An interesting concept.
What would happen if I kept a body in a large flow of magic for a long time?
No.
It’s too early for experiments.
I needed to establish myself first.
All right, here’s the new body.
Its former owner was a vegetable and certainly wouldn’t interfere.
I needed to test the magic.
It should be Requip.
It’s a fairly common School, but who knew how the abilities would behave under these circumstances?
Well, let’s try it.
The body instinctively poured the necessary amount of magic into the required area.
Everything that had previously been inside my victim’s “pocket” spilled onto the clearing.
Hmm…
I had only wanted to summon his sword.
The man’s collection had been small and fairly standard: a sword, an axe, a hammer, and a spear.
Nothing else could fit into his subspace.
His magical reserve had been minimal, and putting anything magical inside would have been impossible.
Such things consumed a huge amount of space in the “Pocket.” But then I happened, and judging by the fact that his entire Pocket was now lying across the clearing when only the sword should have appeared, the reserve had increased somewhat.
I just had no idea by how much.
Well, there was a way to find out.
Time to start packing.
The Dark Ones’ better-quality weapons went into the subspace first, followed by the books on magic.
There was still enough room for spices and some of the fabric.
Altogether, it came out to roughly two carts’ worth of goods.
Not bad.
Very, very not bad.
And what about magical items?
That’s where I hit a wall.
Only the glow-lights and a couple of lacrima crystals fit.
From my new host’s memories, I knew magical items were “heavy,” but this heavy?
Apparently, I was still a very long way from Elsa’s reserves.
Then again, what had I expected?
Even if my magical reserves had simply been added to those of this highway bandit, both he and I were still nowhere near S-rank.
At least this guy hadn’t neglected training.
He’d actually tried to increase his reserve, so I knew the exercises, I had time, and therefore, I would train.
Just not in the forest.
Even with my newly acquired portable warehouse, there was still a considerable amount of loot left in the camp.
Well, as one master of repairing absolutely anything supposedly says before beginning the repair: “Gentlemen, bring everything out.” And I had three assistants too.
By the way, after the frightened one woke up and realized one of his companions was missing, he tried to breathe as quietly as possible whenever I was around.
Once the valuables had been moved from the cart into my subspace, the bandits had to work as loaders again.
Now I’d even managed to pack the tents, which meant some of them were going to be reassigned as pack animals.
But first, they could help me with one more thing.
I should perform that ritual again.
What would it show this time?
The second time, drawing the required diagram was much easier.
The magical process took even longer than the first time, but the result pleased me.
Darkness.
Absorption.
Requip.
Excellent.
Now I just had to master all of them.
And now, back to the city!
I harnessed my “donkeys.” The bag containing the head of the mage who had resisted had to be thrown away.
The smell coming from it was so horrible that it could practically have been used as a weapon of mass murder.
And that’s how we returned to the city, right around dawn.
The cart went straight to the magistrate’s office, where I handed the Dark Ones over to the assistant I already knew.
The goods had to be returned to their owners, except for what was stored in my spatial pocket.
I later changed my face and sold that through one of the fences whose addresses I knew.
As a private citizen, however, I was paid a quarter of the goods’ value.
Together with the reward for the Dark Ones and the magistrate’s “gratitude,” my wallet grew by another two million six hundred thousand jewels.
With my existing savings, I had just under eight million.
It sounded impressive, but in reality, it wasn’t even enough to buy a house in Magnolia.
Apparently, negotiations there started at ten million.
The authorities’ interrogation of the captured mages brought me a certain amount of fame.
Many people had seen me enter the city, and after the confession of the gang’s former leader, that same terrified guy, I received an “official” second name.
Or, more simply, a nickname.
Demon.
Yeeah…
That had been quite a successful hunting trip.
For now, the name wasn’t particularly well known, and I couldn’t use my reputation to intimidate anyone.
Still, the fact that I’d earned such recognition was pleasant.
Strange.
I seemed to be continuing to change.
In the past, I wouldn’t have cared in the slightest what anyone called me.
Almost three months had passed since my hunt for the Dark Ones.
During that time, I managed to reach the Dark Guild from the outskirts and increase my savings by another ten million.
I had to open a bank account because carrying all my money around in cash had become impossible, and filling my subspace with paper was just stupid.
My list of trophies also grew, including piles of books on fire magic and numerous useful artifacts, including several staffs and a magical guitar.
I especially liked the last one.
Its sound was truly magical.
That B-rank mage had been a fire mage, and a fairly powerful one at that.
He was also paranoid.
He slept with one eye open and only ate after a food taster had tried everything first.
That taster was how I got to him.
It’s hard to expect someone to poison food when they’re the one who has to taste it.
But if that taster is carrying a lot of my cells, then he’ll absolutely do it.
Unfortunately, the mage died before I could reach him.
I have a feeling he was the only one who knew where the really valuable stashes were.
Still, what I managed to squeeze out of his assistants was impressive.
It’s a shame, but I’m not arrogant enough yet to take on a B-rank mage with my C-rank strength.
I did manage to increase my rank, though, and completely officially, at the same magistrate’s office.
B-rank could also be obtained there, while anything above that, A-rank, required either approval from the master of an official guild or an examination.
S-rank could only be obtained through an examination, with no exceptions.
As for achieving the status of a “God’s Chosen,” or, as such mages were also called, “God-Equal,” that required not only a massive reserve, but mastery of at least two Schools, the development of something genuinely significant in terms of spells, and an entire list of additional requirements.
There was, however, a simpler method: defeat an existing mage of that rank in **HONEST combat**.
Nobody had managed to accomplish that in the last fifty years.
As for my progress in the various Schools, Requip was going the best.
There were plenty of teachers, and there were established training methods, most of them fairly simple.
Want a larger Pocket?
Easy.
Fill it to the brim, then add a little more, bit by bit, literally grain by grain.
It hurt.
And the pain couldn’t be dulled by anything.
According to one intelligent book I’d ordered from a neighboring city, the energetic body was what actually developed.
Want to summon various weapons as quickly as possible?
No problem.
Summon and dismiss objects from your Pocket until you get dizzy.
That’s how you increase casting speed.
And apparently, that worked for every School.
A pleasant little bonus.
Want to summon not only blades, but change your armor too?
That’s possible as well.
The catch was that you needed an exceptional imagination to place the armor exactly where it belonged on your body, along with a considerable amount of concentration.
Get distracted and, at best, you simply wouldn’t summon anything.
If you think that’s where Requip ends, you’re very much mistaken.
I had to pay my teachers a million jewels in total and spend another two million on the necessary books, but the knowledge was worth it.
Once I finally gained access to at least some actual magical theory, I went all in.
Items could be pulled from the Pocket or thrown out of it, and they could be ejected at a very respectable speed.
The more objects you had in there, the more impressive it became.
And by placing a specific mark on an object, you could even put it into your Pocket from a distance.
But all of it required training.
Training, training, and more training.
I also managed to make some progress with Absorption.
The magic was powerful, but extremely dangerous for the user.
In my opinion, it was much darker than even Life Magic.
A mage absorbed the victim completely: magic, life, and possibly even the soul.
The victim had a chance to resist.
It was even possible for the mage to be the one who got absorbed.
But when the two sides were evenly matched, an Absorption mage had numerous advantages.
For one thing, the victim was transported into the mage’s inner world, where they had to be killed.
And inside its owner’s inner world, the owner had a considerable advantage.
Even then, there was a very real chance of going insane or completely losing one’s mind.
But if everything worked, the mage’s power would increase dramatically.
Theoretically, you could grow enormously stronger this way.
In practice, Absorption users either stopped after their first serious opponent, like Elfman, or eventually lost to another opponent, which led to the creation of yet another terrifying monster.
In any case, I found the ritual.
Only very powerful mages could do without it, and I certainly wasn’t one of them yet.
I intended to try it, and whatever came out of it…
well, we’d see.
As for Darkness, I still hadn’t managed to get beyond the basics and simple strikes using raw magic.
I wasn’t in much of a hurry, though.
Without books or a mentor, it was better not to mess around with it.
Having my hand dissolve for reasons I still didn’t understand when I tried to apply Darkness according to the principles of Requip had been more than enough for me.
This element certainly had no love for its user and did not forgive mistakes.
I also figured out what to do with the cat that had nearly bitten my head off.
That day, I was lucky enough to stumble upon a Ghost Cat.
At least, that’s what the breed of these predators was called.
I don’t think I need to explain why.
The creature was considered fairly dangerous and rare, because it was damn near impossible to find.
It had even learned how to hide from magic.
Its fur was also worth a considerable amount, around three hundred thousand jewels per batch, and since they shed…
well, the cat moved in with me.
Why not?
It was practically a three-for-one deal: profit from the fur, practice controlling the creature, and the opportunity to study the predator’s body and figure out how exactly it managed to hide from magic.
Unfortunately, the last part was clearly beyond me.
I still catastrophically lacked knowledge.
I needed a book on Life Magic, or better yet, an actual mage who specialized in it.
But alas…
And so, little by little, I settled into this new world.
I wouldn’t say I’d accomplished much, but at least I’d built up some kind of material foundation, dipped my toes into the secret art of magic, and even started getting somewhat accustomed to the strangeness of this world.
The turning point in my life came with the next issue of the Herald.
It was dedicated to Mirajane Strauss.
It also mentioned that the “Fairies” had wiped out some den of thieves, taking out about half the city in the process.
Looks like canon had finally begun.
Damn.
I’d been hoping I’d have a little more time.
Well then.
I guess it’s time to head to Magnolia.
Oh, this is going to be interesting.