Lilith: Origin of Succubi

<~> Chapter 182

The next six days passed quickly as our group spent a lot of time practicing magic and I adjusted the mana circulation in my wings.

[Status]
Name: Lilith Baphomet
Race: Greater Succubus [Race Hidden - Displayed as Beastkin (Sheep)]
Gender: Female
Class: [Novice Magic Swordsman] Lv. 12
Level: 50

Stat Spread:
Strength: 100
Vitality: 100
Charisma: 10 (695)
Luck: 20 (705)
Finesse: 70
Magic Control: 100
Magic Force: 100 (160)
Speed: 70 (90)
Endurance: 10

Karmic Energy: 6856

Unallocated Stat points: 0

Skills:
Haggling Lv. 15
Swordsmanship Lv. 38
Illusion Magic Lv. 4
Light Magic Lv. 11
Light Manipulation Lv. 12
Uuna Riding Lv. 13
Linguistics Lv. 10
Ritual Magic Lv. 10
Drawing Lv. 12
Mana Sense Lv. 6
Luck Magic Lv. 6
Enhancement Magic lv. 8
Flying lv. 7
Intimidation lv. 1
Internal Mana Manipulation lv. 4

Class Abilities
Merchant Skill - Calculations
Prostitute Passive - Resist Disease
Prostitute Passive - Magic Fingers
Prostitute Skill - Ease Pain
Prostitute Skill - Freshen Up
Prostitute Passive - Tight Fit
Prostitute Passive - Group Dynamics
Prostitute Passive - Resist Sleep
Prostitute Skill - Center of Attention
Prostitute Skill - Nightcap

Special Passives:
Soulbound Companions
Special drop rate up
Sightspeak
Double Down

Innate Abilities:
Karmic Retribution
Being of Karma

Racial Traits:
Succubus Constitution
Sexual Appetite Lv. 47
Succubus Bond
Greater Succubus Shifting

Titles:
[World Traveler - Hidden Title]
[Origin of Succubi - Hidden Title]
[Dungeon Destroyer]
[First Explorer]
[Early Intervention]
[Demon Hunter]
[Follower of Sorsette]
[Mother of the Succubi - Hidden Title]

[Mana Sense] has gone up 2 levels, [Enhancement Magic] has gone up 3 levels, and I'm also at level 4 of [Internal Mana Manipulation] after adjusting the circulation in my wings and adapting them so they didn't hurt when I hid them. Apparently that can happen. I also adjusted the mana in my tail, it doesn't seem to have changed much but the tail now feels a lot more... real now? I won't get bothered if the length of my tail shortens or lengthens based on my abilities. I made it work in a kind of closed-loop circuit that follows the length of my tail no matter the scale.

Theo told me that while most people shouldn't have much reason to adjust their mana pathways, mages and 'magical creatures' like me can gain a lot of benefit from it as well. Morrigan was able to pick [Internal Mana Manipulation] up too, though the skill seems a lot less intuitive to her than I would have expected. It may be a consequence of not having access to an aura like I do. Theo has told me that in this regard I'm kind of a natural which is a nice change compared to how well all of my other magic studies have been going.

I decided to read over the description of [Internal Mana Manipulation].

[Internal Mana Manipulation - Rare Skill]
The Internal Mana Manipulation skill governs the ability to adjust, maintain, concentrate, and reroute ones own internal mana. This doesn't affect the total amount of mana in the body, only how it circulates and flows through it. Higher ranks improve the ease and ability to manipulate your internal mana, hold your mana in different patterns, and adapt to your pathways being rerouted. It also improves your instinctual knowledge when manipulating your own mana.

The skill description is about what I predicted, only differing in expected ways compared to the [Light Manipulation] skill I also have. It doesn't say anywhere that it's basically the equivalent for enhancement magic but it feels pretty obvious that it is once you have it. When casting enhancement magic I'm able to see the patterns that get overlaid on top of me and intermingle with my mana circulation. This manipulation skill lets me strengthen those connections, spread them out, or condense the effect somewhere in my body.

It also allowed me to figure out a bit more of what [A Touch of Good Luck] was doing and the answer is... not much. It's a very weak luck enhancement spell. The upside is that with [Inner Mana Manipulation] I'm able to intensify that luck with some effort or concentrate the effect. Using my aura, I can even spread the luck magic outside of my body a bit as well, letting me do things like flip coins and have it land on what I want more often. The most obvious application was to combine it with my [Coin Flip] attack spell but that... had odd effects. Rather than just being a straight upgrade it seems the more reliable I was able to make the spell, the less damage it did. It seems the spell's uncertainty directly increases its damage, which seems like a downright weird way for magic to work. I would understand if this was just a video game but in this world, the cause and effect relationship didn't seem present. The magic itself didn't show this effect, it just worked that way with no explanation mana circulation-wise. Theo told me to shrug it off as a consequence of luck magic but it just flew in the face of everything else I've learned about magic so far.

The other useful thing about [A Touch of Good Luck] was that it could affect others, the only problem is that I can't manipulate the ability in others. That made the spell not all that helpful and frankly a waste of mana most of the time. I was told that there were ways to 'overload' a spell, by pumping in much more mana than a spell will normally allow for increased potency, but that wasn't a skill that Theo could help me learn. It differed from just using your Magic Force to increase the strength of a spell which [A Touch of Good Luck] didn't accept. I would have to approach a different mage for that to learn that skill. There would be other mages in the capital but the odds of me finding one that both knew the skill and would be willing to teach it to me with everything that's been going on was kind of low. Mages that went past the bounds of using the spells they learned from their class, spell books, or the military were surprisingly rare. Wild casting magic was already a rare field mostly comprised of scholars rather than adventurers or soldiers. It made some sense, both adventurers and soldiers tended to value reliability over versatility except in some specific cases. Combat-oriented wild mages like Morrigan were quite a rare breed.

On that subject, Morrigan and I were both able to learn a basic magic armor spell and I was able to learn how to infuse other magic types into weapons. Right now I could only do it with water magic but I was working on seeing what kinds of shenanigans I could do with luck or lust infused weapons. The magic armor skill I learned was actually through ranking up enhancement magic. I gained a spell called [Armor of Light] which thankfully operated like [Light Ward] and could be used to block physical and magical attacks, instead of being useless against anything but shadows. The downside was that the spell lit me up like a Christmas tree no matter what I did. It was armor of LIGHT, it needed to give off light to protect me. The ability was less obnoxious during the day but only barely, it doesn't say this in the description but the stronger I made the armor the brighter it was.

[Armor of Light - Light Magic Spell]
Create an armor made from panes of light that can block or deflect physical and magical damage. Strength of the armor is affected by Magic Force and Magic Control. Color, shape, and range are affected by Magic Control. Armor of Light is weak against shadow and dark-aligned attacks.

However, the nice thing about this spell was that I could study this spell the same way I did for imbue and learn to wild cast altered versions of this spell using fire or water. The nature of Morrigan's class, which she frustratingly refused to tell me the name of unless I ordered her to, allowed her to learn a 'colorless' version of the spell that she can fuel with environmental magic. She's overjoyed because she just became an incredible buffer, both for herself and for others. Her staff of manaflow allows her to cast the armor using earth mana and there will be lots of situations where the environmental mana will counter whatever we will be fighting. The only downside is that her version takes a little while to cast. She can't just snap one up on all of us at the same time. It also takes a decent amount of mana so she may not be able to cast it on too many people at once depending on the mana density of the area. It should be amazing in dungeons though. When we weren't practicing that stuff, Morrigan was working with Raya to teach her the basics of magic and wild casting. It's slow going but Raya is making progress, especially with Theo to supplement her teaching as well.

Morrigan continues to seem jealous of the natural aura ability succubi have. I haven't had either of the twins approach me about it yet despite the two of them having several long conversations away from the others. Assuming that's what they're actually discussing, it's hard for me to tell exactly because they haven't been forthcoming with me on this topic. Understandable since I'm kind of biased. I have already warned Morrigan a few times that I won't transform Torien unless she actually wants it, convincing her to go through with it because Morrigan wants to won't be good enough for me. Torien has to want it too, or the twins will have to accept that both of them will not become succubi.

The meetings between the two were kind of spurred on because Theo has started teaching all of the succubi, even the ones that don't really use magic like Sibyl and Cecilia, [Internal Mana Manipulation] so that they can combine it with their natural aura to better utilize it. One of the biggest advantages of having an aura is that you can make it harder for magic to directly penetrate the aura, with [Internal Mana Manipulation] you can learn how to shape and alter your aura more easily since the aura kind of becomes an extension of your internal mana circulation. For fighters, this means one of their biggest weaknesses, magic, can be mitigated using this natural resistance. For mages, it allows them to cast things through their aura as if it were part of their body. This is really useful for Bella in particular, it gives her a bit more range on her healing abilities, not a ton, but enough to be useful. For Morrigan, it would increase her... surface area? and allow her to reach more of the mana in the environment. I don't completely understand but this is the way she explained the benefits she would get.

Mimi hilariously didn't need any training at all and got the skill as soon as it was explained to her. Apparently the way she uses mana in the first place is a lot different from us. So once she was told how to manipulate her own mana it became natural for her and learning how to use her aura was even easier. Mimics have very flexible proportions, obviously, so controlling mana outside of her body using her aura was just like being told that her body extends a little farther. For her, it's not weird to be able to change the shape of her outsides and thus changing the shape of her aura doesn't seem any different to her.

Theo did suggest bringing her to train under a spatial mage though. Her natural affinity for the magic type as demonstrated by her use of her pocket dimension means that she wouldn't have as hard of a time as most people learning it. It would give her some access to things like gravity magic, portals, and teleportation, all of which sound scary powerful. Mimi told me that she already heavily invests in her magic stats for related reasons so becoming a mage would make sense. Her body density is also governed by her pocket dimension so improving her magic stats also increases her durability, meaning it would double as investing in a defensive stat. In the meantime I've started teaching her ritual magic and light magic, if she could learn [Light Scribing] she would likely be able to fuel a lot of magic depending on her affinities. I'm still excited to track down a more in-depth book on ritual magic once we eventually reach the capital.

Sibyl, Cecilia, and Silva trained a lot together whenever we stopped and the first two weren't being taught magic stuff. The three of them had more physical focused builds and the former two kept it that way after their transformation. Sibyl told me she invested a bit into magic since she was learning things from Theo though. Enhancement magic is a natural fit for fighters if they could use it, even if it was only learned at a basic level. She wasn't like me who wanted to split my focus between physical fighting and spell casting but since she had a magic aura anyway it made sense for her to invest in magic a little bit. Magic Swordsman was not a common class and she preferred to stick with what she was familiar with for the most part. Sibyl mainly uses a sword or hand-to-hand combat with lots of throws similar to something like Judo from my original world. Her shorter stature has actually improved her skills with the martial art she uses and it's really impressive to watch.

Cecilia had a sort of berserker class that has a focus on animals from what she's told me. It simultaneously helped her with her job of raising and caring for animals while also giving her strength in line with the animals she was most familiar with. Unsurprisingly, uunas are scary animals when they want to be, as I've experienced firsthand, so by extension, she is also a scary fighter. This made her an obvious choice as a traveling guard who also took care of the animals. She hadn't had this class when she first went traveling with Tarklin but her skills ended up blending that way. It seems there's a lot more to classes than 'this dude uses a sword good' like I have seen so far. Her weapon of choice is her large two-handed axe but she has been fighting hand to hand in their sparring matches.

Not much was up with Silva. She spends a lot of time playing cards or spending time with Torien. Because Torien and Morrigan have been talking a lot in the evenings lately she's had even more downtime than before. She's spent a lot of the time sparring with the others, in addition to using a spear she also knows some kind of martial art as well. It's less flashy than Sibyl's but it seems pretty effective for her. I half expected her to do lots of kicks based on her big rabbit legs but it turns out that her martial art is more similar to something like boxing. She uses her powerful bursts of speed to get in close and do damage around people's guard. Silva is around the same level as the others but the other two don't hold a candle to her in technique. She hasn't lost a single spar, even two on one. Silva is kind of terrifying.

Every night had been filled with lots of sex in various pairings due to the excuse that we should be as satiated as possible once we reached the capital. I mostly kept to my girlfriends but occasionally shared a bed with Raya and Sibyl too. Those two seemed to make it their mission to sample all of us, the only ones who refused were Torien and Silva. The two of them even spent a few nights with Theo much to his enthusiasm. The guy was kind of a horn dog and the next morning they assured me that he really was good in bed. As handsome as the guy is though, I wasn't interested in sleeping with him. I think my first impression of him was negative enough that I intended to keep our relationship professional. He was growing on me as a friend though.

At the end of the ninth day since we left Goldenhearth and the fortieth day since I've come to this world, Torlimal City, the capital of the Torlimal Kingdom, was on the horizon when we stopped for the night.