Asheron's Fall: The Power of Ten, Book Six

I blinked away the Sight before I got too engrossed. I didn’t have the Ranks yet to understand everything that was happening, although Mira was practically salivating to be allowed to spend hours and hours studying the interplay the way I could. Isparian Magic just didn’t have the tools that I did to play with.

Most importantly, this menhir circle was circulating rather large amounts of free mana.

Cautiously, I stepped into the interior of the menhirs, and instantly felt a harsh, raw prickling on my skin as raw, uncontrolled mana leaking out of it was attracted to my natural mana draw, trying to get in.

It felt like mana with thorns, unrefined and unmodulated, and there was a lot of it. Easily 4-5 mana every six seconds, scores of times faster than I could do naturally, and five times faster than Meditation.

Well, I knew where I was going to be standing to get in my rep counts, if I could restore myself from what was going on here.

I looked at that pit below, some sort of short-circuit or bulging in the nexus, where a surge or feedback had pushed back through the system and been vented... and was still being vented.

So, I shot it with a Holy Vivic Dart.

The energies of the henge flared white and electrum, almost singing in the manafield. Vivus spurted and began to nibble at the arcane fire, more thickly as I continued blasting into the small pit, condensing on those jutting crystals and playing over the fused soil.

The sparks shooting up were slowly swallowed and calmed down as vivus began to grab the discharge and naturally vent it back into the ground, returning it smoothly to the ley line without affecting the mana rotating through the area.

I’d have to use II’s to get my rep counts for Valences in, which meant 20 mana, or about four cycles of mana here, 24 seconds, 150 reps an hour, basic 500 reps on the Argos Scale in just over three hours.

I needed to get Sacred Spell down to +0 with all speed, so I could apply it to ALL my I’s, and later my II’s, III’s, and IV’s. The resulting Caster Level bonus from Good Domain magic was only going to be more helpful, stacking with my Coldcasting.

I still needed to explore the area, but I had found an extremely important resource right here. The only thing was going to be the need to get some Karma every day to drive my gear, which meant exploring the area and seeing what there was to find out.

Was I in a hurry? No, but the daily need for Karma for my gear was going to drive most of what I was doing. I should probably also start shutting down the Summons in a broader area, leaving some isolated ones. If, as I expected, the Summons were stronger the further away from a settlement they were, it meant I should be able to shuffle between them just to get enough Naming Karma without a problem.

After all, I was only going to gain a Level and a set of Stat points a day, regardless of what I did, on either side of the equation. Technically I should be taking three days between my Levels, just so I could max out the three Masteries per Level I could take, but I needed some of those Class abilities like, now.

Still, were the costs all that significant, in the long run? I really should be aiming for Six at this point, get my Arcane Thesis, and be able to raise any Secondary Classes I took to Four for a Stat advance. As long as I could earn Karma, the higher costs should be rather irrelevant overall, and if these Summons could bring in tough enough creatures, well, Karma was cheap and easy here.

Even a damn fool could gain Levels if they learned how to snipe these Summons!

That said... I needed my Arcane Theurge Levels as much as I needed my Pool Theurge Levels. And I also needed my Archwizardry and Archsorcery.

Arcane Theurge would allow me to Cast Wizard spells out of Sorcery Slots, which I could recharge with Pool Mana, effectively turning all my Wizard spells into mutable Spells Known. I could also trash them for pure mana to Cast Sorcery spells through, turning them into a monstrous reserve of mana over time.

Archlevels doubled the amount of base Spell Engrams and Spell Slots I had.

Mira blinked at that, and looked at my Casting ability now. 4/1 Wizardry spells and 5/3 Sorcery Slots was 90 mana for I’s and 80 mana for II’s, and that was without my bonuses from Intellect. Just two Levels each of the Arches was effectively +170 mana! That would be 340 mana, plus 2/2 x2 for bonuses, 400 mana!

-How do you have such unbelievable amounts of mana?- she asked, shocked at the amount of energy we carried around.

It normally doesn’t regenerate without hours of work or sleep, and it’s in much more fixed forms, I replied to her. Your Pool has access to every single spell you know, and it’s irrelevant if you have less mana overall if you can recover it quickly.

-Why so many restrictions? It seems... quite unnatural,- she asked, studying the discrepancies between the two systems.

Eyeballing it, the Isparian system makes no allowance for Chaos. I’m gathering you have a more stable and dense magical field than we do. The difference is that your spells are Cast at full cost, and then you convert them down, the exact opposite of what we do. We have a Valence foundation, and do more and more within the Valence, i.e., keeping the cost the same. We have no Mana Conversion, such as it is. We make the same amount of Valences do more, we don’t reduce the cost of the Valence at all.

Given that Cantrips are only coughing up a point of mana every two cycles, and are supposed to be half a Level, in Isparian terms, there is a LOT of energy bound up in keeping the spells safe and controlled, i.e., stopping wild magic or chaos energy from doing uncontrolled shit. As we get better at Casting the spells or Metas, we control the Chaos and use it to further energize the spell, ‘making use’ of the excess mana that is there without losing control of the spell.

-Chaos in your mana and spell structures,- she repeated, studying the Rune and Spell Engrams. -That seems...dangerous?- she hedged carefully.

Oh, wild magic is extremely bloody dangerous. That’s why our spells seem so inefficient and wasteful next to yours, making sure they don’t happen. On the other hand, the levels we can boost them to can still exceed yours by a comfortable margin because of that, whereas you can drive the cost of your spells down by ninety percent, it seems... but your results are variable. We’ll have to do something about that.

It might also be why our magic is so much more fluid and variable than yours is. We simply have more room to play inside the mana structure. Caster Level only seems to affect Spell Penetration and Casting Chance on your side of the equation, since you can fail to Cast a spell, and ours will always go off if the forms are followed. Adding Arcane Mastery to that would enable us to start measuring things far more precisely.

Understanding what that Feat could do had her eyes glittering. -But you must be a Nine to take that Feat,- she pointed out as she read the details of it.

Arcane Mastery let me Take 10 on contested Caster Checks, including Dispel rolls and Spell Penetration checks, among other things. Every single spell that an Isparian Cast was a check against a spell’s complexity of manaflow and control of the spell. Unless your base score was +50 higher than was needed, there was a chance of failure, and if the target had Spell Resistance, the skill check was made against their Magic Defense, exactly as done on our side.

I had significant bonus Caster Levels for multiple reasons, but Dispel and punching Spell Resistance were two of the big reasons. The Isparian magic seemed to be taking advantage of them when mixed with my own.

Isparian magic seemed very fixed otherwise. Damage, area, duration, and range were barely affected by Caster Level at all. The fact some Matrix spells benefited from all those at once was just astonishing to Mira, who definitely wanted to see if I could convert the entirety of the Isparian spell system over to the Matrix format and Cast them all that way.

It was a good idea, really. Adding boosts to range, area, and duration from Caster Level, in addition to scaling damage, would really be useful. However, there was no doubt we’d need Engrams to profit from the whole thing, which would limit the number of spells that could benefit from such a structure at one time.

Chaos, doing things for magic since the time of the first Casters...

Superb flexibility of which spells within a frozen set of them via the Mana Pool. Absolute versatility with enough time given massive selection of spells, with long-term power equal to or greater via the Matrix and learning to control Chaos better.

Wed them together, get a very powerful system of Arcane magic.

I turned my attention to the present and the buildings nearby to investigate.

But first, the crater with all the gleaming blue crystal shards in it demanded attention from me.

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Hundreds of corpses of humans, withered, reduced to bones that weren’t even gnawed on. They were blasted into and melded into the stone all about another spot in the ground that was leaking tainted mana, just like in the dungeon. I immediately started blasting it, one Dart to skulls, one to each of the still-bright blue crystals all around, resonating with some fell energy I didn’t much like.

The holes in the ground formed a triple array, had no idea what was down there, and it didn’t matter.

People had died here... and not all of them were human. A whole lot of them, regardless. Detect Precious Materials found absolutely nothing of value, although vivus started to do its work here, acting on the jetting energies and the plethora of arcanely-preserved dead. I was actually amazed something necromantic hadn’t grabbed this many dead, but they were Really Dead... there was no spark of anti-soul to infuse in them.

Nor was there the slightest sign the various dead, human or otherwise, had any belongings on them, which was deuced strange. Given the way so many of them were impaled by blue shards, and blasted or deformed by the broken arcane energies, something big, blue, and crystalline had exploded here, at the exact moment a whole bunch of... totally-naked and extremely tightly-packed beings were around it.

Four of them looked to have been automatons, scattered and warped and degraded, impossible to reassemble, somehow caught up in the same effect.

Had that been the same thing that happened in the dungeon, only with a lot more people? What had made them suddenly converge here? Some sort of mass Teleport Contingency, gone horribly wrong?

I left the crater boiling and bubbling with mistflame happy to eat away at everything there, cleansing and maybe finally getting the Land to relax a bit here, while I worried at the meaning in the back of my head.

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The upper stretch of the town was damaged and abandoned, naturally enough. I saw no recent tracks of anything human, although the heavy clawmarks of the olthoi were visible in places here and there in the dirt, indicating the guards from the nest checked the places out.

The designs of the wooden structures and some of the ornamental carving on them was definitely Aluvian, although I could see Gharu’n influences, and some from the reclusive Sho. Human-sized entryways, internal furnishings (what had survived), and windows.

A lot of interior destruction, both planned and from the weather, and definitely some wildlife coming in and using the places as dens. The chopping marks and acidic fusing from the olthoi were particularly visible here and there, poking and prodding into places, and they seemed to be trying to encourage the mushrooms to build in the ruins of the buildings.

I set the shrooms all on vivic fire, a constant policy I applied as soon as I got within range of any of them going forward. The Land agreed that whatever breed they were was unnatural, and vivus toasted them nicely, helping thicken the green under the snow and reverse the environmental damage the shrooms had done as it did so.

The main buildings up here looked to be a tavern in the Aluvian style, made out of wood; what might have been some sort of general store given the variety of rusting and unusable goods I saw laying around, and some sort of finer dwelling of better wood, now all warped and rotted, perhaps a mayor’s office or something.