Sylver Seeker

Chapter 279: Magical Fluids

Sylver Seeker Book 7

Chapter 13 (279) - Magical Fluids

An unexpected function of [Still Water] was that Sylver could go inside it.

He wasn’t brave enough to put in more than a hand in at the moment, but all of his shades could enter and exit the [Still Water] mirror like portal without any issue.

When he completely stopped using the perk and the mirror like “portal” closed, nothing happened to the shade inside.

From its perspective as the “portal” above it was closing and was about to fully disappear, the “portal” reopened instantly. Even though Sylver waited a good half hour before reopening the portal in the puddle, and had given the shade a handful of pebbles to move from one hand to the other in lieu of an hourglass to account for the shade’s inability to perceive time.

Presumably the perk wasn’t freezing time inside the [Still Water] space, just slowing it down close enough to zero seconds per second that the shade he’d left inside wasn’t capable of perceiving the incredibly slow passage of time.

The Ibis’ rule regarding real chronomancy, its use, research, and experimentation, wasn’t a rule as much as it was a suggestion from people far smarter and older than you, that knew better, and by all accounts, if they couldn’t figure it out, a young dumbass like you certainly won’t.

Technically, because the magic fell into the “dark” category Sylver was capable of casting chronomancy… technically…

In practice the vast majority of his “research” into the subject was figuring out ways to protect himself from others using it on him.Nyx made multiple very serious attempts at breaking through what she described as the safety rails of chronomancy, which is to say she tried to force time to move backwards. What Sylver experienced in that century spanning four seconds was all he should have needed to disintegrate every single tome regarding the subject he found later on.

But like with all the lessons someone smarter would have learned through observation, and experience in this case, it wasn’t enough just to see a person get burned by sticking their hand into the fireplace, Sylver had to stick his hand into it too to be absolutely certain it hurt.

Just because Nyx couldn’t do it, didn’t mean the great, mighty, brilliant, “young” prodigy genius soon-to-be-True-Immortal-Lich Sylver Sezeri couldn’t figure it out.

But because he wasn’t Nyx, he decided to start with something small, something easy, Sylver tried to slow down time, and discovered that the issue with using real actual chronomancy was that if you slowed something down, it slowed down.

He had assumed the spell would work like most spells, and that the pebble would slow down relative to him, and the hand he was holding the pebble in.

Like in most cases when it came to making assumptions, he was very wrong to assume.

The pebble slowed down relative to Eira spinning around, and Eira as a whole moving at a great speed through space.

There weren’t enough words to describe how grateful he was that he had the foresight to attempt this experiment far away from the Ibis’ physical location, because the underwater crater he created in that fraction of a fraction of a second was still there many centuries later the last time he flew over what became known as the deepest sea on either side of Eira’s surface.

In his mind, prior to casting the spell, he thought it would work like sitting on a horse, and forcing the horse to slow down. The math made sense to him in terms of the giant amount of mana the spell required, because he assumed he was pushing against the metaphorical horse to slow it down.

In reality, and he only figured this out much later, what happened was that Sylver was on a horse that was galloping at an unreasonable pace, and completely unbeknownst to him the galloping horse was on the longest and fastest moving ship ever imagined.

So when he jumped off the horse, landed on a motionless rock sticking out of the water, and tried to pull at a rope attached to the horse running on the ship, the entire ship pulled against him, or rather, it yanked the rope out of his hands and lightly whipped against the pebble he was holding in his hand.

He later worked out that that cherry sized pebble had reached a double digit percentage of the speed of light.

Suffice to say, this was enough of a burn on his hand for him to learn the lesson he should have learned from Nyx.

What most non-Ibis mages and sorcerers called “chronomancy” consisted of various ways of accelerating the passage of time forward. Even the spells that seemed to “slow time down” used a kind of trick in relative equilibrium to slow down one area by greatly speeding up another.

All the stationary storage devices that kept things in “stasis” used a similar method, they just concentrated all of their acceleration into a special kind of empty vacuum where time might as well not exist anyway.

It was a bit more complicated than that, but that was the core principle of it. Sort of how most “ice” magic was just “fire” magic being smart with pressure and the laws of thermodynamics.

All of that was to say that the only “safe” way to use real chronomacy was with the aid of a god.

The few bloodlines that allowed mages to use realserious chronomancy without any exceptions could be traced back to a god being involved with their mortal ancestors.

The point was… The fact that [Still Water] worked so seemingly easily and simply meant that, as far as Sylver was concerned, this was genuine confirmation that at least one god was directly involved in the system’s function.

When he thought about talking through his reasoning out loud while Nels was within hearing distance, he felt the system reach down from the couch it was sitting on to preemptively grab its slipper to smack him.

As had become the norm, he backed off, the last thing he needed right now was to pass out.

His insides were stable so nobody was in danger of him turning feral anytime soon, he filled up the empty space in his torso with the muscles he’d gathered from the [White Hair Ape], and the things he needed to survive were all reasonably functional, but he would be lying if he said he was absolutely fine.

He had everything he needed to fix himself, but he couldn’t do it out in the open. He needed to be somewhere safe, and at least 3 days in one area so his rituals had time to stabilize and wouldn’t turn off in the middle of him working on something vital and irreplaceable.

The [White Hair Ape] regenerative abilities were impressive to say the least, as long as he didn’t get greedy, and didn’t dig too deep, he had an inexhaustible source of blood, flesh, skin, fur, and even a fair bit of health and stamina.

Bones too, somewhat, but the finger that the ape grew back was brittle, it made more sense not to dig too deep and just siphon the creature’s health to grow new bones inside his body, instead of trying to modify the creature’s bones through [Mutating Override].

After tinkering around with it for a while Sylver summarised that the rules for [Still Water] were as follows.

The surface of the liquid through which something could be placed inside the [Still Water] needed to be completely still. It wasn’t enough to use [Advanced Water Manipulation] to hold it perfectly still, the perk completely stopped functioning if the liquid frozen in space was moved so much as a tenth of an inch.

He got the feeling the perk was meant to be used on natural water, like a pond, or a puddle, the fact that Sylver could make water floating in the air motionless enough for the perk to work seemed more like an oversight, rather than its intended function.

Rule two was that if there was something partially through the portal when the water the portal was using as a medium was moved, the perk pushed the item out. The amount of force the perk used to push the item out varied, sometimes it just fell out, sometimes it was launched so hard Sylver barely managed to catch it.

It didn’t matter if the item was 99% through the portal, it was pushed out the same way Sylver’s pinkie was when he tried to see if the portal would slice it off.

He also found out that while he could easily put dead rats into the [Still Water], and place unconscious living rats into it as well, anything “alive” that didn’t want to get in, treated the mirror surface like it was a regular liquid instead of a portal.

He managed to trick one rat into crawling through the surface into the [Still Water] storage space, but the moment the rat presumably wanted to get out, it was spat out through the portal. So if he wanted to house something alive there for any period of time, he would need to keep it unconscious.

Or, as he found out with Mora nearby, the creature had to be scared of what was outside the [Still Water] long enough for it to close. But this again felt like an oversight, and as the pair of rats showed, their fear was finicky, and eventually both were flung out of the[Still Water]portal and flew directly into Mora’s sharp jaws.

In regards to magical items, this was an undeniable complete and total victory on Sylver’s end. [Still Water] had absolutely zero issues taking in a mana powered lantern, along with the crystal powering it. The amount of mana the perk required was a little unreasonable, but only a little, it wasn’t worth complaining about. And it didn’t need the mana upfront, he would have to spend a while in one spot, but as long as he had the time, anything could eventually be placed inside.

At some point during the night, after he was reasonably whole, Sylver met with Kalok and Allson.

Like a lot of wizards Allson was tall and thin, in a sinewy sort of way, he was young too, for a wizard, his beard was graying, but at the moment it was more of a pepper and salt mixture.

As for his magical tool of choice, his staff looked like a large copper pipe wrench that had been stretched and twisted into a staff. Deadly and dangerous the way a sledgehammer was, as opposed to the usual thin and sleek staves most wizards Sylver met had.

The temporarily named “float-boat,” ended up taking over eight hours to gather enough spell layers on its hull to rise an inch off the ground, and another two hours after that for Allson to get it to balance properly in the air.

Stolen novel; please report.

What was surprising was that when once people started boarding it, the float-boat adjusted for the weight without any issues, Sylver initially thought Allson was doing something manually, but apparently Manoc had built the function into the very core of the float-boat.

It was one thing if a metal cart fell down from the sky, something this big falling down anywhere near a town or a city would be a catastrophe.

While Sylver was supervising a small group of shades who were helping the townspeople load their belongings and mining equipment into the float-boat, Kalok brought up the issue of payment.

Kalok was right not to accept the service of a man who hadn’t given any clear terms as to what he wanted in exchange.

And it wasn’t as if Sylver wanted to do something without at least the appearance of adequate compensation, he knew first hand just how quickly that sort of reputation can devolve into people expecting unreasonable things which then quickly turned into unreasonable demands.

Velrod’s only source of income came from the mine, which was obviously no longer functional since there was no longer a portal network to support it.

Between the nearby villages that supplied Velrod with food and miscellaneous materials being destroyed or abandoned, and that mages with transportation based magic were too valuable to be sent this far away for relatively small quantities of semi-rare ores, it was unlikely Velrod was going to repopulated anytime soon.

What made the negotiations all the more complicated was that the value of “gold” was up in the air right now, and on top of that, neither Sylver nor Kalok had a proper estimate of how much the services of an almost level 200 C-rank adventurer were worth.

Even the two merchants who ended up in Velrod by didn’t know what the proper rate would be, and they especially didn’t know what the rate was for a C-rank. Apparently up until recently this area was safe enough that this was the first time some of these people saw an adventure higher than D-rank.

The danger came more from monsters the local adventurers weren’t familiar with moving in, rather than monsters having a high level. The two E-rank adventurers that were housed in the attempt at a hospital said there used to be only goblins and venomous amphibian-like monsters around, and just a week ago they were attacked by rock golems.

All the swordplay and poison resistance in the world won’t help against creatures that throw boulders and are basically immune to arrows and blades.

Luckily there were enough miners that had skills that worked on rock golems, but it’s one thing to know how to swing a pickaxe, and a whole other not to freeze up when a giant rock monster runs directly at you way faster than something of that size should be capable of moving.

During his negotiation with Kalok one of the guardsmen offered without saying it directly to give Sylver all of their dead.

The men who died defending them, the women who had the children run ahead while they threw themselves at the monsters chasing them to buy time, and of course, the children that didn’t run fast enough.

The guardsman may as well have slapped every single person across the face for how horrible of a spike in the spokes of the negotiation his unsaid offer created.

Not that Sylver was against the idea, but there was a time and place for this sort of thing.

Aside from the fact that these corpses were a far cry from “whole,” and went against Sylver’s rule of not using dead bodies within eyesight of living relatives that may seek revenge, he also plain and simple didn’t want to have a conversation like this in front of so many witnesses.

He later figured out that because of the many recent popular songs the concept of what it meant to be an “undead soldier” had shifted a fair distance away from what it actually was. But it wasn’t as if there were that many necromancers walking around, and the few that did exist, likely did the same thing Sylver did. They kept their mouth shut, and didn’t correct anyone that thought all the shades in his shadow asked to join his jolly army of shadowy merry men.

The end result of the negotiation was that Allson owed Sylver either 1 big favour, or a year of service, depending on what the favour was, and that the residents of Velrod collectively owed Allson a fee that would be decided on at a later date.

Kalok trusted the wizard not to ask for everyone's firstborns and wives, but understandably he didn’t trust a pale stranger without any identification to not take advantage of the people Kalok was now responsible for.

It was a fair deal in Sylver’s opinion, at worst, Lola could always use an extra wizard, assuming she was still alive and Sylver wasn’t going to reach Arda and find that the entire city had been reduced to a tall pile of rubble.

Where the fuck is Chrys?

Edmund, Sylver wasn’t too concerned, it was strange he hadn’t dropped everything he was doing to at the very least say hello to Nels, but at least Edmund had the excuse that he knew Sylver would keep her safe.

Granted, Sylver didn’t know how much effort it took for Chrys to project herself this far away from her physical location, but for how long it’s been a messenger bird would have gotten to him by now if Chrys wanted to contact him.

Sylver physically stood up from the wooden crate he was using as a seat, and after making a few estimates that seemed reasonable in his head, made his way over to where Lostal was resting.

Sylver had used his limited medical skills to rewrap everyone’s wounds, stitched a few things closed, and using mushrooms created proper casts for the people with broken bones so they wouldn’t break them any further.

He also properly organized their medical supplies, and rationed out painkillers as best as he could under the circumstances.

Lostal drew a map on the page Sylver gave him, and although the distance was much greater than Sylver estimated, with a boost from [Black Mass] Aleri could fly around the Moaning Heights, reach Novva, and return within six to eight days depending on the weather.

Because there was a serious concern of Aleri not making the journey, Sylver wrote in code, at first glance the letter was from one brother to another, but he mixed very specific details that only Novva, or someone who was in Xander’s hole would recognize. Lostal did the same for a scout in a different unit who he was friends with and would be able to pick out the personal details from his letter.

Once, or rather if, Aleri safely returned with proof that he actually reached Pere and Lostal’s friend, Lostal would send his report, and Sylver would ask Novva to remove his involvement from Lostal’s report.

It wasn’t as if Sylver had created the hollow-vault inside the mountain, and it was going to break open on its own eventually anyway, probably, if anything he and Lostal deserved some sort of accreditation for bringing this information over to Novva in the first place.

With both letters tied to his underbelly, Aleri disappeared into the dark sky, and shortly thereafter Sylver and Spring both stopped sensing the ever increasingly distant shade.

Once everyone was on board the float-boat, Allson sealed the large opening on the back of the ship. Twelve men armed with bows they somewhat knew how to use sat near the edges of the main deck, and Sylver stationed archer shades between the men, along with Mora as a precaution.

He wasn’t too worried about something large attacking them, but a ship of this size had blind spots, all it would take is one goblin to crawl in through a rotten piece of wood and a good thirty people could be dead before anyone realized what was going on.

Once the floating wooden vessel left the confines of the town, Allson floated it up about ten meters into the air. It moved with surprising ease, in areas where it could travel in a straight line it picked up quite a fair bit of speed before the horses and wolf shades pulling it forward had to slow down to turn.

And it was quiet too, not just in the sound sense of the word, but even ten paces away from it, Sylver could barely sense the giant vessel moving through the air behind him.

If he fully numbed his soul sense, ignored the people inside the ship, and ignored the bloodied bandages he felt through [Dead Dominion], he almost couldn’t tell the giant wooden boat was there. Oddly enough, it didn’t leave any trail behind it, the only traces of its passing were the unusually wide spread hoof prints the living horses left as they pulled it forward.

If it flew a lot higher, manipulated the clouds to hide it, an entire army could theoretically fall out of the sky on an unsuspecting city. Or it could drop explosives down onto it first, and then send the soldiers in to take care of whoever survived. Not exactly a revolution in combat, but on this side of the Asberg with not that many flying beasts or monsters, it would certainly be outside the norms enough to be extremely effective the first couple of years.

Military use aside, it made settling down for camp a lot easier than anyone was accustomed to.

The majority of the people stayed inside the ship, Katya’s aunt Mary cooked on a long makeshift stove Sylver made out of compressed dirt, and large pots of dried meat soaked in powdered vegetable stock were pulled onto the ship via Mora’s strings.

If Allson, or whoever took over the research, installed a fireproof kitchen somewhere on the vessel, then there wouldn’t be any need for anyone to leave it while in transit.

It also needed a toilet, and preferably a shower, but it wouldn’t be that difficult to cobble something together, especially with direct access to a magical power source.

On the off chance this did end up being used for the military, both Sylver and Nels didn’t ask any questions about the float-boat, and certainly didn’t offer any advice to the relatively young wizard operating it.

Creatures, monsters, perhaps even people, approached the giant wooden vessel during the night, but either the ship itself, the quantity of people on it, or Sylver’s and Morana’s presence, scared everyone and everything from doing anything more than observing from a distance.

At some point when the first sun was rising, the small camp on the ground was dismantled, cleaned up, and after everyone was accounted for, the float-boat started to move again.

Sylver was informed of three men standing on either side of the road the float-boat was traveling along. He threw Nels’ head up into the air and gave her to Mora to protect, moved the archer shades around on the boat so they would have a better shot, and assigned a fragment of a shade to each and every living person inside the float-boat in the unlikely event the three men were a distraction.

When the men came into view, they all stepped out of the shadows of the glittering snow covered trees, and all of them had their arms raised high into the air.

They spoke in this really odd dialect, the one standing at the front explained their village just down the road was overrun by “hooved goblins.”

At Kalok’s request one of the men approached the float-boat, Sylver wanted to chime in that he could tell by their souls that they weren’t lying or trying to deceive anyone, but it ended up being unnecessary since one of the men had a cousin who was a miner aboard the float-boat, who recognized him and the others, and vouched for all of them.

Mora lifted the three men up into the float-boat with her threads, and Spring listened in on their report, and after Kalok was finished speaking with them, Spring materialized in their room and with Kalok’s permission asked them follow up questions.

Allegedly there was a very large group of chest high tall goblin shaped monsters with white cloth wrapped around their heads, furry goat like legs, with incredibly heavy hooves, each one of them kicked hard enough to shatter solid stone walls apart. They were also in the low 100s level wise, and one of them had enough strength to take out a level 160 warrior in a single kick to the chest.

Once all the town’s guards and combat capable men were out, everyone who was left spread out and ran into the forest. This happened 2 days and 3 nights ago, so Sylver sent shades out to look for survivors, but told everybody not to get their hopes up. Between the snow, the cold, the regular monsters wandering around, on top of the hooved goblins, the fact that these three managed to survive for so long was an anomaly.

The men said the monsters were moving in the direction of Merol, but the part that caught Sylver’s attention was that none of them saw them eating anyone. And not only did they avoid killing people, but they specifically went after limbs to cripple them.

If these were actual Redcaps, in such a large quantity, that meant a nest had caved in somewhere nearby, and if the Redcaps on this side of the Asberg were anything like the ones on the other side… By the descriptions, this group were likely all juveniles…

Still, if their number was as high as the men seemed to think, and low 100s... Sylver told Nels what the men had said, and for the time being decided the whole thing wasn’t his problem.

When Sylver used [Still Water] to store away a tree blocking the road for later use, he noticed that the snow around them was a lighter shade of brown than it should be.

There was plenty of wet dirt to justify the colour, but when he took off a glove, and touched the faintly brown snow with his bare skin, something felt off about it.

He lifted it up to his nose but he couldn’t smell anything, the part responsible for that sense had been in his throat, along with his sense of taste, and at the moment was in a glass jar in his [Still Water].

Sylver had Mora come down to him, and according to her the snow smelled fine, but just like him she could tell there was something wrong with it, even if she couldn’t put her finger/hoof/claw on it.

He was about to drop the subject, when one of Mora’s hooves stepped on the road and made an odd crunching sound.

He dragged his fingers through the snow, and picked out what looked like a small piece of shattered red glass out of the dirt.

It crumbled between his fingers when he squashed it, and as it melted from his slightly warm skin, a line of the light pink liquid traveled down the side of his hand.

He held it out to Mora, and when she licked it, she confirmed what Sylver had guessed from the colour and consistency.

Chrys’ silence made a great deal more sense now.

There was blood in the sky.

Specifically, the positive magic weakening blood the dragon back in the Schelgen mountains had vomited into the inside of the giant bubble covered city.

The bubble that had burst open when Sylver freed the dragon.

The only real question was, was this magic interfering blood moving with a purpose, or had Sylver released a cloud of chaos that would randomly short circuit city barriers every other full moon?

On the bright side, at least he now knew why Chrys hadn’t contacted him, clairvoyance was a very positively pure magic, even a drop of this blood would cause a blindspot, with an entire cloud’s worth this whole area of the Eira might as well not exist as far as Chrys’ abilities were concerned.

Mora went back to the float-boat, and Sylver had the wolves pulling the vessel forward put a bit more of their backs into it.