The Asshai's Bloodmage

 When I'm back in my cabin I see a system alert:

Kill pirates: 51/200

The mission numbers have been updated, it seems that the last pirates have been executed. There were 59 men and 8 are still alive. This week I'll start the experiments on them. The good thing is that among the 8 men there is 1 with violet eyes. A Valyrian, this will allow me to understand the anatomy of our race better. I have to keep him alive as long as possible, when I return to paying attention to my notes about Asshai'i, Liza comes to my room.

She tells me about now being a magic apprentice and her elemental affinity, the rare element lightning. After congratulating her and we chat a little more she says that she heard about the apprentices' meeting and that she is eager to participate and her sister will also participate. I thank her and say that I will let her know when the time comes. I was actually going to schedule this meeting quickly, but we are arriving in New Ghis where we will do a little resupply and hire some men for the second ship so I decided to postpone the meeting until after we leave the city.

***

 With almost 1 month at sea, I am now in sight of the island of New Ghis. We were lucky with the good weather and got here faster than expected, but we may not be so lucky next time. We are now down to 2 ships since Omar decided to keep the ship we captured and named the former pirate as its Captain.

It has been 3 days since the pirates attacked us and I have done as many experiments as I could on 4 of the 8 pirates captured. The reason I focused on these 4 was that they were the oldest and overweight. In addition, I gave some of them non-human traits. I left these traits hidden inside their bodies and analyzed how they behaved and their side effects. I also made them sterile to avoid any chance of them escaping in the future and producing some mutant child.

The first few days I was a little disgusted with myself for being so cruel to these men. But when I talked to Henry about it he assured me that we would all have met a terrible fate if we had lost the fight that day. With women and children seeing the worst side of these criminals. This hardened my mentality and reminded me of my goals of unraveling and understanding all the mysteries of this world. Besides, I am a Blood Mage, and there is no such thing as a kind Blood Mage. They are all cruel and whenever their names are mentioned it is related to diseases, mutants and monsters.

Without the last restrictions I had, I did everything I could with the pirates, I changed their appearances, altered their internal organs, strengthened their skin, muscles and bones to test how much energy was needed for each change. With this, I confirmed that the humans of this world are identical to those of Earth, I also confirmed how much each change costs from the simplest to the most complex, such as altering their organs and main functions.

I tested the limits of men and their adaptations to sensory organs, larger and smaller limbs, faster blood flow, harder and more resistant bones. The pressure ended up being too much and one of the pirates ended up dying, another was in a coma and the last two were very thin and malnourished. I decided to hand them over to the justice of New Ghis to pay for their crimes. I did this because I don't plan on feeding so many criminals for several months at sea. The remaining 4 are enough and there should always be more options if we are attacked again.

We soon arrive at the port of New Ghis, but contrary to what I expected to see, there is only chaos in the place, there are wounded men, broken ships and even a small part of the great wall of the city has been burned and destroyed. I forget that this island was a Valyrian colony, and the first signs of rebellion are already appearing. Slave revolts, piracy and the Ghiscari people rising again in the shadows. I tell the Captain to buy all the water we need and warn that we will leave here as soon as possible. So whoever wants to go to the city must do so at their own risk.

The ex-pirate takes the 3 men in chains and says he knows where to collect the reward, while trying to recruit a few more men for our second sailboat. Henry leaves to trade for the tapestries and I send some crew members with bags of coins to find spell books since it doesn't hurt to try. Some passengers don't take my advice and leave the ship, one of them being Jack and the other the newlywed couple from one of the cabins.

While we wait, I ask for extra water for everyone to take a shower, since this has not been something that has happened often in the last month. So most of them listen to me and do not leave the ship, since they would have to go to an inn to get such a thing.

I ask the VIPs and the rest of the cabins if they need anything to be bought in the city, but most of them are fine. So we wait, ready to leave at any moment. I wanted to be able to take a look at the city and even learn a little more about what happened here, but if an attack or a battle starts at any moment, we must leave quickly.

The water for consumption is the first to arrive; there were vendors at the port who deal only with this. We still had water for another month, this time we bought another 2 and a half months of water in addition to the extra for the passengers to bathe. I buy another 500-liter tank and leave it in my personal inventory. I want to try to use some of the water to help my blacksmith create 1 or 2 more pistols. Having only two with only two shots is too little, and I have a lot of weaknesses when reloading during combat.

Therefore, having more pistols is the best solution at the moment since I'm not that good with swords yet and I don't have many spells to discard the pistols, nor the means to improve my revolver project at the moment. Besides, I don't know how long firearms will be useful and I should gradually stop depending on them. To do this, my inventory would help me have more ammunition by having several pistols, so it's the simplest solution for now.

Henry returns 2 hours later, the couple returns soon after bringing some local items as souvenirs and Jack returns last. The men I sent return carrying some books each. The pirate is the last to return with 6 strong and tall men who look like Ghiscari people, all with dark skin, black hair and eyes. In addition to the new sailors, he has a bag of extra coins that he gives to me and I give to Captain Henry.

After the baths and with everyone on board, we start to leave the place. Henry takes the opportunity to tell me the information he gathered while selling the tapestries. According to rumors, there was a dragon lord staying here with his dragon for several months, but after the disaster was confirmed, the atmosphere throughout the city became very tense, there were many arguments between him and the local lords and after a few weeks someone tried to assassinate him. The man was seriously injured and managed to mount his dragon and escape, but not before flying and burning part of the city's fleet, its walls and the unlucky people who were there.

The tense atmosphere and the constant state of war were the fear of his return, but for me this assassination attempt was very suspicious, whoever did it ran a serious risk of the dragon going on a rampage after the death of its rider and spending several months attacking the island. So it is obvious that whoever did this did not kill him on purpose and only injured him to make him flee the island with his dragon.

With such a dragonlord around, it would be difficult for any sign of rebellion on their part. I now had an understanding of how all dragonlords would perish as time passed. No matter where they went, they would always be on alert for assassination attempts. The Valyrians' reign of tyranny and slavery has now been weakened to the point where it is said to have almost disappeared and anyone who seeks revenge and retaliation will not miss this opportunity no matter what cost they have to pay... Perhaps the person who tried to kill the dragonlord really he didn't care about the consequences in the end.

Soon the small island begins to disappear as we move away heading east. Henry comes to me and gives me a bag of gold coins, it only has 7 coins in it, but after all the loot it's still a good reward since I spent a little on the books. Speaking of the books, I didn't have much luck again, half of them are frauds and the other half are about religions.

In the end there were only two books that are interesting one talks about preparations of a corpse to transform it into a zombie. Although there is no ritual to bring the body back to life, it tells what to do to preserve the body in its best condition, even for sale. I'm not interested in necromancy, but I can use the methods to preserve corpses during my tests and experiments. The last book is a blood ritual, suitable not only for Blood Mages, but for any practitioner as the method used is completely different from the lesser healing book.

If all elemental spells are used in the same way as lesser healing then blood rituals, soul rituals and sacrificial rituals are entirely different methods. The last two are often seen in deity books and anyone can use them as long as they practice and follow the method correctly. It remains to be seen whether someone without talent would still complete any of the rituals, but I believe that when one prays or makes offerings to a God there must be something more involved, perhaps the person does not even need to have talent and just devotion and persistence. I will not touch on the affairs of the gods until I am much stronger than I am as this could bring me great danger. Then I let go of the thought and return to the ritual in front of me.

The rituals that involve blood are the simplest and most of them don't require human blood, at least that's what I believe and what I'm seeing in the descriptions in this book. The ritual in question uses blood simply to record large amounts of information on paper, skin or even walls. The only requirement is that the blood must be fresh, and this wouldn't be a problem for someone with live animals. I decide to test it by recording a copy of the ritual itself using the blood I previously collected from the pirate guinea pigs, the blood is in my inventory in vials and I only use 1 of them. Soon after drawing the symbol on the table and thinking about the information I want, the blood moved from the circle and words formed on the blank papers recreating a copy of the small ritual book. It is now divided into 3 white A4 size sheets with each having at least 6 small pages, all I need to do is cut them out and put them together in the correct order. I leave that for later and make records in the system confirming the veracity of the ritual. I look forward to finding more of these rituals, which despite being simple are very useful and easy to use, and my eagerness to get to Asshai only increases.