Chapter 35
The two pouches sat on Arleria’s worktable like a gift from someone who didn’t believe in wrapping.
Alsen spotted them the moment he walked in. He had bled on the table only a few hours ago. Two mismatched leather pouches, one tied with cord, the other with a strip of cloth, had no business being there.
Luna delivered. With a smile, he walked to them.
“What’s that?” Arleria asked from behind him, quickly catching up.
“I asked Luna to get something for me. She has.” He opened one pouch. The sharp, herbal smell hit him immediately. He closed it.
“I see privacy isn’t a word in her vocabulary.” Arleria glared at the pouches. “And these smell like a terrible idea.”
“It’s psychedelics. I’ve been trying to scout the spiritual planes of existence. For that, I need a drug to help me get my consciousness temporarily out of my body. These should help.”
“That sounds insane.” She walked over to the wardrobe, and started changing to her house clothes.
“I know.” With a smile, warmth spread through his chest. “I’ve been pursuing this for a while. The magical sphere atop the mountain gave me the idea of how to execute it. I will do that tonight.”
Arleria changed into a loose blouse. “It still sounds completely insane. Shouldn’t you wait for your current injuries to heal before you go cause yourself new injuries by experimenting?”
“Nah, it’ll be fine. This is a spiritual walk exercise.
The physical form doesn’t matter for it.
” He sat down by a side table. “I’ll probably be out for a while, so if you fall asleep in the meantime, I’ll see you in the morning.
” He took off the luxurious clothes, not putting on anything new.
He left them on the floor by the chair’s side.
Inspired by Luna’s method, he formed a line of powder on his left forearm.
“Alsen, listen to yourself!” Arleria almost shouted. “You sound insane!”
“I’ll go see the Pellicle. Sorry, and thanks.” He used the free hand to block his nostril, and snorted the powder.
It hit him like a horse kick in the head. His vision blurred in an instant. He leaned back, focusing on leaving his body.
His entire world spun, and he saw himself leave his body, his consciousness floating through the blurred-out world.
Perfect.
He focused on moving through the layers of existence. His vision whirled, splitting into fragments of colors.
A sharp headache shot through his mind.
With a focused thought, he returned.
All right, he needed to do this slower.
He waited for the headache to vanish, and then repeated the idea, just slower.
The world shifted, colors shifted, brightening into a mess of color splatters. The spiritual layer. Natural spirits resided in this sphere of existence. He didn’t see any.
That matched the expectations, given he was in the city. He had to wait a bit to get accustomed to it. The world’s shape barely matched Arleria’s apartment, nothing more than the idea present.
He floated through, the colors making way.
Vellhorn looked like an explosion of a paint factory. A pile of absolute chaos. He spotted a few spirits, cloud-like shapes that floated through, aimless, moving among the rough shapes of houses.
One shape dominated the view. A massive, crimson shape where the dragon slept. The dragon’s presence must have spilled over to the spiritual layer.
Fascinating, but potentially dangerous. He didn’t need to meet Verathras here. Or, anyone else, really.
All right. This should do.
He focused, moving on.
The transition to the next layer felt like stepping through a curtain of cold water. One moment he existed in the world of messed up colors. The next, everything around him turned into shades of black and gray.
Everything around him changed, no longer resembling Vellhorn at all. Though, it still looked like a city, desolate and bleak, a spiritual ruin. Smaller shapes floated around.
Souls of the dead that couldn’t find peace.
He read plenty about this layer, the transition from the realm of the living to the realm of the end. The dead that didn’t manage to cross the boundaries got trapped here, doomed to suffer in partial existence until their souls fell apart.
Even in purely spiritual form, it chilled his spine.
He shouldn’t get stuck here due to having a physical, living form. As far as he understood souls, they naturally returned to their body.
So, even if he were to lose consciousness here, the body would drag the soul back into it.
That was the ultimate failsafe for spiritual travel.
He guessed he had spent enough time here to acclimate, though he lacked any means of tracking time. Even if he had that, he had no idea how long he could keep this up.
The drugs confused the body to stop the soul-pulling effect. The moment the drug effect faded, he would get dragged back to his form, whether he liked it or not, with a nightmare of a headache for a reward.
He pushed deeper.
The world around him faded into darkness, decorated with violet currents in the far distance.
The Void, the end of all life and existence.
An endless expanse, much like space, just spiritual.
Bubbles filled the area around him. Soul chambers, which hosted the souls of the living.
One of them was his, and if he were to dream walk properly, he would start in his soul chamber, and move from there.
He hadn’t the faintest idea how to do that. It just made sense that that was the proper way to go about it.
Right now, he couldn’t even tell which soul chamber was his own. They all looked the same.
Except for one, he realized.
A massive, crimson globe burned not that far off.
Verathras’s soul chamber, apparently.
He must have had some sort of defenses against his soul chamber being invaded or attacked.
Alsen spiritually smirked. There was so much to know about magic and existence. Splendid.
One day, he would discover all there was to these things.
As far as Earthen magic was concerned, this was considered the final frontier of spiritual existence. No research on soul chambers existed.
But if Verathras had defenses on his, then there was a lot to be researched.
Yet now, he had to go further.
He had seen there was more.
The sphere atop the mountain connected deeper, not to the Void, but to whatever lay beyond as more of an idea than a layer of existence. The Pellicle, as the books called it.
He pushed forth again, copying what he had detected at the sphere. If it worked statically, then the same idea would also work dynamically.
The existence around him shifted. All sense of orientation vanished.
In a moment, he floated in empty, white space. Geometric shapes, purely black, floated around. But it wasn’t the shapes he focused on.
Someone else was here.
She lay sprawled over a materialized cloud, her body wreathed in a simple, white robe, feet dangling over the cloud’s edge, head resting on a cloud pillow, six wings spreading from her back, resting on more cloud.
No fucking way.
She opened her eyes, her sapphire gaze noticing him.
The existence around him shattered.
He awoke on the chair, his head pounding like a drum. Sun shone outside, way too bright. He rubbed his face, covering his eyes.
This had taken way longer than he had expected. And he needed water, his throat feeling as if he had gargled sand.
He got up, whole body shaking. On the way for the water, he spotted Arleria. She slept in her bed, her chest moving with soft breaths.
He grabbed water, and drank. More. More. More.
When he couldn’t drink anymore, Alsen stumbled back, and collapsed into the chair.
He focused. System.
The menus floated to his vision. He popped open the skill tree, straight to the archmage tree.
He had three nodes he could spec into at level twenty.
A stat node, which gave plus thirty to two stats, and plus fifteen to three more. Plus one hundred to total stats, a massive boost.
But he didn’t need a passive right now. Passives didn’t have visions.
The other alternative was the spell storage. That one was positioned in the center, suggesting its relevance as the major node for this level.
Next to it, he had another active skill option, External Energy Manipulation.
Effect: Manipulate external magical energy.
Usage: Twice per day.
Required level: 20
Not the most useful node, either. It did nothing when he wasn’t in the presence of external magical energy, which happened just about once, so far.
But in that one situation, atop the mountain, it would have been insanely powerful.
It would have made the fight atop the mountain a farce, as he would use the power of the sphere as his own. Come to think of it, maybe this would allow him to interfere with shields like the architect’s.
With two out of two major fights having external magical energy present, this could be really strong, actually.
Stats were probably better, anyway, but he needed to see a vision of the archmage mentor.
He allocated the point, and locked it in.
His world shifted. He floated in a marble hall, as if ancient Roman in style.
By a floating orb of crimson energy stood the woman. She looked exactly the same as by the pellicle. Angelically beautiful, with blonde hair that fell halfway down her back, dressed in simple white robes, with six wings stretching out from her back.
She stood by the orb, its crimson energies pulsating, intertwining with the cold blue light coming out from her fingers.
‘The easy path is to work with one’s own energy,’ her voice narrated into his mind.
‘It’s clean, straightforward, and simple, without much hassle.
Yet it leaves so much potential wasted. Why use your own power when you can use that of others?
Let them gather energies, forge the artifacts, and do the grunt work. ’
‘Yes, it’s unpleasant to work with the creations of others. It’s filthy, unclean, inelegant, but in the end, one’s dignity and pride are only as useful as his achieved results.’
The crimson energy drew into her in an instant, twisting her skin in ripples. It pulsed outward, destroying the marble hall and shattering it all to dust.
Alsen blinked and he was back in reality.
Except that now he knew that the System’s representation of an archmage hung out at the Pellicle.