The following decades were spent focusing on research, preparation, and Achievement farming. I spent a big part of each day sparring with Sallia. Now that my rune toolkit was going to follow me from life to life, I wanted to be as familiar with it as I could possibly be. Every single hour I spent getting whacked by Sallia’s training sword could keep my friends alive in a real emergency. Getting constantly thrashed by Sallia was… humbling. But it kept me ready for a real battle, which I knew my friends and I needed in order to survive. 

Apart from my time spent practicing, I spent a great deal of time working on a new spell derived from my alteration essence magic system. What I wanted this time was something based around controlling the battlefield and restricting enemies, and preferably also something that could wipe out large swarms of weaker enemies quickly. I had long noticed that in most battles, extinguish was powerful, but ridiculously essence-hungry. The spell’s incredible strength was matched by how quickly it could chew through my essence reserves - and in some cases, I didn’t need the terrifying death-related effect of Extinguish. It was great for wiping out mid-strength enemies instantly, but against stronger enemies, I had no real ability to kill them even with the power of extinguish - their life force was often too abundant for me to make a real dent in their reserves. So I wanted a spell that could ‘curse’ enemies at a cheaper essence cost. 

After decades of hard work, I developed a spell based on a mix of my alteration essence abilities and some inspiration from {Spatial Rifts}. This spell was designed to create dozens of tiny micro-tears in an area at once, with each micro-tear also carrying a flesh-warping, weakening curse effect. This flesh-warping, weakening effect had two major effects: first of all, the weakening effect worked as a direct attribute debuff. When Sallia volunteered as a test subject, we found out that the ‘curse’ could drop all of her physical attributes by approximately two grades on average, assuming she didn’t fight off the curse. The effect was particularly noticeable on Dexterity, which suffered something closer to a two and a half grade penalty, while her life force and her Constitution were less impacted by my new spell.

As an added bonus, this spell could also synergize directly with {Spatial Rifts} to turn weaker monsters in the area into swiss cheese and amplify the effects of the spell. After all of my hard work, I figured out how to use my alteration essence to make even a small papercut from this spell truly dangerous. Extinguish was like trying to put out the candle of life - it was built to extinguish anything it touched, instantly and completely. This spell was built to work more like a creeping infection - a single touch from the spell would try to replicate itself inside of an enemy’s body, sustaining the effect of the curse for as long as possible and attempting to override any defenses the enemy might have. Of course, while it worked similarly to an infection, it was still ultimately reliant upon my essence to keep functioning. The moment the essence used to fuel the spell ran out, the curse would still collapse and disappear. It also had the weakness of struggling against some forms of specialized defense. This spell was less directly suppressed by ‘total life force,’ unlike extinguish - but it needed to cut the skin in order to do anything. In other words, if I was fighting a monster with an especially resilient shell, or unusually tough skin, this spell might still be useless. Still, I thought it was a good addition to my repertoire. For now, I decided to name this spell ‘eldritch storm,’ since it was inspired by my understanding of space and the eldritch.

Developing this spell also granted me a decent amount of progress in a new type of magic ‘skill’ that I had never heard of until now - curse magic. 

Power: Achieve Basic Proficiency in curse magic

Achievement +5,000

Since you have raised your understanding of [Curse] Magic to basic grade for the first time, you have earned a new Skill! Upon your death, you will have the option to purchase [Basic Curse Magic] as an ability, for the cost of 2000 Achievement. 

This Ability has the following effects:

Keywords: None

Any spells that weaken an enemy become considerably stronger. This ability also allows you to directly boost the strength of any curse-type effect for a small essence boost (this is considerably more essence-efficient than average). (This ability is largely useless on anything that is already in the heroic grade or better).

Glut Penalty: 4

This boost was minor, but it was useful. If I had the spare glut penalty for it, there was a decent chance I would take it when we returned to the Market. It sounded like it would boost both Extinguish AND Eldritch storm - and it was a fairly low glut penalty cost for boosting two of my best direct-offense spells. If I developed other ‘curse’ type spells in the future, they would also benefit from this ability. I was beginning to think that was a likely outcome, as well - the more I fought, the more I realized that a lot of my best abilities and best combat strengths were linked to supporting my friends in battle. On my own, I wasn’t a terrible combatant - but I also wasn’t a monster similar to Sallia. I was great a curses, healing, and support rather than solo combat.

Apart from developing my new spell and training with Sallia, I worked on healing in order to boost my Achievement reserves. The rewards might not be outstanding, but there was no such thing as too much Achievement.

Influence: Heal fifty permanent, debilitating injuries.

Achievement +1,000

Influence: Heal two hundred permanent, debilitating injuries.

Achievement +2,000

Influence: Heal one thousand permanent, debilitating injuries.

Achievement +3,500

These rewards boosted my Achievement from 320,130 to 326,630 Achievement. Much like the rewards for forming runes, these Achievements were basically rounding errors - they didn’t really make much of a difference to me right now. However, as long as we found higher tier soul-fragments that we could purchase, or if there were better services or items we could purchase in the Market’s inner regions, even an astounding amount of Achievement could vanish quickly - so I intended to gather as much as possible.

As time passed and I worked on quiet research projects, my friends did the same. Felix improved his understanding of item creation by working on smaller projects for Sallia and Anise, and he created a few basic ‘prototypes’ out of the spare materials Sallia had found in her trial. Anise worked on her spells, and Sallia worked on generating what Achievement she could, as well as improving her swordsmanship. Sallia even managed to push right up to the edge of master-grade Swordsmanship this time. She couldn’t find a way to push into Heroic, but she said she was close - just missing a final ‘something’ to push into a whole new world. She said she was confident she could get there next life, if we found strong opponents to test her blade against.

Time continued to pass, and eventually, I turned 450 years old. For the first time in centuries, I noticed my body start to change. Once again, I was growing old.