John stared at the 10 pieces of parchment, wondering what spells he should put on them. The rarer the spell the better it would seem, too bad his two rare runes nullified each other. On that note, he really needed to find something to practice those on, they were undoubtedly powerful but how much so he had no idea. He decided to try something. Leaving some food by the side of the house he set up a few small traps to hopefully catch something that he could test on in the morning and with that went to bed.

John woke to the sunlight squirming through the curtains and got out of bed. He went downstairs to find Mary sipping some tea and told her he wouldn't be staying for breakfast and checked his traps. 5 of them contained some kind of rodent that looked halfway between a rat and a rabbit. It had a long nose snout and large hind legs. It clearly hopped around and used its rat-like tail for balance. Lifting the 5 full traps with his earth manipulation, he made his way to the college. Again, getting the training room.

He carefully shaped the cages around the creatures so that it made a stone harness and suspended them into the air. Cutting off the leg of one of them, he used the life rune and the wound healed over. Repeated casts didn't grow the leg back. He thought for a second and then tried pairing the life rune with the growth rune. This caused the leg to grow a very slowly back. After it grew back he repeated the process. This time adding in the strength and enhance runes to the spell. Enhance won out here and grew the leg back 20% faster than strength did, making it nearly twice as fast.

He then tried casting the death rune on the rat rabbit. A blackness started to spread from the point he cast the spell and 5 seconds after the blackness reached a point, it would liquify and turn to mush. The spell ended up killing it after 30 seconds. John was rather impressed, it was clearly a very painful death going by the screams it made in the process. He was tempted to try the goo and see how it tasted but decided it was a bad idea, after seeing what the spell just did. moving onto the next subject he tried it with strength and then enhance. This time it was reversed and strength was better, killing it in just over 10 seconds.

He tried other combinations with death but none were particularly good, spray caused droplets of a thick black goo to hit things that would trigger the spell and cone would just cause the entire rat to be hit at the same time. The goo was cooler but weaker since condense wasn't as good as enhance or strength in this case. He decided to go see the old man and see which one would be best to sell.

10 minutes later he was in the training room with 3 more of the rabbit rats and the old man, John demonstrated each of the death spells and the life one. He seemed unsurprised by the death combinations but his eyebrows nearly left his head upon seeing the regeneration spell. Apparently, people with both earth and light affinities were pretty rare so it was a rather uncommon effect. The man offered John 1000 mana per scroll he could make. He also said that the death goo spell would fetch about 500 mana and the cone would get him about 600.

Deciding that the money was worth the lack of variety, John spent the next few hours making regeneration scrolls.

Over the next few weeks, John made and sold scrolls. He managed to get his scrollcraft up to 7, his elemental magic to 5 and his spellcraft up to 9. He had now very clearly overstayed his welcome and Mary was starting to very stuffy with him. He had made nearly 50 000 manna from his scrolls and decided that it was enough for now. He had attended more classes, they hadn't gained him any new skills but he learned how to better utilise different elements as attacks, how to use his manipulation to map see where he could not and how to manipulate his mana more efficiently.

Unfortunately, contrary to his idea of a college, the mages college was less a place of learning and more a place of research, there weren't that many classes he could take without access he wasn't allowed. He did, however, manage to buy a book on runes, it contained a few dozen runes and had examples of intent infused in with them so he could learn how to use them. With that, there wasn't much more he needed from the college. He bought a 100 sheets of parchment and 10 blank books to stockpile what he might need. If he needed more than that he could always find somewhere to buy them or learn to make his own.

He waited until it was fairly late into the evening and entered Jax and Mary's bedroom. It was locked with a metal bolt but he was easily able to move it aside. Standing over them and looking at their sleeping bodies he felt a pang of remorse for what he was going to do but quickly shoved it back down. There was no room for silly emotions. He then sliced each of their throats with his claws. For a second he was worried, Jax had apparently put some points into endurance and he had to put some effort in to slice through his neck but his strength and claws won out in the end. He used blood manipulation to form 3 blood crystals from the blood and then used assimilate on each of them.

Skill activated [Assimilate]

Prolonged contact with a recently made corpse has activated this skill

Your skill [Assimilate] failed

Skill activated [Assimilate]

Prolonged contact with a recently made corpse has activated this skill

Your skill [Assimilate] successfully activated. A portion of the targets recent memories and skills have been absorbed. Effect weakened due to deterioration of the target.

Skill Gained NAME: Cooking You are able to make ingredients into something worth more than the sum of its parts Effects- Food tastes 1% better and food buffs created by you are 1% more powerful every skill level. MP cost- NA Activation Time- Passive Level 6

Mary was worth a new skill, 2 levels in Elemental Manipulation and 1 in Elemental Magic. He was also right about her patience beginning to grow thin with him but it wasn't so much him overstaying his welcome but that she thought Kelly was rather rude and kind of dull. He couldn't figure out why though, he had tried to make polite conversation when he could and tried to be helpful. He also got some memories of 'relations' with Jax. Apparently, the room was pretty soundproof. He would rather forget those.

He went around the house taking what he could. He soon had an inventory full of jewellery, he was nearly 100 000 mana crystals richer (Apparently, these people were much more wealth than he thought they were he supposed the size of the house should have given it away) and he had a series of the most interesting books he could find in the library. Fortunately, he had been eating the meat whilst working on scrolls so the extra weight wasn't more than he could comfortably handle.

He then left the house, deciding against taking the mana-cart as it might be able to be used to track him and he had no idea how to drive one. He ducking into an alley and changed forms into a random looking gnome, a little pudgy and kind of ugly version of a male gnome he killed and learned blood manipulation from. He then took off into the night, heading deeper into the city and trying to get as far away as he could from the house.