264, 2/2

Erick invited Ta’Kamoil into a work room at the top of House Benevolence, to one of his private offices, where a spell diagram floated in the air in front of them. It was [Cascade Imaging], but with a bunch of little tweeks.

“So I have all of it figured out,” Erick said, “The spell is going to function by curving through infinity to see targets in distant lands. The only place where I’m a little stuck is that this spell is going through infinity to see distant lands, and by that same token, it might be vulnerable to back-tracking magic through infinity. How would you solve that vulnerability?”

Ta’Kamoil narrowed his eyes at the spellwork diagrams and adjustments, going back and forth between the basic spell and Erick’s notes. And then he pulled back, and said, “Yeah. So that’s a whole lot different from my own Imaging magics. Oddly enough, I think the only place we differ is in the level of containment and self-reinforcing of our styles. I’m… A whole lot less solid than you are, apparently. This gives me a lot of insight into the Imaging in the command center, and why it isn’t working right—” Ta’Kamoil said, “Sorry about not getting to that before now. It’s been a busy week.”

Erick smiled. “Completely understandable. So how do you— Wait a second. I need to take care of this. I’ll be back soon.”

Erick turned to lightning, zapped out into the sky to become a dragon hovering over the geodesic dome of House Benevolence, just in time to see a 20-kilometer-wide cylinder of metal falling out of the sky. It was thick and grey and jagged on the bottom. It was also mana dead and completely invisible to all of Erick’s magical senses. He had only noticed it because his Lightning Path was screaming at him to move.

And now that he was here, Erick was worried for the first time since—

Shadow appeared in the air beside and above him, like a speck of grey, wreathed in black. She smiled, and teased, “How about learning some Dark Magic, too?”

And then she raised her hand and the sky flashed black.

When the black vanished the cylinder was completely gone and so was all the atmosphere that had been there. The world collapsed overhead, the sky screaming as it filled in the gap, the domed city down below flickering with power as the myriad of protective magics held it all together while wasteland outside of the city flowed up.

And then the implosion of the sky turned into an explosion. A crash of thunder rolled across the world and blasted down the rising wasteland, the shockwave rolling across the world and flattening dust clouds everywhere. More dust clouds rose up when the wave passed. It looked like a sandstorm had just passed out there, beyond House Benevolence. Inside the dome things looked… well. Things looked fine-ish?

Erick turned his gaze back upward, and then toward Shadow. “I don’t think anything broke?”

Shadow turned back to facing Erick, too. She had been looking at the House. She began, “Sooooo… I haven’t actually gone to war in a long time. Forgot about collateral damage.”

“It’s fine.” Erick said, “If this were Veird I would have swallowed it with a [Gate], but no [Gate]s here, so I flubbed that one.”

“That would have been the safer way to solve that, yes. Alternatively, less large-scale Dark Magic, or a simple disk of Darkness.”

“You chose correctly, I think,” Erick said, “No way to tell if there was some hidden magic up there. But anyway.” Erick flexed his aura to the side, conjuring what he had long suspected to be ‘Darkness’. An orb of black held in the air, like a void in the world that sounded like everything and nothing, all at once. It was almost Elemental Destruction, but it was a Destruction flavored with some sort of Void. “Is this Elemental Darkness?”

“Nah,” Shadow said, surprising Erick a whole lot. “That’s Elemental Annihilation. It’s close enough for basic House magic, but it’s not Darkness. Probably safer to use than Elemental Destruction, too. Using Darkness to do what I just did requires you to open yourself up to your true power and then express that power outward in an effort to take apart whatever you’re looking at. That use of Darkness is disintegrative in a way that nothing else truly is, because what Darkness wants to do is pull apart things and see how they work. That’s where the Destruction part of the original Creation, Destruction, Paradox trio comes from.” Shadow said, “Elemental Annihilation truly is good enough for basic magic, though, because only Destruction Wizards can truly touch upon the Destruction parts of Darkness’s domain, and Annihilation is easier to work with than Elemental Destruction, because it is cleaner. And yet, it is not as clean as Darkness. If I would have used Annihilation to get rid of that cylinder there would have been some metal shrapnel left. Probably could’ve added in some resons to make that work as well as Darkness. Keep that in mind! I’m headed back.”

And then she left.

… Erick detoured to the wastelands where he did a bit of spellwork using what he had thought was Darkness to make a beam that he aimed at the ground. A darker-than-black beam of power erupted from Erick’s aura to the side and traced a line of black across the world below, drawing a trench into the ground a good hundred meters deep. The ground caved in around the beam’s path, dirt and stone collapsing back together. The spell failed to penetrate further than a 100-ish meters due to the lack of power Erick had put into the working, at maybe only 400-ish mana for a 5-second-long, meter-wide working, so… Was this okay? Or did he need to do actual Dark Magic? … Hmm.

This was more than fine.

Erick decided that since this was the lowest hanging fruit right now, that he should work on this for a while. Someone in the Den had thrown a city-sized block of strange metal at House Benevolence and it had proven surprisingly effective, if only because Erick had never considered that someone would actually do such a thing… But of course, as soon as Erick had seen the big cylinder of metal in the sky, he knew that he should have expected such a thing.

Absolute destructive spellwork was not something that Erick really liked to do, though.

And yet, Slaver’s Den was bringing up all these old and new ideas of spellwork that Erick had let slide over the years. The update to [Cascade Imaging] was only a few steps beyond that update from hooking up [Cleanse] to that working and auto-targeting every single instance of ‘demon’ within 500 kilometers, for instance… or further than that, actually.

Erick’s update to Imaging could probably reach through the very universe itself to hit very distant places…

Ah.

Well that was a bit distressing, actually.

… Erick hovered in the sky and distracted himself with various workings of Elemental Annihilation.

Beams, Bombs, Bolts, Disks, and a whole lot more. Erick carved up the land with a few different ideas, getting a hang for this magic. Sometimes the spellwork broke itself, blackness spilling out in every direction as it attempted to consume everything. Sometimes it worked well. The ‘disk’ type worked less well than Erick would have liked. He kinda wanted Annihilating Walls of power that he could set in front of something and erase that something from existence.

Blasts and cones of power worked the best for Elemental Annihilation.

This was one of those Banned Elements of Veird, for sure.

Erick experimented with Destruction versus Annihilation versus Void, seeing what the real differences were. He had never done much with Destruction before, either, so this was a good use of his time, too.

The Annihilation form of Elemental Destruction was cleaner than Destruction because Annihilation had a singular purpose to it, which was erasing everything, while Destruction was kinda… weaker? Well. No. Destruction was used in [Cleanse]. Destruction turned matter into thick air, into mana. Thus, Destruction was good for creation, because it left behind stuff that was useful to make more stuff.

Annihilation was more like Void in that it erased everything that it could erase, but it was certainly more destructive than Void because Void sought to make voids in the world where nothing existed. But the edges of Void still existed. Annihilation came through, erasing itself and everything as it tried to escape confinement all the time and then eat the world.

At the end of 20 minutes, Erick was done with his experiments.

Then he wrangled Annihilation into a few different spells, putting them into Benevolence crystals in his soul, but every third or fourth time he tried pressing that button the spell broke apart. It took him another 15 minutes before he managed to make some spells that did not break apart when he rapidly ‘tapped’ them.

Erick temporarily turned himself into a disco-dragon of darker-than-black beams of Annihilation that spun around his body, at his command, and carved the world up like a cheesemaker cutting curd.

Then came thousands of little Bolts of black.

Finally, Erick pointed his power at a mountain in the far distance.

Here now was the ‘greatest’ of these new Annihilation spells.

A dot of black shot from Erick’s aura, and all the world whined at its passing. Air twisted. The sky fell into the dot. And the dot kept going.

The Black Dot struck the mountain and then splashed outward, upward, downward, in every direction, cloying at the entire mountain and then going further, deeper, the mountain collapsing, the atmosphere draining down into that collapse in a rapid, yet controlled manner. The world did not implode and then explode in the destruction of one large mountain. The world simply settled down into a new configuration around a new crater a good ten kilometers deep.

Erick nodded.

He was happy with these new spells.

Annihilation Bolt, instant, super long range, 500/1 mana/reson

A bolt of annihilation inexorably strikes a target, attempting to erase the target from existence.

Annihilation Beam, instant, super long range, 1,000/2 mana/resons

A beam of annihilation aims at your discretion, attempting to erase all caught in the beam from existence.

Annihilation Dot, instant, super long range, 10,000/100 mana/resons

A cleaner version of a spell from long ago, but made with annihilation and updated for new threats. The Dot will destroy a large swath of the world designated at the time of casting. If the Dot is prevented from doing this, it will destroy itself instead.

Erick left behind the new crater in the world and headed back to House Benevolence.

He dropped out of his draconic self, reentering his offices at the top of the main structure, his glowthreads wrapping around his body once again as he went to the office where he had set up the [Cascade Imaging] diagrams.

Ta’Kamoil was not there.

Erick already saw him down in the command center, looking over the [Cascade Imaging] that Erick had put up earlier. Some engineers and other mages were looking it all over alongside Ta’Kamoil, discussing the spellwork, figuring out how it worked, for real. Ta’Kamoil hadn’t been kidding when he had said he simply hadn’t gotten around to doing that yet, but now that Erick had asked for his time he was getting to work on this specific project instead of the tens of other things he had to work on.

The Overseer had left some paperwork behind in Erick’s office, though.

A note rested on top of the papers.

So this all looks like it will work, but the real question is the one you posed about how such a scanning magic could be traced back to its source, making the whole scan vulnerable to corruption and such. The only real answer to that concern is located in Scry Theory.

In a short ways: Make the scanning magic easily disrupted so that the Scry won’t be able to be traced back to the original spell. This is the common way to make Scry magics, because those sorts of magics always do open the user up to Bad Things.

This will not work for the deep connections you’re trying to establish with a truly powerful Imaging spellwork, though, which could allow you to cast spells through this Scry Magic. In my opinion, you should leave the two spells separate. Make a better Imaging with Scry Theory and the ‘curved through infinity’ power. Make another, much more hidden and actively-defensive spellwork to allow that mainframe spell to power other spells. Gate Theory is much more useful for that sort of spellwork than Scry Theory. You might need to make gate nodes.

Erick rapidly read the full diagrams and workings that Ta’Kamoil had left in the rest of the paperwork…

And then he paused.

Yeah.

Using a special core of himself, with some magics in it, would be a great way to do this thing.

And yet…

“I’m recreating [Familiar] but more complicated, aren’t I.”

Erick had a long think about all that.

He came to the conclusion that he was not about to have another child. Not in the middle of a war. Probably not for a long time, too, and if he used his core along with a bunch of soul work and other magics then he might just make a [Familiar]…

Erick missed Ophiel—

Oh, gods, did Erick miss Ophiel.

Erick sat there for a while, thinking about Ophiel, and how they hadn’t gotten the chance to spend much time together after his birth. Did he still have a mana debt? He probably did. Was he rescuing people and getting himself killed? Probably.

Erick would have fallen deeper down a thought hole, but his expanded senses caught sight of something far, far below the ground level of House Benevolence, entering into the massive cavern that Erick had created down there to keep eyes open below the city. It was a gooey thing. Some sort of blood ooze had erupted out of the ground unexpectedly, and then it kept coming. Pretty soon a ten-Olympic-pool-sized animated blood occupied a tiny part of the underground. Red glop flowed, and spotlights on the cavern roof locked on the creature. The creature froze, its gelatin, red body crystallizing into rock in that moment, as though it was trying to pretend it was nothing special.

Or maybe it was thinking.

And then the creature screamed and turned around, vanishing back into the hole it had made in the bare dirt.

The bombardment from the underground turrets struck the hole a second later, caving in the hole.

Erick tracked the ooze for a few more kilometers as it raced down and away from House Benevolence, back through the caverns it had made to approach, to attack. Erick chose to ignore the ooze when it got really far, for he would have needed to pull his sight from other areas to keep looking at the blood ooze.

Erick turned back to his work.

He missed Ophiel.

He was not going to make another [Familiar].

He chose to go the more complicated, non-sapient route with [Cascade Imaging]. The ‘better scanner’ was easy enough to make using Scry Theory and curve-through-infinity resonwork, so that is where he started.

Instead of one giant ball of cascading light in the sky above the Imaging, Erick went with countless smaller cascaders that all worked together and through many different spectrums of light and sensory magics to produce a coherent image at a given location.

He did have to use [Conjure Force Elemental] tuned to be more like [Conjure Benevolence Book Elemental], though, to make the spellwork actually work as desired. It wasn’t a [Familiar] at all, but more like that old spell of [Summon Jewels], his rad-collector spellwork from long ago. He also ended up using [Scry], because of course the spell needed [Scry]. That put his spellwork at 2 parts of the 3 part recipe for [Familiar].

Not the big piece, though. Not [Telepathy].

Knowing what Erick now knew about [Telepathy] having a Mark of the Fractal Universe inside, the fact that this spell was missing [Telepathy] pretty much ensured that it wasn’t sapient, and it would never become sapient.

Book Magic, Scry Magic, Particle Magic, Light Magic, [Ward] and Illusion for display purposes, [Renew] for adjustment purposes, and resonwork, all eventually came together into a working, cohesive whole, 15 hours after Erick started attacking this specific problem. He cast the spell four different ways before he decided on how he was actually going to make the imager, and also the next version of this particular magic.

– – – –

On a plateau outside of the city, Erick stood as a dragon under the dim light of the ‘night’ that sometimes took hold of this land of Slaver’s Den. The sky was still bright, but the world was cooler and the land was dimmer.

And then the light began to return to the land in a gradual brightening. Day was coming.

And Erick spoke,

“Of knowledge vast, this woven art,

“To make all seen, through realms apart.

“Spectrums plied, viewed true and keen

“Touch the sky, and sights convene.”

Erick wove his aura and Benevolence as he worked and Benevolence worked with him, ten thousand bits of power and creation flowing on its own, into positions and into alterings, and throughout his soul. Much like how Erick had created [Grand Reincarnation] in his soul without actually making that magic himself, this magic did the same.

Text appeared.

Infinite Imaging, instant + time, special range, 500/10 mana/resons per Cascader

Conjure a cascader that will build up an image of a greater surrounding area over the course of a minute, or less. Resulting map lasts until dismissed. Recasting Infinite Imaging on the same location will create more cascaders that will network together to make the image clearer faster, to scan from multiple directions, and to extend the range of this spellwork.

All cascaders linked to the same image work together.

If you designate a target, then the image might show that target.

If you designate a search for a target in a different slice of infinity, or a different layer of infinity, then the resulting images generated on the map will be from that slice or layer. Costs of spellwork increased commensurately. This spell’s duration drops from ‘unending’ to 100 minutes when used in this way.

+1 resons added to cost per Slice pierced.

+100 resons added to cost per Layer pierced.

And then the magic appeared.

A soft white mist glowed in front of Erick, while a bright white orb flashed into existence high overhead. As the orb above cast waves of dissipating power into the world, that power echoed out there and came back to the light. The ‘cascader’ began to inform the mist in front of Erick. That mist slipped into place here and there, rapidly forming a map of the surrounding area.

Erick smiled.

He cast the spell a few more times to test it out. He designated stuff that he knew should work first, like his own DNA. Soon, there was Erick’s body glowing in the center of the Imager map, while softer blues were back in town, with a lot of blues on his perch at the top of the House. He was kinda surprised that he still shed DNA like that, but he had built this body to be ‘normal’, so yeah, he shed DNA like a normal person. Kinda nice to see, actually. Made him feel somewhat grounded.

Erick flicked through a few more searches, like ‘blood’ and ‘plants’ and such, and all those normal options still worked as expected, and then he searched for something he knew that [Cascade Imaging] could not do; he searched for Elemental Evil.

With great joy, Erick watched as a great deal of the places beyond House Benevolence, a hundred kilometers away, lit up blue. He could search for intangibles, now.

Erick focused on finding Elemental Evil and also Elemental… Hmm. Stone? Sure. Elemental Stone and Evil, and make it a dual search.

The map shifted, and Elemental Evil remained, while Elemental Stone appeared as well, and the colors shifted. Elemental Evil turned black on the map, while Elemental Stone turned yellow. Evil was black? Eh. Erick supposed it was black in reality, so it was black on the map, too. Much of the land here turned yellow, but it was a thin yellow, as though the Elemental Stone in the land wasn’t that dense at all, and it wasn’t, so that made sense. The spots of black out there were pretty thick, though.

Erick looked into the sky where the cascader continued to image the land…

Erick cast the spell again, and this time he designated an image of the land about 750 kilometers… that way, way beyond the edge of the current image, over by the city of Den, the main city of Slaver’s Den. He did not see the cascader come into being, but he certainly saw when the imager populated with more fog in front of him. That fog rapidly coalesced into another image of more land, all the way beyond the edges of the current image, and the two images flowed together to form one.

The city of Den and the hundreds of kilometers of land around it rapidly came into focus. That image gained the search parameters of the Evil and Stone of the previous cascader command, too, and soon Den was a showcase of black dots and a whole lot of thin yellow everywhere.

Erick switched the search to ‘Dragon’. House Benevolence and himself lit up; a scattering of tiny blue dots on the field. He grinned at that. Long ago, he had been warned about searching for and then finding dragons, but his old [Cascade Imaging] couldn’t actually do that unless a dragon was in their draconic form. This one could find Elemental Dragon anywhere, though, in any form, because Erick’s Dragon had been Paradox’d into Benev—

Shadow stepped into the air beside the spellwork, saying, “That’s pretty neat.”

“I’ll have to figure out a way to make others able to interact with it but it should work a lot better than the Imaging we have in the command center.” Erick asked, “Got something you’d like to search for?”

Shadow was a short 2 meter woman floating amid a 40 meter-wide map, and she was also a tiny dot of blue next to Erick’s own dot of blue at the center. She felt like a whole lot more than who she was as she focused.

Shadow said, “Search for Powers, as in the designation made by Margleknot.”

“… Ah. Well. Let’s scan all of Slaver’s Den, actually, see if there are any out there.”

Erick pressed the button inside his soul that made more cascaders and soon the relatively small, 40-meter wide map, spread out wide, Benevolent white glows rapidly falling down into the shapes of cities and wastelands and forests and rivers and all sorts of places. Mountains, defensive structures, coliseums, and more and more cities, villages, villas hidden in the woods, castles on mountainsides, hidden ports on inland seas and one particularly tall sculpture out in the center of that sea. It was a sculpture of Captain Shackle, the demon Walara, and the pseudo-power Chains, all standing atop the backs of slaves, crushing them underfoot.

Erick looked at that sculpture for a moment. “I’m going to blow up that sculpture.”

“You should leave it until the end and then blow it up. It’s more demoralizing that way.” Shadow added, “And you can make that your final ritual to officially make this land ours.”

“That’s a good option, too.” Erick studied the map for a few more moments, before he declared, “No Powers out there besides you and I, but this isn’t that conclusive.”

“Scanning magic never is. Are you really going to make the zealot zombies you’re planning on?”

Erick skipped past asking her how she knew of that, when he had been purposefully vague about all of his musings and diagrams in the air. Obviously Erick was being spied upon, but…

Had Shadow been listening in at the classroom with the ex-slaves? Maybe Erick had leaned too far into appeasing them, and yet… He had been going for a double-misdirect sort of thing there, but… He wasn’t very good at all that stuff and he probably never would be. That was fine. He didn’t like doing that sort of thing, anyway.

Erick asked, “Do you feel I shouldn’t?”

“I feel that the best thing to do is to be as ruthlessly caring as you can be, and this spellwork might be exactly that.” Shadow pulled out a rather large book from Elsewhere. It was bound in gold, iron, and platinum spider legs, and it looked ancient and yet brand new. Erick tried inspecting it with his various senses, and the only thing that worked was visual sight. She floated the book into the air in front of her, toward Erick, saying, “It’s a Book of Beings and Non-Beings. What you want to make is in there, and this book will help you find the line between a magical effect that makes a person, and a magical effect that you can erase when you’re done with it. When you’re done reading it, it will come back to me, but it would be better if you would hand it back to me yourself. Only open it when you’re sure you’re alone, too. Anyone else reading it will be turned inside out and made into an abomination. It’ll try to do the same to you, of course, but it will fail.”

Erick shrunk down into a person and took the book in a hand, and then he looked to Shadow, floating there above the Image of Slaver’s Den with him, all the world like a map of white light around them. Freely giving information was… Well it was a pretty nice courtship gesture, Erick decided.

Erick smiled softly, and said, “I suppose I should gift my Queen a fitting exchange. Do you have a desire?”

Shadow chuckled, grinning. “You’re already doing it, Erick.”

And then she stepped away into Elsewhere, vanishing from sight and senses.

Erick looked to the side, to the map. Shadow’s little blue dot reappeared at House Benevolence. Erick smiled at that, and then he shifted the big map to search for Evil. The entire map of Slaver’s Den repopulated with blue, all the way to the edges of the continent where these lands melded into other lands, far beyond sight.

And then he held up his hand and canceled the spell, crushing a facsimile of it in his grip, giant white claws breaking every cascader out there and the image floating before him.

Erick turned attention to the ‘Book of Beings and Non-Beings’, looking the metal thing over, and then Erick turned to lightning. He moved away from where he had been to wrap himself in a [Hasted Shelter] and a few other magics, to settle down onto a [Force Platform] before he opened the book.

Golden, silvered iron unwrapped from the book’s cover like spider legs pulling back from a web, the whole book radiating a vicious power briefly, knocking off a few hundred thousand points from Erick’s Mana, Health, and Psyche, before the damage settled down to a low-drain. The pages beyond the first were filled with information that jumbled for a while, before it settled down, and Erick could make sense of the swirling words.

It read to him:

That’s a complicated magic you have in mind.

Ah? A sapient book?

Maybe.

Erick couldn’t see its soul.

The book extended its spider-leg-like clasps and set down on the [Force Platform] before it opened wider, the smallish book expanding till each side of the book was a meter square. Pages flipped until the book reached somewhere closer to the back than the front. Spell diagrams began to appear alongside images of the creation of the spell.

They were four-meter tall sexless warriors with crowns of burning light and swords for wings. Two long arms ended in large hands with larger claws.

Words appeared.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Is this the general idea?

“More or less? Yeah. I guess that kinda works.”

Please read the marked chapters and then we can iterate on this idea.

The book closed. Eight bookmarks, each in a different color, fluttered down from between the pages. The book then opened up to the first bookmark.

… This was a pretty neat book.

Erick started reading the section titled, ‘Making magic, not minions’.

It turned out to be a pretty good place to start, even if it was mostly a refresher course.

– – – –

Erick alighted upon yet another plateau far away from the city.

He was in his human form, and wearing normal clothes.

It had been four subjective days since he started reading the Book of Beings and Non-Beings, though it had only been 2 real days. He had needed to take some breaks now and then in order to establish his new [Infinite Imaging] inside the House, and to prevent a few smaller attacks here and there. The Imaging in the House was already hooked up to the command center and working quite well; a lot better than [Cascade Imaging] did, and probably because this one had been designed to be more friendly. What truly made it easier was that Erick had figured out a way to allow someone to channel mana into a runic web that cast another cascader into the Image. From there, it was just a matter of personal ability to use some basic Elemental Book, and the rest was all computer engineering stuff from the engineers and Ta’Kamoil. They added a whole bunch of new functionality to the new Imaging, enabling the command center to function very, very well.

Slaver’s Den didn’t seem to have an answer for the new version of [Cascade Imaging], either, which was great. A whole bunch of previously unseeable places were now fully revealed down at the command center, and Querkooda was busy at work charting out new threats and responses and war plans.

Slaver’s Den didn’t seem capable of stopping the new cascaders at all. They saw the glowing white orbs, of course; those brilliant cascaders were impossible to miss. But when they approached those orbs with any sort of power at all, the orbs popped. Erick was pretty sure that someone would eventually come up with some ways to attack through those ‘scry orbs’ or block them well, but that was true of all Scry Magic; there was no be-all-end-all solution to the ever-evolving arms race of Scry versus anti-Scry magic.

For now, it worked well.

And now Erick was going to make the Absolute Grand Violence war magic he had originally set out to make.

… He thought of Solomon again.

And then Erick dove into his soul and copied [Infinite Imaging]. With eyes half-lidded and his soul holding onto the copy of [Infinite Imaging], Erick spoke as he adjusted the power inside of him,

“With incantations, weave the base,

“A canvas for all spells to trace.

“Through solidity of magic streams,

“Here holds a power; frightful schemes.”

The copy of [Infinite Imaging] shifted inside of Erick, becoming something simpler, but only vaguely, like turning a computer into a monomolecular wire. The new spell held a promise of endings in a way few of Erick’s spells ever did, because this was the spell that Erick had told himself he would never make. This was a spell that was, perhaps, worse than attaching [Luminous Beam] to [Cascade Imaging], because he could attach any spell to this one.

Erick pulled out of his soul and summoned the new spell to the forefront of his mind.

Words appeared.

Spellsurge Weave, instant + time, special range, 500/10 mana/resons per weaver + Special Cost

Conjure a weaver that will build up an image of a greater surrounding area over the course of a minute, or less. Resulting map lasts until dismissed. Recasting Spellsurge Weave on the same location will create more weavers that will network together to make the image clearer faster, to scan from multiple directions, and to extend the range of this spellwork.

All weavers linked to the same image work together.

If you designate a target, then the image might show them.

Each Spellsurge Weave image is a magic completely unto itself, made at the time of casting, for each main cast of Spellsurge Weave will accept 1 imbued spell from the caster that must be a spell that exists within the caster’s soul. Freeform magic is not accepted. Targets of that imbued spell can be changed by casting Spellsurge Weave again, but the imbued spell cannot be changed once imbued.

Spellsurge Weave will support the imbued spell as it is able, acting as a Node Network for that supported spellwork.

Erick breathed out as he read over [Spellsurge Weave]. The words said a lot, but the actual spell would do so much more than what it said it would do.