Loopshard

The Covetous Vessel spell was quite complicated to pull off, and from how Sylvia had described its effect, along with his own understanding of how it should work, it was obvious the result wasn’t anywhere near as powerful. The System was clearly reducing its full effect, which, given that the spell technically had the ability to eliminate all of the bloodfiends or humans in Moonport in one go, was something to be expected. Allowing any player to have such devastating power at their disposal was clearly a bad idea.

The way to activate the spell was to first draw out a circle with a heptagram inside, then he needed to make an instruction in a language he didn’t understand, but which Sylvia apparently could read, since her melody shifted every time he made a mistake. Though she wouldn’t directly tell him when he screwed up, since apparently she wasn’t allowed.

If I could understand this language, then I would be able to fine-tune the instructions to be extremely precise, perhaps all the way down to telling the spell to target a specific person.

Once the ritual drawing itself was complete, he had to pile corpses within. With some experimentation, he found that three was the optimal amount. From how the Covetous Vessel formed, it reminded Adam of the Princely Raiment, since its size and duration depended on how much it was fed.

Sylvia made a sound when Adam activated the ritual spell with an injection of mana, causing the three corpses to flow together into one amorphous blob, before taking on an identical shape to the target dummy which he’d turned into a bloodfiend beast. Then the ritual creation lunged forward, fusing with the dummy and exploding them both in a shower of gore.

As it were, it would create a copy of the enemies whose corpses he used, and then it would seek out the nearest entity that matched them. The version he’d been shown by the Flayed Lady would’ve created a blob that split into many smaller creatures that would then seek out the nearest lifeforms that matched their flesh.

“Its power is greatly diminished, but you do not have to speak to activate it, alleviating the most common point of failure for such a complicated spell,” Sylvia remarked.

Although Adam understood the spell thanks to the Flayed Lady, he didn’t realise it was meant to have an activation phrase attached to it. “Would I have to say something in the same language as the writing?” he asked, looking down at the spent linework which had turned black.

“I cannot say,” Sylvia replied, but her melody told him he was right.