Chapter 1413 (Patreon)

Knowing that field tests would be the only way to truly understand Lia’s unique understanding of Mind Magic, we hadn’t lingered long at Jademoon Tower. Instead, we had instantly begun our hike through the forest, just as we had originally planned. Only that it was a completely different forest than expected, one that wasn’t drenched in torrential rain, nor was it filled with insane, murderous flora.

During our hike, with Lia leading the way, I listened as she spoke, her words filling the soft din of a forest’s night. The more I listened, the more I had to wonder if we were even using the same magic. Her interpretation of Mind Magic was so different that the question I had to ask became more and more fundamental, until I finally dug deep enough and found a point of concordance. That point, the area we agreed upon, made me realise just how far she had come from my teaching, because other than that, other than the aspects I had taught her, everything else was completely different. She had taken what I had taught her, but ran with it in a completely different direction, to the point that I wondered if I’d be able to put her ideas to practical use.

“You see them?” Lia asked me suddenly, making me pause. My focus hadn’t been on my surroundings; instead, I had focused on the things she had told me, the explanation given for her magic, and tried to make sense of that. Tried, and failed, if I was being honest. But now that she made me pay attention, I quickly felt my ears twitch as they caught the familiar sound of conversation, loud enough to be carried to us, even over the din of the nightly forest. Then, I saw the faint flicker of flames, so very familiar and so obvious in the night, making me feel like a fool for missing the signs in the first place. 

“A hunting party?” I asked after a moment of thought, thinking that was the most likely explanation for anyone camping out in the open.

“Probably,” Lia nodded next to me, “Hunting, maybe gathering, or even exploration- might be all three at once. You know how it goes: the group goes out; if they come across good game, they take it; if they stumble upon something worthwhile to harvest, they gather; if they find something they can’t exploit with their small number, they come back with more people.” 

“True,” I agreed, well aware that few people had the leisure we had, able to devote massive parts of our time to pursuits not directly linked to our survival. Power was such a useful advantage, especially when the way that power could be applied was as varied as what Luna and I could do. We didn’t need to worry about a large number of mundane tasks; we had the ability to trade our assistance as a valued commodity, and the people of Maggie’s community were always willing to buy. Hel, there had been more than one occasion that people had offered themselves to us, willing to become our servants, our slaves in all but name, in exchange for protection and comfort.

“So, let’s get a little closer and see if I can get your way of Mind Magic to work,” I decided after another second of consideration. “Do you want to work on your concealment of allies, or are we both working our own tricks?” I asked, curious if Lia wanted to train herself, too. 

“Certainly,” she accepted after a second of thought. Moments later, I felt her power flare, the sensation subdued and subtle. Anyone further away wouldn’t have been able to feel anything, just as concealment magic was supposed to work.

Sensing the streams of power she wove around me, I couldn’t help but nod in approval. It wasn’t quite how I would have done things; the concealment was worked in similar, but still rather different ways. The methods weren’t mine, but I was confident that they worked well, maybe not as well as I could have done it, but well enough. Or I simply considered things from a different vantage point, making my concealment broader, capable of preventing a wider variety of senses from detecting my presence, but ultimately, that meant my methods had different vulnerabilities. Concealment and detection, divination and obfuscation, different sides of the same coin. I could imagine countless different ways to accomplish either, and I doubted any method would work against every counter. And vice versa. 

Covered by Lia’s concealment magic, we made our way towards the clearing with the human camp. There were five of them; well, one was awake and on guard, while the other four were curled up in a mix of blankets, sleeping bags and furs.

Focusing on that one guy, I started weaving a bit of Mind Magic, trying to evoke a response from him. If everything worked, my spell should have made him hear a fairly loud noise from the forest, though the type of noise wasn’t defined by the spell. 

Moments later, the guy looked around, incredibly confused. For a moment, he glanced at the sky, then he held out a hand, palm up, and looked up again, muttering to himself. He wasn’t speaking loudly enough to let me hear everything, but I managed to catch the words ‘lightning’, ‘clear sky ’, and ‘weird’, giving me a fair idea of what he had heard and what he was thinking about now. 

With the baseline established, I began to weave more spells, testing the guy’s reaction while also using my own Mind Magic techniques to read his thoughts from his mind. That part, the reading of his mind, was then amplified by Lia’s new technique, allowing me to roam around his mind without him ever noticing my presence. Between testing random tricks using either my own or Lia’s methodology, I delved into the guy’s mind, doing my best to improve my technique. Though maybe using this particular guy had been a mistake, the majority of his memories were rather boring. 

His life before the change, from what I could tell, had been utterly mundane. I was fairly certain I had seen trees with more excitement in their lives than this guy had, though at least the change had given him something to worry about beyond his nine-to-five and his lack of success with the ladies. 

After the change, he fell in with a small group of survivors; the group absorbed other groups until they formed a community, somewhat similar to the one led by Maggie. Just without some of the issues, namely those created by my presence and that of the Blessed City. That guy’s community were just a bunch of people trying to survive, and they had even learned some arcane magic to assist with that. Not that this guy knew anything beyond the basics about that, or that he had demonstrated any talent.

At most, he was a glorified porter, though he had a smidgen of skill with a blunt weapon, but that was about it. He might just be the least interesting person I had ever consciously seen. 

But that lack of interesting traits made him useful in his own right. His mind was completely mundane and average. Average, in this case, was quite useful, as I was fairly certain that any reaction I could draw from his mind could be replicated in the mind of another. In a way, his mind felt so basic that I considered it a useful allergy test; if he reacted strongly to something, everyone else would, too.

At least that was my current theory, and I ran with it, pushing and prodding while relying on Lia to keep me hidden. Eventually, I even made it so he wouldn’t notice our presence at all, allowing us to discuss my experiments until it was time for the group to change shift. Then, another of their party was awoken and took over, both as the group’s guard and as my test subject. 

The second subject worked just as well as the first, though I needed to be a little more careful at first. This one felt a little more self-aware, though maybe it was because he had been newly awoken, or just wasn’t as tired as the other guy. It didn’t really matter; at least once I made myself at home in his mind, it didn’t. By that point, I could have walked up to the guy, and he wouldn’t have realised that something was wrong, simply because his senses wouldn’t alert him to my presence. 

At that point, I watched Lia demonstrate her own version of that technique, and I couldn’t help but stare when I realised just how powerful it was. She literally walked up to the guy, without him noticing her presence, bit into his neck, drank some of his blood, and he never realised a thing. Only after she was gone, and most of the wound had healed, did he realise something had stung him and smacked the area, grumbling about mosquitoes. It was, quite frankly, an insane ability, but the rest of the testing might have been even more important to me. 

After all, I had worked hard on delving into the mind and analysing memories.