Blessed Time: The Complete Series: (A LitRPG Adventure Box Set), page 21
Luckily, those four months passed quickly and productively. Ikanthar literally never spoke to him during that time. Servants would fetch him and ensure that Micah was dressed appropriately before ushering him off to a much larger laboratory, where he would perform the same ritual time and time again. At some point, when Ikanthar was a beautiful and vibrant young woman, she stopped appearing, and one by one, Micah found himself casting the spell on a series of geriatric senior Knights.
Transferring energy for the Knights wasn’t nearly as beneficial to his research as the times he’d performed the ritual on Ikanthar herself, but it hardly mattered. By that point, Micah had already created most of the theoretical framework for a ritual to harness the temporal energy. He wouldn’t be able to cast the ritual before reverting the timeline—too many eyes were on him at all times—but the Knights provided ample research material he needed to polish off his final draft.
He didn’t know for sure what the difference between Ikanthar and the Knights was. Maybe it was her total level eclipsing theirs or her status as a Chosen of Katton, God of Fire and Forge, but for some reason, the energy flowing from her was just on another level. He hoped that when the time came, it wouldn’t matter, but really there would only be one way to find out. In his next life, he would need to do everything he could to avoid falling into her grasp once again.
He looked up at the ceiling of his room. It was two hours past midnight, and the moon was high in the night sky. Hopefully, Mursa would be looking down on him—a minute was a long time to wait while trapped amongst enemies. The guard had long since changed and none were nearby. Just in case, he’d pushed one of his bookshelves in front of the door.
“Blessed Return.” The voice, not his own, issued forth from Micah’s mouth and time began to blur.
TWENTY-NINE
RITUALIST
Micah opened his eyes. He was thirteen for the third time.
Rolling over, he buried his face in his pillow and screamed out his frustration until his tiny frame was breathless and red. Two years of biting his tongue and serving as a slave for the Golden Drakes and the Royal Knights. Two years of smiling at his family while Brenden’s mocking eyes bored into his back. Two years of betraying everything his parents had raised him to be on a fundamental and systematic level.
He rolled over and looked at the wooden ceiling of his childhood bedroom, his breath coming in ragged sobs. Those last few months when he’d been treated as nothing more than a piece of meat had tested him. It had taken everything Micah had in him to not mouth off. Maybe he’d even have gotten lucky and one of the Knights would have killed him. Only the knowledge that he had a way out of his servitude had kept Micah going.
This time, things would be different.
He stood up, stretching his scrawny limbs and shuddering in the morning air. Weak. Defenseless. With a creak, the bedroom door slid open and Micah whipped around, his heart pounding in his chest. Esther’s hand, pudgy with baby fat, was barely visible inside the entryway.
“Come on in,” he said, relaxing slightly. Mentally, Micah made a note to act more like an actual thirteen-year-old. Emotionally, he might be twenty-three, but everyone would expect age-appropriate behaviors.
Shyly, Esther slipped into the room, her eyes on her socks. When she spoke, her voice was soft, the consonants stretching out in a childish lisp.
“I heard you yell.” She shuffled her socks across the hardwood floor. “I wanted to make sure there wasn’t a mouse or spider scaring you.”
Micah smiled at Esther as he crossed the small room to meet her. Whatever else may come, this was what he was fighting for. These little islands of normalcy in an uncaring ocean of chaos and danger.
“And what would you do if there was a mouse?” Micah asked, reaching down to tousle her hair. “That would be pretty scary.”
“I’d get Trevor!” Esther exclaimed proudly. “He’s big, and he said that if there were any kids being mean to me or any monsters, he’d fight them. He’s going to be an aven shurer.”
“What about me?” Micah feigned outrage. There was just something about Esther’s attempts at heroism that melted the years of stress and nightmares. “I’m pretty strong and I’m going to be an adventurer too.”
“But Trevor beats you every time you race or wrestle,” Esther replied dubiously, inspecting his stick-thin arms. “Even Becky beat you last week when you tried to race her, and she’s a girl. I think I’ll call Trevor if there’s a monster.”
Micah winced as Esther wriggled from his grasp and ran out of the room, apparently satisfied that there wasn’t a spider or rat in his bedroom. He’d forgotten that Becky, the tomboy daughter of a neighbor, had been his rival until he began working for Keeper Ansom. Of course, the word “rival” overstated Micah’s role in the relationship. Becky trounced him fairly thoroughly every time they tried to compete.
Frowning slightly, Micah pulled out the Folio and paged to his previous memories of Becky. Sure enough, she received a combat-related blessing and became an adventurer for the Sword Disciples. They were a mid-tier guild like the Lancers, and as of the end of his first timeline, she’d been put in charge of a low-level team. Even with a Mythic Blessing, she’d managed to one-up him once again.
Closing the Folio, he sighed. He truly did have the build and reflexes of a spellcaster. Both Trevor and Becky grew up with the muscle and agility of melee combatants, but even after all of his work in the previous timeline, he’d barely reached an above-average physique. It seemed that leadership escaped his grasp once again. After all, it was hard to earn the respect of an adventuring party casting spells from the back line.
Once again, he’d have to go through all the awkwardness of puberty while working out and trying to temper himself. He certainly wasn’t excited about another four years of body aches, hormonally destabilized moods, and cracking voices.
Still, having to start from scratch was better than being trapped by the Royal Knights. Micah had learned his lesson there. Without backing, if he revealed the extent of his gift, some powerful force would swoop in and exploit him. He couldn’t let that happen again. This time, he needed to find a way to defeat the Durgh alone.
It was time to see what tools he had to work with this time around. Micah called up his status.
Micah Silver
Age 13 [ERROR] / 23
Class/Level-XP
HP 8/8
Attributes
Body 4, Agility 3, Mind 9, Spirit 8
Attunement
Moon 4,Sun 1, Night 2
Mana
Moon 8/8, Sun2/2, Night 4/4
Affinities
Time 10
Wood 6
Air 5
Blessings
Mythic Blessing of Mursa - Blessed Return, Ageless Folio
Skills
Anatomy 7
Enchanting 6
Fishing 1
Herbalism 5
Librarian 4
Ritual Magic 14
Spear 7
-Wind Spear 2
Spellcasting 20
He tapped his chin contemplatively. His skill levels were high, even for someone at the 20th level. As awful as the Knights were, their methods were effective. Being forced to repeatedly cast rituals and spells that should have been beyond his abilities had done wonders for his skill growth. In fact, he was fairly close to the skill requirements for becoming a Thaumaturge. He just needed to upgrade his Enchanting skill by 4.
Summoning and opening the Folio once again, Micah turned to the page detailing Karin Dakkora’s ritual on energy transference and his theorized permutations to it. The three major uses he’d speculated on were using temporal energy to fulfill some or all of the attunement cost in enchanting, using temporal energy to fulfill some or all of the life force requirement for a summoning, and trying to find a way to weaponize Temporal Transfer.
The final method was well beyond his meager store of mana at the moment. After all, he’d need at least enough mana to initiate Temporal Transfer in order to begin siphoning temporal energy into a target. That said, the other two might be just what he needed to fight off the Durgh incursion.
In his last life, Micah had focused on ritual magic, but he had managed to develop enough of a base in enchanting at the Academy due to the similarity of the two fields to know that attunement was an enchanter’s primary problem. Almost every enchantment took at least a half-point of attunement, with more powerful enchantments taking multiple full points.
He could gain a point of Moon attunement fairly quickly by “learning” a first-tier spell, but beyond that, as a thirteen-year-old, Micah didn’t really have a good way of gaining more attunement. Goods were given to youths for free, but by the same token, no one in their right mind would buy an object from him lest they incur Luxos’ wrath for undermining the monetary system.
If he was going to become a Thaumaturge, Micah would need to gain 4 points in Enchanting without earning a single level. That meant perfecting his modification to the temporal transference ritual. The only way he would be able to gain those skill levels was by dramatically decreasing the attunement cost of new enchantments.
Sighing, Micah closed the book. The worst part was that he’d need to do all of this while maintaining a normal schedule. His family would wonder if he didn’t get an apprenticeship, so it would be off to Keeper Ansom’s library once again for him.
Despite being productive, the following months left bags under Micah’s eyes. The library contained the basic books on ritual magic and enchantment theory he needed to finish adapting the ritual, but beyond that, they were more or less a waste of time. He’d already learned most of what he needed at the Royal Academy, and almost everything he hadn’t already committed to memory was safely transcribed in the Folio.
The nights, on the other hand, were of great use. Almost casually, he set up teleport beacons in his bedroom and at the dire stoat’s cave, the large weasel posing almost no threat to him. Air Knife wasn’t a particularly powerful spell, but at his level of Spellcasting and skill level in the spell, even with the meager handful of mana available to Micah as a classless Blessed, he easily murdered the creature from a distance.
Defeating the dire stoat and reclaiming the cave was tedious rather than a challenge due to Micah’s skill levels. Once he set himself up in the cave, Micah began procuring the animals he’d need to further his experiments.
Night by night, he accumulated creatures, either by catching them in a series of live traps or by purchasing them at the market and ferrying them out to the forest. They weren’t powerful magically, generally being young and inexperienced, but with practice, he was just barely able to touch the temporal energy in them.
Surprisingly, he gained an extra point of Moon attunement the first time he successfully performed the transfer ritual. Somewhere out there, Mursa was watching and rewarding Micah for his research.
It wasn’t as much of a success as he’d hoped, dropping the price of enchanting a bolt of his father’s cloth to make it more lustrous and durable from one-third of an attunement point to one-tenth of a point, but Micah took it as a sign that Mursa smiled upon his efforts. Strange, really—he’d expected a more negative response from the stories told about Karin Dakkora.
After that, he replicated the ritual as often as possible, transferring the age and experience from his collection of geese and raccoons—two months at a time—into enchanting a series of knickknacks.
Without a class, Micah didn’t have the mana to make anything truly powerful, but that didn’t mean that his efforts were fruitless. After almost two months, he’d gained 3 points in Enchanting and developed a collection of costume jewelry and cheap blades that could perform minor but useful effects.
Nothing too powerful, but enough to catch a merchant’s eye if Micah could risk the attention. A ring that would pulse in the presence of poison. A belt buckle that would aid digestion. A necklace that created a bubble of air around the user’s head on command, letting them breathe underwater for a period of time or avoid gaseous attacks.
Unfortunately, Micah had a problem. He was beginning to run low on attunement, having burned through most of the points he’d gained from successfully “learning” ritual magic and enchanting. He couldn’t afford to waste more attunement on minor enchantments powered by inefficient transfers of temporal energy from younger creatures.
Luckily, he had a goal. In a nearby grove lived a great stag. Once upon a time, it must’ve been a king of the forest, chasing any other buck from its does with ease, but now, age had caught up with it.
Its former red-brown coat was gray, fur falling off in clumps due to sickness and malnutrition to reveal the wrinkled skin beneath. It was more than a match for Micah physically, but then again, what wasn’t? With the aid of his magic, Micah hoped to capture the creature in order to use its temporal energy in a grand enchantment that would push his skill level up to 10.
The Saturday of the hunt began like any other, with Micah making an excuse to Trevor and Esther about why he couldn’t play with them despite being off work at his apprenticeship followed by performing the teleportation ritual out to his cave. Almost immediately, he began working on a very particular ritual, one he’d seen Brenden perform dozens of times but had never tried himself.
Regretfully, he dragged over the cages he’d made for the pair of badgers that he’d trapped almost a month ago. He preferred using temporal energy to the more traditional way of performing rituals, but the first time through a dangerous casting wasn’t the time to substitute. After all, if this didn’t go perfectly, he would almost certainly die without someone on hand to protect him.
Opening the Folio, he began the ritual, slashing open his forearm to drop blood all along the outside of the circle. His voice took on a strange resonance as it began to mix and interact with principles far outside the visible world. A strange pressure began to build around Micah, and reality thinned. For a brief second, he glimpsed into a formless and chaotic beyond, just a sideways step from Karell, but Micah closed his eyes and refused to let it distract him.
Then it came time for the sacrifice. He plunged the dagger into one badger after another. Over the past month of him continually rejuvenating the animals, they’d become tame, almost pets. It pained him to betray them, but a ritual of this magnitude called for blood and life. The weak souls of the badgers wouldn’t provide much of an anchor, but they were by far the best medium he had on hand.
The darkness of the page parted like a curtain as a large, hairy hand reached out from somewhere else and grasped onto empty air. With a bestial howl, it pulled itself forward, staggering onto its hands and knees. The gap in existence winked out behind it as it stood up, almost nine feet in height. The Onkert daemon was just as he remembered it, with the snarling maw of a wolf placed on top of the huge and well-muscled body of a gorilla.
Micah sighed, only to quirk his mouth slightly when he received a point of Moon attunement. The ritual was successful, and the Onkert would follow his every command until its anchor—the anima of a pair of badgers—faded.
He had between fifteen and twenty minutes. He’d have to hurry if he planned to catch the stag that quickly.
THIRTY
A THIRD CLASS
Micah gasped for breath as he tried to follow the galloping Onkert daemon. He’d gotten close enough to the stag to wound it with an Air Knife, slashing open its leg and leaving a blood trail for the daemon to follow, but his tiny body couldn’t keep up. The Onkert barreled through the forest, digging its armored knuckles into the soil as it shouldered past old-growth trees and trampled underbrush.
Already he was only following his summon by sound and its path of destruction. The Onkert was far ahead of him, occasionally howling as it sought its injured quarry. Micah stopped for a second to catch his breath, his rail-thin arms and legs trembling from exertion. Idly, he hoped that the sound of the Onkert barreling through the forest scared away whatever else might be nearby. His tiny, sweat-soaked form wasn’t in any shape to fight off a particularly aggressive rabbit, let alone a boar, wolf, or monster.
A howl of triumph interrupted Micah’s panting. With a grunt, he pushed off of the tree he’d been resting against and began jogging down the trail left by the daemon. Hopefully, it would follow its commands and only subdue the stag. He’d never seen the Onkerts disobey Brenden, but this was also his first summoning. Only the Sixteen knew if the incantation binding its will was done completely correctly.
About four minutes later, Micah staggered into a clearing, sweat streaming down his body and his breath coming in short, ragged bursts. The daemon held the stag pinned to the forest floor, its slavering wolf jaws whining and snapping at it, but Micah’s will held it back. No matter how it tried, the daemon was unable to harm the majestic but aging creature.
Mentally, he assessed the time and sighed. There wasn’t energy left in the summoning ritual to drag the stag back to his cave before the Onkert dissipated. Micah began quickly pulling ingredients out of the backpack that had become the bane of his existence on the jog over. He didn’t look forward to it, but he would need to make a priority out of cardio once again. Getting winded from even this minor piece of exertion was downright embarrassing.
As efficiently as possible, Micah set up the transference ritual around the stag. It had given up struggling, exhausted from the chase, but now it was still, trapped under the Onkert’s weight. It eyed him warily as Micah traced a circle of quartz dust around it and began placing the reagents. He made his adjustments on the fly, judging the time of the ritual from the angle of the sun and hoping that his calculations were correct. Rituals weren’t meant to be performed without hours or even days of preparation, but Micah would only have one chance at this.
