Chapter 486 - Grow the cheese!

[Sixth symphony’s movements]

10% Maximum mana : A Graceful dream of Spring : 

Temporarily increase natural health and stamina regeneration by 20%. 

Prevents disease and illness.

Prevents food from spoiling.

Makes it easier to fall asleep. 

May affect the weather.

20% Maximum mana : A Tense mystery of Autumn :

Greatly sharpens the senses.

Makes it easier to concentrate, understand and memorize.

40% Maximum mana : A Regal festival of Summer :

All physical stats are improved by 10%.

Airborne Mana is fluidified.

Channeling speed of all magic is doubled.

80% Maximum mana : A Vengeful tyranny of Winter :

All damage received by the caster is inflicted upon everyone else as soul damage.

May dramatically affect the weather.

So many more effects to keep track of… Couldn’t the skill have been simple for once?! And it’s not even a sustained cost like [Runeforged Overlord] so it’s not halved by the scepter.

Alright, well. The effects are decent. The summer movement is especially interesting. I wonder what fluidified airborne mana is supposed to do.

Let’s try these out.

Sofia activated the Spring movement, and a tenth of her mana instantly left her body. A calm melody started playing, composed of a few different instruments and even an ethereal and distant voice singing softly in a language Sofia did not understand, seemingly coming from all directions. Despite the sudden mana loss, Sofia felt invigorated by the music.

Mana : 4 520 014 / 5 022 238 (4 520 014)

Her mana was stuck at 90%, expelling some more into the air, she checked her regeneration, it was not impacted. Then she looked around, trying to see the mana movements producing the music, thinking that it was weird how it moved by itself.

Interesting how this… Hey!

“It’s another curse!” Bookie exclaimed in shock, saying out loud what Sofia also just realized.

“It sure looks like one,” Sofia agreed, “This one does not spread to our mana though, it doesn’t even get absorbed, I think.”

“It’s just passing through me,” Bookie observed, looking at his hands, “It feels a bit good, Sofia.”

“Then it must be working well. Want to try the other ones?”

“Yes!”

I wonder if they can stack.

Without canceling the Spring movement, Sofia activated the Autumn one as well.

An additional twenty percent of her mana left her body, and a tenser version of the same melody started overlapping with the first one, a second, more hurried voice responding to the first one whenever it stopped singing.

They’re actually made with the overlap in mind? Worthy of a God’s craft, I suppose. This does make me feel like my mind is clearer somehow. I guess this one increases processing? 

It’s good, but in a battle my opponents also get the effects, don’t they? I can probably make the most out of extra processing compared to anyone at my level, though. Interesting tradeoff.

Mana : 3 515 566 / 5 022 238 (3 515 566)

“This one makes me feel smarter!” Bookie commented.

“Quite the nice curses, right? I wonder what Zerei will think of them.”

“I’m sure she will like them too! And the music is really nice!”

The movement of summer added another layer to the music, and while the effects of fluidified airborne mana were hard to really understand, and the physical stat boost was minimal, the channeling speed buff was absurd. It stacked multiplicatively with the [Hand of the first Saintomancer]’s halved channeling time. Sofia tested that it worked to reduce the time to carve an un-life rune from five to two and a half minutes, and the time to invoke the [Spine of the Black Sun] from a second and a half to less than a second.

Further testing uncovered that Sofia needed to have at least the same amount of mana in reserve that was going to be locked to activate a movement, which was not surprising, and that the soul attacks from the winter movement did not seem to affect Pareth nor Bookie at all, likely due to the Mark of Aphenoreth.

Sofia switched the skill activation around, leaving only the Spring movement active, “Well, there we go, two new skills. They’re quite good, if a bit situational. I say we stop with the serious topics for a while and get to work making this place a real home, how does that sound?”

“A bit more to the left, maybe?” Sofia said.

Pareth thought about it for a second, then nodded and pushed the bone closet slightly, Sofia could have moved it with [Bone dominus] but Pareth was enjoying carrying the furniture around so she let him do it. For now they were only focused on the amenities for the first floor, with Sofia making all kinds of sideboard, tables, chairs and such things with bones and letting Pareth do all the thinking when it came to arranging them around the rooms.

Bookie was in book form, resting on a shelf between a bunch of fake bone books, that made him feel at ease, apparently.

“Well, I should have made enough for most of the first floor, I’m going out to extend our garden,” Sofia told Pareth as she left the hall.

The explosion of the mana storage units had left nothing of the city past the now nonexistent shield that used to protect the castle, which meant the castle was sitting on a perfectly round bit of midenicite floating in the Margin’s void, and that was it. 

That might be enough space for a small garden but… The mana-trapping machine in the basement has the range to cover the size of the entire city, it’d be a waste not to use all this space.

I don’t have much bone left in stock… How does my armor work for filling the storage now that it’s made of ‘light’?

Sofia summoned her wings and tried to snap one off at the base.

Man, light bones are pretty solid, I don’t think I can break that without any strengthening effect. Dominus can still carve them effortlessly though. 

A bone wing made of solid light fell into Sofia’s hands, it was considerably lighter than she expected. Has my armor become this much lighter too? I didn't even notice the difference.

She stored the broken wing in her bone storage, watching as it already regrew behind her back. Then she took out the wing again.

“Still made of light. I don’t know why I expected it to turn into regular bone… Does it fuse well with real bone at least?”

Testing with some Pareth bones from her reserves, it did fuse just as usual, it just looked a bit weird as the opaque white bone melded with the slightly translucent golden bone.

The margin is already lit but I might as well still build with my own bones, golden is nice. The most crucial step is to make sure everything is strongly secured to the midenicite island. I’ll make it all one block of bone, and I guess I can drill holes into the island and insert bone rods in there to make sure it will never fall off…

Wasn’t there this thing about structural integrity, though?

Sofia looked inside of her storage ring.

Where did I put the architecture books… I knew this was a good buy.

Two weeks later, the castle’s main rooms were entirely furnished, in part by furniture Pareth had just made by himself with his own bones. Bookie had grabbed all of Sofia’s random stored metal and technological things, and spent his time ‘building things’ with the engineer skeleton. During this time Sofia had completely extended the castle grounds with a gigantic round bone platform spanning the entire radius of what used to be Zangdar city. 

“Whew, that took a while.” Sofia finally stopped as she just finished fusing the last bit of bone to complete the platform. “I’ll make the guardrails later…”

She sat on the spot, legs dangling above the void.

“Still, though, what’s taking Alith so long…”

Bookie, can you send me the Plant hero?

Sofia stood with the plant Hero before a large bone plant box filled with crushed bones mixed with blood and water.

“Are you really certain none of the seeds I have will grow here?” Sofia asked again, but the skeleton shook his head again, showing Sofia the wheel of cheese he had picked out from her reserves of food. This was Exidian cheese she really liked, and she only had two small wheels left so she was a bit reluctant to let the skeleton experiment with it, seeing as she might be stuck in the margin for a while still. “So this cheese really is the only thing you can grow in the margin on my necromancer dirt… You- I… You know what, do it, I don’t even know anymore, you have my permission, grow the cheese.” 

The plant hero pressed the cheese into a ball, then rolled it into a long log on the floor, before putting that on the gross soil. Then, with his two palms aimed at the thin log of cheese, he activated his magic. 

Rapidly, a fuzzy orange layer grew all over the cheese log, and wart-like growth started emerging and growing up, these turned out to be tentacle-like orange mushrooms, each growing to about the length of a finger. With the skeleton’s magical prowess, the entire plant box was covered in orange mushrooms in just a few minutes.  

“These are actually mushrooms, right?”

The skeleton nodded.

“They don’t look as bad as I feared when they started popping up. It’s a bit like… Thick orange grass? Do they do anything fancy?”

The Skeleton picked a mushroom from the lot and mimed eating it before holding it out for Sofia to grab.

“Oh. If it grows from cheese it does make sense that it’s edible.”

Sofia picked up the orange fungi and threw it into her mouth.

Hey! That’s actually really good! So this is where the aftertaste of the cheese comes from!

Sofia looked at the box of orange mushrooms with a look of newfound respect.

“I’m getting books on mushrooms next. Let’s make a few more planters of this to decorate a bit. It’s not much but that will have to do for now…”

Wait, no… I have another ‘Seed’ I could take care of now!

Pareth! Can you grab Bookie and come here?

Let’s raise our very own Dryad!