Chapter 199: Chapter 190 – Divination

It was late enough - near dark - when they arrived that the crowd of people for the spontaneous demonstration was mostly gone, but Serenity could see some abandoned signs. He couldn’t read them, but Rissa told him that KILL THE WORMS, END THE LIES, and CLOSE ALL DUNGEONS were the most common.

She started laughing when she saw an abandoned BIRDS AREN’T REAL poster. Explaining the joke to Raz took long enough for them to reach the ley line.

Serenity was grateful this was New York City. There were some people who would confront anyone, but after a rally like this, it was simple enough to avoid anyone still carrying a sign. The people who weren’t carrying signs seemed less confrontational, and they made it to the ley line without incident. There was no need to actually go to the dungeon itself; doing it outside the barriers set up around the dungeon made it less likely they’d run into trouble.

Serenity walked around the barriers, feeling his way through the ley line. Basic Sense Raw Magic was hugely helpful; he didn’t have to do anything to tell where the ley lines were.

It was a strange feeling. Serenity felt empty inside, and felt the energy flowing into him. Unlike the past times he’d been in ley lines, he didn’t start feeling full; instead, the soreness deep inside himself he felt whenever he tried to cast a spell felt soothed. The energy that flowed into him simply seemed to disappear; he wasn’t sure where it was going. It didn’t seem to be refilling his mana and essence pools, though when he checked his Status they were less empty than they had been.

He needed to concentrate on the divination; he could figure out what he’d done to himself later. He hoped he hadn’t messed up his spellcasting; it didn’t seem likely that it was permanent, but it did seem likely that it would take longer to heal than he’d first estimated. Perhaps he’d visit the Tutorial and ask Blaze; he might have an idea what Serenity’s stupidity had done, or at least how to fix it.

Serenity linked to Rissa’s sight, while not sharing his with her. Seeing from two perspectives was difficult enough for one of them; they didn’t both need to be slightly disoriented. While they were laying out the maps, Serenity noticed Russ drifting to the side; it wasn’t until a stranger spoke that Serenity realized he’d been stepping between the working and a couple of onlookers.

“Hey, is that guy glowing? What’re you doing here?”

Serenity tried not to pay too much attention to the conversation; he needed to get the maps and everything set up correctly. Theoretically, it didn’t matter if they were oriented the same as reality or not, but in practice any misalignment made the divination more difficult. There were forms of divination that took advantage of the misalignment gradient, but Serenity wasn’t planning anything that complex.

“We’re on a ley line. Strange things happen on ley lines, like dungeons. So we’re trying to map out the nearby ones. That requires starting in one.” Russ explained what they were doing while implying a why that wasn’t quite accurate.

“Two.” Serenity muttered. “Maybe three. But I think only two.” it was obvious they were at a ley line nexus, which could form at any ley line meeting. Serenity had seen many dungeons that were simply on a ley line and not at a nexus, but he supposed it made sense that early ones would pop up at nexuses. Almost all nexuses had something, after all, even if it wasn’t always a dungeon.

Most were settlements or cities. Of course, that was off Earth; Serenity wasn’t sure how it would turn out here.

“Why are you looking for dungeons? They’re dangerous, and then there’s stuff like those worms.” The new voice sounded scared and young. Serenity couldn’t tell from the voice, but he suspected it was a woman; after all, she was openly admitting fear, and that was something men weren’t supposed to do. It was ridiculous, but Serenity knew that he suppressed his actual feelings sometimes because he wasn’t supposed to admit them.

A glance up showed a smaller figure hanging onto the arm of the larger person who’d spoken first. The size differential was large enough that Serenity decided he was wrong; the second person wasn’t a woman, it was a child, probably with a parent. Realizing that somehow made him feel better, but also guilty for his assumption.

“It’s better to know than to be surprised,” Russ stated. His voice sounded peaceful and soothing. “What we’ll do once we find out will depend on what we find.”

“You are going to let the authorities know so they can handle it, right?” The older man’s voice sounded confident at first, but unsure by the end.

“Yes, we’ll be sure to let the right people know.” Russ sounded confident and authoritative, and Serenity could see the two gawkers back off. He needed to finish the setup.

As Serenity taped the last map piece into place then tacked it to the ground, he realized that he’d missed a step. He’d set the ritual up to have a spell pattern, since he’d expected to be the one casting it, but he hadn’t confirmed that Phoebe could use one. If she couldn’t, he’d have to change the spell; he’d probably want to turn it into a true ritual. That would be the easiest for an unskilled caster.

Serenity made his way over to Rissa’s mother; she was standing near the pack he’d set on the floor. As he pulled the small pouches of colored sand out of the bag, he asked. “Do you know how to make a spell pattern? I can draw it out for you, but I can’t weave the mana for it right now.”

“A spell pattern?” Phoebe looked blank. “I’ve never heard of that before.”

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Serenity should have realized it wouldn’t be known if they were building rituals from incomplete grimoires. He just hoped they weren’t doing the same thing with actual spells; while that was less dangerous than incomplete rituals, it would mean that the level of knowledge was even lower. “When you build a spell - cast a spell - what do you do? Everything, even the mental part.”

Phoebe looked at him blankly. “You say the words and make the gestures and use anything the spell calls for, then feed it mana. Why?”

Well, at least she knew how to feed a spell mana. That was more than some rote spellcasters, and told him that the problem wasn’t that she hadn’t tried; she’d clearly never had the opportunity to learn what lay behind the words and movements. It was still going to make this harder.

He hadn’t designed a chant/gesture combination to shape the spell, since he could directly shape the mana. He more or less knew how it was done - he’d used that sort of spell once upon a time - but he wasn’t sure he’d get it right the first time, and they’d probably only get one or two attempts. More than that, he wasn’t sure he could teach it precisely enough for someone else to get it right on the first attempt.

Maybe he could cast the spell since he was in the ley line?

Serenity pushed a thread of mana out and started to make a shape. It got farther than it had outside the ley line. Long before he could have completed even a simple spell, he felt his insides clench and ache as the mana was pulled back into him. “No, I still can’t. Dammit…”

He couldn’t design it from scratch and teach it to Phoebe tonight, but maybe he could tweak one she already knew? Physical divination spells all had some similarities on the magical level; all he’d have to do then is alter the target parameters, and ley lines weren’t exactly trying to hide.

“Phoebe? Russ said you were good at divination, what spells do you already know? A map divination, especially?” Serenity looked back up at his future mother-in-law hopefully.

She must have still been thinking about what he’d said earlier. “What does that have to do with spell patterns? What are they, anyway?”

“They’re …” Serenity stopped as he tried to quickly condense what he knew about them. They were the nonphysical forms that magic flowed through for any spell that was more than Intent and mana; even a pure-Intent spell would end up following a framework; it simply would be the one formed by the Intent rather than the skill of the caster.

Vengeance had met a few people who used purely Intent-based casting over the years. It had power, but at the same time it was the most vulnerable to distraction and unrecognized Intent. The biggest advantage of Intent-based casting was that it could work as fast as you could form the Intent, and therefore was the only spellcasting that could compete with Path Skills on casting speed. Even so, he’d had Path Skills and it also was almost always significantly less efficient; for his purposes, it simply wasn’t as good as using a spell framework.

That was all theoretical, though; what Phoebe needed to know was how spell frameworks applied to what she knew. That made the answer easier. “A spell framework is what’s built by the gestures, words, and sometimes other stuff you use to make a spell. I usually build them directly, but I can’t use mana right now. Since you don’t know how to use them, the best bet seems to be to take something you already know and modify it to fit what this spell needs.”

Phoebe stared at Serenity. He thought about what he’d said. Simple, direct, and to the point; he’d managed all of those. Did he need to say it differently?

“You can modify spells on the fly and expect them to work.” Phoebe said it flatly with no apparent emotion.

“Yes?” That was what he’d said he was going to do. It was the best solution. Was it really that hard to believe?

“Okay then. We’re going to have a long conversation when we get home. I want to learn more about this, and I want to talk to you about a ritual I’ve been trying to decipher.” Phoebe seemed pensive for a moment, then her gaze sharpened. “Could you use this to find all of the Hegemon Worms in the city?”

“Theoretically, yes. In practice, not in a useful way. I could probably make a multi-day ritual that would detect where they all were when the ritual started, or a simpler spell that would point in the direction of the nearest one. Even that would be mana-hungry if it had to cover any distance.” Serenity hadn’t really thought about hunting the worms that way; it would’ve worked for the Final Reaper, but Serenity simply didn’t have the mana pool for it.

Really, he didn’t have the mana pool for finding ley lines either, without the technique he was using to make it cheaper. There was a reason everyone used connections to find things. “The trick with this is that we have a connection - it’s why we had to be in the ley line to cast it. We’re not actually finding ley lines; we’re looking for ley lines that touch the one we’re in, following it until we run off the map. That simplifies the problem enormously … it’s physics, really, the power required increases by the cube when you’re trying to cover a spherical volume. That’s just as true in magic as it is in anything else. If you build the spell correctly, though, you don’t have to use a sphere; following the ley lines means that the power is linear by distance, with increases per connection … it’s much, much lower for the same land area.”

Serenity was pretty sure Phoebe’s eyes had started to glaze over in the middle of his explanation. He’d kept it as short as he could. He supposed it didn’t matter; ‘better spell construction means less mana needed’ was easy enough to understand. “So, what map divination spells do you know? You’ll probably have to demonstrate so I can see what they do.”