A Jaded Life

Chapter 1341

I couldn’t help but sigh in disappointment when one of my ideas didn’t pan out as hoped. Or expected, meaning I had to go back to my drawing board and erase a fairly large portion of my current theory about the Mind, the Soul and the system from it, as I had just demonstrated that it didn’t match reality. At least it didn’t match it when testing on Joshua; it was possible that the guy simply had no soul, or that his fairly high aptitude for Mind Magic was skewing results. But, sadly, it was more likely that my theory was wrong, or at least incomplete, and I would have to accept that, rather than try to find another test subject that didn’t falsify it.

After taking a moment to look down on the crumpled form of Joshua, I let out a snort of disgust. The guy had seriously soiled himself when I prodded his mind a little too vigorously, making me briefly consider whether I should change his diet to make further accidents less fragrant. Or maybe drug him with laxatives the day before experiments, just to clean things out so he wouldn’t be able to make a mess during my experiments, only in his cell.

Shaking my head, I conjured a torrent of tepid water, just warm enough to avoid harming my test subject, and cleaned him up. I didn’t bother with being gentle, just with being thorough, no matter how disgusting that was. The things I did to advance my magical knowledge sometimes made me wonder if there were boundaries I wouldn’t cross. Because the list of people I wouldn’t gleefully sacrifice wasn’t a long one, consisting of a total of five, maybe six, beings, only three of whom were present in this dimension.

The water was enough to wake Joshua back up, and he immediately started to shout, scream and generally bitch, though he had already learned that trying to physically attack me would get him nothing but pain. Magical attacks, on the other hand, were something I encouraged, as each one gave me new ideas. They weren’t that strong to be threatening, mostly due to his lower level and my own magical skill, but the guy was somewhat creative, impressively vicious and highly motivated. A part of me was considering telling him that killing me would do nothing but doom him to die within a prison he couldn’t escape, but that would likely blunt his efforts to attack me, depriving me of a source of different ideas.

No, it was better to let him try, as that would keep giving me ideas. Initially, he had tried to warp my perception of him. First, he had tried to make me see him as a loved one, an attempt that failed spectacularly. Afterwards, he tried the same, only by making me see him as a friend or a member of my family. It didn’t work, but that didn’t mean I hadn’t taken note of the way he used Mind Magic, nor did I plan to forget it.

Curiously, he had interspersed those attempts with direct attacks and even tried to subtly and slowly worm a tendril of compulsion into my mind, pushing it deeper each day. Not in a violent, outright attacking way, but more akin to ivy, a slowly creeping vine that would eventually strangle me. That might just be the most dangerous way he had demonstrated yet, but I had enough magical perception to notice it. His magic, at least to my senses, had a disgustingly cloying smell, making it almost impossible to miss. Hel, by now, I could smell his aura from mere proximity, though that heightened sensitivity was worrying me a little, making me wonder if he was trying something else. It was possible that he was trying to push out as much magic as he could to saturate the environment with his magical presence so he could slip a subtle attack past my guard.

He hadn’t yet, but that didn’t mean he would never be able to try. Progress and experimentation could be rather hazardous.

After I dumped Joshua back into the hole he was staying in, ignoring the guy’s rambling, ranting and screaming the entire time, I returned to other pursuits. In the week since I had offered Waylon the deal, I had been busy trying to figure out how to actually get him magical abilities. Using Soul Magic, similarly to the way Lia and I had used it when creating some of the critters we had made during our journey, would increase his affinity by a bit, but it just wasn’t enough. Using the two-out-of-one-hundred scale I had used to illustrate his affinity to him, Soul Magic might raise his affinity to a twenty, maybe a twenty-two. Better by an order of magnitude, but nowhere near the intensity I considered necessary to use magic proficiently. To say nothing of the risks, we didn’t have a single success when starting with such a low affinity as Waylon had, so it might just result in a horrifyingly painful death for him and a disgusting mess to clean up for me. So, that avenue wasn’t one I wanted to traverse.

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Using Blood Magic was the other avenue I was considering. Not using my Blood, at least not if I could help it. It was a little too close to what I had done with Lia, and while I didn’t dislike Waylon, I had no attachment to him. I certainly didn’t want to make him a vampire and empower him like that. If anyone made new vampires, it would be Lia, using her own blood and subordinating them to her.

Instead, I had visited the Ice Giants and harvested some blood from their strongest male, not that the giants had noticed. It was quite potent in and of itself, reminding me that they were incredibly well-suited to living in the far north with its brutal winters, but I had no idea how well it would translate. Would he become something akin to a Giantblood, Sigmir’s race of people I had seen on Mundus? Would he even get the increased affinity to Ice Magic, or would he simply get resistance to Ice and Cold? There was a lot of cross-over between magical affinity and resistance to said magic, but whether that was inheritable, I had no idea. How much of magical affinity was a purely physical trait, as opposed to an innate trait baked into your very soul?

I also had drained the blood of a few other creatures near the Nexus Tower, doing my best to also draw out the Ice Magic innate to those creatures with my Blood Magic, hoping that I would be able to access their innate affinity. So far, my work had been met with decidedly mixed results, though I obviously hadn’t experimented on humans just yet. I just didn’t have enough willing test subjects to waste on long shots. Maybe if I started to get better results, I would try them on Waylon, but that hadn’t happened yet.

Which left that last, somewhat curious idea I had. I already knew that divine magic functioned akin to a tax. The faithful paid their taxes in Astral Power, and the ‘government’, the deity in this case, provided services by utilising their empowered agents.

Pushing Waylon to pursue the path of a divine spellcaster would be relatively easy, but it also would be the easy way out. It wouldn’t teach me anything, but the idea might be worthwhile. Divine Spellcasters didn’t need to actually learn spells; they didn’t need to understand arcane magic, which is why I liked to compare their spellcasting to ordering takeout. You didn’t need to know how to make a good beef chow mein; you just needed to know that it was menu item twenty-eight and the restaurant did the actual cooking.

Which raised the question, what if I somehow managed to create an exchange between Waylon and either myself or one of the two divine domains that were part of me, exchanging raw Astral Power from him for ‘pre-flavoured’ Astral Power? It would give him access to highly potent Ice Astral Power, allowing him to cast Ice Magic as if he had an incredibly high affinity for it, though it wouldn’t help him with the actual magical learning.

Still, it might be an option, though I had no real idea how to facilitate that. I doubted it would work with the divine domains, at least not until, or unless, I ever gained true control over them and became the deity in question. Something I doubted would ever happen, given that the Mother was already splitting off from me and becoming its own being. Plus, neither deity was actually purely of Ice, or Ice Magic, or anything like that. The Pale Lady had some Ice in her domain, sure, but the Pale Lady was, to the best of my knowledge, more focused on Death and stagnation, not on Ice itself.

No, if I wanted Waylon to draw power from elsewhere, it would have to come from me. And I had no idea how that might work, other than feeding him my blood whenever he wanted to cast a spell.