Chapter 70: Experimentation

Kaius stared at the blood that rocketed from his hand, spraying down the front of the desk. Splattering on his carefully arrayed notes. He spun in his seat, turning away from the desk to spill blood on the floor, groaning as agony lanced through his hand.

Porkchop was on him in a flash. “Kaius! What the fuck!”

He grunted. Feeling as his health flooded out to treat the injury. Before it could reach it, he snatched it up in his grip with single minded focus. Ignoring his pain

**Ding! Rapid Adaptation has reached level 19!**

This was an opportunity, one that he couldn’t let go to waste.

Much like he had in his fight with the Grimclaw, Kaius directed the health to the wound manually. Feeling the shattered bone and torn flesh, he diffused the resource, knitting structures back together. Bone was first, the framework for everything that came after. Then came ligaments and connective tissue. He suppressed a heave as he felt as snakes of white filament crawled across bone. Muscles rippled, weaving themselves back over. Then his skin. Pain vanished.

Taking a deep breath, he clenched his hand into a fist, twiddling his fingers to make sure they all moved right. That was one of the main struggles with manual healing. If you messed up you could inadvertently cripple yourself. Requiring you to reinjure and try again.

Still, he’d done well enough, and his hopes had been realised.

**Ding! General Skill Available! Would you like to learn: Fast Healing (Rare)?**

He grinned. A little earlier than he had expected, but a welcome addition all the same. The first of the skills he needed for Lesser Regeneration.

“Sorry about that.” He said. Porkchop shot him a look. “What?! I said it was volatile.”

“You might have stressed that you might be blowing up your HAND!” Porkchop yelled at him.

“I’m fine, see?” He held up his left hand, twiddling his fingers. “Besides, I got one of my next skills! Now if you’ll excuse me, I should go fetch a towel before I ruin any of my notes.”

Leaving Porkchop standing there staring at him in shock, Kaius hurried off to grab something to mop up his blood.

He really didn’t want to have to copy his notes again.

…

Dabbing at the blood on the desk, Kaius’s eyes roved over his latest skills description.

Fast Healing:

Level 1

Rare

Tis’ but a scratch.

Increases the flow rate of your Health pool, drastically increasing healing speeds.

Each level minutely increases the rate at which Health is expended to heal wounds.

Well, at the very least he would be getting some good use out of it. He doubted that his little accident would be the only one to happen while he worked on his formation, and they were likely to get worse as he managed to get further and further through the process.

After cleaning up the blood as well as he could, Kaius sat back down at the desk and prepared to jump right back into inscribing his body formation. He pushed his papers back to the far edge of the desk. In all likelihood, there would be more failures, and he wanted his notes outside of the splash zone.

Laying his hand back down on its surface he grimaced slightly at the tackiness left behind after his little accident. This time he was extra careful to make sure his arm was perfectly comfortable. He had no intention of letting simple discomfort be the reason he failed his inscription.

Taking a deep breath to steady himself, Kaius swept up his stylus, starting the Sovereign sigil with gusto. Now that he was prepared for the stinging violation of his stylus slicing through his metaphysical flesh, he stayed steady. Whorling loops followed his implement, standing clear to his True Sight.

Despite his nerves, he refused to rush. It might have been taxing. Exhausting his will as he held the sigil clear in his mind, splitting his focus to hold the saturated mana stable in his arm. It was worth it, this was an exercise in precision, not speed.

Even with his careful pace, he still finished the sigil far faster than he had the first time. More confident in his abilities, and the way the stylus interacted with his malleable flesh. With careful focus he let mana flood the runic working, clamping down to hold it steady in the confines of the central array.

After a minute to ensure it had stabilised, that his focus was clear enough to add yet another point of failure to the mix, he moved on.

Finger-length by finger-length, a dense scrawl of Vhaxanish script began to encircle the central sigil. It was a band maybe half a finger in width, a dozen dozen rings of impossibly small words. Sentences of control, structures of transference. It stretched his dexterity, pushed the limits of his fine motor control. It was by far the densest runic working he had ever done by multiple orders of magnitude.

**Ding! Runic Lexicon has reached level 6!**

His pace slowed to a crawl. The dense working requiring all of his focus. He didn’t even try to keep the entire thing in his mind, instead returning to look at his notes after every word, each made up of up to a hundred complex runes. Despite his focus, his flow, there was only one thought that stood dominant at the front of his mind.

He REALLY fucking hated Vhaxanish. It was so painful to use he was of half a mind to categorise it as a form of offensive mind magic. Even having preplanned the entire working, the grammar was so complex, its runes so subtly different, that every stroke of his stylus threatened to ruin the entire working with a single mistake. Because of course Vhaxanish was inflexible to the point that a single error would be more than enough to break the entire array.

It was a nightmare of a time, having to ensure that he slowed his pace low enough that the channelled drain of his stylus kept pace with his mana pool. He couldn’t allow it to start to eat into the mana he was keeping locked in his hand.

Somehow he managed. Holding his focus rigid enough to keep his arm saturated, his Sovereign sigil stable, and still scribe the Vhaxanish control array. Nearly a full three hours later he was finished. He sat back, dropping his stylus to the desk with numb fingers to wipe at his sweat sodden forehead. Still making sure to take perfect care not to shift the hand that he had planted flat on the desk.

**Ding! Runic Lexicon has reached level 7!**

..

**Ding! Runic Lexicon has reached level 10!**

He had to admit, despite all its problems Vhaxanish was a pretty script. Sharp and austere, the densely packed circles of runic sentences hung black against his skin. Looking much like an impossibly sharp and defined tattoo. Each ring of runes was small enough that he imagined it would probably look solid black from a distance to someone without an ocular skill.

Now for the moment of truth.

He suffused the array with mana, letting the density in his arm rush inwards, controlling it with his will. So far so good. The dense rings of black script started to light up, line by line.

**Ding! Mana Manipulation has reached level 7!**

Suddenly, his Mana hit… something. There was a surge. A crack.

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He’d made a mistake. FUCKING Vhaxanish!

The array destabilised, blowing a hole clean through Kaius’s palm . Agony surged, blood and viscera splattering through the air.

“Son of a BITCH!” Kaius screamed, yanking his hand away from his precious notes. Cradling it to his chest as health surged to heal the gaping wound. Moving with far more speed than before he had acquired his latest skill.

**Ding! Fast Healing has reached level 2!**

Evidently Porkchop was confident that he would be fine, because all he heard was the sharp cackle of his friend laughing at his misfortune.

….

Getting the control array to stabilise ended up taking two full weeks. Two. Weeks. Of frustration, agony, and bloody minded determination to throw himself into the wall he had stumbled into until it broke. If the confusing and overly complicated nature of the script wasn’t enough, he’d discovered a new problem with Vhaxanish. The actual runes were pretty stable.