Luge felt his mental power draining rapidly. In his mental-power space, it was as if an invisible brush were tracing a wondrous spell model high above; his mental power was the force that drove the brush, and also the equally invisible ink forcibly drawn up to feed it. For now, all he had to do was keep the ink flowing without interruption, letting it run slowly so his mental power would not fluctuate too much.
A zero-ring spell model usually had only twenty nodes.
Fetid Skin's had nineteen. Just as he began to feel a trace of fatigue, the spell model was finally completed. It drifted through his mental-power space like a strange kite, turning over and over.
Watching closely, he saw that the spell model, like those runes, kept changing within a certain range. Or perhaps a spell model was simply another kind of rune—more complex, but not a strange creation shaped by deliberate human effort toward complexity.
Luge stared at it for a long while before leaving meditation.
The scroll had warned him that building a spell model quickly would drain mental power rapidly, and that he must be at his best before unrolling it.
Once he had rested enough, he lost no time in beginning to meditate on the runes.
He traced the six runes one after another with utter familiarity, his mental power steady as a trickling stream.
His tracing grew faster and faster until he entered a state of self-forgetfulness. Before the first rune showed any sign of fading, he had perfectly finished tracing the sixth.
For an instant, his mental-power space seemed to hold still; then it began to expand outward. An invisible repulsive force existed among the six runes—their power was stretching the mental-power space, while the space's own resistance and restraint squeezed them back toward the center. The six little darlings drew closer and closer. Beautiful threads of light began to radiate from the runes, and when the threads touched, they twined together.
The entire mental-power space quivered.
Invisible ripples spread outward as the demonic mark took shape, continuing until the expansion and trembling of the mental-power space ceased.
A dark red demonic mark rested peacefully at the very center of his mental-power space, like a wound left by claws tearing through flesh. Seen closely, it was made of countless tiny runes that shifted constantly while the overall form remained unchanged—as if those six runes had been broken down in that instant into numberless tiny things.
He opened his eyes and wiped the sweat from his forehead; a smile crept onto his face and would not stop.
His mental-power space, only just stabilized, was insistently pouring out an indescribable emptiness, a strange sense of something missing—as though a person's soul were no longer whole.
It was like hunger from the soul.
The moment the feeling surged up, he knew what he had been waiting for had happened.
That was the zero-ring spell slot the meditation method created when the mental-power space expanded. It sat at the very top of the space; only after the chosen spell model was slotted in would he become whole and be rid of that sense of loss.
This was also why fixed spells were so special, capable of becoming almost instinctive.
He steadied himself and entered meditation again.
The Fetid Skin spell model had already been drawn up toward the heights.
The process went astonishingly smoothly, which showed that the spell really did have an extremely high compatibility with him.
At the moment the spell's solidification was complete, he fell into a brief daze.
In that instant his gaze crossed an unimaginable distance and saw an exceedingly remote place, where a pure white giant tree stood all alone. Five thick branches split from its trunk, and not a single leaf grew on them. A single glance at the white tree filled him with a sense of absolute holiness; for no reason he could name, it seemed the purest and most sacred thing in the world.
An instant later, he came back to himself.
The completed spell model settled into the invisible missing place. A completeness originating in his soul washed through him, and for a moment both body and mind rippled with an indescribable ease.
It was as though a star had appeared on the dome of his mental-power space.
He gazed up at it, feeling as if he were creating a phantom world of his own, with the demonic mark as a canyon beneath the starry sky.
He came out of meditation.
Even as he rose and worked his limbs, he eagerly began trying the first spellcasting of his life.
He simply formed the thought.
The zero-ring spell Fetid Skin succeeded at once, as smoothly as if by instinct. Everything felt natural, as if he were breathing. High compatibility together with solidification into a spell slot meant he felt not the slightest awkwardness or cost in casting.
After Fetid Skin was successfully cast, it entered the stage of being maintained by consuming mental power. He closed his eyes and felt it for a moment, and it seemed to him that he could keep the spell running forever.
He grinned and twitched his nose twice.
Gradually his brow furrowed, and his nose twitched harder and harder, until the fine hairs on his face were shaken loose one after another.
In this bizarre place, the kobolds' sense of smell might not be the strongest, but they were definitely an outstanding race at the top.
“Is it because of compatibility?” That was the only guess he could make.
He felt none of the torment described in the Fetid Skin spell, none of the suffering the caster was supposed to endure.
There was only a faint, indescribable smell.
It was neither foul nor fragrant. It did not sting the nose, yet it was always noticeable. Its peculiarity cost him a good many brain cells to describe accurately, and he still failed. It seemed the sensation was not confined to smell alone.
Probably very few people ever fixed this spell, he thought.
Because few did, there were few records. The inheritance scroll had not mentioned any special change after solidification the way it had for Boiling Spirit. In his own special case, solidifying the spell into a slot was one factor, and high compatibility might have played a part too; together they had deepened his mastery of the spell.
His thoughts returned to the tree he had seen while solidifying the spell.
Why would a spell supposedly foul and stinking show him a holy, strange tree in some unknown place?
He clicked his tongue and paced in place, kicking away two small stones that were in his way.
After mulling it over, he was still somewhat uneasy about the spell's effects.
He wanted to go out and test it against a sufficiently strong kobold, such as Big Dumb Hmph, who had become a guard.
Before that, he decided to take care of the storage pouch.
He rested a while. After assessing his condition, he picked up the arcane mark inheritance scroll and slowly unrolled it.
With an invisible ripple perceptible only to mental power, another inheritance scroll crumbled into dust that pattered down.
Now formally a first-rank apprentice wizard, he had a firmer mental-power space and denser mental power. The arcane mark spell model had only fifteen nodes, so the process naturally went off without a hitch.
The completed spell model floated in circles above the mental-power sea, orbiting the demonic mark in the void.
Normal, unfixed spell models had to be imbued with mental power before every casting. Gestures and incantations could help adjust mental power, bringing it closer to the spell model's fluctuations and speeding the filling process.
Feeling the drain on his mental power, he chose to generate his arcane mark on the back of his hand.
Zero-ring spell: Arcane Mark.
Every caster's arcane mark was unique, accompanying them through life like their own name.
At the caster's will, the spell could imprint a personal mark on a target surface, one that others could see or that could remain unseen. It could expose petty schemes that passed off fakes as real or quietly swapped one thing for another. It could also be used to track a target: within a certain range, the caster could sense the mark's approximate location.
More often, arcane marks were used in contracts of all kinds.
Contracts between wizards, or contracts made when binding a familiar, all required an arcane mark. A wizard would not casually leave their name behind; they almost always signed contracts with an arcane mark, and this was recognized by the laws all the same.
That was why this spell was also counted among the three spells one needed to master first.
During the mark's generation, the caster could not influence its specific pattern, nor could they actively change it later. The thing was like an abstract portrait of the caster in this world.
“Absolutely no bone, and don't you dare give me a mark shaped like a dog's face…”
He watched the mark form anxiously. Only when it was past halfway did he breathe a little easier. Parting the sparse hairs on the back of his hand, he revealed a mark of two interlocking rings. Inside were crisscrossing lines, and the blank gaps between them outlined a flower that had not yet fully bloomed.
Chapter 8