Eldritch Exorcist

I focused and started analysing my thoughts. Were they any different?

Was I mad?

Yes.

But that was nothing new.

Was I madder than usual? Now that was the question.

I went over my family's moral compass. Did I have some new inclination toward the murder of the innocent or the twisting of people into abominations? Maybe a strange need to enlighten the next person I meet about our Lord and Saviour Azathoth?

Not that I could tell.

Thankfully.

I reflected for a bit on my past kills, checking if anything had changed. I repeated the reasoning for each, but arrived at similar conclusions. No oddity there.

I wasn't excited about easy fights with normal humans. The only pleasure I took in an easy kill was the fact that it brought me closer to any goal I had. That, and a bit of pleasure in getting rid of someone I didn't like. But that was it. It wasn't the kind of sickening euphoria that could become addictive.

Hmmmm.

What did that mean? I looked once again at the scroll.

Faith: 1.

A spiritual understanding of the incomprehensible. It was a contradiction, but one I didn't know how, or if it in any way affected me. It was not something I wanted to leave for later. My mind was my most important tool.

So if nothing immediately showed itself, then there was one place to check.

At the source.

I sat down in a meditative position, ready to fall into myself. But instead of taking the plunge towards my soul, I started shifting in my spot. My movement range had changed, so sitting felt different. There was no tension, no matter how far I pushed my knees down towards the floor while sitting in a full lotus.

It was strange.

I gave myself some time to get used to it so that any shifting on my part wouldn't disrupt my meditative state.

I then closed my eyes and allowed myself to fall through my consciousness. I felt as if time had stopped. I slipped beneath my mind into the space deep in the soul.

As always, I arrived at the barren field of gray. As always, there was the linen rope. And as always, there was the darkness, directly behind my back.

I turned around and looked at the wall of void. And I could immediately feel that something was wrong.

There was the familiar feeling of something trying to arouse a sensation of fear inside me, but just ended up as a dull pressure on the soul. But the sensations of wrongness grew. There was a change. There was beauty to it that I didn't see before, a pattern, a rhythm, and in it was a gaze looking back at me, a gaze I wanted to–

I ripped myself out of the meditation.

I arrived back in my own body in the attic as a sharp headache assaulted me. For a second, I felt like a fish out of water, like I was in the wrong space and couldn't breathe. Only after a few seconds did my lungs remember their role, and I took a few deep gulps of air.

Trying to meet the gaze of the Abyss. Was I suicidal?

I took a few seconds to calm my breathing and reviewed what had happened.

At no point did I lose control or reason. It didn't feel like that.

So what was it?

I knew better than to gaze into the Abyss, especially with my current strength.

The answer was something different. I think it was fascination.

Like noticing something new in your favourite painting and hyper-fixating on it, that's what I did. I hyper-fixated on the rhythm of the Abyss. I was always drawn in by it, but now there was more. There was an understanding, a part of me telling me I could see through the darkness if I just looked long enough.

Without any feelings of fear, that was a dangerous thing. I had nothing to warn me except my own reason, and it was not as quick as the primal sensations of terror.

The good news was that the change didn't affect my personality or reasoning. But my relationship with eldritch magic was something I needed to work on.

I closed my eyes and went back into my mind, this time reminding myself over and over again not to look too long into the wall of nothingness. Once I felt in control once again, I started on the next step.

I then whispered the god's name and invoked the magic at the lowest level I could.

It flew through me, the strange, squirming, and writhing force. I kept my eyes closed for now and just sensed it move, trying to get it under control. I immediately sensed the difference once again. The whispers that accompanied the magic were now much more inviting, softer on my ears. The strange, reverberating language of the Void seemed to have a flow to it, a rule buried deep within the many voices. And if I just listened closely long enough...

I ignored that suicidal idea and let the magic flow into my eyes before opening them.

The mysteries of the material world were laid bare as usual. Existence screamed as the eldritch magic wanted to tell me everything about it. But this time it was less threatening, once again more inviting. The knowledge wasn't forbidden, but something that should be known.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

The energy flow through my body actually felt pleasant. Unlike the sensation of a foreign being crawling inside me, now it was like a warm current, well, almost. A squirming current, but warm.

I ended the contract and let the energy flow out of me and dissipate around me. I could see eyeballs and tentacles form in the air like mirages in a desert, but with the minuscule amount I used, they quickly dissipated.

I had a lot of work to do.

First on the list was speaking without biting my tongues.

I looked at the skin scroll once again.

Race: ? Bloodline: ?

Circle: 3

Standard Spells per circle:

1st: 18 -> 27

2nd: 6 -> 9

3rd: 4

Stats:

Body

Strength: 16 -> 19

Dexterity: 17 -> 23

Endurance: 16 -> 25

Constitution: 15 -> 17

Mind

Intelligence: 23 -> 26

Wisdom: 15 -> 16

Willpower: 25 -> 29

Mental Defense (non-fear): 24 -> 27

Spirit

Soul: 19 -> 20

Instinct: 0

Faith: 0 -> 1

Manifestation: 0

Social

Empathy: 2

Charisma: 4

Pressure: 21 -> 25

Passion: 8

Skills: Multilingual; Authority Over Mana (apprentice); Authority Over Mind; Eldritch Madness; Eldritch Tongue; Servant to the Abyss; Spell Casting; Ritual Casting; Curse Weaving; Full Astral Projection (apprentice); Golem Creation (novice); Darkvision; Accelerated healing

Secrets: Fire, Space, Death, Mind

Mysteries: Space, Death, Curse, Soul, Mind

Enigmas?: Eldritch

That was quite the increase. What was surprising were the physical attributes. Strength wasn't that high for the third circle. But dexterity was quite unexpected. With speed like that, I could actually dodge a warrior without any spells.

The most surprising one was endurance, which suddenly skyrocketed. I didn't pay that much attention to it before. It was essentially a measure of how much your body could endure, both in terms of exhaustion and physical damage.

I curiously looked at my finger. The wound from piercing it for the scroll was already closed. So it was this type of endurance.

I should have high survivability and healing, but not much had changed when it comes to the flesh's toughness. I should be able to live through some nasty wounds, though, probably even survive something like a pierced heart.

That also meant I needed to change my body enhancement spell. I had agility covered without magic. Now, toughness was the better choice.

"Neat," I said, somehow without biting myself, while closing and opening my hand.

Darkvision and Accelerated healing were a nice addition.

There were many more gains than I expected. I knew there was more to it. My lineage needed way more investigation, not to mention my relationship with mana.

I also needed to check if I unlocked some bloodline magic. But if it were Eldritch type, then I'm not sure how I would even access it. Would it be by instinct, like a sorcerer? But my instinct was at a firm zero. Instead, my faith rose as if for a priest or a warlock.

Then again, it was a scroll made by a relatively weak fortune teller. It's possible that more complex changes weren't detected.

A change to Ophelia's curriculum was needed. I now had a pile of research and fixing shit about myself on my plate. I guess I would need to contact her Qi teacher sooner than planned. She would start on physical training next.

I was about to head home and start on my long list of things to do, but decided to check on one last thing. I was curious how my new mental stats affected my magic, with willpower jumping by four and all the other attributes improving.

I picked Flames of Purgatory as my test subject. It was a dual-attribute spell that was one of the tougher ones to cast. It would make for a good benchmark.

I connected with my mana. It flowed and listened much better than before. Happy about the growth, I raised my head to start casting.

But I immediately ended the spell.

I was concentrating as I usually did. Maybe slightly more to sense any difference, but by no means was it the type of state where I forgot about everything around and focused on magic alone. Not the kind of state where the personification of my mana should show.

But there she stood.

Previously, whenever she showed, she would be somewhere in the distance. Sometimes in the corner, sometimes sitting on a bench in the background, or looking in through a window. But right now, when I connected to magic, she showed herself standing right in front of me.

In full view.

Closer than ever.

After returning from the mansion following my ascension, I started on my new routine. In the morning, I would sit in front of a mirror and practice speaking without making strange faces or piercing my tongue.

The trick I discovered was to actively push my second tongue against the floor of my mouth while talking. That would make it almost the same as the way I spoke previously.

I could leave it at that when it came to my ability to communicate, but there was more to my new appendage. It turned out that speaking in both Arcane and Abyssal was made much easier when using the second tongue.

For Arcane, I would press my original tongue against the roof of my mouth and use the new one to articulate the runes. My initial theory was that the shape of it or the construction of my new throat opening made the strange and inhuman language of the Arcane easier to pronounce.

The words seemed to, well… roll off my tongue.

But that theory went out the window the moment I tried silent casting while instinctively blocking my original appendage. Just doing that helped with the spell as if it were some flesh antenna connecting me to magic, no matter how strange it sounded.

This effect was further amplified when trying to control ambient mana, as the initial part of attunement was made much quicker. Magic accepted my will faster, even when it wasn't familiar with me.

Now, the case for Abyssal was even more complicated. Arcane was a language made to be spoken by a vast and all-encompassing entity, but eldritch was a language that was made not to be spoken at all.

Pronouncing even one word took a toll, not to mention actually pronouncing all the strange throaty sounds required. But if I used both my appendages, I could sense the burden lessening.

That was true at least for the one phrase that I was training on repeat in preparation for a test of my new control of Eldritch magic. In preparation for the offering, and prayer at the altar of the abyssal god.