[Sofia’s Shadow Scepter] : Must be primed to unlock advanced functions (1013 / 1 000 000 000 mana).
“Missed by thirteen…”
Admiring the incredible item, Sofia was starting to realize how wasteful she had been. Every second spent regenerating mana when she was already full was a second where her skills could have been leveling up. And now that her immediate focus was shifting to leveling her skills for the trial, this scepter and its ridiculous requirement appeared.
I bet Valeure could charge it up in a day or two.
I bet she would want to keep it too. Especially with the last lines of the description. Can’t ask Astelia to help with this even if with her we could charge it up twice as fast, and Kuli is a fighter…
I’ve been putting it off but it might be time to find that T.L.D.R lich. If I want the best shot at the trial I should do it now. It’s a bit dangerous but… Hmm. There are a lot of things to take care of before the trial. But first, I have a skill to upgrade and a Dungeon to explore. I don’t think this was the boss. I haven’t even stepped foot into the namesake Cathedral yet.
Before leaving the safety of her ghost-repelling ritual and starting her exploration again, she spent some time re-reading her skills and her status. She had to replace the immortality runes anyway, and she wanted to summon the High-Priest this time.
[Venerable physique of the primeval void] :
Second step : Become able to see in the dark (71.316%/100%)
Didn’t go up much… Or rather went up quite a lot considering all I did was find the city and enter the house. My vision is still quite limited.
Name : Sofia Aphenoreth
Age : 20
Class : [Saintomancer]
Level : 199
Health : 5995 / 5995 (5*level + 5000 filter2)
Stamina : 1994 / 1995 (5*level + 1000 filter2)
Mana : 948 / 89000 (-10000 Alith) (-5000 Scribe Link) (5000 base + (500*(level-1)))
Specialization : [Eclipse Skeleton]
Alteration chance : 97%
Active Skills (7 / 7)
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀[Spine of the Black Sun] - Level 122
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀[Heal Undead] - Level 64
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀[Summon Blood] - Level 85
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀[Angel’s bolt] - Level 100
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀[Maiden Banshee] - Level 199 (Lv.199)
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀[Graveyard of the righteous] - Level 108
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀[False immortality] - Level 3
Passive Skills (6 / 6)
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀[Blessing of the Deep] - (2/4)
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀[Armor of Bones] - Level 100
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀[Pristine essence]
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀[Vakariazrehafin of Sorrow]
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀[Holy Wings of undeath]
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀[Venerable physique of the primeval void] - Second step Shadow gathering realm
Classless Skills (6 / 6)
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀[Fast reading] - Level 52
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀[Way of the Fool] - Level 19
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀[Poker Face] - Level 36
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀[Identify] - Level 2
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀[Sanctity] - Level 77
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀[Mana manipulation]
Special Skills (1)
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀[The Book of Skeletons]
Summoned heroes (3 / 4)
Lv.199 Pareth (Holy Ogre Eclipse Skeleton) Lv.199 Alith (Maiden Banshee) Lv.199 Book of Skeletons (Book)[Mark of Aphenoreth]
Available Active Skills :
[ command] : soul that none can resist. [Restore ] : Infuse the target with mana toAvailable Passive Skills :
[Blessed hands ] : Shape mana directly through the hands [ with suffering] : all those who touch it except the necromancer with long lasting [Agony]. [ marrow] : ERROR [Runic ] : You are one with the runes of [ dominion] : in a spherical area around you.
Everything is going up nicely. While I’m waiting for my mana… I wonder if it isn’t time to get rid of [Pristine essence].
[Pristine essence] : You are the unblemished. Immunity to magically induced memory alterations. Augmented resistance to perception alterations.
The memory alteration thing seems useless now. Aphenoreth’s mark already helps against any kind of soul tampering, and [Pristine essence] doesn’t even work for stuff like alcohol.
Also, I’m pretty sure the whole fake reality of the first trial was a big perception alteration and it didn’t help back then.
The resistance to perception alteration isn’t worth that much, as evidenced by, well, this whole dungeon. If the darkness isn’t a perception alteration I don’t know what it is. And the unblemished thing… I don’t think it really did anything. Maybe my skin is a bit shinier than it used to? I don’t think that warrants keeping the slot.
The only time I can recall it being even somewhat useful is when I got controlled by [Domination] and could still see around me… Which didn’t help.
Plus with the second trial approaching, I’ll have to be ‘rebuilt’ again when I pass. And I got screwed for having [Pristine essence] the last time, making it more painful that it should have… Yeah I think it’s better to let it go.
Losing an immunity seems bad but I might as well take a skill to be immune to stubbing my toe at this point, at least it would be useful sometimes.
But what do I get instead? I’ll get a new passive skill slot at 200 I think but I’ll also get new keywords so it’s fine if I use up what I have.
And I’ve been thinking about this for a bit.
[Blessed hands marrow dominion]
I'm not sure what it would do but dominion over marrow through blessed hands sounds like something I could use. I'm hoping for either something that allows me to give myself custom upgrades through dominion over my own marrow, or something that allows me to do the same for skeletons through my hands. Either that or a passive healing skill of some sort.
There are a few other ways it could go but I’m hoping for something very basic. You know what I mean, Sir Scribe. We’re on the same page, right? I’m trusting you with this. The keywords should be exactly what’s needed for you to be able to make what I want. Please.
Could have gone for 'runic' instead of 'marrow' but with 'blessed' from [Blessed hands ] also being in the equation I'm too scared of it becoming a skill related to Scripture. And [Runic dominion] is the same to some extent...
You have lost the passive : ‘Pristine essence’
Sofia’s vision suddenly got a bit darker. That was it for the changes.
I suppose it did help a little… Hey what’s done is done.
You have acquired the Passive skill : ‘ dominion’
You have acquired the Passive skill : ‘ marrow’
You have acquired the Passive skill : ‘Blessed hands ’
It wasn’t until later when Sofia was busy carving the second rune on her body under the guard of Pareth and the High-Priest skeleton that her new passive skill was finally ready. The name of it was enough to put a smile on her face.
[Bone dominus] : The Saintomancer can control, fuse and reshape all inert bones in a 10 (10 * skill level) meters radius; the Saintomancer can reshape all bones their hands touch. (This will make them unable to be used as new Skeletons, except as constructs)
The Saintomancer can create and control up to 1 (Skill level) blessed marrow bone construct. The construct is sturdier than its original parts and is considered a Golem and a Skeleton.
For each nearby blessed marrow bone construct, the Saintomancer and all Skeletons in the construct's reach receive the following effects :
Regenerate 0.5% maximum health every second. Bones are 10% sturdier.
Sofia couldn’t wait to try it out but there were still some details she noted. There are multiple parts that surprise me. The whole construct thing is a bit weird, the scaling makes me think this is probably another compressed-level skill. No way this can go up to level 100, the effect stacking would be insane.
Also that makes [Heal undead] almost obsolete… I can still use it to heal Alith though, and it heals much faster than the constructs, with a longer range. The best part though is how it doesn’t mention the mana usage, so it must be minimal like the other passives.
And then… Reshape all bones they touch. All bones…
Her first instinct was to change the shape of her wings. Like clay that you work on it was indeed reshaping, meaning no bone was created or lost, but the form changed. She changed her wings to look like long arms sprouting from her back. Her control was lackluster but it worked. She still could only naturally move them like they were wings though, and had to use the skill to move the fingers one by one. Impractical. She reformed her wings to normal and broke the tip on the left one. Can I stick it back on? She could.
Then she took out some of her cut wings that were in her storage and tried to add them to her actual wings. That didn’t work. She discovered that after a few seconds of being detached from her body, the bone could no longer be repaired like that. I can probably still fix internal injuries though… But my own bones aren't inert bones so I need to touch them with my hands to reshapes them. Thinking that she tried to reshape one of her fingers, giving it a slight curvature. That was kind of disquieting to look at so she fixed it. Guess my hands count as touching their own bones...
“It’s very versatile. And if I can touch someone else’s bones… They’re dead. What stops me from reshaping their ribs to pierce the heart?”
Actually, that’s kind of useless. If I can touch their ribs I don’t need that to kill them.
But what if I use the pointy end of my wings to stab someone in the forehead or the temple? Might surprise someone, and the instant I touch their skull…
Sofia shivered at her own ideas. She decided to explore the less macabre parts of the skill next. First, she wanted to try displacing Pareth’s spinal spikes to all be on his head, but that didn’t work. Matter from one bone couldn’t be transferred to another one, but she could do things like change the shape of his horns to make them curved like Karin’s goat horns. Overall she found this part of the skill to be a bit underwhelming.
The last two things she wanted to try were the control of ‘inert’ bones, which she still hadn’t used, and the making of constructs which she didn’t fully understand. At least the actual control of the skill had been very intuitive until now.
She dumped dozens of her cut bone wings’ supply on the floor and tried to work with that.
The more things she tried and the wider the smile on her face got. Absolute control. This was what she had. If she wanted to fuse all the bones and make a sphere with it she could. If she wanted to make the sphere fly up, then change to a huge bone hammer, she also could. And most importantly, if she wanted to add or remove pieces to and from her bone armor… She absolutely could.
She took out hundreds of cut wings and used them to make her armor thicker. It worked well up to a point where she could no longer move due to the weight and blocked joints. Adding a ton of mass maybe isn’t the way to go.
One of her first instincts was to go near a wall, to extend her armored hand, and move the matter of her armor, reshaping it to form a long spike coming out of her palm. The bone spike formed, piercing the wall.
“Oh.”
This skill is crazy. The possibilities… Endless.
Reshaping and controlling the bones around her required a lot of focus but there wasn’t any real limit to what she could do. She couldn’t figure out how it worked but it used no mana at all. She tried to emulate the complex shape of Orvod’s move with the stone lotuses, and she could almost do it well but the shape of the petals had a lot of room for improvement. She couldn’t do like him and fly on a cube of bones though, while the bones could float, they didn’t have much force to them unless they were grounded.
She played around doing all sorts of shapes with the bones, and finally, she decided to try the construct function. She reshaped all the bones she had taken out into a greatshield, mimicking Pareth’s usual design. How do I make that a construct though?
She tried a few things before figuring out that she had to pump it full of mana, which finished emptying her reserves. The bone shield hardened visibly, taking on a golden sheen and glow reminiscent of the state the mist skeletons were in when invincible under the sunlight.
Sofia could feel the effect of the blessing trying to heal her, though it did nothing as she was full-life and had the runes up. She looked at Pareth, raising the shield in front of her, “Hit it, don’t hold back.”
Pareth’s hit was heavy, it sent Sofia tumbling back until her back was up against the wall. But the shield was almost intact, the scratches on its surface visibly healing by themselves. Great! She could store it without trouble but would lose the healing effect as it wasn't 'nearby' anymore. I can probably use that on parts of my armor too… I guess the helmet is a good choice, and so is the chestplate. There must be more than I don’t understand about this whole construct concept but I’ll look into it later when I’m not in a hostile dungeon.
Done with her testing, she had to say, the scribe didn’t hold back. This was a skill worthy of the keywords used and the slot taken.
Now I need to regenerate my mana and redo the runes all over again…
Sofia dispelled her runes and sat on the floor.
[Sofia’s Shadow Scepter] : Must be primed to unlock advanced functions (1013 / 1 000 000 000 mana).
“Missed by thirteen…”
Admiring the incredible item, Sofia was starting to realize how wasteful she had been. Every second spent regenerating mana when she was already full was a second where her skills could have been leveling up. And now that her immediate focus was shifting to leveling her skills for the trial, this scepter and its ridiculous requirement appeared.
I bet Valeure could charge it up in a day or two.
I bet she would want to keep it too. Especially with the last lines of the description. Can’t ask Astelia to help with this even if with her we could charge it up twice as fast, and Kuli is a fighter…
I’ve been putting it off but it might be time to find that T.L.D.R lich. If I want the best shot at the trial I should do it now. It’s a bit dangerous but… Hmm. There are a lot of things to take care of before the trial. But first, I have a skill to upgrade and a Dungeon to explore. I don’t think this was the boss. I haven’t even stepped foot into the namesake Cathedral yet.
Before leaving the safety of her ghost-repelling ritual and starting her exploration again, she spent some time re-reading her skills and her status. She had to replace the immortality runes anyway, and she wanted to summon the High-Priest this time.
[Venerable physique of the primeval void] :
Second step : Become able to see in the dark (71.316%/100%)
Didn’t go up much… Or rather went up quite a lot considering all I did was find the city and enter the house. My vision is still quite limited.
Name : Sofia Aphenoreth
Age : 20
Class : [Saintomancer]
Level : 199
Health : 5995 / 5995 (5*level + 5000 filter2)
Stamina : 1994 / 1995 (5*level + 1000 filter2)
Mana : 948 / 89000 (-10000 Alith) (-5000 Scribe Link) (5000 base + (500*(level-1)))
Specialization : [Eclipse Skeleton]
Alteration chance : 97%
Active Skills (7 / 7)
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀[Spine of the Black Sun] - Level 122
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀[Heal Undead] - Level 64
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀[Summon Blood] - Level 85
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀[Angel’s bolt] - Level 100
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀[Maiden Banshee] - Level 199 (Lv.199)
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀[Graveyard of the righteous] - Level 108
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀[False immortality] - Level 3
Passive Skills (6 / 6)
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀[Blessing of the Deep] - (2/4)
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀[Armor of Bones] - Level 100
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀[Pristine essence]
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀[Vakariazrehafin of Sorrow]
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀[Holy Wings of undeath]
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀[Venerable physique of the primeval void] - Second step Shadow gathering realm
Classless Skills (6 / 6)
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀[Fast reading] - Level 52
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀[Way of the Fool] - Level 19
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀[Poker Face] - Level 36
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀[Identify] - Level 2
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀[Sanctity] - Level 77
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀[Mana manipulation]
Special Skills (1)
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀[The Book of Skeletons]
Summoned heroes (3 / 4)
Lv.199 Pareth (Holy Ogre Eclipse Skeleton) Lv.199 Alith (Maiden Banshee) Lv.199 Book of Skeletons (Book)[Mark of Aphenoreth]
Available Active Skills :
[ command] : soul that none can resist. [Restore ] : Infuse the target with mana toAvailable Passive Skills :
[Blessed hands ] : Shape mana directly through the hands [ with suffering] : all those who touch it except the necromancer with long lasting [Agony]. [ marrow] : ERROR [Runic ] : You are one with the runes of [ dominion] : in a spherical area around you.
Everything is going up nicely. While I’m waiting for my mana… I wonder if it isn’t time to get rid of [Pristine essence].
[Pristine essence] : You are the unblemished. Immunity to magically induced memory alterations. Augmented resistance to perception alterations.
The memory alteration thing seems useless now. Aphenoreth’s mark already helps against any kind of soul tampering, and [Pristine essence] doesn’t even work for stuff like alcohol.
Also, I’m pretty sure the whole fake reality of the first trial was a big perception alteration and it didn’t help back then.
The resistance to perception alteration isn’t worth that much, as evidenced by, well, this whole dungeon. If the darkness isn’t a perception alteration I don’t know what it is. And the unblemished thing… I don’t think it really did anything. Maybe my skin is a bit shinier than it used to? I don’t think that warrants keeping the slot.
The only time I can recall it being even somewhat useful is when I got controlled by [Domination] and could still see around me… Which didn’t help.
Plus with the second trial approaching, I’ll have to be ‘rebuilt’ again when I pass. And I got screwed for having [Pristine essence] the last time, making it more painful that it should have… Yeah I think it’s better to let it go.
Losing an immunity seems bad but I might as well take a skill to be immune to stubbing my toe at this point, at least it would be useful sometimes.
But what do I get instead? I’ll get a new passive skill slot at 200 I think but I’ll also get new keywords so it’s fine if I use up what I have.
And I’ve been thinking about this for a bit.
[Blessed hands marrow dominion]
I'm not sure what it would do but dominion over marrow through blessed hands sounds like something I could use. I'm hoping for either something that allows me to give myself custom upgrades through dominion over my own marrow, or something that allows me to do the same for skeletons through my hands. Either that or a passive healing skill of some sort.
There are a few other ways it could go but I’m hoping for something very basic. You know what I mean, Sir Scribe. We’re on the same page, right? I’m trusting you with this. The keywords should be exactly what’s needed for you to be able to make what I want. Please.
Could have gone for 'runic' instead of 'marrow' but with 'blessed' from [Blessed hands ] also being in the equation I'm too scared of it becoming a skill related to Scripture. And [Runic dominion] is the same to some extent...
You have lost the passive : ‘Pristine essence’
Sofia’s vision suddenly got a bit darker. That was it for the changes.
I suppose it did help a little… Hey what’s done is done.
You have acquired the Passive skill : ‘ dominion’
You have acquired the Passive skill : ‘ marrow’
You have acquired the Passive skill : ‘Blessed hands ’
It wasn’t until later when Sofia was busy carving the second rune on her body under the guard of Pareth and the High-Priest skeleton that her new passive skill was finally ready. The name of it was enough to put a smile on her face.
[Bone dominus] : The Saintomancer can control, fuse and reshape all inert bones in a 10 (10 * skill level) meters radius; the Saintomancer can reshape all bones their hands touch. (This will make them unable to be used as new Skeletons, except as constructs)
The Saintomancer can create and control up to 1 (Skill level) blessed marrow bone construct. The construct is sturdier than its original parts and is considered a Golem and a Skeleton.
For each nearby blessed marrow bone construct, the Saintomancer and all Skeletons in the construct's reach receive the following effects :
Regenerate 0.5% maximum health every second. Bones are 10% sturdier.
Sofia couldn’t wait to try it out but there were still some details she noted. There are multiple parts that surprise me. The whole construct thing is a bit weird, the scaling makes me think this is probably another compressed-level skill. No way this can go up to level 100, the effect stacking would be insane.
Also that makes [Heal undead] almost obsolete… I can still use it to heal Alith though, and it heals much faster than the constructs, with a longer range. The best part though is how it doesn’t mention the mana usage, so it must be minimal like the other passives.
And then… Reshape all bones they touch. All bones…
Her first instinct was to change the shape of her wings. Like clay that you work on it was indeed reshaping, meaning no bone was created or lost, but the form changed. She changed her wings to look like long arms sprouting from her back. Her control was lackluster but it worked. She still could only naturally move them like they were wings though, and had to use the skill to move the fingers one by one. Impractical. She reformed her wings to normal and broke the tip on the left one. Can I stick it back on? She could.
Then she took out some of her cut wings that were in her storage and tried to add them to her actual wings. That didn’t work. She discovered that after a few seconds of being detached from her body, the bone could no longer be repaired like that. I can probably still fix internal injuries though… But my own bones aren't inert bones so I need to touch them with my hands to reshapes them. Thinking that she tried to reshape one of her fingers, giving it a slight curvature. That was kind of disquieting to look at so she fixed it. Guess my hands count as touching their own bones...
“It’s very versatile. And if I can touch someone else’s bones… They’re dead. What stops me from reshaping their ribs to pierce the heart?”
Actually, that’s kind of useless. If I can touch their ribs I don’t need that to kill them.
But what if I use the pointy end of my wings to stab someone in the forehead or the temple? Might surprise someone, and the instant I touch their skull…
Sofia shivered at her own ideas. She decided to explore the less macabre parts of the skill next. First, she wanted to try displacing Pareth’s spinal spikes to all be on his head, but that didn’t work. Matter from one bone couldn’t be transferred to another one, but she could do things like change the shape of his horns to make them curved like Karin’s goat horns. Overall she found this part of the skill to be a bit underwhelming.
The last two things she wanted to try were the control of ‘inert’ bones, which she still hadn’t used, and the making of constructs which she didn’t fully understand. At least the actual control of the skill had been very intuitive until now.
She dumped dozens of her cut bone wings’ supply on the floor and tried to work with that.
The more things she tried and the wider the smile on her face got. Absolute control. This was what she had. If she wanted to fuse all the bones and make a sphere with it she could. If she wanted to make the sphere fly up, then change to a huge bone hammer, she also could. And most importantly, if she wanted to add or remove pieces to and from her bone armor… She absolutely could.
She took out hundreds of cut wings and used them to make her armor thicker. It worked well up to a point where she could no longer move due to the weight and blocked joints. Adding a ton of mass maybe isn’t the way to go.
One of her first instincts was to go near a wall, to extend her armored hand, and move the matter of her armor, reshaping it to form a long spike coming out of her palm. The bone spike formed, piercing the wall.
“Oh.”
This skill is crazy. The possibilities… Endless.
Reshaping and controlling the bones around her required a lot of focus but there wasn’t any real limit to what she could do. She couldn’t figure out how it worked but it used no mana at all. She tried to emulate the complex shape of Orvod’s move with the stone lotuses, and she could almost do it well but the shape of the petals had a lot of room for improvement. She couldn’t do like him and fly on a cube of bones though, while the bones could float, they didn’t have much force to them unless they were grounded.
She played around doing all sorts of shapes with the bones, and finally, she decided to try the construct function. She reshaped all the bones she had taken out into a greatshield, mimicking Pareth’s usual design. How do I make that a construct though?
She tried a few things before figuring out that she had to pump it full of mana, which finished emptying her reserves. The bone shield hardened visibly, taking on a golden sheen and glow reminiscent of the state the mist skeletons were in when invincible under the sunlight.
Sofia could feel the effect of the blessing trying to heal her, though it did nothing as she was full-life and had the runes up. She looked at Pareth, raising the shield in front of her, “Hit it, don’t hold back.”
Pareth’s hit was heavy, it sent Sofia tumbling back until her back was up against the wall. But the shield was almost intact, the scratches on its surface visibly healing by themselves. Great! She could store it without trouble but would lose the healing effect as it wasn't 'nearby' anymore. I can probably use that on parts of my armor too… I guess the helmet is a good choice, and so is the chestplate. There must be more than I don’t understand about this whole construct concept but I’ll look into it later when I’m not in a hostile dungeon.
Done with her testing, she had to say, the scribe didn’t hold back. This was a skill worthy of the keywords used and the slot taken.
Now I need to regenerate my mana and redo the runes all over again…
Sofia dispelled her runes and sat on the floor.
