“This…” I admitted to Lenore, over our mental connection, “might have been a mistake.” Once again, my curiosity managed to cause me trouble, or should I call it anguish? Earlier, when checking on Rai, I had managed to increase the amount of information I learned when using my Blood Magic as a diagnostic tool and after we were done eating dinner, I had the bright idea to use that new tool on myself. If I was able to learn a little about the local anatomy by observing the healing process within Rai, I should be able to learn more, by observing my healthy body, or so I thought.

My idea was correct but I should have remembered what some call the sausage-principle. In simple terms, if you love sausage, you really don’t want to see how it is made. Or, in regards to my own experience, just because your body is able to do something doesn’t mean that you want to know too much about it. It was one thing to know that my stomach contained rather potent acid or that my gut was home to a variety of bacteria that tore apart the food I had eaten earlier, it was a whole other thing to witness it closely, by mental observation.

It didn’t help that my Blood Magic didn’t come with a convenient zoom-function, it worked on my own mental focus, giving me a far too intimate image of my digestive-system than I would have liked, making me wonder if I would ever want to eat again.

“Don’t think about it as part of your body, simply think of it as something you observe.” Lenore suggested, while sharing her own thoughts and ideas. She was quite interested in the way the micro-organisms turned food into usable energy, what I thought was Life Astral Power or Vitality and the by-products I had mentally labelled as Death Astral Power and finally the simple, material waste.

Curiously, she was most interested in that material waste and what happened to it. I was rather amused at her fascination, wondering if the developers had foreseen this occurrence when they decided to leave out, or eliminate, the process of, well, waste-elimination from Traveller-Avatars. On the other hand, so far I had not seen any heavy-handed “invisible-walls” on Mundus, everything had been implemented as a coherent part within the world, which made me curious how they had implemented that particular mechanic, or not-implemented it.

Pushing away the gross sensation that came with inspecting my own body on that level, I followed the, let’s call it, flow of waste-material, pushed along by involuntary muscle-contractions. Looking at it that way, it was fascinating, making me wonder if there was a way to use the death-astral-power that was created as a waste-product in some way, allowing me to empower my spells, if only a little. After a few minutes of mentally moving along the stream of material, along a few breaks to regenerate some Astral Power, I hit a wall.

The matter simply disappeared, without any trace, without rhyme or reason.

“That’s interesting.” Lenore muttered, her thoughts as perplexed as my own. It was as if there was some sort of barrier or portal, simply getting rid of the waste, including the magical by-products, but I was entirely unable to perceive anything. The portal-idea was the most humorous to me, especially when I remembered reading about a Japanese God of the Toilet or something along those lines. I had heard jokes about worshipping at the porcelain Throne, even if the context was a little different.

Shaking my head, I forcibly pushed away the idea to investigate the strange barrier or whatever it was, instead deciding to focus my time on less fecal matters. Even if Lenore had the idea to use the Death Astral Power present within everyone’s digestive system for a spell. So far, she only had a rough draft but that was rather intriguing. Her idea was to create a necromantic spell that essentially incubated within the gut, using the Death Astral Power to slowly form itself into a deadly curse, using the power inherent in their Blood to kill the host and reanimate them as an undead. She even had multiple ideas to propagate the curse, either using the victim's blood to transmit, or, in a quite nasty twist, to slowly get expelled with the other waste, slowly poisoning the surrounding area. The mental imagery coming along that second idea showed the simple sanitation in the Bright Hollow, using my own worries about spreading disease as a jumping off point. Finally, the third idea was to forgo the reanimation and simply use the power gained from killing the host to transmit the curse in a deadly emanation, cursing everyone nearby to get infected with her cursed disease. It only required a small amount of power to start off, instead using the power created during the digestive process to incubate, making it both deadly and effective at the same time.

For a moment, I was tempted to help with her idea, trying to turn her rough drafts into something that had a chance to work, a deadly and cursed disease but decided against it. Sure, the current rough state made me think it had potential but to get from an idea I thought had potential to a working spell was a long path, one that I didn’t want to go with such a spell. While it would be effective against large groups of weak people, I somehow doubted that more powerful people would succumb the same way. In addition, I wasn’t too interested in slaughtering massive amounts of peasants, I wanted magic that could be used in direct combat. For that, Lenore’s idea was completely useless.

“Let’s continue on that other idea we had.” I told her, bringing the current iteration of the spell we had developed using the ability of the Despoiled Bride’s Dress as a base. So far, we had managed to create a relatively simple spell that used my Darkness-Magic as a base, imbuing it with Death Magic, which was a good start. Getting to this point had been easy, as every spell Lenore and I used together carried the Death-Attribute, which meant we had a solid foundation to build the spell on, the only challenge being to allow me to cast it on my own.

I was quite happy with our current progress, since it gave me a quite powerful non-physical attack, which would hopefully bypass an enemy's armour, maybe even part of their natural resistance. That was one of my weaknesses, a good chunk of my magic was rather simple using physical objects, like my Frozen Shuttles, Icicles and so on, to whack the enemy. That was useful but at the end of the day, the damage I could cause with a Frozen Shuttle was so far below the damage Sigmir could cause with her Lok’nar that it wasn’t even funny. In regards to that, I was better off trying to strengthen my allies with Blood Magic or hinder my enemies, which had been another good chunk of my magic. Now, the combination of Darkness and Death-Magic gave me a way to hinder an enemy while dealing damage to them, maybe even allowing me to cripple their abilities while they were dying from my magic. A deadly curse, one that sapped their strength on application while slowly draining their life, that seemed to be the best way to fight with my Darkness-Magic.

Similarly, Lenore had quite easily been able to combine her Death-Magic with her Wind-Magic, she had done so before, the only difference was that she now wanted to create an indiscriminate attack carried by her voice. Working on that was a little more difficult, at least for me. While area-of-effect-attacks dealt less damage to your allies, they still dealt damage and getting repeatedly hit with Lenore’s powerful Death-Magic was, quite frankly, painful. On the other hand, her training gave me motivation to come up with a way to defend against purely magical attacks, which might be important in the future. Before, when we had been attacked by the Mind Magic of the Bolotnika, I had managed to improvise but now, I was able to methodically incorporate an anti-magic effect into the Cloak of Shadows I used for concealment. The idea was that the cloak was devouring magic that came from the outside, which worked quite well, even if it took a lot of power to keep that version active. My current idea for improvement was to use the spell reactively, only activating it if I felt a large amount of Astral Power incoming. For that, I would either need to use my runic projection to instantly create the required runes or I would have to create a magical item using those runes, allowing me to simply channel power into it, blocking attacks. And that was where I had hit a wall, the magical item creation. My work with the dwarves had been focused on my Ice-Runes and the creation of linking-formations for those runes, forcing me to start over at the beginning with Darkness.

With a smile on my face, I began to create the simple runes, carefully feeling the flow of magic between them, trying to recognise patterns. It was a slow-going process but at the same time, it was something I enjoyed a great deal.