Elysium's Multiverse

Chapter 10

Riven flipped yet another page, curiosity getting the better of him as he continued to read without pause or boredom. Allie and Jose would have loved this kind of stuff, and he couldn’t help but wonder what they were going through right now. His mind began to wander, and worry set in about whether or not they were okay. They needed to survive their own trials in order to be reunited with him, according to the system’s early message when he’d first split off, but he had no way of telling whether or not their trials were just as ridiculous as his own or if they were having an easier time.

No, he couldn’t think about that. Back to the present, and he put his nose to the grindstone for learning. The prologue for the text had indeed been helpful, but there were still many questions concerning the actual spell he needed to learn rather than just the backbone fundamentals.

The spell Wretched Snare had a vision that he could produce easily enough just by the way the spell was drawn out in the book. Pictures of a black, sticky, needle-laced net of Unholy magic were drawn on the parchment rather well. However, the book also described how he needed to encompass the thought of burning, the thought of being sticky, the thought of ensnaring an enemy into the vision rather than just what one physically saw. Vision included not only sight, but also purpose and meaning—which was something Riven hadn’t necessarily anticipated upon the initial description in the fundamentals section.

The channeling of his mana wasn’t too hard to do, and that might have been due to the fact that he’d already gained the Unholy pillar via the blessing he’d received in the maze. Blessing of the Crow had imbued him with the pillar in a vision of what Riven now knew without a shadow of a doubt was the inherent changing of his soul. He’d inherently felt it might be that, but it’d just been guesses made upon introspection until now. What he hadn’t known was that the pillar, that bustling orb of green, crimson, and black lights that had attached itself to the white core of his center self, was actually a type of converter. One that would convert his body’s pure energy into mana that he could then use for the spell he was trying to learn.

He was curious about how the next spell would work, but at a bare minimum he assumed learning Bloody Razors would be harder to do because it was in a more specialized pillar. He had the Unholy pillar already, so a subpillar shouldn’t be too hard to acquire? Or maybe it came along as a package deal since he had the major category already? Then again, he did have a high affinity for blood magic, at least according to earlier prompts. It was hard to tell from the pages of the book.

Thirty-six hours had passed in that well-lit room, and he was beginning to sweat with the exertions of pushing mana through his body. He’d identified the inner source of his power, his soul, through a good amount of meditation and direction from the book. He could feel it, a presence inside him that pulsed every time he tried to force forward the energies that’d been so foreign to him in the beginning—but now that this power was within him and available to him, it made its presence known as a stark outlier from how his body had felt previous to leaving Earth.

It was like he’d grown an entirely new organ, almost akin to lungs. But instead of air, they breathed power.

The energy had been very hard to deal with at first. He could feel it, twisting and turning as new mana channels were dug out and created through his physical body and his soul. It’d been painful, but he’d endured—and now the hot, smoldering collection of raw power that tingled at his very fingertips struggled to be let free against some mental barrier he couldn’t quite place his finger on yet.

Again he pushed, sending out a wave of rushing power that caused his hands to convulse…but otherwise he got nowhere with it.

What was he doing wrong?

Riven closed his eyes in a meditative pose while sitting on his red velvet armchair, concentrating on his inner core and feeling the roiling energy within his soul vibrate upon his mental touch. Slowly, ever so slowly, he began to draw the energy through his pillar—converting the energy into mana. He drew the energy forward from his core, into his body, farther into his hands—and could literally feel it heating up the skin along his fingertips on either side.

All right…now for the vision again.

Within his mind’s eye, he began to focus on what he wanted to create. A net of black, writhing needles that would ensnare his enemies, burn his enemies and keep them at bay.

The mana began to condense—welling up into shimmering black balls of energy that floated over either hand. Smiling to himself for at least getting this far, he began to push harder on his mana reserves.

The black balls expanded outward, ripping apart as tiny needlelike appendages began lengthening and withdrawing over and over again until the black mana had formed strings very much like a net. Each one of his hands contained a square, stringy, four-by-four-foot net of the Unholy power—and it continued to grow to an even greater size until at the very last second they each popped.

The mana dispersed into thin air. He hadn’t been able to stabilize it again, and he felt the energy leave his body. It was yet another failed attempt at the spell that caused him to growl with irritation.

Something here was very wrong.

He began flipping through the book again. He was certain he was channeling correctly; his vision was good, too, so there must be something wrong with his understanding of the spell.

He came up with another hypothesis, which absolutely failed minutes later. Then he came up with two more ideas, both of which failed in turn over the next hour despite many attempts. But it was a passage from one of the very last pages of the tome that caught his attention in the end—something that he’d overlooked before.

He put his finger on the line and read aloud. “‘Using this Wretched Snare, you must imbue your mana with the concept of pain. You must manifest pain into not only your vision, but also connect that vision with the true essence of what it means to be tortured with mind and body.’”

He blinked and repeated the last part of that line. “…with mind and body.”

Previously he’d been thinking about how pain could be inflicted upon someone in the form of physical pain, focusing on back when he’d been a kid and burned his hand on a kitchen stove. He hadn’t been putting much effort into imbuing the magic with the idea of what mental pain could accomplish through this spell…so it was time to give it a shot.

Moving through his memories, he didn’t have to think hard on what the most torturous ones had been over the course of his life. There were three of them, each one a significant weight upon his shoulders that even now caused his body to ache when thinking about them. But it was the memories of his family going missing that instantly sprang to the forefront of his mind; it was the hardest to cope with as he sat there in sullen silence contemplating his life.

He quickly snapped out of it, though, using the remnants of those memories in conjunction with a physical burning sensation. He utilized proper channeling once again, forcing the soul energy through his Unholy pillar. Then he added vision, commanding the black orbs to begin forming nets above his outstretched hands. As they slowly expanded, he incorporated his new understanding of what this spell’s purpose was…to imbue these nets not only with physical pain, but also to afflict his enemies with emotional pain as well.

Lo and behold, the magic stabilized.

With a low hiss, the nets of black energy expanded to over six feet in diameter and erupted from his outstretched palms. They shot across the room, landing two dozen yards away and splattering against the floor with an acidic sizzling sound while the black needles of the nets bubbled and writhed.

“HELL YEAH!”

Riven shot his fists into the air with a hoot and did a very brief victory dance with a self-satisfied nod. He repeated the spell once, twice, and then thrice while aiming at the clay dummy a little ways off. Each time the nets would expand after being fired, and the sticky needles would contact the dummy before biting in and wrapping around the object. When the acidic black magic ate all the way through the dummy a couple dozen seconds later, a new dummy would then appear.

It took him a while to get his head on straight after that. The excitement of being able to really cast magic was intoxicating, despite his fucked-up situation and the potential of a life-and-death battle headed his way. It was insanely cool, so at the very least he’d go out with a bang!

Riven settled back down and pushed aside the Wretched Snare tome, pulling over the other tome that read Bloody Razors with the six-pronged red throwing star on the front. The introduction to basic blood magic was overall the same as the other had been, with a few key exceptions to the earlier paragraphs. After that, it got more complicated.

Just like all other blood-related spells, the focus you should be keying in on is the concept of remaking blood in your body’s own image. Cause the material within your blood to multiply, redistribute that blood into the environment, and cycle it into your soul’s Blood subpillar to simultaneously convert it into mana. If you cannot focus in on the Blood subpillar, you may use the Unholy pillar as a substitute—though it may be harder to do it this way and is more costly in terms of mana consumption.

Like many of the elemental pillars, utilizing your blood abilities can actually allow you to create ambient mana from the surrounding environment. Namely, you can draw out power from the blood of your fallen enemies. If there are corpses nearby, use them. This allows you to cast spells in the Blood subpillar at a reduced or even free rate if your mana manipulation is good enough. This aspect of using your environment to benefit, enhance, or even pay the mana cost of your blood spells is the same reason why the elemental subpillars of the Fae category are so popular despite their rigid utilization and relative lack of diversity. Just like a water mage can use nearby water, so too can you use nearby bodies to fuel your blood spells.

Otherwise you’re looking at creating mana-imbued blood from thin air. Creating it by utilizing your own body’s crimson liquid as a blueprint is the easiest application of this branch of magic, but this will obviously be more mana-expensive than using the environment around you, such as using the fallen soldiers on a battlefield for a highly reduced mana cost.

But utilizing the environmental factors is a long time coming and will take a lot of practice. Probably years or even decades, especially if you’re a beginner. In the meantime, rotate the mana and sharpen the mana’s vessel in your vision for eviscerating your enemies.

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