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11. The Tricks and Turns of Magical Study
🕑 Added 2022-01-13 18:26:29 +0000 UTC“Very well, Damien Karles and Head Professor Victor shall duel in a week’s time in the university’s arena, I shall be the judge.”
Damien cringed looking at ‘sparkle boy’ acting so pompous, he knew his real personality after all. That was admittedly a dark time in Damien's past.
Damien started playing the game with the basic characters, but after a few playthroughs, he got a little bored. After searching online, many recommended he tried out ‘August Greentail’. Damien looked him up and found out he was a high-level villain with A grade necromancy. He was basically the perfect villain character as he was a Prince and heir to a kingdom, had many loyal servants, and could do anything he wanted within Kassinki’s Capital city.
The game was also 18+ and allowed players to participate in… well, some less savory exercises at August's summer houses. Let's just say Damien suspects that his weird kinks were acquired through his playtime with August.
August is also a massive obstacle to Damien. In two years' time, the current King Edward Greentail will fall ill to a plague and die shortly after. Since Edward only has one son and a daughter, the son will obviously receive his position.
The main problem with this is August is both a human supremacist and also very interested in Vampires immortality. August hates the idea that someday he will lose his dazzling youth and be reduced to a grumpy old man like his father. Just ruling over Kassinki isn’t enough for him. He wants both immortality and the entire world under his rule.
So in two years' time, he will not only start slaughtering demi-humans causing the greatest genocide in history, but he will also launch an invasion alongside Oshal into the Kazimir mountain range. His excuse is that he wanted to wipe out a potential threat to his nation's security, but in reality, he just wanted to find the secrets of immortality.
So, Damien has a decision to make. Create a cure for the plague and save the King and alter the storyline? Or somehow August's sister takes the throne instead, either through August’s assassination or somehow convincing both the public and the King to hand over succession to her.
Damien just ignored August and the Head Professor and quickly entered the Public Library. He had been here many times in the game, but it was far more amazing in real life. The heavy smell of wood and books, the dim lighting from glowstone's, and the low murmuring of students who were sitting over open books with deep looks of concentration.
Damien quickly navigated the hundreds of rows to find the books he needed. In total, he picked up twenty books, and he carried them all with Psychokinesis. He couldn’t manipulate all of them at once but instead used his glove hands, one at the bottom and the other on top of the stack, to stabilize it.
A lot of students looked up from their reading and gawked at the sight of a floating tower of books that seemed to orbit Damien as he inspected the shelves.
Just as Damien was heading towards the librarian, Fay appeared and tried to sneakily place a book on his pile. Damien quickly grabbed the book from her hand and inspected its title.
Basic Principles of Mana Manipulation
‘So she's trying to learn magic…’
Damien looked at her and used Telepathy to read her surface thoughts.
‘Dad… no… wish I could learn… magic looks… amazing…’ since his skill was still low level it was only a jumbled mess but nothing about burning him to death at least.
She seemed to have a really sad expression, and Damien felt that maybe he could cheer her up by accepting the book.
‘Potentially I can get in her good books despite murdering her family? Or is that just insane thinking?’
‘Well, seeing how she learns magic from this book will help me understand how residents of this world learn spells normally. I have to teach soon after all…’
Damien just put the book on his pile of now twenty-one books and wordlessly headed towards the front counter, where a surprised librarian sat staring at the floating books.
“Excuse me, student, you can only take out three books at a time…”
Damien was confused for a second and looked behind him but realized the librarian was addressing him.
“Oh, I am Head Professor Victor's teaching assistant, I have to do research on material for his classes, so I need these books.”
The librarian seemed suspicious but saw Damien's level of control which should be at least C or even B grade and his noble clothes…
Worst case, he would get an earful from the Head Librarian for this. The librarian noted down the book titles and raised his brow reading some of the names. The books seemed so random and didn’t follow any particular theme, how these could help in a lesson the librarian had no idea.
After checking out the books, the duo also bought enough food for a few days from a stall, Damien started at his pitiful amount of bronze coins that remained. He really needed to make some money somehow, his paycheck won’t be coming in till the end of the month.
Damien retrieved his carriage from the frightened guard, he promptly threw his badge on the floor and stamped on it once Damien was leaving. Quite odd behavior…
Apart from taking a bath, sleeping, and watching over Fay, Damien had a rather peaceful few days. He mostly focused on reading through his mountain of books.
***
Damien casually floated five books in front of him while sipping on some cheap wine he found left in the servant's rooms. The red wine had a sharp sour flavor, similar to vinegar, that slightly burned his nasal passages as it went down. It was rather unpleasant, but he enjoyed the atmosphere it created. Swirling the wine in the glass made him feel like a true villain, which seemed to appeal to his soul.
Speaking of soul, he had managed to slowly get control over his body and traits. They were still there but more controllable. He could almost touch things without gloves now, and he was able to reduce his sleeping to only 12 hours a day. His [Concentration] had only increased in potency, but that aligned with Psychic magic. It took Fay more brute force methods to break him out of a trance if he was deep in thought about something. It had almost become a little joke between them when she had to smash two frying pan’s next to Damien's ear one time.
Damien took out his pocket watch with Psychokinesis and snapped open its lid with his mind. He looked at this deathly pale yet handsome face, with a slight bit more concentration his status appeared:
[Damien Nightshade]
[Noble Vampire]
Skills:
Psychokinesis [C+]
Automatic Writing [F]
Telepathy [E]
Pyrokinesis [E]
===
Blood Magic [F]
===
Mana Control [D]
Traits:
[Germaphobe] Unable to learn melee skills / 100% Increased control over ranged spells
[Control Freak] Increased affinity to control skills by 10%
[Lazy] Increased mana regeneration while resting by 20% / Increased exp to learn new spells by 10%
[Concentration] Increased affinity with mental spells by 5%
[Noble Aura] Intimidation increased
His status had changed a lot over the last few days, but nowhere near the progress he was expecting. His skills were now grouped up under the school of magic or affinity he specialized in. It seemed his affinity was either hidden or was forced by his traits that focused on mental and control-based magic, which perfectly fit.
It seemed since this became the real world, certain game mechanics haven't followed. For example, learning new skills was completely different. In the game, a player just had to pick up a book that contained the spell, open it and that was it. They would gain the spell at F tier, certain spells couldn't be learned, or they were locked behind certain restrictions, but usually, a player's character could learn most spells.
Damien had opened the books from the library and expected to learn the skills instantly. But that was not the case. Instead, he was greeted with pages of diagrams and runes that showed how the spells worked. Once a person read and understood the book, they could try to copy that spell's formation, if they were successful the world rewarded that person with the skill at F grade.
Damien glazed down at the book and could only laugh at the runes. It was just a simple programming language written in English. It seemed he was reading, writing, and talking in this world's native language without knowing it. Only after seeing English as the rune language did Damien realize he was even speaking a different language.
To everyone else, it looked like some ancient and profound language but to Damien, it just looked something like this:
Spell Fireball(Size, Distance, Mana)
Spell was the ‘function’ call. So anyone who was planning to use the Fireball spell would first shout out ‘Spell’ they would then follow it with the spell name, in this case, ‘Fireball’. They then had to provide the spell with the expected size, the distance of the target, and how much mana. These were all done mentally with an image in the mage's mind.
Damien almost wished it required the mage to shout the parameters out because he could easily understand the rune language and then react to their spell. He would have been able to tell the size, where they were aiming, and how much mana they were using for every spell.
Damien would occasionally watch Fay try to practice and read the runes from her book, it seemed genuinely hard for her to read the runes for some reason? Her pronunciation was completely off at times, and it seemed to affect her ability to manipulate the mana around her body.
Damien was pretty sure he could speak the rune language fluently, which would surprise people. He had tried to see if he could cast spells just by saying them out loud, but it seemed impossible for him to learn or cast spells that were not of the ‘mental’ nature.
Surprisingly, Pyrokinesis was under the ‘mental’ category as it was just basic fire manipulation with the mind. An actual fire spell like Fireball was completely impossible for him to cast, as he had no affinity to Fire.
The only spells he could use or learn were Psychic or Blood spells. Unfortunately for Damien, all the books on Blood magic were strictly controlled in the Mage Tower, while the rest were stored away in the libraries of Kazimir.
The only new spell Damien had managed to learn over the last 3 days was Automatic Writing, which was just a specialized version of Psychokinesis. It allowed him to manipulate sticks of chalk or any writing utensil and direct it to write for him. He didn’t have to manually move the chalk, but just convey it words or diagrams, and it would write them out for him. Useful for teaching but not for the upcoming duel.
The five books surrounding Damien all covered different topics, one was even about world history instead of magic. He was desperately trying to find out how to raise his Psychokinesis to B grade. It was stuck at C+ no matter what he did.
He wanted to learn other Psychic spells like:
Materialization - S Grade, The creation of objects and materials or the appearance of matter from an unknown source.
Astral Projection - A Grade, The ability to voluntarily project an astral or mental body.
Petrification - A Grade, The power to turn a living being to stone by directing mana into their eyes.
Clairvoyance - B Grade, The ability to see things and events that are happening far away, and locate objects, places, people, using a ‘sixth sense'.
Levitation - B Grade, The ability to float or fly by mystical means.
Automatic Writing - C Grade, The ability to draw and write without conscious intent.
Telepathy - C Grade, The ability to transmit or receive thoughts supernaturally.
The number of skills available to Psychic mages was very limited but all incredibly powerful. But to Damien's displeasure, all the useful ones were locked behind S, A, and B grades.
Damien was researching how to raise his Psychokinesis, but there was little information on it, there were very few that reached above C grade, and it turns out they wish to keep it a secret. Damien understood why nations wanted to keep the number of powerful Psychic mages to a minimum, just Clairvoyance alone is enough to win a war, for example.
Materialization isn't even worth mentioning, as there are no S rank mages that even walk the planet. Kazimir had been the last recorded S rank, in Blood Magic.
Damien saw Fay sneaking glances at him, she suddenly let out a deep sigh and seemed to gather some courage to ask him something.
“M-master… can I ask something?”
“What?” I ask, a scowl appears on my face due to my concentration being interrupted.
“Since you are so good at magic, could you maybe teach me a spell?”
Damien's jaw just dropped for a moment before [Noble Aura] corrected his attitude and his [Concentration] trait kicked in two weigh the pros and cons.
Pros:
- I can learn how to teach other people before my job as a teacher starts after the duel.
- Ability to study if Fay also has restrictions with learning spells and if she has an affinity
- If she learns the cleaning spell, my Germaphobe trait will leave me alone
- Improve relationship through teaching her
Cons:
- She could learn Pyrokinesis or Photokinesis and kill me
- Could maybe poison me somehow or kill me in other horrible ways…
Damien then used Telepathy to read Fay’s surface thoughts. Again she was thinking about her Dad refusing to teach her magic and she seemed surprised I didn’t reject her instantly. She also thought something about having no talent for magic?
‘I expected her to be thinking of what spells could kill me or something? Well, I guess letting her learn a simple lifestyle spell-like Cleaning would be fine, unless she can somehow clean me to death?’
Damien simply replied “Sure” after much debate. The pros outweigh the cons and if he discovered her using magic from either Pyrokinesis or Photokinesis he would deal with her before she could threaten his life.
