[CYA] Chapter 173: Venom Station (5) (Patreon)

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EjqxeaY7wYl1SK_Y9ZajbTwPil7XksRuiKQQ5bkvPxE/edit?usp=sharing

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<Alex, Real - Venomous Invaders, Space Station>

Alex talked with Bev as she scanned him with her portable devices and personal magic, working to keep his own resistances to magic and examination tamped down to let her do her work.

After a bit, she grumpily reminded him that he needed to improve the caloric and nutrient profile of his Create Rations, or he wouldn’t be able to keep depending on it to feed himself.

As he wasn’t really doing much while she worked, Alex pulled up the spell description again. He knew what it said, but he hadn’t actually reviewed it in… he honestly didn’t know.

Create Rations (Common)Spend Mana to create rations.Turn Mana into food for humanoid creatures.Humanoid creatures of higher level or higher race rarity will require more mana to feed.Rations cannot be preserved by mundane means.The created food lasts up to 12 hrs if not magically stored.

His eye twitched. The description was as he remembered it, but actually reading it made something very obvious.

It didn’t say that higher level or rarity would take more rations to feed. It said more mana.

In the way that he’d been using the spell, it took exactly the same amount of mana every time, flowing into the over-complex, under utilized tangle of the magical language automatically when he triggered it.

Bev paused, clearly noticing his reaction. “What is it?”

“I just re-read my Create Rations spell description, and it simply states that more mana is required to feed higher level or more ‘rare’ people.”

She nodded. “That makes sense. Create Rations is a fairly standard spell, though it’s rare for it to remain in that form for more than a couple of days. It’s one of the easiest to advance spells I know of.” She smiled. “Mine advanced to Create Sauce, an uncommon spell which just makes a sauce that compliments whatever I’m eating, containing any nutrients and calories that I need to balance out that I have to hand.”

Alex’s mouth opened in shock. “That’s… That’s amazing.”

She chuckled. “That’s magic. The dining hall workers at the Academy were grateful when I got it, because I was always asking for sauce, dressing, or addition with practically every meal.” He gave her a raised eyebrow, and she shrugged. “I was a bit entitled in my youth. It comes from being born into full citizenship, but that’s neither here nor there.”

Alex grunted, feeling like there was something in what she’d said that he didn’t understand, but his mind was mostly still on the Create Rations spell.

Experimentally, he called up the framework from the System. This time, rather than activating it and letting his magic be drawn in, he pushed it in instead, not letting the spell trigger as he continued to add power.

It flowed into the pattern that he was used to, but as more mana continued to flow in that mana branched out from the original point of spellwork, the language of power growing around it, elucidating and adding further instructions and specifications.

When he’d put in nearly a hundred times the amount of mana that he’d been using since back when he was level 2, he paused, feeling like the magics were in a stable state.

There was a flicker of power, and the spell activated, coming together and dropping a roll into his waiting hands.

On the surface, it looked like a fist-sized sourdough roll. On the top side, there was a slit that seemed to have been stuffed with butter.

Steam rose from the food, the butter already melted.

Alex swallowed in unrestrained desire, the scent unlocking long suppressed memories.

It smelled exactly like the rolls that his…

Tears pooled in his eyes, but he wiped them away, a smile building on his lips.

Still mostly lost in memory, he said a small prayer of thanks out of habit and took a careful bite.

It was perfect.

Tough, solid crust—but not so thick as to be a problem—with a soft hearty inside. The butter had soaked into the totality without pooling anywhere specifically.

It was both incredibly light—not pressuring his already over-full stomach—and satisfying in a way that practically eliminated his hunger at a stroke.

He devoured the food, uncaring of the occasional tear tracking down his cheek.

When he finished, he sighed, leaning back and speaking mostly to himself. “Oh, I needed that.”

Interestingly, his spell didn’t advance as he’d expected it to, but only a moment’s thought told him why.

He’d been using the Create Rations spell a lot, effectively cementing it in its current form. It would take dedicated work to shift it forward now.

He believed Bev when she said it was generally a very modifiable spell—by its very nature, it seemed to be incredibly varied based on the individual caster to begin with—but that didn’t really change his thinking.

Spells and skills that were used too uniformly wouldn’t grow well.

Just like attributes… like I was so recently warned.

He sighed, but it was the contented sigh of someone who finally understood what work actually had to be done when they’d previously been faced with a nebulous task.

Alex was quite familiar with the feeling from his days working as an IT Project Facilitator. Finally understanding the road ahead was the best part of any project, often even outstripping final completion, which, for IT projects, was a famously nebulous thing in its own right.

Bev finished her scans and smiled. “That hit what you needed, nutritionally. It will take a bit to actually pervade your body, but you’ll be feeling better over the next few hours.”

“Thanks, Bev.”

“Of course.”

The others were doing a quick sweep of the cleared station to ensure nothing lingered, despite Alex’s quest seeming to indicate that nothing did.

Juba was the first to return, his drones hovering behind him. “I wasn’t watching closely. Were you able to get a reasonable haul of aspect?”

Alex pulled the harvester from his Inventory and handed it to the bigger man. “I have to say. It is incredibly gross, scrapping dead bug-things into a pile to trigger this, but I can’t say I didn’t like the results. Yes. I got a good lot of aspect.”

Juba looked it over and nodded. “Clean and in good repair. Thank you.”

Alex waved that off. “Thank you for lending it to me.”

He took out a green gem. It was multi-faceted and irregularly shaped, more like a pebble than a traditionally cut gemstone. Even so, it was clear and clean.

His Analyze provided a nice result.

Life AspectConsumable - Not recommended for human consumption.

Use to increase the life aspect of whatever they are used upon or within.

Alex felt like he could eat the aspects, but he would be checking with Bev about that… later. “Nearly a thousand of these. You want any?”

Juba shook his head. “No. I’ve no interest in another man’s rewards.”

Alex smiled. “Well, thank you. It seems I might need to get a harvester for myself.”

Juba grinned in return. “You may use mine whenever you wish, and when we arrive at Dorgon, the logistics bases will have some available for contribution. We should have more than enough from this voyage for you to claim one as part of your droptrooper package.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” The haul wasn’t that large from what he was beginning to understand, but given the relative weakness of the dreadweavers, it was larger than it really should have been. That was likely due to the origin of the dreadweavers being direct magical manifestation rather than biological.

As the others returned—the others being John, Pilar, and Natasha—Alex pushed himself to his feet.

Grant was posted at the airlock between ship and station. Even with it locked, they all wanted to ensure nothing got into the ship, and it was quite literally Grant’s job to ensure things like that didn’t happen.

Lenka and Kaylee didn’t enjoy fighting where they could avoid it, and both of their skills were better employed within the Innominate regardless.

Audry was relaxing in her duty station, simply monitoring the collector arrays that were unfolded atop the ship. That was apparently creating close to a thousand life aspect every hour.

I may need to ask for some of that for my own use.

He was starting to understand some of the nuances involved, having taken time during his earlier breaks to read up on what he could.

Life aspecting an item wouldn’t be the same as using his own HP and Life to prep it for his modification, but it would be far better than not doing so.

From what he could understand, it could be likened to accents and languages. Life Aspect was English, but didn’t match his particular accent of the language.

Even so, ‘teaching’ an item English—even if not his exact accent of English—would make it easier to work with. At the same time, doing so would mean that it would, likely as not, never match his perfectly.

If I teach it to speak, it’ll match me. If I let it learn elsewhere and then just come in to clean up, there will be some differences.

There wasn’t really anything wrong with that, but it would likely preclude what happened with his dadao, where it was all but bound to his Life directly.

It would take quite a bit of experimentation to figure out the nuances and limitations, but he likely wouldn’t have time for that for quite a while… potentially.

John clapped Alex on the shoulder drawing him from his drifting thoughts. “Good to have you back with us.” He hesitated for just a moment. “Are you… Are you good?”

Alex gave a tired smile. “No, John. I don’t think I am.” He closed his eyes and drew in a deep breath. He kept them close to ask, “You up for chatting when we’re back on the Innominate?”

He could feel John looking at his closed eyes for a moment then the man seemingly gave a firm nod. “Absolutely.”

Alex opened his eyes. “Thanks.”

Pilar smiled. “I’m glad you’re alive. We all are. Would you like to go back to the ship? We can finish the rest.”

Alex shook his head. “I’ll be alright. I want to see this through to the end.”

Natasha grunted. “Good. To live life is not like crossing a field. Also, the survivors have waited long enough.”

“Indeed.” Alex straightened his back, squared his shoulders and placed a genuine smile on his face.

Natasha huffed a laugh and shook her head as she moved toward the closest locked hatch.

Alex held the pass-codes for all the doors. They could all have added them to their command items, but there was no real need with him along for the ride.

He walked up to the door and lifted his left bracelet. His right hand was held behind his back, grip on the handle of his dadao once more strapped to his back.

The door wooshed open, and a wash of life magic and a stench flowed out.

Alex’s eyes widened. “Short fuse!”

He and the others acted quickly, even as the containment fields began deactivating along with the unlocking door.

The three survivors in this panic room were all isolated, cancerous growths in evidence all across their flesh.

Alex could sense echoes of magic that had placed them into what were effectively medical comas even without the access to true stasis pods.

Juba ran to one, pulling out his harvester and slapping against her chest, activating it and causing thick streams of green light to pour from her every pore, eyes, mouth, and even her ears and nose.

Bev ran to the one that looked to be in the worst shape and a stream of healing magic flowed from the woman like insults in a rap battle.

Alex did not try to analyze why that analogy was what came to mind first, instead assessing the tumors on the last survivor in this room in the same manner as he had the dreadweavers.

The magical language came out of the man for Alex’s inspection at the behest of his class, through the System.

It looked very different from the dreadweavers.

What Alex saw was rather akin to a wordsearch with every letter constantly changing… and in three dimensions. Also, instead of being a few real words hidden among the noise, every combination was ‘real’, twisting and corrupting the life within the man.

Alex grimaced, reaching forward and beginning to shunt the twisted magics off to the side.

There was a tangle of the man’s own magic and the externally imposed life magic.

It took him less than ten seconds to come to a frustrating realization. This was too complicated for him to handle in this manner.

The dreadweavers had been all but entirely manifestations of magic, and he’d wanted to kill them. This was a living person with far more stable internal magics that were already past the tipping point of corruption.

Alex didn’t hesitate. He placed his hand on the man’s forehead—doing his best to ignore the unnatural texture and shaping of it—and moved his Life.

He wasn’t fool enough to tell it to heal the man. That would, likely as not, have given aid to the tumors and start an unstoppable cascade of horrors.

Instead, he instructed his Life to isolate the invasive life magic and harden in defense of any parts they could find without it.

Almost immediately, the wordsearch changed form, parts stabilizing and allowing him to shift them aside, pulling them from the mess of life magic.

The change made it a bit more like a game of pick-up-sticks, but played with his mind, and the other players wanted to destroy the whole pile. Alex couldn’t let them have even a single turn if he could help it.

Alex blessed the food within him as his body continued to process the spell created sustenance, giving him the staying power that he wouldn’t have had before figuring out that now-so-obvious trick.

The room was small enough that he could sense the others working. Juba’s harvester was a beacon of life magic, creating a rain of aspect stones as he moved it across the beleaguered body.

It didn’t heal that survivor, simply pulling the tainting magic from the ravaged woman.

Bev finished first, trusting her patient to John, Pilar, and Natasha while she moved to Juba’s working to heal the portions that had been cleared.

Alex continued his work, drawing all the life magic together and isolating it to the best of his ability. When he’d gotten a few places truly cleaned, he began healing, focusing only on the purified portions.

In truth, he was doing a weaker version of what the other two were doing. Where Juba pulled the aspect free, Alex only isolated it. Where Bev restored the whole person, Alex was fighting to give strength to the few parts where he dared make the attempt.

As such, when the other two finished with the second survivor and came to help him, he gave a quick explanation before stepping back, continuing his work, but shifting into a supporting role.

The whole process only took about ten minutes, all told, and after it was done, Alex was exhausted once more.

His stamina had up-ticked with the short rest and food, but it was nowhere near back to full.

Bev went back and checked the three patients. As she did, Juba brought a sack of life aspect to Alex. “My friend. This aspect seems a bit different from the others. My examination skill doesn’t show any variation, but I think it might be of use to you.”

Alex took the sack and looked in. Where the life aspect he’d seen before was a light green, this was far darker, almost verdant. When he analyzed it, he gave a tired smile.

Life AspectConsumable - Not recommended for human consumption.

Use to increase the Life aspect of whatever they are used upon or within.

Note:This life aspect is most closely attuned to Alex Johnson.

“Thank you, Juba. I think that this will be very useful.”

Bev grunted. “You got that from the one Alex helped?”

Juba grinned and nodded.

Alex nodded along as well. “Yes, ma’am.”

She quirked a smile. “I’m glad it’s useful to you, because your patient is the best off. If we can have you work with all the remaining survivors, they’ll have the best chance to come through this with minimal side-effects.”

Alex closed his eyes and groaned. “Understood, Bev. Can I grab a half-hour sleep before we open the next chamber and break the stasis and isolation magics?”

She considered for a long moment. “I think that would be workable, yes.”

He smiled. “Thank you. Then, we can get back to saving these people rather than letting me make some crazy mistake because I’m not thinking straight.”

She smiled knowingly. “That, Alex, almost sounds wise.”

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