An Oath was far from a necessity. In fact, the look I got from Guille was an obvious giveaway. But it wasn’t really a lie. Oaths were a part of the induction process, just one that Escinca tended to disregard. In this case however, I wasn’t taking any chances.

Regardless of Guille’s reaction, Glonek couldn’t go against it either. It was a heady feeling to realize that I was the one in charge of things here, even if I didn’t hold any official rank above Aurier or the others. They had every right to countermand me. But at some point. I had started leading prayers. At some point, I was the one giving little speeches.

At some point, I had become the one heading to Ring Two to conduct a meeting with a Great House.

“Of course,” Glonek said with a smile. “A Binding Oath requires the right Path to carry out. I assume you possess it, since you’re leading this little induction ceremony.”

I smiled. “I don’t. But I know someone who does.”

Without me even needing to turn my head, Aurier nodded at me before hurrying off. We didn’t need to wait long. I only had to stare uncomfortably at Glonek’s partially crystalline eyes for about a minute before Aurier returned with the Elder in tow. He looked a little weary. Maybe Aurier had rushed him in a bit too quickly for his advanced age.

“Aurier told me what was going on,” he said, looking from me to Glonek and back again. “I would have liked to say this is a rather unprecedented event, but well…”

He was probably talking about inducting a vampire into the Sun Cult, but then, we already had our own belligerent little half-Scarseeker.

Glonek’s smile almost turned into a smirk. “I’m fine with having predecessors. They’re good at paving the way, yes?”

Escinca slowly smiled. Even that looked a little tired. “Indeed.” He exchanged a look with me. “I was told you intended to carry out an Oath, Ross?”

I nodded. “If you would be so kind, Elder.”

There was a slight reluctance in his eyes, and honestly, it would have been better to discuss the matter with him first. But the idea had come up in the spur of the moment and I didn’t want to let the opportunity slip by.

Escinca understood it too, and thus, offered his hand to the vampire, who took it. The Elder’s thin fingers looked frail in the Scarseeker’s grip.

My heart thudded a little. If Glonek had any hesitations, if he had even the slightest relation to the Scarseeker who was behind the Scarthralls, then this was his final opportunity to back out. My eyes bored into him, almost silently daring him to make an excuse, to find some way to sidle out of it right at the very end.

Glonek did no such thing.

“Let us begin, then,” Escinca said. His voice changed into a stronger tone. “Do you profess to perform, to the fullest of your capabilities, all your deeds in service to the Cult of the Sun?”

Glonek closed his eyes and nodded solemnly. “I swear that I do.”

And so it went, basic questions of fealty coming from Escinca, all of which Glonek reacted to positively and answered in the unsurprising affirmative. A small part of me was hoping he was lying and the magic would cause him to burst into flames, but nothing so dramatic happened.

Not even when Escinca said, “Do you swear that no action you take nor decision you make will ever be one that purposefully leads to harm for the Cult of the Sun?”

“I swear,” replied Glonek.

Nope. No golden flames burning the vampire alive.

I didn’t feel good about it, but I wasn’t about to argue against logic. At least this was solid evidence that we now had one less vampire to worry about. Now, we just needed to find the actual Scarseeker responsible for the Thrall mess.

The formality of the Oath ended around the same time that Lady Kalnislaw and her idiot son returned. We were all polite and pleasant as we thanked them profusely for gracing the temple with their presence and that we would be delighted to host them again, if they ever decided to pay us another visit. Escinca was the one who said the most of that.

Personally, I was just glad to see them finally go. The whole meeting thing had felt way too long.

But hey, I had come away with some important developments. Not only did I have more knowledge to help locate the Scarseeker we were all hunting for, I had also inducted another Scarseeker into the cult, thereby reducing the number of suspects. Assuming the whole Oath thing was effective.

“How do Oaths work?” I asked Elder Escinca as we were busy cleaning up after the little celebration.

The Elder still looked tired. We had all requested that he let us handle everything, but the old geezer was determined to not act his age and continued working alongside everybody else. “You didn’t even know and you were still determined to see it carried out?”

“Well, I remembered what you said about how they were binding, and I’ve got good reason to have faith in magic.”

Escinca considered that, then laughed softly. “I suppose you do, what with how much you’ve been using it and growing. But yes, Oaths. They are not limited to any singular Path or Aspect. Rather, a certain style of Paths, if you will. An array of commanding Paths all possess the ability to manifest Oaths via their Aspect of Leadership, as well as other things such as seeing certain information about their subordinates and so on.”

“So you’ve got an Aspect of Leadership then?” I asked as I helped put away the dishes after they were cleaned.

“Something like that. Unlike your Path of the Acolyte, I possess the Path of the Hierophant.”

I pushed out a quick breath. And here I thought managing two Aspects and ranking them up higher was trouble enough. How many Aspects did Silver-ranked Paths allow? What if there were multiple Paths involved? Should I be stressing when I had just the two? What if I acquired a third, or even a fourth Path? Would I be able to handle all the Aspects involved?

No point in worrying about that now. I would cross that bridge if I ever reached it. Right now, I had two Aspects which took up a good chunk of my attention, and both of them had the potential to learn new Affixes. Oh, and the new temporary Affix I had received via Sacrifice.

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That took up most of my focus for the rest of the day. Since Sacrifice had hit Silver, I wanted to bug Escinca about new potential Affixes.

However, I had already acquired two by forcing Sacrifice to take my dumb Path Interaction vision as a tribute, one of which was temporary. Also, apparently incompatible. Remembering that had reminded me of my actual real goal for that day—finding a way to get a hold of the Path Interactions before they drove me nuts.

For now, I just asked Escinca if he knew much about Soul Sight. I was getting a little tired of what a mouthful the latter was.

Turned out Escinca hadn’t heard of the first, nor had any idea why it was even under Sacrifice. He was glad I had learned Experientiality, though. I recalled his little lesson that Experientiality was simply the Affix that allowed Sacrifice to be used on one’s own experiences that weren’t strictly tangible.

That gave me something to work with and think about, at least.

Escinca was really tired, though, and I wanted to give him some peace and quiet. Asking the trio of Santoire, Guille, and Sreketh to make sure the Elder actually got some rest—Hamsik was already gone, and Aurier had to leave to carry out his smithing duties—I decided I was going to head straight to the Mage Guild.

No, I hadn’t asked the Elder to pen another letter to Kostis. I had no idea if the Scalekin mage was going to be there or not, and pestering Escinca to hound my master for me wasn’t my style. Plus, the man needed rest.

So instead, I went to Silhatsa’s desk, happy to see that she didn’t seem to be that harried.

“Hi Silhatsa,” I said. “Is there a mage class on Path Interactions?”

“Path Interactions?” She sat forward in her chair, pinkish scales seeming to glimmer like she had applied snake-lotion on them or something. “Are you already going through those? Your Paths already getting close to Silver, are they?”

“Well, almost. One is at Iron X and the other Iron IX. They’re close enough, which started this whole thing, I guess. They’re a real pain in the ass.”

She snickered with a hiss. “Alright.” She consulted a register for a moment. “You’re lucky. One of the prerequisite classes for the class on Path Interactions is actually a class on Augmentations. Things work out nicely, don’t they?”

It certainly sounded like they were working out well now. I wondered how many others of the prerequisite classes that I had more or less dismissed was actually something I would need to learn about. They were obviously not offering them like free electives.

“Oh no,” Silhatsa said, suddenly apologetic. “We have limited seats for the classes and both of the sessions are unfortunately full. Do you mind if we pushed it back to next week?”

Not ideal, but I knew the old adage of never shooting the messenger. “Can you pen me in ahead of time, just so I don’t get locked out from next week’s sessions too?”

“Of course!”

“Thanks, Silhatsa.”

Well, since information about Path Interactions was going to have to wait, I supposed I could turn my attention to other matters. Such as figuring out what in the world Soul Sight was.

To that end, Silhatsa said I could borrow one of the areas of the field reserved specifically for mages who wanted to explore their Aspects and whatnot in privacy.

It was apparently a right for all members of the Mage Guild, not something they had to pay for. Thanking Silhatsa again, and blessing my luck that there were training fields available for use, I headed over to one and found myself in a private nook in the Mage Guild grounds.

The earth there was flat, essentially a field of dirt. I squinted at the lone fenceposts bounding the field. Runes were inscribed in each of the posts, and I figured I knew why. There was the same slight sensation of walking through faint cobwebs, like I had felt at the dungeon entrance. In other words, there was some sort of Ward active here too.

Made sense. Wouldn’t do to have a mage who couldn’t control their Aspects accidentally shoot a practitioner in a different part of the field with a lightning bolt or something.

I focused on my training. The problem with my new temporary Affix was that I only had five casts of it. That meant I’d be wasting at least one cast on just figuring out what in the world it even did.

For the first time, I felt like cursing the Weave’s general lack of information.

That said, I didn’t have to test it out just yet. Just because the Weave didn’t tell me anything about it didn’t mean it had to be completely unknown. I was going to exhaust both the Mage Guild and Xokrist academy and any other sources of information I had before I decided to try it out myself.

So instead, I worked on Field Manipulation. At least, to start. I had other plans later on.

My first goal was to see if I could push the boundaries of the fields I could create. Their upper limit was directly proportional to my Aspect’s rank. With Gravity having grown, I could make a decently strong field that was about the size of a manhole. Was that bigger than what it used to be before? Honestly, I found it hard to tell.

The more interesting part I found was that I could manipulate the directionality and recreate the same repulsive effect I had discovered at the Adventurer’s Guild. In other words, I could make certain portions push back lightly with Siphon while the rest of it dragged things down heavily with Infusion.

That sort of unbalanced force naturally made the ground crack. Moments later, the areas where the gravity field was acting upwards began to make the dirt float higher and higher.

“Wild,” I muttered.

I had just discovered a way to destroy something only by applying my Gravity.

Next, I tried a slightly different tactic. It took a lot more concentration, and I could feel a ton more buzzing threads of void-purple light emerging from me than I had expected.

I was attempting to create individual fields on each floating clump of dirt. Little circles of amethyst energy, each one targeted at a different clump, such that the clumps all started pulling themselves together. I also modified the larger field on the ground, so that as the clumps moved through the air, they could remain floating.

About a minute or so later, I had created a misshapen ball of dirt about the size of my head. Mana exhaustion was poking at me, but I smiled. This felt like real progress.

And with that clump now available, I focused on a different capability. There had to be an easier way of manipulating Gravity to shape things than the way I had played around with Field Manipulation. I recalled brief mentions of other potential Affixes I could learn, so I concentrated on trying to bring that about.

I focused on making Manifestation happen.

All I was doing was pushing a good chunk of my mana out. More and more dark violet threads coalesced into a single point where I want to make Gravity materialize into thin air. I tried compressing them, tried using punches driven by Power to create and push in even more strands of mana into the same spot.

I didn’t have a ton of physical, scientific knowledge about the workings of gravity as it existed as the elemental force. However, I did have some ideas.

Black holes, for instance. I knew a bit about those. From what I remembered, a key part of a black hole was matter being compressed into a smaller and smaller space, creating a point of immense, incalculable density. A singularity. That density was a significant component—or perhaps the source itself, I wasn’t sure—of the iconic gravity that black holes were associated with.

I wondered if it would lead me to obtaining the Aspect of Singularity that Linak had mentioned. From what he had said, the Aspect had sounded too destructive, too uncontrollable. I wasn’t cowed, but regardless, I was pretty sure I wasn’t getting it anytime soon.

For now, all I did was try to emulate black holes. Push enough Gravity Aspected mana into a single point, make it so dense that that its tangible effect of attraction was forced to come out even without an anchor.

It didn’t work out as I envisioned. I wasn’t suddenly awarded with a new Affix, nor did I actually feel like I had created a ball of pure Gravity. But I was working on it. I was getting there. The little spot where I had pushed in all that mana was a tiny orb or darkness, and when I moved my hand close, I could feel my skin tingling, my hand feeling the slightest tug.

I was making progress.

That said, the whole exercise had drained a decent chunk of my body’s capability to handle mana. The hollowness was back again, trying to make its presence known.

That didn’t mean I was going to stop right there though. Even if my activities had drawn a few eyes from other mages who had a clear line of sight to my current spot. As such, I kept practicing as soon as I had recovered.

Although, I did reconsider my practice. The direction of it, rather. Manifestation was fine, but did I really want it to take up an Affix slot? Especially I might end up learning other elemental Aspects, such as Heat and Light, which could benefit from Manifestation too?

Right. Something like manifestation, a specific ability that would be useful for more than one Aspect, needed to be able to reach all those Aspects.

Basically, I might be better off getting Manifestation as an Augmentation for a different Attribute.

I kept training. Well, I wanted to. But one of the onlookers turned out to be that Rakshasa who didn’t even look like a mage. Worse yet, the bastard was approaching me.