Book 2, Chapter 9: Spell Improvement

[Alen]

The Stoneskin Rat was a relatively small creature, native to the Sandsea and other desert regions within the continent of Redaria. Standing roughly seven inches tall on its hind legs, it observed its prey—a small, blue insect. It stalked closer, darting behind a rock and peeking its small head out. Its little nose twitched fervently as it approached, the scent of the tantalizing blue insect filling its primitive senses with joy. It stopped behind a stone just a distance away. Power gathered in its hind legs.

Finally, with a little squeak, it sprung.

Teeth tore into the insect. Claws held it pinned to the ground. Its juicy green blood spurted out, splashing onto the tongue of the satisfied rat. The rat gorged on the insect for another second before pausing. Why wasn’t this insect resisting? It tilted its head. Did its teeth gain the power to kill bugs instantly? The rat licked up the juices and nibbled at the insect some more, reveling in the newfound discovery of its insect-annihilating buck teeth as it cackled in the rat-equivalent of joyous laughter. It would save some of the insect, even. It could feed its children with pride tonigh—

Sand all around the rat burst upwards, creating an inky-green box of insect chitin that trapped it within. The rat jumped, terrified. It clawed at the walls, but the chitin wasn’t even scratched. It grit its teeth and readied its strongest attack—the insect slaughtering tooth!

With a little screech, the teeth helplessly bounced off the box of insect chitin, doing as much damage as its claws did, which was to say, none. The rat stared in horror.

The top of the inky-green box opened, and a pair of emerald eyes stared in to look at the rat. The eyes flashed, glowing for a brief second before the walls all around the rodent suddenly bubbled into rapid motion, encasing everything but its head inside of a sturdy, mana-enforced chitin. The rat screeched in indignation, exerting its strength to the fullest in an attempt to break out. Its efforts proved futile. A finger reached into the box, and the rat snapped at it in anger.

“Fuck!” Alen cursed, waving his wounded finger about and narrowing his eyes at the rat. “If I get AIDS or Herpes from this wound, I’ll turn you into a walking, dick-shaped, skeleton rat.”

It squeaked derisively at him, and he grit his teeth. Alen gathered mana at the tip of his finger, adding a projectile property to a temporarily edited version of Numb Senses. It would weaken the effect, but Alen refused to believe his skill couldn’t incapacitate a lowly rodent. The spell shot forward, before blowing over the rat’s head like smoke. His spell didn’t seep into the rat’s body, but was instead repelled, flowing out of the box like the black plumes of a chimney. Alen noticed a sheen of light surrounding the rat’s fur like a second layer of skin. He frowned. This thing was magic resistant.

Alen gathered mana into his hand, using a little bit more than a percent of his total reserves—almost thrice of what he had just used. Conjuring Numb Senses into a projectile once again, it shot forward and sunk into the rat. The rodent immediately displayed a dazed expression, as if it had just awoken from a deep slumber.

The necromancer nodded to himself and touched the rat’s head with his finger once again. His mana flowed into its skull, and for the first time since coming to Redaria, he observed a living creature with his magic. Alen’s mana coursed through it, creating a sort of 3D image in his mind. All over the rat’s body, green motes of energy coursed through it, cycling around its physique and looping back into the mass of glowing multicolored strands inside of its skull. He nodded. There were more strands than the ones he found on recently killed subjects, and now, there were even motes of green light he had never seen before.

Alen glanced back at the inky-green beetle protectively blocking the path towards him and nodded once again. He turned his attention back to the rat.

The new strands inside the mass were more… emotional. It was conscious. While his summons took the part of the consciousness that was for processing bodily inputs and commands, he wasn’t utilizing, say, the summon’s soul. Memories, feelings, and experiences were different from the cold, detached ability to process. It was what made his undead more effective killers. Instinct to fight, purple strands to regenerate bones, and the emotionless part of the conscious that forced the body to move. He moved through the new strands of consciousness one by one, feeling different emotions course into his chest.

Fear, helplessness, and a desperate want to survive. These were the rat’s current feelings. Alen frowned, going through more of the strands within. Inside his chest, he gained a vague feeling. Somehow, he knew the rat had children. He knew where it lived, where it slept, what it ate.

Alen felt lost inside of the rat’s soul, and he felt himself losing a grasp of what he was—a human. He gritted his teeth and forcefully severed the thread of mana that connected him to the rodent. He fell back and landed on his ass, blinking as his eyes adjusted to the familiar sight of the canyon. What… was that..? He dazedly wondered, glancing at the box in amazement. For a moment, he was the rat. It felt like the images in his head wouldn’t stop until he saw the little rodent’s entire life play out with his own eyes.

He conjured a ball of water with his mana and drank, the cool liquid flowing down his throat. He let out a sigh. No more ruffling through the rat’s memories.

He stood up, and touched the rat’s head again, making sure to avoid the colorful core of the mass of strands. He searched through the outer layer—the subconscious part of the rat. The places in charge of running organs, repairing damaged bone and tissue… He stopped. These weren’t what he was looking for. Alen stopped and observed the furry creature again, before suddenly remembering the motes of green light that coursed through its little body. He sent his mana down from its head, probing the green lights with it. Immediately, a feeling of vitality surged into his chest, seemingly wiping away a small bit of the fatigue he felt.

The necromancer blinked his emerald eyes in surprise. Perfect, he thought.

Alen wrapped his mana around a part of the flowing green motes, before extracting it from the rat. Immediately, it looked to have visibly thinned, the previously plump rat looking like it had eaten scarcely over the course of a week. He felt a little bad as he sent the green motes into his body. He’d give the rat a few bugs later. Suddenly, as the lights covered in his mana sunk into his body, he felt an itchy, tingling sensation around his wounds. It was extremely weak, but it didn’t seem to be affected by Numb Senses. He felt a grin creep onto his face. He’d found it.

Moving about to collect the dead blue bugs he scattered around the area, he dropped them into the box. The chitin encasing the rat receded, and so did the walls, the rot properties of the mana within causing the small black-green box to disintegrate into fine black sand.

He nodded to himself. “Okay,” Alen breathed out. He went back inside his temporary hiding spot, a gap between two large boulders and dangling, shriveled weeds, and started editing his mana program for Blightbolt. He’d changed it to function with his new mana programming language the night before, and now, a few more tweaks was all he needed to succeed in creating a prototype for his life drain spell.

He kept the projectile property of the spell, but changed it like his newly edited version of Rotfire Blast, which concentrated power into a smaller, basketball-sized projectile that exploded upon contact instead of that excessively destructive cone of Rotflame. Not only did it save him more mana, it also increased how effective the spell was in general. Now, his eyes were set on creating two version of his drain spell that he could switch from freely. A projectile that exploded to become a storm of life drain in order to provide a surge of health, and a constant, beam of magic that steadily drained vitality over time.

As he’d already finished the concept over another sleepless night, he didn’t have to spend much time checking it for flaws in the final program.

Alen left his cubby hole, and with a snap of his fingers, his skeletal beetle. It was his only undead at the moment, but now that he wasn’t traveling anymore, Alen planned to keep them summoned until he reached the capacity he could control.

“Let’s go,” He told the beetle, which of course, didn’t respond.

The two moved forward, with the necromancer taking a safe position a few steps behind the beetle. Due to their relatively deep position within the canyon, or at least what Alen considered deep, encountering other monsters wasn’t very hard. Alen hid behind a rock and ordered his beetle to climb the walls of the canyon. The animated shell of inky-green chitin latched onto the walls and stalked forward, staring down at a centipede below. The thousand-legged creature was strange, but dangerous. The blue shell on its back was constantly in wriggling motion, looking very much like running water. It had a practice of hiding under the sand and luring over thirsty prey, before incapacitating and killing them with the neurotoxin dripping from its wickedly sharp mandibles.

It snapped threateningly at the undead beetle above, clattering its legs in excitement. Alen felt his skin crawl. Creepy.

He gripped the scar on his left palm, before letting out a breath and pointing his hand at the centipede. Clasped in his palm was a shard of inky green chitin, hissing with a black-green fog due to the excessive amounts of mana compressed within. Alen immediately ordered his undead to jump, and the beetle followed. It fell quickly, the horn on its head aimed at the centipede’s head.

Simultaneously, the necromancer released the Bone Spike spell he had within the piece of chitin. It exploded forward, a massive spike of reinforced insect exoskeleton stabbing out at the evading centipede.

Alen felt it connect. The centipede was skewered through the side, and with a splurt, green blood spurted out as the beetle scratched it with its horn. The beetle immediately pivoted its body to the side and rammed the creature. The centipede twisted it’s body. The two tails at the end lashed at the undead. The beetle crashed into the canyon wall, but came out relatively unscathed and managed into inflict another wound on the eighth-threshold centipede with its horn.

The insect wailed in a cacophony of high-pitched screeches. Alen watched it tear out a piece of the beetle’s face with its mandibles. It encircled the undead, wrapping around it. The beetle thrashed, but it was futile. Alen grinned and activated a spell.

Necrotic Blessing: Deathchill.

A screech of agony surged out of the centipede’s mouth as it backed up, the rot sinking into the unprotected flesh of its underside. With a bang, the undead beetle slammed into the wall, eliciting a pained screech from the thousand-legged monster. Its horn stabbed forward, and with a squeal of agony, the centipede thrashed around futilely, but ultimately stayed pinned to the canyon wall.

Alen approached it, but kept himself a safe distance from its thrashing pointed legs and sharp mandibles. His beetle’s shell was hard enough to be unaffected by the legs, but he wasn’t. Stretching his arm forward, he activated the prototype. Slowly, a tendril of black-green mana reached out and pierced the centipede, but it did not do damage, and instead looked as if it phased right through the carapace. As soon as it sunk a few inches deeper, the centipede began to wail in pained rage. It bucked its body wildly as green motes of light were sucked iut of its shell and traveled through the thread, before entering Alen’s body.

The latter’s forehead was drenched in sweat, his eyes scanning the blue screen before him as he constantly edited the spell.

Some of the motes of light would fade as it traveled, and keeping up the connection used up an obnoxious amount of mana. Using the constant use, Alen spotted the errors faster and worked to correct them one by one. He felt an uncomfortable itching in his wounds—wounds that were repairing themselves. The flesh wriggled and writhed, connecting to the other side in an effort to recover. Within half a minute, the wound on his side had fully healed, and the one on his arm was already beginning to start itching as it was repaired.

Finally, with a gasp, Alen canceled the spell, falling to his knees and sucking in a breath of air. Every time the motes of light entered him, he felt an intense discomfort, as if a whole arm was forcing its way down his throat to grab at his heart. He looked at the centipede. It didn’t look much different, but it looked to have weakened a little from his life drain spell and its incessant struggling.

It hissed at him, spitting out harmless fluids from its mouth as each of its legs repeatedly clattered against the beetle’s inky-green shell.

Alen looked at his bicep and sighed. He’d need a lot more of those lights if he wanted to fully regenerate his arm to normal condition. His mana was currently at around sixty-four percent, nearly a whole fifth of his mana pool drained away by his prototype life drain magic. Alen managed to fix numerous little errors and revised a few lines during his use, but he was sure the errors wouldn’t end there. There was still a lot more he had to fix for the spell to get into a useable state. Wasn’t there any other way to—

A shrill screech interrupted his train of thought. Alen frowned and looked to the side, only to spot a group of ants scuttling their way towards him. Each was as large as a hand, and the approaching mass looked like a wave of sand waiting to swallow him up. He didn’t feel too much panic. The ants were strong due to their numbers, and usually dominated even monsters like the centipede, but unlike said centipede, Alen had spells of mass annihilation.

Well, for ants anyways.

He pointed his palm at them, preparing to cast the cone-shaped variant of Rotfire Blast when a thought popped into his head. Wasn’t this a perfect opportunity to use his life drain spell’s alternative form?

Changing the mana program operating the mass of mana in his hand, a trick he recently figured out how to accomplish, Alen saw a black-green ball of mist gather in front of his outstretched palm. It continued to drain mana, until Alen winced as it reduced his capacity by thirty percent. His current spells were monsters in mana consumption, but when he managed to compress and increase their quality by enough, reducing the ‘processing power’ needed to run the mana program, he would have a devastating arsenal of spells at his disposal.

Finally, with a whoosh, the ball of mist sped forward and splashed into the mass of insects with a silent roar. Immediately, a large amount of ants let out miserable screeches as their bodies crumpled like dried weeds. The mist changed with every mote of light drained from the ants, looking like a patch of the night sky full of twinkling green lights. It began to gather onto itself, turning back into a ball full of compressed mana and vitality.

It shot towards Alen and slammed into his chest. A part of the mana he used for the spell returned to him, and he immediately let out a sound of surprise when the wound on his left arm stung as if he had just drunk a potion.

“Agh!” He gritted his teeth, taking a step back. The flesh inside his wound rapidly knitted together, eliciting a sharp pain that Alen was familiar with.

The regeneration came to a sudden stop. Alen looked up and glanced at the retreating mass of ants before turning to the still-pinned centipede. He killed it with a weakened Rotfire Blast to the head, then he used his beetle to snap a piece of the insect’s carapace off (with the required strands inside, of course. He wasn’t in that much of a rush), along with one of its long legs. Alen turned around, and then he ran from the scene of the fight. A new monster might come up at any moment, and Alen didn’t want to risk a third encounter with his current mana reserves.

His arm lugged on behind him. The flesh was significantly repaired, but the bone was probably still fractured. Alen entered his hiding spot and hauled the centipede’s leg in with him. With a grunt, he heaved it onto a table made via AutoBone and beetle chitin, before sitting down with a sigh on a somewhat shabby chair designed the same way.

Two of his objectives had been satisfied. First, his life drain spell was confirmed to be functional, and when Alen got it to manageable levels of mana-consumption, he’d let the system acknowledge it as a spell in his list. Secondly…

Alen stared at the centipede’s leg and felt his stomach gurgle out a complaint. He shook his head. No. He was not going to starve to death. His stomach had to stop being a little bitch for both of their sakes. He closed his eyes and manipulated his mana, finding the flame element for his mana-mix. Focusing all his efforts on cleansing it of Necrotic mana, he managed to completely clear it of the black-green element in a bit less than two hours. Alen wiped the sweat from his brow and conjured a clear, blue flame in his hand. He was spending less mana on Numb Senses, and what he’d used up a while ago had already been restored, so he didn’t worry about the cost of such a little flame.

He nodded his head and extinguished it. Alen walked outside and had his undead beetle snap the thing layer of carapace around the limb. He waltzed back inside his cubby hole 2.0 and lit the flame over his hand once again, carefully roasting the insect meat that he’d acquired.

It dripped with green blood, but he made extra sure not to get any of it on his already tattered robe.

Finally, with a final whoosh, the flame in his hand disappeared. Alen laid the meat on the table and assessed it. It had browned nicely, and although it lacked seasoning, it gave off an enticing smell. To make extra sure he wasn’t going to die after eating the meat, Alen took the time to catch another Stoneskin Rat. He coaxed the little bastard into eating the meat, and observed it for half an hour inside the chitin-box he’d used to trap it.

Seeing that the rat wasn’t wailing miserably on the verge of death, Alen shrugged and rushed back into the cubby hole, before he ravenously devoured the meat on the inky-green table.

It was a bit bland, with a trace of sweetness, but the arm-sized cylinder of meat sated his hunger by quite a lot. Alen let out a sigh and leaned back into the chair, staring at the light of the sun outside his literal man-cave. It was probably still around an hour or two past noon, and the heat was especially prevalent in the canyon outside. There were surprisingly a lot of trees and plant life scattered about, but not nearly enough to make up for the Sandsea’s scorching rays. Even worse, in this side of the Sandsea, Alen felt that it was even hotter than normal. He shook his head and looked back down at himself. It was time to get to work. Again.

He infused a large amount of mana into the centipede’s piece chitin, making it ready for summoning. Then, he opened up the programs for his new life drain spell, Rotfire Bolt, and Summon Skeletal Minion. As he worked on decreasing the mana-cost of the three spells, Alen let his thoughts wander. Now that Lynn and Roland were far away, he was able to fully experience getting the maximum amount of XP for a kill. Usually, it would be split into a 2:1:1 ratio, with the highest amount going to the person that landed the killing blow, but now, he was essentially receiving double that amount.

Alen knew Necromancy would fully show its potential in this canyon. While he was trapped in here, Alen planned to summon undead up until his max capacity, then use his little army to wipe out as many bugs as possible. It would not only give him the needed experience of controlling more than a dozen undead at once, but it would also let him pass mana thresholds at a speed that he’d never reached before.

Time passed relatively quickly. His eyes scanned the programs and fixed errors, along with constantly compressing the blocks of commands in order to lessen the mana cost. Alen’s legs would feel numb every now and then, so he stood up and did a few stretches, along with a few light exercises within the man-cave.

Apparently, those would help his physical stats grow by just a little each threshold, but the effects would truly show when he reached higher levels. He continued for another two hours, while simultaneously creating a new spell based heavily on Bone Spear. He’d be hunting for dinner soon, and this time, he wanted to taste some Giant Sand Viper. For that, he needed some spells that didn’t outright destroy his food.

Finally, with a slap of his knee, he stood up and looked outside. It was getting dark soon. He threw down a piece of blue chitin and activated the spell contained within. The giant centipede formed and curled around him protectively, edited by AutoBone to have sharper, barbed legs, a thicker carapace, two mouths, and a back covered in sharp spurs. He got on a seat he’d designed onto its back and ordered it forward.

He grinned. A snake was getting skinned tonight.

A blast of Rotflame exploded against the canyon wall, decaying rock and stone as it sent an avalanche of boulders into the path of a Sand Viper below. It twisted its body, agilely weaving through the falling horde of boulders unscathed. It curled around one of the rocks, the its mouth opened to spit out a glob of green fluid. The emerald-eyed young man chasing after the serpent saw this and raised his arm, a black-green spur ejecting out from inside his sleeve to form a shield-shaped piece of chitin that shot forwards to meet the dollop of acid. The piece of chitin was immediately destroyed, and the young man waved his arm downwards like a clap of thunder as a boom exploded out from above the canyon. A beetle shot down and slammed into the snake, the two bodies competing in a match of strength.

The necromancer hopped off from the giant centipede he was riding and set it forward. He gathered mana in his right hand and soon, a large ball of necrotic mist had formed.

Alen pushed his palm forward, and with a soundless scream, the ball of mist lunged forward into a tendril that phased right through the snake’s thick scales. The latter bit into the beetle’s head, tearing it clean off and sending the lifeless mass of chitin collapsing down. It was given no room to breathe, however. The centipede surged in and bit the snake’s neck, with both of the combatants hissing madly at the other. Thick, red blood splattered into the sand as the centipede’s sharp legs repeatedly stabbed into the snake’s skin. Shallow wounds built up, and blood flowed almost incessantly.

As the two large creatures fought, Alen ran towards the corpse of the beetle and infused the still-remaining pieces of consciousness into a piece of beetle chitin he had inside his robe. Depositing forty percent of his mana into the piece, he threw it down, and within seconds, the beetle had reformed to surge back into the fight.

Sweat poured down Alen’s face. In front of him were two blue screens, a status that told him about his rapidly draining mana, and one where he debugged the spell program of the life drain spell.

Dust rose into the air. The beetle had hauled and thrown the snake into the cliffside with its horn. With another boom, the centipede lunged, wrapping itself around the snake and eating away at the scaled creature’s flesh. The giant snake was rapidly weakening, both from its wounds, and the thread of mist that was draining the green motes of life from its body. Finally, with another thrust off the inky-green beetle’s horn, the snake’s body spasmed, before ultimately falling limp.

Alen closed the spell program and forced down the awful feeling in his throat and stomach. It appeared whenever he cast the life drain spell, but he could tell his body was adapting to it. Alen guessed that by the time he perfected its first version, he would no longer feel discomfort from using it.

He approached the corpse of the snake, ordering his skeletal centipede to rip out the flesh. Alen took a sample of both the scales and the bones, before ordering the centipede to pile the gathered flesh onto the beetle’s back. Seeing that all he needed to accomplish was done, Alen got on the back of the centipede and rushed out of the area, afraid of encountering any more foes. He refreshed the duration of Numb Senses on his arm and checked his mana. It was around twenty percent. He sighed. Mana was an ever-present problem that plagued him. When was he going to have the leisure of spamming spells as much as he wanted?

Idle thoughts passed through his head as he traveled back to his secluded spot. Soon, he had returned, and his mana had regenerated back to fifty percent.

Alen conjured a flame and immediately cooked the snake’s meat. He gorged on it, feeling even more ravenous when he realized this was his first meal in almost two days. It was nothing compared to what he experienced in his first week inside the forest, but that was another level of risk and danger he never wanted to feel again. A large part of the meat was left uneaten, and Alen grit his teeth as he completely destroyed it with a wave of Rotflame. Hunting for another meal the next day was better than risking being found by the apex predators of the area.

Most would come out during the night, and Alen already had bags under his eyes from lack of sleep. The constant need to refresh Numb Senses’s duration and the incessant sounds of battle outside kept him awake over the past two days.

While he had the two undead stationed outside, and with orders to attack any living thing below the tenth threshold that neared his hideout, Alen still didn’t feel safe. This canyon was different. It wasn’t like the forest of undead that had stronger foes the deeper he went in. Danger was spread out everywhere. Swarms of insects, powerful beasts, and monsters both stronger and weaker than him were littered all over the place. He remembered the lion-like beast near the oasis and shuddered. If he had rushed in and attacked it, he would probably be dead by now.

He checked his left arm. It had healed by a decent amount. Alen still couldn’t move it around, but the destroyed flesh had knitted up almost completely.

Alen impatiently tapped his fingers on the table made of insect chitin. Now what? He wanted to go out and leave the canyon as soon as possible, but Alen knew he would have a hard time doing so until he reached at least the tenth threshold. He couldn’t just waltz out and hunt in the middle of the night though. The lack of vision made it exceedingly dangerous, and all the stronger monsters became active after the sun went down. He sighed. No use rushing it.

For tonight, it was going to be spell programming once again. He’d be damned if he didn’t improve after another all-nighter. As for sleeping? His increased Constitution and Vitality somewhat reduced his need for it.

Sleep could wait after he got rid of the glorified vagina in his left bicep.