Saintess Summons Skeletons

Having returned to Ser’Extra, Sofia sat in the production chamber of her Lumian bone factory. With her better understanding of enchantments and Delicate’s help, she had been able to upgrade the production Skelems a bit. There was no longer a need to cut the bones to harvest them, as they were now programmed to discard everything from the pelvis down every three seconds like clockwork. As long as Sofia sat in the central spot surrounded by the Skelems, her close aura could hit all twenty of them at once. Between her aura’s passive skeleton healing and the improved healing bonus from [Radiant World Mirror], the Skelems healed for about 44% of their total health in three seconds, just enough to regrow their lower body in time for it to be discarded again.

Sofia caught all the bones from one batch and turned them semi-liquid for easier measurements.

About fifty liters for one batch.

Exactly one cubic meter a minute. Still a bit slow with how much the city foundations still need… But that will do, I just have to sit here more often. It’s good that Eve fortified the underground more with her dungeon or it might have all collapsed under the weight even with all the pillars I buried for support at the start…

Now back to the skills.

Gradually optimizing skills through repeated casts of [Stress-Test] was a long and boring process. On the other hand, working on [Summon Blood] was likely to be a months long endeavor in the best of cases.

Ugh… If I could just sit in a system toybox with a much faster time for a while…

Sofia pulled up the description of her own version of the skill.

[Paradise Toybox]: Who has never dreamed of a perfect world?

Creates an artificial reality according to your will.

WARNING: Essence of Yvraveteth required for safe use.

Using this skill without the required essence will instead cost mana.

In such cases, the artificial reality will be extremely unstable and will not function as intended.

Possible malfunctions include: Failed activation, Uninhabitable artificial reality, Permanent Blueprint alteration, Critical memory loss or alteration, Failure to return to reality, Reciprocity of state in the real world, Sudden artificial reality failure, Clones, Spontaneous Explosion, Split mind, Insanity, Uncontrolled timescale alterations, Reality Slipping Sickness, Aura corruption, Sudden Death, and more!

However, two Spell snippets can safely be used with mana only:

Leave the Toybox: Allows the user to dismiss themselves from an artificial reality.Freeze the Toybox: Allows the user to temporarily stop an artificial reality’s timescale except for themselves.Mana costs will vary depending on the artificial reality’s settings.

Reading the list of possible side effects again, she could only sigh and give up on the idea of trying to use the skill herself. The reciprocity of state, blueprint alteration and timescale alterations that she needed if she wanted to use a toybox as extra spellcrafting time weren’t even base functions of the toybox, just controlled failure points.

Anna or Jin could work with that and make it stable, but me?

At this point I have to just pray that the next trial will be in a faster time toybox and use that like I did for my bone armor originally in the ranking tower…

I suppose though, I could start with getting rid of the majority of Summon blood before the trial, I just need to be careful not to cut out the wrong part. Going to take a long time too but not nearly as much. Probably also a few days to make a full bone wire backup of the spell structure first.

Aaah… I’ll just work on [Summon Self] for now.

Sofia quickly left the factory to grab a small pile of books from her library before returning to her spot.

Sorrow’s library had a few spell grimoires hmm. There is even one with Velania’s skills... I still cannot believe she just let me have that. Most of them aren’t fit for me but [Meridian cleansing] looks like it would work well, I just have to reach level 400 first…

Anyway, surely there’s some decent elemental magic somewhere in there.

Sofia flipped through the pages of multiple grimoires, not finding anything that really tickled her brain for a [Summon Self] fusion even if some of the spells were quite interesting by themselves. “And this is the last one…” Sofia said, grabbing the only book left to read named ‘Warmonger magicks’, which she had good hopes would have something considering the name.

“No, not this… Not this either… ‘Grasp Heart’? Oh… Curse tendrils in the shape of a hand to grab the heart directly in the target’s body. Like a primitive version of [Hollow Heart]? I’ll keep this one in mind. If I could ‘grab’ bones from a distance to extend the strength of my close aura’s control further it could be really good.”

Flipping a few more pages, Sofia found another familiar spell. “Aura lock. It’s actually got the full schematic unlike the Exidian book! This… This could be it.”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Sofia spent the next six days sitting in the factory, collecting the bone pile every so often, learning to wildcast Aura lock with her usual internal bone guide method.

We got the actual system description for it? Quite rare for a wildcast.

[Aura Lock]:

You will not be making any friends with this.

Attempt to override control of the target’s aura to lock their mana in place relative to their mana heart.

The higher the target’s Processing is compared to yours, the more likely Aura Lock is to fail.

For multi-target casting, the total of their Processing is pitted against yours instead.

Unlimited duration.

Maximum 5 targets per cast, you must be within the field aura of all targets or closer, and they must be within your far aura or closer when the spell resolves.

Fixed cost: 65 Million mana.

Requires a 24 (4.8) Seconds channeling to deploy.

Cooldown: 24 (12) Hours.

So it’s actually a Processing contest to compensate for weaker Aura? It’s really a strong spell, It held Velania for more than a minute back then.

The mana cost is a bit steep right now but a fixed cost is good long term. And now to fuse that with [Summon Self]... I feel like I will have to do a lot of trimming.

Might as well run it through [Stress test] a few times first.

Despite the absolute simplicity of the [Summon Self] spell, the fusion was anything but easy, the two spells simply had no matching mana circuits whatsoever. The fusion was impossible without an intermediary spell like the one made with Zerei to fuse [Reign over shadows] and [Saintomancer’s Star] some time earlier.

Sofia did not want to bother Zerei every time, so she worked on the intermediary by herself, taking another seven days for it, and one more for the fusion itself. She was still unfamiliar with the exact details of Aura Lock’s circuits despite having learned the spell, which slowed down the entire thing even more than expected.

When the struggles were over, the final result, she felt, was worth the effort.

[Lock-Step] (1.1S):

Instantly teleport yourself anywhere within your close aura, locking in place all non-neutral foreign mana in close aura range around your landing point.

Instant cast.

Fixed cost: 145 Million mana.

Cooldown: 240 (120) Seconds.

Whew. It turned out fine after all. Worse is some ways better in others. Non-neutral foreign mana is certainly one way to spell things out. If I teleport next to Pareth he’ll be locked too, then. Not the most flexible of spells but it’ll do. I couldn’t do anything about the mana cost but it’s not too bad… Long term. Long term…

In just one or two filters 145 million won’t be too bad. Hopefully.

It’s getting rid of the Processing requirement that fucked it, I’m almost certain.

But that means it should work to restrain actually dangerous targets for a bit. It might even stall an Ascended for a second or two, maybe? Something the Processing measuring contest certainly wouldn’t let me do.

Anywhere in close aura is a great range upgrade, too, compared to the 13 meters it had before.

Reminds me I haven’t checked the Aura window ever since the trial… It’s just so depressing how little it grew.

Eleven times stat multiplier for the Ultimate rank heart doubled by the Crown of Victory my ass. My mana went from five millions to a hundred and yet my aura… If not for the earring’s 77% bonus it could have barely even been called an upgrade compared to the previous filter!

Sofia rolled her eyes as she opened the dreaded system menu.

[Aura]

Aura: 3635 ((552 * 3.72)*1.77)

Aura growth: +2 per level

Aura modifiers:

[Dreams Of a Demon which Gods Envy - March of the Envoy]

[Pillar of creation]

[Shroud of Ackenohh]

[Avatar of Zeus]

[Fae Ancestry Specialization]

[All-In Earring]

[Blessing of the Deep]

[Radiant World Mirror]

Currently Active Aura effects:

[Mana sense]

[Lingering]

[Demonic Aura - I win, you lose]

[Sovereign of Unshackled Frames] (+[Optimized framework])

[Graveyard of the Nymphs]

[Abereth of Greed]

[Runelord]

[Lock-Step]

Estimated Aura range (distance from mana heart):

Close: 36.5 Meters

Field: 365 Meters

Far: 10.05 Kilometers

Just how?! How did the base aura go from 435 to 552 when my mana shot up by TWENTY TWOtimes?!

Aura growth ‘plus two’. It’s even worse than I thought it was going to be.

What did the book on sub-stats say again? A stat better left to Dragons? Yeah, I get it now.

Despite having been aware of exactly how much her aura range had changed all this time, Sofia was still pissed at the numbers.

I would almost drink the damned aura potion right now out of spite this is so infuriating.

… Aaaah…

Grandma said her close aura was wider than my far aura…

Even if my aura doubled every filter from now on I wouldn’t even come close to catching up when I reach her level!

Sofia really felt like flipping a table.

Dragons really have it too easy.