NOVEL NEXT Chapter Twenty-Five: The World Slows Down
With the execution of Tywyll's plan, the world seemed to slow down once again. The dark sect's activity had already been hampered by the bounty hunters in the city, eager to cash in on the rewards posted by the Divine King of Shenlong and our own High King, but with them now having what – at least to them – seemed like undeniable proof that Yushin was simply a member of a quasi-rebellious faction within the Divine King's Court, she was no longer a major target.
That wasn't to say that the sect's activities were entirely gone. During the summer solstice celebration, they had attempted to poison Elder Tywyll with a mind-altering poison, and to extract information from Charm. Shé Rui and his wife still found themselves occasionally battling one of the sect, as they seemed convinced that he had to know something about the location of the mysterious Traitor Wyrm's child.
Fortunately for us, though, their actions had largely been met with failures across the board. Shé Rui and his wife were a match for any singular member of the sect, and while it was possible to pile on bodies until he was captured, it still wouldn't be instant. No fight at their level of power was quick, and it would be near impossible to capture the pair before the Erudite or a powerful member of the city guard could arrive to put a stop to it.
The sect member who'd gone after Charm hadn't even been able to lay a scratch on the strange man. He'd wound up killing himself to avoid capture, and it seemed like the sect leader was unwilling to commit more bodies to chasing down such a shaky lead.
The woman who'd attempted to poison Elder Tywyll had confessed to a hundred thousand different crimes and motivations while under duress and the effects of truth spells, but the information was impossible to use. While being tortured, people would convince themselves of whatever they needed to in order to get a moment of relief, and could even make themselves believe that they were telling the truth. It was the main reason my family had never employed torture as an interrogation tool, only as a punishment.
Not for ethical reasons, merely because it was inefficient.
Elder Tywyll didn't care about that. With her generally amusing and amicable nature, and with the way she seemed to genuinely care about Salem and his family, it was easy to just think of her as an old witch, like Magda.
But she wasn't just an old woman, she was a hag. Tywyll seemed to delight in shattering the dantien of the cultivator, tearing her bloodline apart, and stitching them back together in the wrong way. Once the sect woman's spirit was shattered, Tywyll set about breaking her psyche. Within days, the woman was rendered completely incapable of speech, and barely even screamed anymore, even though her body hadn't been touched a single time. It was only when the cultivator's spirit and mind had been broken that Tywyll started working on breaking the woman's body.
It was a chilling reminder of just how inhuman she really was, and made me resolve to not ever let professor Toadweather – or any other faerie for that matter – put me in a position where I owed them an open-ended debt.
Despite the moments of horror, glimpsed only through entering the room with Tywyll before she'd cleaned up, oblique comments about the status of her 'project', and the nightmares where Salem occasionally slipped into her dreams, the rest of the week passed peacefully.
Classes were largely on break for the week, meaning I spent most of the time with either Salem, Yushin, and Jackson, or else with Salem's family. Both of them were fun, albeit in their own ways. My friends visited me at work, we all went out to eat at various street vendors, played a handful of the games that were set up, and wandered around the city to look at the shops. I hadn't really had a chance to do that last year, with how caught up in my preparation for the duel I'd been, and it was fun to get a chance to explore with my friends.
Yushin was captivated by a shop known as 'The Serpent and Steelworker'. It was owned by a lovely couple in their fifties, both graduates of the Citadel who had turned their affinities toward mercantile interests. One of the owners was a human artificer, while her wife was a steel mage with an Ouroboros bloodline, and their shop specialized in creating enchanted weapons and armor for people with bloodlines.
Yushin waffled back and forth on purchasing a pair of daggers that were designed to channel and enhance a serpentine bloodline. They would be just about perfect for her, but they were also absurdly expensive, about twelve thousand silver – and that was with the student discount that the shop offered.
Jackson tried to get me to buy a sword that could be flooded with a fire bloodline to strengthen itself and light on fire, and Seren seemed to agree that it would be a fun thing to play with. I turned both of them down, though, as I had no real interest in mastering weaponry. My refusal caused my familiar to pout and sulk, but in Seren's defense, his concept of mortal money was extremely limited.
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Jackson was personally most interested in a glassblowing shop, which rather surprised me. The owner of the shop wasn't a mage, cultivator, destiny marked, nor did they have a bloodline or any other method of power and magic. No, they were simply a person who used their skill in glassblowing and fine work with glass to create all sorts of different things. They sold a handful of instruments that could be used by artificers in the production of magical devices, but that wasn't the focus of their shop.
Indeed, just like the owner, most of what they sold wasn't meant for magic at all. They sold plates, bowls, and other dining vessels that were made from mixing together the scraps of different colors of glass left over each week. They sold bottles of all sorts of different shapes and sizes that could be used for drinking, for storing cooking oil, or for holding wine. But Jackson's favorite thing that they sold were tiny glass ornamental animals.
The day that the shop owner spent making the animals, Yushin practically had to peel Jackson away from the viewing window, and I was fairly convinced that if she hadn't, he'd have been content to sit there all day, watching the old glassblower work.
Salem's favorite shop by far was the artificer-based tattoo shop. The shop owner was a woman in her thirties with blue-green hair and a hint of some sort of aquatic bloodline, though it was so weak as to be practically powerless.
What was far more interesting was her affinity. It was, technically, an ink affinity. But unlike most ink affinities, it wasn't limited to strictly material manipulation. Rather, the actual core affinity spell was much closer to an artifice or alchemy affinity than to a traditional ink manipulation. It allowed her to grind up materials and imbue their properties into ink, which could then be shaped into specific forms in order to create specific effects.
The chalkboard that held the list of what the shop's tattoos could do was admittedly pretty impressive. There were tattoos that could serve as storage for ether, allowing the person to store ether within it, then draw it out into their pool at a later date. There were tattoos that could improve a person's physical strength and speed, with some versions reliant on channeling ether through them like a spell, and others simply acting as permanent enhancements. There were tattoos that could hold specific spells within them, such as arcane armor, in order to release the spell at a person's whims, before slowly recharging themselves over time.
While all of them were indeed impressive, they also weren't staggeringly powerful. The ether storage could, theoretically, hold enough power to fire a billion ninth circle spells at once, but all artifice – including this strange, ink-based version – was constrained by materials. If I wanted a tattoo that could hold that much power, I'd need to get my hands on equally rare and powerful ingredients that were also of the right sort to be used for storing magic.
That held true for all of them. The materials to create a self-recharging arcane armor tattoo were expensive, with the cost of upgrading it to greater arcane armor even more so.
"Are you thinking about having your tattoos charged with magic?" I asked as Salem looped by to check the board a third time. "She does offer restructuring of existing inks."
"Maybe," Salem said. "It's… My affinity an' other magic isn't as offensive as you an' the rest'a the team. If I had somethin' ta' let me be permanently stronger an' faster…"
"You are a useful member of the team. None of the rest of us can read minds, sense the presence of anything capable of thought, or implant suggestions into people," Yushin said, cutting right to the heart of the matter with her usual mix of bluntness and kindness. "However, you are right that in terms of raw combat output, you are the weakest in the team. A minor but permanent physical enhancement would not be amiss, but it is not critical for your development either. You could utilize certain ritual spells to achieve a similar effect."
Salem made a noncommittal noise, but nodded. In the end, he didn't purchase any tattoo modifications that day, mumbling something about wanting to compare to the rituals.
Of course, exploring the city with my friends wasn't the only thing that I got up to that weekend. I spent more time with Salem and his parents as we went to a variety of restaurants around the city. Their family wasn't rich, nowhere near the level of the Dreki family, and they were merely aids to the Elder Council, not members, but they were far from poor. It had been a long time since I'd personally eaten anywhere remotely as nice, apart from the school food around the solstices.
Though there was a bit of an initial awkward area with Salem and his family, in no small part due to Salem's condition, my own family history, and – most of all – the fact I was dating their son, by the time the week was passed we were chatting more normally. We talked about their work, Salem's courses, my courses, and our plans for after graduation.
That conversation was a new one for me. For most of my life, I'd been trying to keep off the Dreki family's radar. When I'd first come here, I'd assumed I'd be a shut in, visiting classes and rushing back to my room, and that when I graduated, I'd have enough power to hide from them permanently. I'd never expected to be free, only to be able to find a small town or large village and work as a wizard, hidden away from the prying eyes and ears of my family.
Now, though… I didn't know what I wanted to do after. The small town life had appealed to me specifically because it was a place to hide, not because I loved it.
Salem's parents were sympathetic to my plight, but didn't tell me what I should do. In a way, I was thankful to them for that. It would be far too easy for someone to just tell me a new direction, but instead, they pushed me to think on it and figure it out for myself.
But before long, the week came to a close. I once again took a carriage to High Trees with Salem, and we waved goodbye to the visiting Erudite, Elder Tywyll, and to Salem's parents, before returning to the school to finish out the rest of our summer courses, and prepare for the autumnal ones.