Chapter 22
As he walked down the street and prepared to cut into the forest to find his clearing-turned-ritual site, Zeth glanced over the requirements to conduct Demonic Covenant.
[Strength of sacrifice required: Moderate
Required ritual circle diameter: 8.81 feet (originally 10 feet)
Time required to draw: 4.41 hours (originally 5 hours)
Upkeep time required each day: 3.52 hours (originally 4 hours)]
They were pretty strange. To begin with, the required strength of sacrifice needed to activate it was the highest he’d seen—Empowerment Ritual had only recently risen up from ‘Low’ to ‘Moderately Low,’ and even that was getting difficult to manage at this point. So something all the way up to what he assumed was the next level, ‘Moderate,’ was almost certainly going to take quite a lot to activate.
On top of that, the diameter was also gigantic. Once again, when compared to Empowerment Ritual’s now-4.41 foot requirement, Demonic Covenant doubled the size of the circle. At least the smaller time requirement was nice—though, four and a half hours still wasn’t exactly a breeze. The strangest part of it all, though, was the upkeep time requirement.
Zeth finally understood precisely what it meant—the circle would effectively undo that many hours of his work each day, meaning he’d need to spend that much time repairing it if he wanted to keep it ready for activation from one day to the next. For all of his other rituals, that upkeep time was always a small fraction of the total time needed to draw the circle. But here, it was almost fully equal to the initial requirement.
Effectively, this meant that, unlike a Hellfire Ritual, he wouldn’t be able to do something like draw a few of these and keep them prepared for when they’d be needed in the future. Rather, if he wanted to summon a demon, he was likely going to be drawing the entire circle that very day. Which meant it would be basically impossible to summon a demon on short notice. And, with its massive diameter requirement, he wouldn’t be able to carry something like this around with him to activate whenever he needed to. At least, not unless he could reduce the diameter of his circles by an insane amount. Maybe that would happen eventually.