Chapter 556

Having taken control of a pocket of empty space, Nick moved to the next foundational step in spatial magic. That was a basic relocation, moving a rock one foot to his left without applying physical force.

He closed his eyes, tuning out the hum of the crystals lining the walls. Spatial magic, Raphael had explained, had little in common with the rigid laws of the material plane.

It was, in fact, a deeply esoteric discipline. To move an object instantly, a mage had to convince themselves that the object already existed at the destination. It was a negotiation, which was why casters often set it aside until they had enough power to force the issue.

Few people possessed the natural inclination to question the natural order of things, and even fewer managed to make it stick.

Nick fed a sliver of mana into the space around the stone and felt for the invisible laws anchoring the rock to its current coordinates. It took some time, but his earlier practice helped, and he eventually grasped the concepts and envisioned it slipping out of phase, almost like when he dipped in the ether, but not quite.

As expected, the World resisted, a stubborn mule refusing to move. Reality demanded continuity.

Now, he could have overpowered the block. Hell, he could even have used his connection to the World to convince it to let it happen—and he had several plans to use exactly that when it came to the school's higher arts—but that would defeat the purpose.

Instead, he focused harder, applying more and more pressure with his mind alone until he was so convinced of the process that the World had no choice but to give in.

A sharp crack echoed through the tunnel. The stone vanished from his palm and reappeared exactly twelve inches to his left, then dropped to the floor with a dull clatter.

Nick let out a long breath, wiping cold sweat from his brow. The mental cost of such a basic spell was absurd. He could have hurled a house-sized boulder across a battlefield with his telekinesis for the same cost he had just spent to move a pebble one foot.

Worse, it had no practical utility in combat. If he tried to redirect an enemy’s blade or teleport himself out of harm’s way, the sheer concentration required would leave him wide open to a dozen fatal blows.

Again, he was reminded why this art was so rare, despite its sheer utility. He was dipping his toes into an ocean, but even the shore was deep.

That’s what I get for doing this without actual spellforms.

To wield spatial magic with the same instinctual fluidity he applied to his elemental spells, he needed an affinity, something to bridge the gap between his intent and the World’s resistance.

A ritual could grant him that affinity. If he could find a creature born with it, a high-tier monster steeped in the Starlit Caves' twisting space, he could sever its link to the World and graft it onto his own soul.

It would take a lot of preparation; such a beast would be hard to pin down, and he would need to take it alive to ensure the best results, but the resulting leap in his capabilities would save him years of painstaking practice.

It was that, or finding a mage with the same affinity, which would surely be easier to manage but much harder to cover up. Such people were in very high demand, and their disappearance would be noticed. If he could even find one scummy enough to deserve death, anyway.

“I guess I can start looking if I don’t find anything here,” he muttered, then cleaned up his surroundings with one of those new nifty spells he’d picked up in Trelan and made his way down the tunnel until he reached its natural end.

He wasn’t fooled and expanded his spiritual senses, pushing his awareness through the solid rock. The dungeon's architecture was a chaotic mess of overlapping caves folded into impossible geometries, yet the ether flowed through the stone like water through a sponge. He sensed an untouched cavern system just beyond the barrier, teeming with hostile life.

The Vael mages were slowly securing the main descent and charting the obvious paths, but they had ignored the possibility that something could be hidden just a few feet off that path.

With a smirk, Nick summoned a dense shell of kinetic mana around his right fist. The air rippled, distorting the crystals’ light, and he drove his fist into the wall.

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Rock shattered. He struck again, carving an opening through the barrier, turning solid stone into gravel. Within seconds, he broke through to the other side.

Shaking off the dust, he stepped out of the narrow passage and onto a wide, sloping ledge overlooking a vast rift.

The dungeon’s strange nature was far more pronounced here. Crystals grew in towering formations, twisting upon themselves and bathing the space in their strange light. The cold bit into his skin unnaturally, and even with his enhanced physique, he had to circulate warm air to keep from shivering.

A skittering sound echoed along the ledge, and Nick turned, already aware of their presence but curious about what they’d do. Shadows detached from the crystalline outcroppings, and soon he faced lizards the size of wolves. Their hides were made of interlocking crystal plates, perfectly mirroring the glow of the cave walls.

They moved quickly, their clawed feet finding purchase on the rift's vertical surfaces with an ease that should have been impossible given their size.

Hmm, decent earth magic, but it’s a secondary ability.

Their levels were in the mid-sixties, and given their coordination, he could tell they were dangerous pack hunters in their natural environment, with high resistance to attacks thanks to their crystalline armor.

The lead lizard hissed as it noticed him staring straight at them, a sound like glass grinding against glass, then launched itself through the air, its jaws unhinging to reveal rows of crystalline teeth.

Nick stepped back and formed a kinetic blade over his forearm, compressing the edge until it hummed. When the monster was inches away, he drove the blade upward, bypassing the beast’s thick armor plating and sliding it smoothly into the softer joint of its jaw.

The lizard convulsed, and he threw it away with a flick of his hand.

The remaining two attacked in unison: one aimed low at his knees, the other sprang off the cavern wall to strike his throat.

Nick pivoted on his heel, letting the low strike glance off his enchanted coat. He caught the airborne lizard by the throat, his fingers locking around the segmented crystal plating, and channeled a surge of raw force into his grip, crushing the armor and the spine beneath it.

He tossed the limp carcass aside and brought his boot down on the third beast's skull, ending the skirmish.

He harvested the cores quickly, deeming them of decent quality, though a bit lacking in power, and tossed them into his iron ring.

His descent proceeded with little trouble. While more lizards tried their luck, he’d already assessed them and barely let them approach, sending bursts of cutting wind and storing their bodies.

He was almost starting to think he’d only face lizards when the crystal veins pulsed, plunging the path into alternating flashes of blinding light and absolute darkness. Nick narrowed his eyes.

A high-pitched, harmonic ringing filled the air.

Dozens of small entities descended from the ceiling and hovered like buzzing insects. It took him a moment to realize they were elementals, manifestations of light and shadow. The light elementals were blindingly bright, leaving searing afterimages on his retinas, while the darkness elementals were voids of absolute black that absorbed the surrounding light.

I sensed them only when they approached. Some kind of melding with the environment? That could be dangerous. It’s almost like they only started existing when they approached.

They hovered around level fifty, weak individually, yet they moved in a coordinated swarm.

A cluster of light elementals rushed him, detonating in a series of disorienting flashes that forced Nick to raise an arm to shield his eyes. At the same time, the darkness elementals swept in, dropping the temperature to a bone-chilling level and wrapping his vision in a suffocating shroud of black.

It was an effective tactic, he had to admit. They blinded the prey, disoriented their senses, and slowly wore them down with rapid fluctuations in temperature and light, all while staying out of range.

If he’d been a mortal mage, he would have been forced to raze his surroundings to take them down, and he was sure many a powerful beast could have been brought low.

Nick summoned the [Saga of the First Flame], using the concept of the eternal hearth to establish a domain of unwavering light. A golden aura flared around him, pushing back the darkness and absorbing the blinding flashes.

Perhaps it was excessive to use a Prestige-tier spell like this, but he was always of the school of thought that having a tool and never using it meant that when it came time to break it out, one would be far less effective.

With his vision restored, he went to work.

He unleashed a series of claps, compressing air and spiritual mana between his palms and directing the shockwaves upward. The blasts swept through the swarm, shattering the elementals’ fragile bodies. Sparks of dying light and dissolving shadows rained down around him.

The notifications cascaded across his vision, a steady stream of minor experience gains. It wasn't much, but it warmed his blood and gave him a good bit of freeform casting practice.

When the last elemental dissolved into the ether, Nick dispelled the golden aura, and the cavern returned to its normal gloom.

With nothing else approaching after his little show, he took a moment to center himself, extending his spiritual awareness down into the rock to check on the competition.

The mages of Vael were advancing, though with great caution. They had established a forward camp in a large chamber and were sending small, heavily shielded teams ahead to clear the tunnels.

At this pace, it’ll take them weeks to map the whole dungeon, not to mention the fights with the Guardians.

It wasn’t necessarily a bad approach. It certainly let them plunder the place for what it was worth, as evidenced by their use of specialized mining and carving charms to carefully extract crystals from the stone.

The veins closer to the core were essentially condensed mana, crystallized by the sheer pressure of the spatial collapse, and were quite valuable.

If they could extract it all, it would be a fortune large enough to fund the Tower of Vael for a decade, perhaps even enough to buy them the resources needed to advance their Archmages’ growth.

But they were running on a tight timeline. Every moment they wasted here was another moment someone could use to alert Bluetear.

The farce outside won't last long. Even without my intervention, they have at most a week.

Still, they didn’t seem in a hurry, so Nick severed the connection and withdrew his senses.

He had intended to alert the Tower of Alluria as soon as he confirmed the dungeon’s existence, but the Vael mages' slow harvesting gave him an opportunity.

He would let them mine their crystals while he delved into the untouched depths, claimed the Guardians’ cores, harvested the best loot, and uncovered the secrets of spatial warping.

Only after his pockets were full and he'd met his progression goals would he warn Bluetear, letting the Archmages of Alluria descend on the interlopers.

That’s going to be fun to watch. Pity I can’t stick around too long, but it should be worth it.