151 - Bad Idea

“You did what?” Leander shouted at Alexandra as Speck giddily recounted the tale of her fight against the lizard.

“It worked!” Alexandra protested, raising her hands. “I didn’t even get hurt. By the way, you’re the one who claimed my beam could pierce through the Gold-rank’s scales. Guess what? It didn’t. I had no choice.”

The ghost rubbed his eyebrows. “Don’t go around exploding stuff on the surface. This thing can cause some serious damage.”

“I’m obviously not planning on using it willy-nilly,” Alexandra said, calming down. “I’m not a complete idiot.”

“Complete is doing a lot of work here.”

“Hey!” She poked through the ghost with her finger. It had no effect. “You have to admit, it's pretty cool.”

“Make. Many. Rocks,” Speck added, nodding the head of its shadow figure.

“No, Speck. Things are not cool just because they make rocks,” Leander said.

“Wrong.”

Alexandra smiled. “For the record, Speck’s current obsession is entirely on you.”

“I hope that you at least benefited from this fight.” The ghost settled down on the Kesh sarcophagus.

“I haven’t checked yet.”

The cave was already unstable from the fight. She hadn't wanted to risk it collapsing on her by checking there.

Alexandra summoned her journal. Opened it.

Inflict Weakness 14 -> 15

Drain Life 7 -> 8

Aggressive Assimilation 6 -> 7

Manyfold Style 13 -> 14

Solar Blast 4 -> 6

Rays Of The Sun 1 -> 4

Giant Slayer 6 -> 7

Familiar Contract 3 -> 4

Solar Affinity 2 -> 3

“No…” Alexandra’s hands shook. “That can’t be.”

“No levels?” Leander asked.

“Way too many fucking levels! Shit.”

“And that’s a bad thing because…?”

Alexandra opened her mouth. She had no plan to reveal her class and its perks to Leander, so she didn’t say anything. All those skills leveling without completing a single training quest was a catastrophic waste of contribution points. The common skills were not too bad, but there were several uncommon skills and Giant Slayer in the mix. She estimated there were about 10,000 potential points she didn’t get.

“I’ll never save up enough…” she muttered.

“Enough for what?”

“Rock. Purchase.”

“How do you even know what a purchase is?” Leander pulled his translucent hair out.

“Never mind,” Alexandra said. She shouldn’t miss the forest for the trees. Any small gain would be meaningless if she could succeed with her guild project.

She returned her attention to the final notification in her journal.

Insurrection III: Slay a Gold-rank while being at the Bronze rank. +25 all stats.

Going from ten to all stats to twenty-five was a significant boost. It almost made up for her loss. Furthermore, even if it wasn’t ideal, she’d earned a lot of skill levels. Her strength had skyrocketed once more.

She closed her journal.

“Okay,” she said. “So the experiment didn’t work. I can keep my mana inside my core with Solar Concentration, but it won’t stop others from seeing it.”

Leander nodded. “I’m glad you’ve figured this out.”

“You could have just told me.”

“And you wouldn’t have learned anything,” the ghost answered. “Now, let’s move on to the next lesson. What you’ll want to do is—”

“Curse myself.”

Leander paused and closed his eyes for a second.

He opened them again. “What?”

“I should curse myself to make my mana invisible to outsiders. If it works, I’ll move on to a sickness.”

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Leander sighed. “So I hadn’t misheard. If I weren’t already dead, I’d be concerned for the lifespan you’re making me lose with your stupid ideas.”

“How is it stupid?”

“Curse. Bad.”

“Thank you, Speck,” Leander said. “It’s as our deal elemental says: curse bad.”

Alexandra shook her head. “It’s not that bad.”

“You’d need a sickness to make it permanent. This is on a different level from the basic curses you might have endured.”

“No shit.” She rolled her eyes. “I’ve dealt with plenty of sicknesses. Hell, I’ve even been hit with a malediction. Admittedly, this one was a pain to deal with. But I’m alive and healthy now. Besides, it all depends on the effect. I’m not going for anything bad. I just want to hide my core.”

Leander stared at her. “A Bronze-rank surviving a malediction. What’s next? A plague?”

“I was Iron back then. But yes.” She shrugged. “You were a hero too. I’m sure you’ve been through stuff.”

“I mean, yes. But not so early in my path,” Leander said.

“You’re too modest. Anyway, what about that curse?”

Leander relented. “Fine, let’s entertain the idea. I guess it could technically work. Do you know how to design curses?”

“No.” Alexandra grinned. “I figured you would.”

“I don’t. Veil Sealers specialize in formations.”

“And let me guess: there’s no formation that could solve my problem.”

Leander shook his head. “Oh. There are plenty of formations that could help you. But nothing you could learn in the limited time we have.”

“Then curse it is,” Alexandra said, rolling up her sleeves.

“I fail to see how you plan to do that. I’m repeating myself, but I know very little about curses.”

Alexandra pulled out her journal to keep track of the process and cracked her knuckles. “Alright. Dark Bolt into Life Curse. Let’s start small.”

“Small,” Leander repeated, like he couldn’t believe his ears.

She summoned a needle of Dark Bolt onto her finger with as little power as she could manage and fired it against the wall.

You are suffering from the curse of withering touch.

“Huh.” She flexed her fingers. Nothing dramatic. Just a faint drain, like she'd skipped a meal. “Okay. That's survivable.”

“Congratulations,” Leander said flatly. “You've successfully hurt yourself for no reason. A momentous achievement.”

“Bad,” Speck offered. Its shadow-head bobbed. “Interesting. Bad.”

“See, even Speck's impressed.”

“Speck is impressed by rocks, Alexandra.”

“Yes. Rocks. Best.”

She ignored him and examined her core with Curse Unraveling. Withering curse made her mana thread thinner, but not less noticeable. She took note of the process just in case, and dispelled the curse.

“Next one.”

“There does not need to be a next one,” Leander said.

"There does, because I need to find inspiration for my core-hiding curse." She was already weaving the second attempt with a little more power.

“This self-curse ability of yours is interesting. I’ll give you that much. Are the curses random?”

“As far as I can tell, yes,” she answered. “But they do scale depending on how much power I put in. I never went above sickness,” she answered.

“Lunatic,” the ghost muttered.

“That's how research works, Leander. You don't get an omelet without breaking a few eggs.”

She cast her second Dark Bolt.

You are suffering from the curse of hollow ache.

"Oh, that one's worse," she admitted, blinking as her vision swam under the headache she’d just given herself.

"Fascinating," Leander said, arms crossed, floating in slow, unimpressed circles around her. "So when you spend more mana, the curse gets stronger. Truly, no one could have predicted this outcome. Certainly not I.”

“Shut it for a sec,” Alexandra groaned as she examined her core. “Need I remind you that all you said was: curse bad.”

“Bad,” Speck agreed solemnly, then immediately drifted closer to poke at her skin, delighted.

“Don't encourage her, spirit.”

“Curse. Of. Rocks.”

Alexandra found the curse not helpful to her goal and unraveled it.

"Next," she said aloud, already weaving it.

You are suffering from the curse of Numbing Frost.

Alexandra's grin faltered. “Ah.” She shivered. “Another dud. Nothing to take out of this one.”

It barely held against solar mana, disintegrating on its own a few seconds later.

“Fourth time's the charm,” Alexandra muttered, and put a bit more mana into the weave than she meant to.

You are suffering from the curse of the fading mark.

Her skin went pale, almost translucent at the edges, and when she glanced down at her hands, they looked half-erased from the world. Her stomach lurched with a wave of nausea.

“Okay, that one's unpleasant,” she said, swallowing hard.

“You look like a ghost,” Leander said, tilting his head. “Which is, I will note, an insult to actual ghosts, because you still look worse than me.”

“Rude,” Alexandra said weakly. She looked at her core.

Her mana, normally distinct and compacted inside her core, was diffused across her whole body in a thin, ghostly haze.

“Huh,” she said slowly, poking at the edges of the effect with her senses. “Leander. Look at this.”

Leander drifted closer, frowning. “Now that’s actually promising. In this state, anyone will be able to tell that your mana is wrong, but it's so diffuse even I am struggling to pick up the signature of the divine. And that’s with me knowing that it’s there.”

“The only issue is the nausea and ghostly features,” Alexandra said. “Plus my mana feels weak.”

“Bad,” Speck said. “Sick. Bad. Bad.”

“I know, buddy, I'll fix it in a second.” She was imprinting the shape of the curse into her memory as she unraveled it. “This is the thread I've been trying to find. Camouflage instead of wall.”

“That is,” Leander said slowly, “actually not a terrible insight. For once.”

“High praise.”

“Curse. Of. Camouflage,” Speck offered, delighted.

“I appreciate the enthusiasm.” Alexandra dismissed the curse with a grimace, her mana threads snapping back into her core as the nausea finally ebbed. She flexed her hand, color and solidity returning to it. “Alright. New plan. Forget hiding the core. I design something that muddies the signature of my divine class.”

Leander pinched the bridge of his nose.

“I want it noted,” he said, “that you nearly made yourself sick to death arriving at a conclusion I could have handed you in one sentence.”

“Well, you didn’t,” Alexandra said. “Besides, now I actually understand why it works. That's worth a little nausea.”

“Bad. Idea,” Speck said again, cheerfully. “Cool.”

“Thank you, Speck,” Alexandra said. “See, Leander? Even the elemental gets it.”