Blood Magus

Chapter 6

Zeth slept for about eighteen hours.

He went to bed soon after reuniting with his mom and sister, which was around midday, and awoke the next morning. For a moment he had the irrational urge to check if it had somehow been another four months, but when he left his room, he was greeted by his mom eating breakfast, notably not looking like he’d been missing for another third of a year.

“Are you feeling okay?” she asked. “You were asleep for a while. We don’t need to call a Healer, do we?”

“No, no, I’m fine,” he said, taking a step toward the door to leave. His plan was to go to the library today to do some re

He hadn’t really thought about putting a circle on an object and then taking that object around with him, but it was good to know that wasn’t an option ahead of time.

Actually, it would probably be a good idea to test something like that, in terms of its restrictions and allowances. Zeth glanced around to ensure the library was empty, then subtly began drawing a tiny circle on the current page of the book with his thumb.

After a couple minutes, it was finished. So then, if he tried to move the book or turn the page, that would count as moving the object and the circle would be erased?

He tried giving the book a gentle shake. The circle stayed. Then a more intense shake. It stayed.

Zeth frowned, stood, and started walking. Step after step after step, the ritual circle stayed planted on the corner of the page, until he was all the way across the room.

He glanced around again, then erased the circle with his finger. How had that not counted as movement and erased his circle?

He thought for a moment. Maybe, the Blood Mage version of the Ritual Circle Mastery Skill’s description include that bit about not being able to move them around, and the reason his didn’t have it is because he just…could? Blood Magus didn’t have the same restriction that Blood Mage had? That was certainly interesting.

Then Zeth got an idea. A terrible idea. A terrible, horrible, idea.

Hellfire Ritual, once armed, would activate and engulf someone in flames the moment they touched it. Only, it didn’t have to be that they touched the circle. It could be that the circle touched them.

If Zeth put the circle on something like a plank of wood, then slapped something with the wood…

It was clearly dangerous. He’d already seen how powerful the Skill’s flames were, and being so close to someone he used it on would likely burn him. But it probably wouldn’t kill him. Maybe he could get some basic fire resistance Universal Skill to avoid getting second-hand burns from being so close to his opponent when he caught them aflame. That could work, right?

At the very least, a strategy like that would eliminate the main weakness of Blood Mages that the book claimed they had—he could bring his ritual circles around with him. It would be like was his ‘lair.’ And if the book said that nobody under any circumstance should enter the lair of a Blood Mage…

Once he was done reading up on Blood Mage, Zeth moved on to searching for two specific things: Skills that could profit him Skill Points, and Skills that could let him resist fire. That meant Universal Skill compendiums, which meant a lot of reading.

Unlike the ease of finding exactly what he was looking for out of that Class book, finding the right Universal Skill was a matter of brute force. First off, there were a whole lot of them. And second, he didn’t have any particular name to search for. So the alphabetical ordering was much less useful. There were technically books that sorted the Skills differently, like books consisting exclusively of profit Skills, or of Skills that had a specific use, but those all cost money to access.

So, opening the massive tome of Universal Skills, he went straight to the ‘F’ section, looking for any Skill that began with the word ‘Fire’ or ‘Flame.’ Unfortunately, he found nothing particularly useful. But next, he went to the ‘H’ section, looking for ‘Heat,’ and hit exactly what he was looking for.

would

So, at max Rank, this would effectively give an extra seventy-five Endurance worth of heat resistance for the cost of four Skill Points, after counting the ones he’d get back for Ranking it up. Considering the cost of purchasing seventy-five points of Endurance outright would be twenty-fiveSkill Points, this would be very worth it, as far as Zeth was concerned.

Only, he have to Rank it up. Which would require him to get severely burned a bunch of times. That was probably why the cost was so low.

Speaking of low costs in return for harming oneself, Zeth also found some profit Skills worth considering. There was Breath Holding, which would require him to almost drown a few times over in order to unlock, there was Dirt Eating, which would require him to eat a “significant amount” of dirt to unlock, there were a bunch of other resistance Skills for different poisons and venoms, which would require him to repeatedly subject himself to a specific poison for each one…

Most of them sounded pretty horrible, to be honest. And for the most part, they all cost seven, eight, even nine Skill Points. He’d only get a tiny bit of profit for Ranking them all the way up to full, so it would simply be more efficient to purchase something like Vile Focus for now, anyway.

But one did catch his eye.

That one was cheap, profiting seven Skill Points after Ranking it to max, and even had a seriously beneficial effect—uncommon to see in profit Skills. At max Rank, it’d increase his healing speed to ten times what it would normally be.

The thought of an injury that would normally incapacitate him for an entire week suddenly needing less than a single day to recover from was certainly tempting. Only, its unlock requirement…Talk about a downside. Oh, just bring yourself to the brink of death, no big deal. And continue doing that over and over again to Rank it up. That’s all.

So maybe not now. But if he could find a way to unlock it, that would certainly be beneficial.

Zeth’s stomach grumbled. Had it been that long already?

He didn’t want to leave, but also wasn’t about to voluntarily skip a meal—not after feeling such voracious hunger yesterday. So he headed home. He’d gotten what knowledge he could from the library, now it was time for action. He didn’t anticipate being left alone by his enemies for very long, so it was time to get that “butcher’s workshop” going, do some rituals, and prepare for a fight.