Scratching the bridge of his nose, Deacon took a moment to gather his thoughts, mentally ticking off the checklist he'd been running through for the past hour. Glancing down at the flattened, scrubbed, and mana-cleansed stone slab he stood atop, he exhaled slowly, letting his shoulders roll once as he forced himself into focus.
After reaching into his Spatial Sling Bag and pushing aside the liquid cleaner and scrub he recently deposited into it, he pulled free a thin, white chalk stick and murmured an Identify as he raised it to his eye level.
Item Name: Ritual Chalk
Type: Tool
Rarity: Uncommon
Duration: Usable for up to 20 full ritual circles before crumbling.
Description: A stick of white chalk infused with mana, designed for precise ritual work. Once used, the markings can last up to 24 hours; resisting natural decay. However, after 24 hours, the markings vanish entirely.
Effect: Used to inscribe ritual circles, wards, and summoning diagrams.
Deacon gave a curt nod to himself in reaffirmation before flipping the chalk in between his fingers to now hold it as though it were a pen after dismissing the panel in front of him.
Then he picked up the Grimoire of the Ritualist of Huitzilopochtli he'd set aside. Flipping carefully through its thick parchment pages, he didn't stop until he reached the chapter on the Lesser Heart-Fire Ritual.
As Deacon began rereading the chapter for the twelfth time today, he was entirely absorbed in and didn't even react to the noise of tree branches snapping behind him.
Emerging from the treeline, Sam and Esmerelda stepped into the clearing while panting heavily as sweat matted their foreheads. Despite the both of them being physically unharmed, their robes were not.
Sam's outer robes bore thin, thorn-like tears across them, as if he'd been dragging himself through brambles, while Esmerelda's robe's hood was slowly repairing itself as it was torn clean off.
"See," Esmerelda gasped out as she caught sight of her time. "Told you… it was here."
Behind them, however, were massive creatures that looked far worse for wear.
Sam guided forward a floating Level 11 Armadillobear, the bear's natural plated armor cracked in spiderweb-like lines as though it had been battered repeatedly with blunt force until its body finally surrendered. It snored faintly with its elongated tongue dragging across the ground despite its raised height, unconscious but alive, hovering in place under his spell's grip.
Esmerelda, by contrast, dragged along a Level 10 Gnoll. Its wiry, hyena-like frame twitched sporadically from the immobilization spell she'd wrapped around it. Half its fur was shaved in ugly patches where her magic had seared it away, its legs bent at angles that looked wrong for any natural gait, and attached to a couple of its jagged teeth were bits of fabric that belonged to Esmerelda's robe's hood.
"…Shut up," Sam panted out as sweat arced across his face and dripped onto the grass below.
"Perfect timing," Jass muttered as she got up from where she stood and moved away from the thirteen other pits filled with similar creatures around her to nearby, where Deacon was currently at.
As Sam and Esmerelda closed the distance, Jass slammed her hand into the ground and cast Gouge Ground. Mana rippled out from her palm, racing across the earth. The ground shuddered, then caved in with a deep groan, opening into two square 5 x 5 x 5 meter pits.
Due to her skill, not a single grain of dirt or a pebble fell inside the pits; instead, the loose dirt and pebbles grew tougher and fortified the pits.
After the pits were formed, Sam and Esmerelda immediately dumped their respective beasts into the pits, where they landed with dull thuds that rattled the section of the forest they were in.
Sam let out a sigh of relief as he rolled his left shoulder. "That should make fifteen, right?"
"Yup," Bonehead answered absently, though he hadn't even looked up as his attention fixed on his chest, where he'd shifted his core.
The usually hidden dark-red crystal, which normally glowed faintly from where his sternum was, was now temporarily lodged where a human's belly button might have been for better "access".
"That's more than enough," he continued after a pause, voice distant but certain. "Fifteen hearts gives us all room to try… and enough to cover at least two fuck-ups each."
Deacon hummed, eyes flicking from the pits back to the grimoire at his feet. "Here goes nothing," he said quietly to himself as he crouched atop the cleaned and cleansed stone slab and began to draw the ritual circle for the Lesser Heart-Flame ritual.
"So… you figure out how to draw out your essence from your core yet?" Sam asked Bonehead, after glancing over at Deacon, who looked to be a quarter way finished with drawing the ritual circle.
His eyes flicked between the faintly glowing lines of the ritual circle and the mana string hovering in front of Deacon that held up the opened Grimoire of the Ritualist of Huitzilopochtli that Deacon kept glancing up at in between every symbol and line he drew out in chalk.
Even though to Sam, the pages he was looking at looked blank, with the way Deacon's eyes moved across the page, it was apparent that there was text that only he could read – which made sense as in order to even open the book, a connection to Huitzilopochtli was needed, and only Deacon had it.
Bonehead gave no response at first, his shoulders taut beneath the layers of robes he wore. The second tick of the minute hand – or at least, the mental tick in the back of Sam's mind – saw those shoulders gradually relax, as if tension itself were seeping from him.
"Yeah," Bonehead finally said, rising to his full height as he dropped his hands. He then began to peel away the layers of his robes and sweatshirt beneath it until he stood bare from the waist up and revealing his dark red core to the world.
"This should make it much easier to manipulate with that gone now," he muttered to himself as he only wore his black sweatpants and boots, stuffing the removed robes and sweatshirt neatly into his Spatial Satchel.
He turned toward Sam, who had now stepped beside Esmerelda and Jass, observing the ritual setup and the pits with a mix of anticipation and caution.
"You really gotta tell me your tailor who managed to get you those digs and still got them to give you the same stats as what I got," Sam then said while pulling aside his lower robes to reveal his Soldier's Leggings that he got from Floor Three.
"Undead only, I'm afraid," Bonehead admitted with a grimace-looking gesture. "She refuses to take anyone other than undeads as customers, and upon purchase, we have to Soulbind it to ourselves as proof that we won't just pawn them off."
"Damn," Sam said with a click of his tongue. "I'll search the web after we finish this if I can find any tailors that could make something similar."
"I hope you do," Bonehead replied honestly. "They feel so much better to wear than leather. It was well worth the 40,000 credit cost."
"Anyways, I've always known how to draw essence from my core," Bonehead admitted, voice calm but edged with gravity, "but it's been a while since I've had to extract my essence like this. And a lot of it at that." He tilted his head slightly, letting a shadow pass over his hollow eye sockets. "It's a lot more difficult to pull it out cleanly from the core, because, as you can imagine… one slip, one small miscalculation…" His pause stretched, tension curling like smoke around his words. "…it won't be pretty, nor painless."
"But once I extract it," he continued, a faint smirk tugging at the corner of his jaw, "I can manipulate it freely and can keep it sterile long enough to perform the ritual properly."
With that said, they all turned to Deacon to see him wipe the sweat from his forehead with the back of the hand that held the Ritual Chalk as he rose slowly from his kneeling position atop the stone slab. The ritual circle was now complete; it stretched 1.57 meters in its radius from where he currently stood, every rune and line was glowing faintly despite not having a lick of mana injected into it – not yet, at least.
"That should be it," he muttered under his breath as he carefully exited the circle and began eyeing each and every component of the ritual circle he'd just finished drawing.
After confirming that everything was perfect, he nodded faintly in approval, then straightened fully and turned to face his friends. "I've finished everything on the circle; it's time for the ritual to begin."
At his words, the team shifted into action. Jass moved first, bending low and gripping the edges of the pit. With barely any effort on her part, the ground quivered and lifted up the Level 11 Armadillobear that Sam just dumped inside it.
Jass's muscles visibly tensed as she grabbed the still-intact chunks of the Armadillobear's armor and hoisted the 350-kilogram creature onto her shoulder. Grimacing slightly under the strain, she made her way toward Deacon, her face twisting with the effort of carrying the beast.
Deacon, without any visible strain, stepped forward and gently lifted the Armadillobear from off her shoulder. The creature's massive body sagged in his arms but remained fully under control, its claws scraping faintly against the stone slab beneath the ritual circle.
"WhoaWoah," Jass muttered, stepping back and blinking at him in mild disbelief. "You must have put every single point you had into Strength."
Deacon chuckled awkwardly as he placed the creature just outside the ritual circle. He said nothing in response, only returning his attention back to the ritual circle he finished drawing.
Lowering the mana string that held the Grimoire of the Ritualist of Huitzilopochtli in front of him, he brought it back to his hands, then flipped towards the previous pages, where he quickly reread what he needed to do to perform the ritual, specifically focusing on the incantation he would need to say.
Once he was sure that he had everything down, Deacon reached into his Spatial Sling Bag and pulled out two items; a brazier and charcoal that he personally made hours ago out of the wood of a dead tree he found while hunting down wolves, armadillobears, and gnolls.
Making his way into the center of the ritual, Deacon placed down the traditional ritual brazier that he found and took from the Temple of Huitzilopochtli less than 12 hours ago.
He'd done so because, while looking at the drawings of the before-and-after effects of the ritual in the grimoire, the brazier resembled some of the ones he'd seen in the temple. He thought it would be smart to grab a couple for himself and the others from its still- standing ruins, just in case the ritual specifically required these types of braziers.
Then, making his way towards the Armadillobear, he reached into his Spatial Sling Bag and placed down two silver daggers and a Tier 1 high- quality obsidian shard on the ground, within the very edge of the ritual circle, but kept both away from one another.
From there, he quickly took off every piece of equipment on his person and tossed them out of the ritual circle, including his Spatial Sling Bag, leaving him just in his boxers.
Making his way back into the center of the ritual circle and placing the charcoal into the tall, tripod-mounted ceramic brazier decorated with interlocking swirls, he took a step back and, with a snap of his fingers, cast Ignis, setting it alight.
As the brazier was now set alight, Deacon injected mana into the ritual circle beneath him, causing a dull white glow to bleed into the color of reddish orange – the same color as his own flames atop the brazier.
Turning around, without making any eye contact with his friends who were staring at the ritual circle and himself intensely, he kneeled in front of the unconscious Aramdillobear and picked up one of the silver daggers.
No time for last- minute jitters, Deacon thought to himself seconds before he sank the silver dagger into the throat of the Armadillobear and ended its life.
*[Armadillobear Lv 11] has been slain – Partial XP has been given.*
Ignoring the notification, Deacon pulled out the dagger, sank it into its chest, and began carving toward its heart. He then started muttering the first incantation, which translated to:
"Heart to hand, life to mine,
Power taken, blood entwined.
Death be bound, strength remain,
Your essence lives within my vein."
As he finished the incantation, in his hands now held the large heart of the Armadillobear that was still warm.
Placing down the bloodied silver dagger, Deacon grabbed the other, clean one along with the obsidian shard and made his way back towards the brazier. In doing so he took notice that the blood that was leaking out of the Armadillobear was being absorbed by the ritual circle and tinging the reddish-orange color glow into a slightly more crimson-colored one.
Now standing in front of the brazier, he carved a shallow circle over his sternum and rubbed the obsidian shard onto the blood that was dripping from his chest.
After it was soaked in his blood, Deacon carefully placed the bloodied shard into the flames of the brazier, where, within seconds after placing it inside, the reddish-orange flames flickered purple for a brief period before returning to their normal color.
Seeing that everything was going according to plan, Deacon took in a deep breath and stuck his right hand into the flames of the brazier.
Huh, Deacon thought for a brief moment as the flames within the brazier were no hotter than lukewarm water.
Now somewhat at ease, Deacon pulled out the now bright purple obsidian shard that was untouched by ash and immediately pushed it inside the heart of the Armadillobear. With the third-to-last step complete, Deacon began the final incantation, which translated to:
"Heart in hand, blood entwined,
As I consume you, your power is mine.
A fragment of your spirit dwells within,
Strength eternal, life begins again in me."
As he finished reciting the last line, the Armadillobear's heart, which was previously losing its vibrant crimson color, was now bright purple, the very same color as the obsidian shard moments before he inserted it into the heart.
With just the last step remaining, Deacon swallowed the saliva in his mouth before bringing the heart to his mouth and consuming it whole.
*Your Race has reached Lv 12 – Points allocated, +1 Free Point*
*Your Race has reached Lv 13 – Points allocated, +1 Free Point*