EmEs_etherious
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Chapter 97-Ether Manipulation
🕑 Added 2023-09-21 22:59:01 +0000 UTCThe first time Arthur tried to replicate the effects of skill without the system's assistance hadn’t gone too well, and his seventeenth attempt wasn’t faring much better. That wasn’t to say he hadn’t made any progress at all, however. Unbeknownst to Arthur, his learning speeds, whilst not incredible, were far beyond average and the fact that he was progressing so fast all on his own without the aid of a teacher would annoy the wealthy parents throughout the universe who sent entire earldoms educating their spoilt children to no end.
At first, Arthur had been a little afraid that the system may exile him for practising what might be considered unstructured magic, but the nigh omniscient creation truly had lifted the limiters since his unlocking of tier-two access. In fact, he was now pretty certain that such activity was encouraged throughout the wider multiverse.
Concentrating, Arthur poured a tiny trickle of ether into his regeneration skill, barely enough to heal even the slightest of grazes, but healing wasn’t his purpose here. He wasn't too certain where his skills were located initially and it was only through Alyssia’s description of the soul that he’d realised that that was where the strange system of gifted skills resided.
It was only after his first actual attempt trying magic without the system's assistance that he fully appreciated what its creators had done when designing the ‘safety boots’ as Sir Ruffeus III had called them. Trying magic without them on was like flying a fighter jet when your only experience with vehicles of any kind was loading a truck with stock at your local retail store, an impossible task to say the least.
Simply changing your ether into the correct affinity, something a skill did so fast and efficiently that Arthur had never thought to even question it, was a difficult undertaking in and of itself and it was the easiest part of the entire process. Arthur used all his perception to introspect and view his regeneration skill's inner workings. Maybe he was just wasting time, but Arthur didn’t want to stay relevant in the system forever. And more importantly, Arthur ENJOYED learning magic.
He doubted anyone on Earth wouldn’t.
It didn’t matter if he was going about learning it in the completely wrong way, it beat the splitting headaches aura manipulation always gifted him with. At least with this, he was getting somewhere. The healing skill that Arthur was trying to master was actually pretty simple. If it was due to the fact that it was a fairly low-rank skill, or because he managed to level it twice to reach the fifth level, Arthur was unsure. He’d been unable to even observe his other skills no matter how much he tried, which was why he believed it was most likely due to his latter reasoning that he was able to do anything at all with his regeneration skill. He understood it a little better than his other skills.
When put under scrutiny, the healing skill looked like a maze to his inner eye. Except that Arthur had learnt that it was so much more than that. The closest thing he could think of that resembled it was probably a sense of code, or maybe a machine created for a very specific function. Arthur observed his trickle of ether immediately became attuned to the healing element as soon as it entered the skill’s structure.
How Arthur wasn’t sure, and he had no time to ponder over the conundrum as he observed the now attuned ether rapidly flow through the inner framework of the skill. Every pathway it flowed through changed it in a subtle way, every twist and turn altered its very nature, imparting it with instruction until the ether that left the skill fractal was fundamentally changed from the ether that had entered it. The energy had been given purpose, it was now bound to act in a specific way.
Arthur directed the healing energy into the ground, wasting the minuscule amounts of ether that had been used for his observations. He took a deep breath and focused himself, entering a pseudo-meditative state as he mentally prepared himself for his latest attempt at unassisted magic. He didn’t immediately draw on his ether reserves, instead taking out some time to isolate and identify the healing potential his ether inherently possessed. Arthur had come to learn that his ether did not come from any specific point within himself. Instead, his entire body, or perhaps his soul if he took into consideration that they were nigh identical mirrors of each other, generated the stuff until his body or rather, his ether reserves were topped off at full. All Arthur had to do, was identify which parts of it were more closely attuned to the heling affinity, which frankly turned out to be almost a half of it.
It wasn’t for no reason that he found healing the easiest school of magic to use. His potential in it was followed by water, and then surprisingly soul magic, ether of shadow attunement making up only a seventh of what his soul naturally generated. A completely normal result, given the fact that he had gained the affinity through absorbing a shadow panther’s core. Though Arthur’s eyes were closed, they were starting to hurt a little and he could feel the strain on them building the longer he observed the different ethers within his soul until it threatened to reach the levels of a full-blown headache.
Arthur pushed through anyway. Grasping at the ether most suitable for his needs, he drew it to the surface, opening his eyes in the process. It wasn’t exactly healing affinity ether per se, but it was the most susceptible and likely to change into it. The easy part of the job was done, and Arthur now had around 500 ether of questionable healing affinity to work with. The short task had left his brow drenched in sweat, despite it being the part of the process that required the least effort and Arthur dreaded the next few steps. Taking a deep breath, Arthur looked at the wound on his hand. The cuts were already starting to heal with his absurd health regeneration and any practice he might want had to be done in the next few minutes.
He mentally catalogued everything that this particular healing would require, picturing a diagram of the anatomy of the human hand in his head. One particularly deep cut had cut halfway into the tendon that allowed the movement of his thumb, an injury that could have potentially been life-altering in the pre-system era. Now it was just annoying. Okay, first the tissue, then a healthy dosage of mitosis to regenerate any lost blood cells and finally some clean healing to make sure I don’t scar.
The process was extremely simple as Arthur didn’t need to worry too much about ACTUAL science with magic on his side and if he could rely on the system’s assistance then the job would be done in a second or two. With his self-imposed restrictions, however, he could potentially be here for days before being ready to deal with the injury. A droplet of sweat made its way into his eyes, the momentary distraction making him lose control of a portion of his ether. He now only had 470 ether to work with, a mere tenth of which would normally be more than enough to deal with his cut palm.
Okay, intelligence determines how much ether I have to work with and willpower is what helps me control it. A conclusion Arthur had come to a long time ago but never really appreciated until now. Willpower dictated his ability to impart instruction onto his ether, or going by his own understanding of unstructured magic, his ability and potential to code his ether.
Or maybe he had it the wrong way and willpower actually made his ether more malleable and versatile for his ability to control it but he had no one to ask direction from. Arthur hoped he was right. He didn’t want to build all his theories on magic on false preconceptions. Arthur needed to speed things up. Maintaining control over 470 ether without pouring it all into a skill was not an easy task and the strain was exponentially rising the longer he forced it to remain inert. The first and most important directive in magic was ensuring your ether was at the right affinity to cast a spell, something Arthur should now be able to accomplish with relative success. Only for healing magic of course, but it was a start.
Harnessing his considerable willpower, Arthur directed and shaped it into a command. A simple one, and the most important. Become healing affinity. He pictured his first time at the hospital when he’d broken his collarbone as a child, his delight as he saw Rize’s gradual recovery before his very eyes. The amazement and the childlike wonder modern medicine and its history had inspired in him.
The miracle of life.
That’s what healing was to him. Arthur centralised those emotions and ideologies with his willpower. It had taken a lot of trial and error to realise he could affect the affinity of ether in this way, all his prior attempts a series of failures that had finally culminated to fruition. Arthur directed his concentrated package of emotion into his ether and watched in amazement, and worry, as it changed the very nature of the ethereal energy. Gone were its destructive tendencies, the dark underlining of shadowy potential it possessed subsumed and overwritten with the directives of growth and regeneration.
It was beautiful and, well… magical, to bear witness to magic in its unrefined form. Before gaining his perception stat, Arthur had only been able to see ether as a sort of shimmering in the air. Now, however, when he focused the entirety of his attention on it, it appeared to glow with a green luminescence, a trait unique to healing magic. Shadow showed up as purple and water as a light shade of blue. Soul magic, for obvious reasons he’d been unable to observe. The headache that had begun as a mere annoyance had now grown to rival and exceed those caused by his aura compression, and Arthur knew that this training session was quickly nearing its end.
Going beyond this point may prove to be dangerous, but Arthur did so anyway. Ignoring all the red flags his brain was sending him, Arthur battled through his headache and pain using his mental stats, which Arthur was rapidly realising was nowhere near enough for his purposes. Unstructured magic should definitely not be this hard, of that Arthur was certain, but he was almost possessed with a need to succeed in this attempt as if his life hung in the balance.
All thoughts of rationality had left him, the only thing on his mind now was a drive to finally use some proper magic. His vision darkening around the edges, Arthur recollected the winding pathways of regeneration skill fractal, using all his intelligence and perception to analyse exactly how the skill affected his ether.
Warning! Misuse of Ether and willpower is starting to damage the host. You are now suffering from mage burn.
Arthur ignored the system's warning that told him he was obviously doing something wrong. He couldn’t react to it at all, having lost cognizant thought a long time ago. Arthur was now operating solely on instinct, or rather, the bestial side of him was asserting itself. Arthur was finally going to learn first-hand that his titles meant far more than the surface-deep description the system gave them.
He was a half-breed, part man and part beast, a hybrid that meshed the best and worst of two worlds. One could not best an apocalypse beast in combat and expect to remain unchanged. Especially after trying to claim its power’s for oneself. The ether he’d gathered startled to take on a purple tinge and the grass around him started to die. The air seemed to be charged with electricity, and flashes of violet light started to form within Arthur’s ether. The massive cloud of ethereal miasma now produced a definite indication that it contained far more ether than the initial 500 Arthur had supplied. Before things could get further out of hand, a pebble-sized rock suddenly tore through the air and struck Arthur on the forehead. It didn’t make any noise, having broken through the sound barrier the second it left Alyssia’s hands half a mile away. The impact did little damage to Arthur, but it did distract him long enough for him to regain his facilities for the shortest of instances. That was long enough.
With a tectonic boom, all of Arthur’s gathered energy was released into his surroundings. Half the lake's water instantly evaporated when it ran through it, the chaotic energy and the earth 20 metres around him looked like Swiss cheese with the number of holes it now had.
You have learnt the general skill Ether manipulation (Uncommon)
Arthur didn’t see the message, his legs giving away as he finally lost consciousness. Before Arthur could hit the ground, a green-skinned hand caught him and lowered him gently onto the now lifeless soil. Alyssia stood there, a look of exasperation on her face as she looked at the unconscious idiot before her.
”How in the world did his aura control get worse”? She asked the stormwater standing next to her. The beast just snorted in response.
