Nathan

Year 2850 | Month 4 | Day 6

“To start off, I’m sending you the spell scripts for the death mana versions of the barrier, bullet, and bolt spells, since they’d just be a waste of the time you spend making them,” the skeleton says while pulling up a terminal and tapping away on it. And as he does so, I can’t help but notice that he’s using mana to activate it and make the screen register his skeletal finger since he doesn’t actually have skin for it to register naturally.

After a few seconds of his tapping, I feel a buzz from my terminal before I open it up to find the spells there. And they aren’t much different from the fire mana versions of them.

“You’re going to have to make edits to them yourself still, just to make them usable with your body,” he continues, looking at me again. “And that process is going to kill off your cells as you figure it out. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if using death magic at all will always hurt you at least a little bit. Your body isn’t adapted to death mana like it is fire mana. Just your mana arcs and the small amount of adaptation they bring to the rest of your body.”

I grimace at the idea of basically causing necrosis in my body every time I use death mana.

“I doubt this is the full extent of what the pain would’ve been if you hadn’t been a pseudo vampire with miasma in your body already,” the skeleton continues before looking down at his terminal again. “These next two scripts I’ll be sending you and going over with you at a later date since you don’t have a clear understanding of miasma. The first spell is one to absorb the miasma of your surroundings into you and use it as fuel for your body, which should let you clear any of the small amounts of miasma in those caverns of yours. And the second spell is a barrier that is able to completely block miasma from passing through, unlike the fire mana barrier you’re using that lets most of it through.”

My eyes widen at that, and I can’t help but grin.

Okay, now those spells will come in very handy for the caverns. Not only will it help me do my experiments in a more clean environment, since I’ve had a few issues with the miasma damaging my subjects and experiments before, but it’ll also help the people living in the caverns as well.

One major issue of living on this continent is the miasma coming from the Dark Forest. While it doesn’t kill any of the people on the continent as long as they don’t get too close to the forest, it does shorten their life spans by at least a couple decades. So the people living on the inner section of this continent live for less time on average than those in the outer sections.

I’ve never cared much about it beyond how it affects my experimental subjects though, since the animals living here are in the same boat.

I get the buzz from my terminal for the second set of scripts before the skeleton says, “I’d like you to try the spells out for the first time here without changing them to see what they’ll do when used by your body, but you need to convert more of your mana arcs to be able to do that. So get to it.”

This is going to hurt.

After converting about a fourth of my total mana arcs into death mana arcs, I begin to test out the spells for the skeleton before leaving. And each of the spells has the unfortunate side effect of causing minor necrosis in the parts of my body that the death mana passes through to get to the spell circles. Also, the longer spells like the barrier might end up failing and backfiring on me instead if they take too long, since the mana I use is constantly being used up as it damages my own body.

I don’t even need the king’s help to figure out how to fix the spells for my usage though. All I need to do to fix it is make a set route that’s short and doesn’t pass through anything important or difficult for the mana to move through. Then I shouldn’t have the issue of burning out the mana in the arcs before it even leaves my body.

The other two spells that he gave me though… they didn’t work at all. But the miasma absorption spell was meant for the skeleton’s body before it became a skeleton. Not for a pseudo vampire whose body isn’t adapted to death mana.

So all the miasma absorption spell did was bring the miasma into my body to make it eat away at me until it faded away.

And the barrier was just like the other barrier spell but even worse, since it required more mana to use as it’s a much more precise and complicated script in general.

But overall, I got what I came here for. Or at least, sort of. I didn’t get time or space magic, but I did get death magic.

One is better than none. Even if that one is killing the cells in my body with its use.

That’s fine as well though since those cells are just restored right away anyways.

I let out a sigh as I walk back through the Dark Forest at the fact that I have another thing bringing me pain nowadays. Just one more thing to add to the already long list, most of which these days are my own doing thanks to my experiments.

It’s fine as long as it isn’t as bad as when I was aging myself.

I feel a shiver run down my spine at the thought of that particular pain.

At least I won’t ever have to do that again.

My train of thought is interrupted when I reach the edge of the Dark Forest, only to find several magicians standing on the other side of a river near it wearing heavy armor likely to protect them from the miasma.

Huh?