idea with them. “That’s what we’ve been working towards to resist.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe I’ll make Sreketh and Aurier squint.”

That reminded me of one other person I could rely on for this, as well as getting some other training in.

“I was a little busy,” Gutran said when I asked him why he hadn’t cared to visit the magic festival. I had asked him for some training sessions again, and he had obliged. Apparently, he was never too busy for me. I’d need to find a way to be properly grateful for that. “My wayward apprentice really thinks it’s time to ramp up our business and I… decided I won’t be holding him back.”

I raised my eyebrows at Aurier, who flushed. It wasn’t just from the heat. Now that I thought about it, I hadn’t seen him at the festival either, not for long at least.

“Well, I’m glad,” I said. They had already said something about being busy with booming business before, and this just went along with that. “If there’s some way I can help, please let me know.”

Gutran grunted. “You’ve helped plenty. You’re the one who kickstarted this whole mess, what with you bringing in all the adventurers and whatnot.”

I grinned. Grumpy but appreciative, as Gutran ever was.

We focused on training again. I had felt like my physical Attributes were lagging behind a little, so I had requested Gutran help me rank them up a bit. We followed the usual tactics. Evading to help with Agility, taking powerful hits to rank up Vitality, and sparring with unrestrained intensity to help raise Power.

With me being Gold-ranked now, they weren’t going to show any improvement easily. I spent literal days training with Gutran—in between all the other things like cult duties that I needed to take care of—and got one measly rank in Vitality.

[ Rank Up!

Your Vitality Attribute has risen by one Rank.

Vitality: Gold VI ]

Well, it was something.

The other reason I happily trained with Gutran was because he wasn’t too bothered by me shining light upon him. His nictitating membrane had the additional effect of shading his eyes against any radiant harshness. I had thought they were just for underwater use, like how crocodiles had them, but apparently not.

“What are you even trying to accomplish with all that light of yours?” Gutran asked.

I supposed just because he wasn’t too bothered by it didn’t mean it wasn’t annoying at all. So, I reduced the intensity of my Illumination.

“I’m trying to give it some added juice,” I said, before explaining my terrible phrasing to Gutran. “Like something extra. An added weight—”

I froze. For the past couple of days, I had been thinking of the potential new Affix as something to simply debuff enemies. But what if I could make it a little more complex? What if I could inflict my other Aspects automatically while just shining Illumination upon my opponents?

What if people affected by my summoned light were weighed down too, or suffered vaporizing heat, or both?

“Very intriguing,” Gutran said when I told him about my new idea. “I have heard of certain Aspects complementing each other in that manner. A fellow soldier was a little infamous for using his Aspect of Noxiousness to not only flood enemy camps with gas but also allow the rest of us to inflict our Aspects from a distance.”

It was rare for him to talk about his war days, and honestly, that just made me wonder if that counted as a war crime or not. Unfortunately, he didn’t have a lot of insight on how it worked. Other than one key detail, that was.

“It’s normally not possible to do something like that with just a special Affix,” he said. “You need an Augmentation to connect through all your Aspects.”

I smiled. “It’s a good thing I ranked my Thauma to Gold, then.”