CC 10: Thesaurize ~ Fifteen! (Patreon)

“Ah, what a perfect day to leave the Town behind and go off in search of adventure, fun, and rare materials.” Joe took a deep breath, leaning back with his hands on his hips as he surveyed the swirling cloud cover of Jotunheim. “Perhaps freeing a captive friend, and filling the population of Novusheim with the residents of a few towns I destroy along the way so we can hit the minimum requirements for upgrade.”

The skies above Novusheim were practically alive with the sounds of Dwarves, ritual towers, and monsters clashing in the killing corridors around the Town. A small part of him felt guilty over the fact that he was leaving everyone here to fend for themselves while he went off in search of a single person, but he also knew that he’d done everything he could for the time being to improve their defenses.

Until they had another large boost in morale, it was going to be difficult for Joe to scoop up any more building slots, and creating Trash-tier towers that would just fall apart in a day was never worth the effort.

No, he’d waited long enough. Just as he would for any friend in trouble, Joe was determined to set out right this minute. Flippantly tossing out a ritual tile, swiftly followed by his stabilization cubes, Joe prepared to exit the Town from above. No one came to bother him, as he had managed to establish in their minds that being around him when a ritual was being set up was tantamount to volunteering to act as a power source.

Even so, the Ritualist triple checked that no one was near him before he felt confident in quickly slipping on his new shirt, his brain immediately filling with the distance and direction he needed to travel in order to find the wayward Architect. Joe quickly input those variables into his ritual, then took the shirt off as fast as he could without damaging it. It was created with a fifty percent reduction in durability, meaning that he, with his high level of strength, had a good chance of ripping it in half if he forced the issue.

Seeing as it was now a magical item, tearing it off would result in an explosion of the item wrapped around his torso. “Now that would be one not-so-magical hug.”

In the next moment, he’d stored away the shirt and stepped into a bubble. An instant later, he was two hundred feet in the air and zipping along at a breezy eighty miles per hour. Joe had consulted his schematics, as well as sending up a query to Tatum, and found that the range of shrine-to-shrine teleportation was currently limited to roughly two hundred and fifty miles. If the Ritualist was willing to take the time to build a more impressive structure, a Grand Ritual Hall for example, that could be extended out to over a thousand miles.

“That would be a giant waste of resources.” Joe murmured to himself as he settled into his studies. With three and a quarter hours until his bubble would land, he began going over his grimoire of dark rituals for a likely candidate for revamping.

If he was going to be stuck in a bubble for something like a hundred and twenty-five hours—not counting the amount of time it would take to build shrines and sleep—he needed to work on his class quests, create something interesting, or at least keep himself busy until he’d arrived at his destination. All of that aligned neatly with his new quest to take those darker, twisted rituals and cleanse them, turning them into something beneficial and… if not nice, at least not bent toward getting a bounty placed on his head.

A small part of his mind needed to remain on the terrain zipping by beneath him. When he’d explained his exploration plans to the council, Grandmaster Snow had only agreed to his journey so long as he marked down anywhere they might be able to find natural resources. According to her, this world had once been heavily traveled, if not highly populated by long-term residents.

Mostly, Jotunheim was a phenomenal place to go and get resources from monsters. Similar to a safari, it had also been the location for hunting trips, bachelor parties, and other extravagances of the super rich or powerful. Seeing as the world had been locked down and those same ultra-rich and powerful people were slain or captured, there was a high probability that this world was covered in loot buried beneath the snow.

Weapons, armor, and magics that had been lost to time? All of it was somewhere on this supermassive planet. Sure, it was likely that a good chunk of it had been crushed flat, degraded with time, or whatever else may have happened, but there was also likely a hoard hidden away under the snow that was protected from all but the most powerful creatures on the planet. Joe liked to imagine that he could find a cave of wonders somewhere that would open if he would just answer a few riddles, but he knew that was—to put it mildly—unlikely.

The further he traveled, the more engrossed he became in his work. He’d started his attempt at cleansing additional rituals with the Ritual of Sacrificial Regeneration. This one was most likely the closest to ‘positive vibes’ of all of the darker rituals he’d been given, but given its rarity, it would still be extremely difficult to crack. “Choose up to four willing creatures, including the target. Whenever the creatures take damage, the target will heal for a portion of damage taken.”

Joe closed the book as he pondered how he’d break that down further. Specifically, how he’d strip away all of the extras, then add in his own intention to power the growth of the Master-rank ritual. Taking a moment, he wrote down a symbol that he had decoded on the Expert circle of the ritual, translated into a haiku so he could better conceptualize it. Since he’d been toying with so many of these recently, he decided to start there, even though he’d found seven different variations on symbology that could imbue intent into this ritual. “None of them were haikus! So, I’m totally justified in starting here.”

Chuckling softly to himself in his otherwise empty bubble, Joe started pulling apart the mathematical formula that generated the words of the prime number descriptor. When he was finished, he read it out loud, wincing at how poorly the translation came across. “Pawn’s pain feeds his self. Mage’s power grows on each hurt. Healing bonds, life thrives.”

“Well, that isn't very nice, is it?” Joe shook his head at the thought that someone would use this ritual, magic that everyone involved needed to agree to be a part of, and still consider them a pawn instead of a friend. “You know, I bet I could just replace ‘pawns’ with ‘friends’ and leave this one alone. At least, if I were trying to still gain Health when my friends are hit.”

He had bigger, better plans for this ritual. Instead of letting his party sacrifice themselves or get hurt for him, Joe wanted to completely alter the targets of the ritual from people around him, to creatures that were damaged. “If I can combine this targeting section with the Ritual of Mana Withering, I wonder if I could make a feedback loop that drains mana from anyone hit. If I could use that on my towers, they wouldn't even need a Mana Battery to function.”

There was still an issue of combining this ritual with a secondary one which would do the actual attacking, but Joe had been doing well in setting up arrays of rituals. There was only one major issue with that plan, and it was a strong enough argument against it that Joe decided to abandon that train of thought entirely. “If I'm going to use a Master-rank ritual just to feed other rituals… that’s just wasteful. Especially since I'm going to have Havoc creating a Mana Battery recharging station anyway.”

Eventually, he landed on the idea of combining this ritual with an enchantment on a weapon to create a Master-ranked lifesteal enchantment. As the intent of the ritual wasn’t actually to cause harm or kill other things, or have them sacrifice themselves to empower the user, Joe figured the intent of the ritual would still be considered positive. “All this ritual wants to do is keep its user alive. I think that will be enough, so let's start creating some intent as we go through each of these circle diagrams.”

Before he knew it, his bubble was landing, popping, and depositing him in the snow while he looked around in surprise, blinking owlishly. “What in the abyss? There's no way it’s been three hours already! It's still bright out-! Oh. Right. Jotunheim.”

Needless to say, a little over three hours was nowhere near enough time to strip down and rebuild a Master-ranked ritual, not if he wanted it to work and not explode in his face, that is. Joe hopped up, brushed some snow off the Exquisite Shell over his legs, and set up a Field Array. Moments later, he was ten feet below the surface of the snow, and working on widening the area around him. “Monsters aren't going to come and stomp this flat if they can't see that it exists.”

Joe hummed tunelessly to himself as he set up the ritual to create the shrine. No monsters interrupted him, no strange sudden events transpired that he wasn't expecting. Instead, after a short while, he had a shrine growing in mid-air, and was then back in a bubble looking over his magical diagrams.

Twice more his bubble landed and he got out to build a shrine before he was absolutely sick of sitting in an awkward position. “I think that's going to have to be it for the day. Jaxon may have had a point… this is pretty mind-numbing.”

The Ritualist was approximately seven hundred and fifty miles away from Novusheim at this point, and decided that now was the time to test out the fast travel system. Placing a hand atop the altar, he sent a cheeky wink up to Tatum in the sky. Fractions of a second later, he was down a few hundred points of mana and standing in the town square of Novusheim. Joe tossed his hands in the air, letting out a whoop and shouting, “It works! I didn’t just waste a huge amount of time for no reason!”

His face fell slightly when he realized that meant that he got to sit in a bubble again for approximately another one hundred and sixteen hours. “Ya~ay. It works.”

Still, he couldn't be too upset. The enforced alone time gave him plenty of opportunity to better his craft, and studying such a high-ranked ritual for so long was already giving him ideas on how to improve his other designs. The better he was at rituals, the better Joe would be able to kill monsters and keep this Town safe. Every incremental bit of growth was going to be necessary for when they attempted to push for a City, and he wasn’t about to shirk his duties now.