Short summary of the last chapter:

Spoiler : Voice and Kyle’s mom both caught a disease. The mana signature of the disease made Voice start thinking about the intricacies of magic casting. He got a few new skills, and was debating whether or not to use a blood sacrifice to unlock the secrets of magic.

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Voice tried using his Deconstruct Spell, but to no avail.

Voice walked back into his student’s house. “Boy, listen to me if you want your mother to live.”

Kyle looked hopefully at Voice. Voice’s expression flickered for a moment, but he shook his head and continued.

“If you want your mother to live, you need to listen exactly to what I have to say, ok?”

Kyle began nodding his head vigorously. He opened his mouth to speak, but Voice interrupted him.

“I’m going to need the piece of jewelry the Elder gave you.” Voice held his hand out. As Kyle uncertainly placed the ring in his hand, Voice canceled his Mental Domination Connection. “Don’t move no matter what.”

Voice gave a command before grabbing a nearby kitchen knife, and slicing the boy’s hand. The boy flinched, but his eyes had become murky. He stood there, blood dripping from his hand.

Once he saw Kyle was unresponsive towards the wound, Voice sneered a bit and steeled his mind. After taking a deep breath, he began his plan.

Voice activated several spells and skills at the same moment, while simultaneously beginning to engrave glyphs on Kyle’s body.

Voice activated 9 Mental Domination Connections. Each repeated the same line: You are the puppet of Your Alchemist Master.

At the same moment as those skills activated, he used Instruct, and shouted: “Obey my Orders!”

The connections Voice was using would be noticeable if and only if Kyle ever gained his mind back.

When Voice activated these skills, he also activated Petrification (Major) by stacking 10 Petrification (Minor) spells on top of each other.

Petrification (Major)

The target loses some movement speed, and will find it harder to move. The target suffers a 75% reduction in both categories. This duration of this spell is (10 + (darkness affinity/10) * Aura) seconds.

The base spell cost for this spell is 5000 mana.

After the first debuff, Voice used the debuff to make the boy drowsy.

He made the debuffs permanent, and began inscribing runes on the boy. The runes quite literally translated to ‘You must Obey and Please your Alchemist Master’. Each rune was roughly the size of an adult fist.

Due to the semi-recent patch, his runes weren’t as powerful as they could be, but he decided to make up for that with sheer numbers. A total of twenty of these runes fit quite snugly on the boy’s body. They all connected to one rune on his chest. That rune would absorb mana from him, and dispense it to the glyphs.

Voice Silenced the boy with a spell. Finally, Voice activated Phoenix Flames. Not on himself, but on the boy. The intense heat from the flames instantly scarred the boy’s entire body, only to have the healing aura of the same flames recover him.

For an hour the flames continued. Due to the fact that Voice’s affinity and purity were both higher in light than fire, the healing was far more potent than the flames. The runes seemed to greedily devour the mana in the boy’s body. The skills gnawed at his mind, consuming him from the inside.

Voice forced himself to watch as the boy struggled to show his pain, but was unable to due to the various debuffs on him. As the moments ticked by, Voice grew sicker and sicker with himself. His only consolation was that he was going to verify if this method could really control someone.

When he could not stand to look at the work he wrought, Voice turned to Kyle’s mother. “Sorry. You and your son must perish for my sake.”

He laid hands on the woman, cast a Silence spell, and ripped out the entire mana signature of the disease. The woman let out a soundless scream, as her body convulsed violently. Voice stared down at her with no remorse or pity to be found in his eyes.

The moment the mana signature completely left the woman’s body, it exploded, spreading blood and viscera everywhere in the nearby vicinity. The boy stood stock still for a moment, almost as if he realized what was happening to his mother despite the pain his body was going through.

Voice turned his head, and looked at the boy. The boy was obviously crying, but the tears were evaporating before they left his eyes. Voice sneered as he moved past the boy.

Voice used his Super Dash ability. It burned twice the stamina but allowed one to go 1.5 times faster than normal. He quickly ran to a house that had light mana signatures. He calmed himself, and knocked.

“I am Karma Lithe. Open up if you want a cure.”

After a second of shuffling sounds, the door was opened, revealing three very sick people. Two adult men, and a single adult woman.

Voice nodded after he was invited in by an obviously desperate group.

“If you want to be cured I need time to examine each of you individually. One of you should wait in each room. I’ll start with the girl first. Shut the doors after you pick a room to wait in. I can’t have ANY interruptions or it might mean her death.”

The two men seemed like they wanted to reject his offer, but something compelled them to listen. Each of the men went to a different bedroom, and shut the door as instructed.

Voice laid his hands on the woman as she babbled her gratitude. He cast a Silence spell on her. She seemed startled by the sudden loss of ability to speak, but didn’t have time to think on it. Voice used his own mana to wrap up the mana that made up the disease.

With his light mana covering the disease, he again tried ripping it out. A similar event happened to the woman as had happened to Kyle’s mother. Voice frowned as he continued on to the next subject.

The village had a few dozen people only. Not enough to try every theory on, but he had the option of Prediction and Simulation. He cancelled his earlier simulations, and focused solely on how to cure this disease. He used prediction to see the effects of each of the things he planned to try. He would then try the thing that seemed to have the best result.

Most ended poorly. Whenever trying to pull out the mana of someone’s body, he would invariably cause them to explode. When pulling out only one type of mana their bodies would be effected in a drastic way.

Pulling out all of the water mana in someone’s body led to them slowly turning to dust. Pulling out fire mana caused their bodies to instantly freeze. While this did give him a whole new idea on combat, it didn’t solve his present problem. He needed to cure himself, then find a subject to test on for the truth of magic.

He used about half of the residents in his attempts to understand the disease. Each time his Simulation skill would be updated with more information to work with. He activated his Light Speed (Minor) spell, and began to think up ways to solve this problem.

One time Simulation showed him making the disease himself, but with opposite mana signatures. Light where dark was etc. He used about ten minutes studying the pattern of the mana fluctuations of the disease, and used Prediction to determine what it would be x amount of time later.

After about ten minutes he finally managed to Predict it perfectly every time. Although he couldn’t understand the mana himself, he could at least Predict what it would look like a few seconds ahead of time.

While using Prediction he tried to overlay the mana signature. First he had to sculpt the spell. He spent thousands of mana sculpting the spell that only actually required about a hundred. The first thing he did when doing this process was gauge exactly how much mana to use. The process was similar to how he built up his mana in blocks, but different enough that he was having major issues with it.

Eventually he simply pictured the finished product in him mind. After making sure his visualization was spot on, he willed the mana into existence. In less time than it took to blink the mana fizzled out of existence.

Damn it! How is this supposed to work? The damn mana construct won’t stay!

Voice made another, and continued to feed it mana. It held for as long as he fueled it, but gave out the moment he stopped pumping mana into it. No matter how many times he tried it, it always resulted in the same thing.

Eventually he gave up and decided to just put the mana construct into a person’s body. He was starting to get nervous. If he delayed too long, it would negatively affect him. The longer he waited, the more likely it was that he would die from the disease.

The first time he put his created mana construct in a subject’s body, it resulted in the body exploding. Voice moved on to another subject. He gained one piece of vital information about this though. Once inside someone, the mana no longer had to be fueled by him.

The second time was much better, but the timing was somewhat wrong.

The body of the subject began twitching, and quickly the situation turned into a full blown seizure for the subject. Voice quickly tried to take his mana out, but couldn’t. It was stuck. Much like the original construction. As Voice watched, the two mana signatures slowly fused together, and created another, different mana signature.

The new signature was blended between the original one, and Voice’s ‘cure’. The result was the constant seizure of the patient, eventually leading to death. After the subject died, Voice gave it a try on another subject.

With each new subject he was more accurately able to implement his own mana signature. The closer it got to perfectly overlaying the original at the perfect time, the less negative repercussions it had.

Eventually there was only one house left, other than the Elder’s and Kyle’s. In the house was a single old lady. She smiled nicely as Voice offered to ‘help’ her with her condition.

It played into his favor that the disease had apparently effected everyone in the town. Otherwise, he would not have been able to use so many for his experiments.

With his full concentration on the old woman, Voice began to work. He carefully crafted the mana signature he would need, and used his Calculations skill to perfectly gauge the time. When the time approached for him to push the mana signature inside of the old woman, he did.

The old woman shuddered for a moment, then laid still. Voice watched the mana signatures in her body as they battled each other for dominance, and slowly began to fuse. In seconds the two mana signatures seemingly fused and canceled each other out.

Voice looked at the old woman. She had a deep outline of every mana type. The mana inside her body rapidly exited her pours, and evaporated into the air.

She looked at Voice. “Are you done? How is it? Am I going to live?”

She couldn’t even tell the difference! She felt nothing!

Voice beamed at her. “Yes. You are going to live. Now I must attend the others before anything happens to them.”

The old woman smiled and thanked him by giving him some fruits she had picked in the safer parts of the forest.

He repeated this process for everyone in the Elder’s home. He also prescribed bedrest for at least a day. Not for their health, but so they didn’t discover his doings to the other homes.

He walked back to Kyle’s house. The boy was still on fire, and soundlessly screaming in anguish. He checked on his condition for a moment, then went to the side.

He carefully constructed exactly the mana structure he needed, after triple checking with prediction. Using Calculation, he perfectly timed the moment he needed to implement the mana into his body. The time came, and he pushed the mana inside his body without hesitation.

He felt as if something had gripped his body. The battle that raged on inside his body was far more intense than any other person’s he had cured. Every part of the mana struggled to continue to exist inside of him. Even as it was destroyed, it tried to create smaller versions of itself to have another chance at survival.

Voice balked at sight of what was happening inside his body, but he was powerless to stop it. If he tried and failed, at best he’d get to try again and at worst he’d explode.

The mana signature Voice created followed the same pattern as the disease that plagued him. Wherever the latter went, the former soon followed. It seemed like an eternity, but it only took a few minutes of time.

During this time, Voice felt himself grow weaker and weaker as his mana was drained to fuel the process. It ravenously tore at his mana reserves. The fifty points per second that he restored barely kept up with the strain.

After a handful of minutes had passed, the mana in his body finally flew out from his pores. He was only left with his own mana.

Due to great achievements in deconstruction spells, and showing oustanding mastery of magic, Group Skill: Magical Mastery has been increased to level 100.

You have become more familiar with Group Skill: Magical Mastery than most people will become with any other skill. But you have not truly mastered it yet. To truly master this skill, you must learn the history of magic and what magic truly is.

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Hey guys and gals! Damatu here.

I just wanted to take a moment of your time, to ask for a bit of a favor. If you like this story, or even just have some constructive criticism, please drop me a rating.

My story is slowly coming to a close, and i feel like I've grown as a writer. Rating my story, with or without the in depth analysis of it, will show me where I've actually improved, and places i might need to work on.

I've already started dabbling in other stories, but I want to hear from the people that have hung on this long to my story. You guys mean a lot to me, and so do your thoughts. If you don't have the time or inclinaiton to rate it, that's fine ; ) . If you do though, well that's even better!

Thanks, and see you next chapter!