Chapter 127: Stealing a Secret

The idea of controlling a spell's intensity was still new to Jess. It sounded rather complicated.

He'd never heard anyone at the Slaughtered Lamb, including Gakin, talk about how much force to put into spellcasting. In fact, he'd barely heard those warlocks talk about casting techniques at all.

You recited an incantation and waved your arms the way someone had shown you. If it worked, great. If it didn't, too bad. Everything was left to chance.

Obviously, learning how to cast a weaker version of a spell wasn't something one could do overnight. It must require deep communication with arcane energy or the ley network, not just pronouncing an incantation correctly the way Jess did.

Marin said nothing more. He lowered his head and returned to his book, leaving Jess to think it over.

In truth, Jess had never felt that he was genuinely communicating with the ley network.

He was like a public speaker who had memorized his speech perfectly and could deliver it with tremendous feeling. The arcane energies were the audience. Jess stood onstage and spoke with such passion that the audience was moved to tears. But he had no idea what his speech meant, or why anyone found it moving.

The moment someone in the audience asked a question—when Jess wanted to control arcane energy more deeply, say by adjusting a spell's intensity—he would have no idea how to respond.

Perhaps that was what talent for the arcane really meant. Gifted mages met that audience as though they were brothers and sisters. They shared a language and could understand the audience's thoughts and feelings precisely, because they'd grown up and lived among them.

Jess didn't know those people at all. He understood neither their culture nor their personalities. He didn't even speak their language. He was more than an outsider. He was a complete foreigner.

But shadow was different.

Far too different.

Jess responded to shadow power with such intensity that every time he used it he had to suppress the urge to control the shadow—or to let the shadow control him.

He could feel every stirring of shadow energy and understand the emotions it seemed to express to him. He wanted to answer, but didn't dare.

And whenever he drew on shadow and felt it affect him in return, he had to examine himself afterward for changes that shouldn't have happened. That process of self-examination was even more exhausting than studying arcane magic, Orcish, or alchemy.

If the arcane was an audience, shadow was a beautiful woman who pursued him relentlessly. She was charming and affectionate, and her smile was enough to make him lose himself. But wherever she went she carried a knife, her eyes fixed on his heart.

She never said what the knife was for, or why she kept staring at his chest. She didn't need to say a word.

Meanwhile, he paid less and less attention to the knife, drawn instead to her strange charm. Little by little, the tip pressed against his skin until blood began to seep out.

At first, the pain would wake him up. In the end, even the pain would become part of the pleasure.

Dark magic accepts anyone willing to accept it. Every spellcaster seemed to know that saying, whether the mages at the Wizard's Sanctum or the warlocks of the Dagger Society.

Yet Jess sometimes felt that he was the only one dark magic had accepted so completely.

Lost in thought, he glanced at his pocket watch. It was already ten. The Arcane Intellect he'd cast on himself was probably about to wear off.

Morning would soon be over, and Marin had lessons to teach at the Wizard's Sanctum that afternoon. What had Jess come here for? To listen to a lecture and spend the rest of the day thinking about his shortcomings?

No. He'd come to memorize an incantation!

He glanced at the warlock bag on the floor. It had taken a lot of nerve to bring the imp into this room. He couldn't waste the chance.

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Marin had opened his book again. Soon he might even pick up his pen. Would there still be time to make a request? Was Jess really going to accept two months with no proper magic to practice?

"Master," Jess said.

"Hmm?" Marin didn't look up.

"Could you demonstrate the spell one more time?" Jess asked. "If you can deliberately cast weaker spells, doing Mage Armor again shouldn't be too difficult for you. I only want to feel how a standard casting takes shape. Last time I was so focused on watching that I didn't pay attention to the movement and changes in the arcane energy. I think I should focus more on responding to the moods of the ley network and the arcane energies. After all, casting means communicating with arcane power. That's what you taught me."

Jess felt slightly guilty about baiting Marin into reciting the spell. The old mage had only been trying to help him.

But his desire to learn Mage Armor had become an obsession.

If Marin refused again and insisted on waiting until Jess returned to take an Abjuration course, he'd give up and stop thinking about it. But if Marin agreed to demonstrate it, then it was a chance handed to him by the Holy Light.

Uh... the Holy Light?

"Very good," Marin said, interrupting his drifting thoughts. "You're right. Controlling a spell's intensity means communicating deeply with arcane energy. You'll need to study for a long time to master it. Since you feel so strongly about this, I can't bring myself to dampen a student's eagerness to learn."

Here it comes. Here it comes!

Jess was practically shouting inside his head. Saeno, you little bastard, are you ready? Everything depends on this!

This time Marin didn't even take out his spellbook. He walked confidently to the middle of the room and pushed the table back a little.

He looked almost excited. Maybe he'd been looking for an excuse to demonstrate it again himself.

The old mage glanced at Jess. "Pay close attention to the gathering arcane energy. Feel how it responds to my summons. Listen to it speaking. Listen to it singing, Mr. Seso."

Then he raised his right hand and began to chant.

The magical winds that rose, the arcane energy spiraling inward from every direction, the room becoming strangely weightless, even the flashes of lightning, fire, and natural energy from the elements captured by the arcane—all of it failed to hold Jess's attention.

He was watching Marin's lips. Every syllable, every note, every shift in tone. He even began to recognize patterns in the dragon-language incantation: explosive sounds like a dragon breathing out, hissing sounds like the flutter of a snake's tongue, and deep voiced consonants like growls from the throat.

When Marin finished, multicolored light burst around him. Crystal-like armor settled close to his robes, glowing in many colors. A sudden wind made the papers on the shelves and desk flap wildly.

But Jess heard only one thing: the incantation repeating again and again in his mind.

"Lokpotorui, Arcanóa, Molodatu, Unibersoa-ren, Inguruku, Izukutu, Irementarak, Itakshi, Bedinkatu, Nazazuinsa."

Once the demonstration was over, Jess didn't linger. He made an excuse about being hungry, grabbed his bag, and left.

He forced himself to walk calmly until he was out of the garden. Then he broke into a run and raced all the way home, repeating the incantation to himself as he went.

He kept looping it through his short-term memory, trying to force it to stick. He could hardly believe he'd managed to retain so many phrases at once. Arcane Intellect must have helped.

He burst into his room, ripped open the warlock bag, and shouted, "Come out, Saeno!"

The imp appeared in a flash. Jess grabbed it by the neck.

"Write it down! Right now! From memory! Write the sounds in Common!"

He shoved a piece of paper at the imp before it could even speak. Something about prices was already written on one side.

"The back!" Jess flipped it over and thrust it into the imp's arms. Then he snatched another sheet and began writing furiously.

"Lokpotorui... damn it..."

He scratched his head and struggled to remember. To his surprise, the imp finished first.

"Done, Master!"

It offered him the paper. Jess snatched it and tossed it aside.

"Don't bother me! Let me finish!"

He closed his eyes and pictured Marin casting the spell. Only when he had written the final syllable did he look up.

As he reached for the imp's sheet, he could feel his heart thumping in his chest.

He placed the two side by side and compared them character by character, from the first to the last. A few syllables had been written differently, but the overall pronunciation and the order of the phrases matched exactly.

He needed to be as accurate as possible. This magic was too important.

Jess spoke an incantation and cast Arcane Intellect on himself again. The earlier one must have worn off.

He no longer cared about possible side effects or Marin's warnings. There were more important things at stake.

With Arcane Intellect helping him, he wrote out Marin's incantation again. This time he even marked the pronunciation as carefully as he could. Then he checked it once more, using the imp's version to correct a few uncertain parts.

There shouldn't be any problem this time.

Jess copied the cleaned-up incantation onto another sheet. He added the casting principles he'd read about before his first attempt and the things he'd noticed when Marin demonstrated the spell, describing them in words and simple sketches until the page was covered.

Finally, he tucked the paper carefully into his warlock bag. By the time he'd finished everything, it was nearly evening.

Mage Armor was much more complicated here than in the game. He hoped the effect justified all that work. If it merely reduced damage by a few percent, that would be next to useless in the real world.

What difference did it make if an explosion blew a four-inch hole through you instead of a three-and-a-half-inch one?

Still, Fear and Drain Life were both much more complicated—and much more frightening—than their game versions. There was no reason for Mage Armor to be worse.