CHAPTER 44: SPELL MOD

Zephyr searched through the debris of the fallen lighthouse, finding a few crystal pieces scattered around. Most of these light crystals were smaller than his pinky finger. So, they were not that useful.

The rest of it sublimated when it exploded, releasing a shockwave that destroyed the lighthouse while creating a blinding light pillar that pierced the sky.

Seeing that it would take a lot of time to find more crystal pieces, Zephyr decided to abandon his search for them. Then he casually walked away from the black stone lighthouse that crumbled inward and made his way to the village.

Walking around the empty village, he entered a random house. As expected, no one was home.

But there was some bread within the cupboards of the kitchen. Without waiting for permission, he ate the bread with some pickles he found lying around.

Generally, the fishermen bring back fish for their families to consume daily. But because of the storm warning, they didn’t go to the sea. So, there were no fish or any protein for that matter within the house.

Zephyr really wanted to eat chicken that day. By losing an arm, he had lost a lot of protein. And healing the wound through instinctual magic was draining him.

However, there was nothing within the houses of the villagers that could satiate him.

Gulping down what remained of the bread, he stood up, drank some water, and took the wooden cup along with him.

The cup appeared to be a personal item of the house’s owner. There were rag dolls, polished filleting knives, and a plethora of personal items in the house.

However, they looked well cherished. Zephyr didn’t want to bring them along.

A simple search spell, when he knew the general direction of the islands, didn’t need any fancy personal object. A cup would suffice for his purpose.

Placing the cup into his robes, Zephyr moved to close the doors and windows firmly shut. Then he sat on the ground to meditate.

This time, he was meditating to rearrange the spells within his mindscape to face the necromancer.

From the battle with the undead knight, Gale, Zephyr had gained many pieces of useful information. One of which was the strength level of the necromancer and his favourite spells to use. So, he was optimising his own spells to form a battle strategy to defeat the necromancer.

At the same time, he gathered mana to create more cores.

—

A few hours later, Zephyr opened his eyes.

The number of cores he had inflated to 1024 during those few hours. That was almost an increment of 25% of mana he could use.

Zephyr was satisfied with it. However, the sleepless night drained him.

Smiling like a fool for a second, he fell into a deep slumber.

—-

By the time he woke up, the warm rays of the sun were drilling through the fog. It was well into the morning—almost noon.

Groggily rubbing his eyes, he sat up on the cold floor.

The sleep seemed to have brought new life into his eyes. The wound on his left arm was no longer aching, nor was he feeling the throbbing headache.

Compared to last night, he was in good condition.

’One last thing to do.’

Zephyr said to himself and immediately went back to meditation. His consciousness appeared in his mindscape soon after.

There, he could see his cores floating gently; all 1024 of them.

The mana held in these 1024 cores would be equivalent to that of a normal beginner mage. Zephyr had finally caught up to a real mage in strength. Now, he could proudly declare himself a mage, and no one could stop him.

Watching the cores floating, almost all of them etched with runes, he smiled.

This took a lot of work. But he finally did it.

The majority of the cores were arranged in circular formation, depicting a spell. All spells in Mindscape looked like small donuts, made of cores attached one after another. Each core contained a rune, and cores were touching each other to form the entire spell matrix.

Ignoring the mana gathering spell, he focused on the rest.

When he went to the closer to the core cluster, he could see the mana bolt spell in its entirety.

It was a spell with 16 runes that consumed 16 cores worth of mana. Zephyr believed these runes contained all the necessary information to create a mana bolt, such as the form, size, mana requirement, speed, etc. However, he was unaware of the function of each individual rune. So, he didn’t bother digging deeper into it.

The mana bolt in its shape and form was as efficient and optimized as possible. Therefore, he believed that any improvement he could make to it would not matter. So, he let it be like that and focused on what he could do with chain casting.

And chain casting quickly was his big plan to defeat the necromancer.

For that, almost all his remaining cores were etched with lightning and light-element modifier spells in a fifty-fifty ratio.

So, just next to the mana bolt spell, he could see rings made of 12 cores each floating gently. These rings were lightning and light enhancements that he could chain cast with the mana bolt.

There were about 60 of those, around the mana bolt spell.

’I hope this works.’ Zephyr muttered and began to move the spells with his mind.

He grabbed the mana bolt and placed it in front of him. Then he brought a light element modifier and put it in front of the mana bolt spell.

Because of the current arrangement, Zephyr could activate mana bolt + light element almost simultaneously.

16 cores of the mana bolt activate in sequence, creating a mana wave in the center of the circular formation. The mana wave will shoot through the center of the light element modifier while it’s active to complete the chain cast spell.

"In the game, while playing as Aster, I had limits to how many spells I could activate at the same time. So, even if I could multicast spells, there would be an upper limit of spells I can chain."

"Now, I don’t have that limit."

"And I can disregard cast delay and activation delay entirely."

He turned to look at the sixty floating spells.

"The maximum activation and cast delay I have is the max of a single spell because of executing it in parallel." Zephyr smiled.

With that thought, he brought in all light and lightning modifier spells and placed them in front of the mana bolt.

Now, the entire structure he created looked like a rail gun.

Mana bolt was at one end. The lightning and light element modifiers were stacked to make a long cylindrical barrel.

"He He He." He laughed while watching it before opening his eyes.

"Let’s call it the Railgun alpha version."

"Spell formula = Manabolt + 30(light) + 30(lightning)."

"I could make something better in the future, so Alpha it is."

"The only problem is that it would instantaneously consume all my mana. Still, it’s better than any individual spell that I know of."

The original Zephyr didn’t know much about larger, complex spells. So, he had limited ways to create a strong spell.

"I should probably use the sword as a battery, improve my mana pool, and test it out," Zephyr noted in his mind and stood up.

It was time to leave.