Shades of the New World

Chapter 85: New abilities

After Evin had explained everything, he began questioning Ssatsko.

"Grandpa, if you're hiding any other place with former authorities or Beast Lords, then you better tell about them now," Evin said in a joking tone.

"Lord Kena was the last of them all, but from what I heard, you're going to follow his footsteps aren't you? I'm pretty sure you're going to meet many more distinguished individuals," Ssatsko answered with a smile.

"You sure we're done now?" Evin didn't wish to believe the sly old man.

"Ah, now that you mention it, we're going to meet an Artificer expert who can make channeling artifacts. Since the town here above is basically a sorbothium mining city, naturally, there would be many people specialized to create relate artifacts," Ssatsko said.

"I knew it"

"Well, we're going there as a customer, so there won't be anything special"

Evin then got Karan back into his shadows again and left a hefty amount of Refined Sorbothium with him. He stored the rest in his own storage artifact and asked Rith about what she got.

"Look here," Rith said, and showed Evin something that looked like a star-shaped metal pendant. As far as Evin could tell, there was nothing special about the thing.

"It's an item that was created by the Ancestor. Iorn explained that Lord Kena received it from him when he was learning about the World of Space. It acts like a crutch for Space mages for when they're trying to maintain more complicated spells. It's like having a secondary specialized brain for sustaining World of Space spells," Rith explained excitedly.

"Then what can you do with them now?"

"Well, obviously, I can create better portals. I can probably send you back above your bed, without a single inch of deviation. And I can maintain that portal for much longer periods, provided I'm keeping an ample supply of lodestones. And, I can finally do this in a more practical way," Rith said, and some sort of prismatic armor appeared on her body.

Evin could see that pieces of the armor resembled the energy that portals made.

"Is that a portal armor?"

"Yes! I will never have to worry about attacks hitting my body ever again. Obviously, a decent half-core World of Space mage could pose a threat, but as long as a Lesser-imposer doesn't turn the area around me into a different World, I will be practically invincible in the half-core level," Rith said with glee.

"That's kinda amazing. When will I be able to replicate that?" Evin asked with wonder.

The idea of a portal armor sounded more and more overpowered in his mind.

"Perhaps you can do it after you become a lesser-imposer. If you were a Cosmic, you could probably do it when you're a peak half-core like my brother, but that's alone would cost you 70 percent of your concentration, allowing a very slight window for you to do other things," Rith explained.

Hearing the Cosmic mention the mana-core, Evin remembered something and called out to Arza and Ssatsko.

"Hey come here, you two, I got something for you," Evin said with a smirk.

Half an hour later, Arza had become a peak Quarter-core mage and Ssatsko's horns had become bigger and shinier. There wasn't much effect on Rith, since she was quite a strong mage in the first place, but an increase was still an increase so she couldn't complain.

The group then decided to focus on getting used to their new powers. Since Evin had just become a quarter-core mage, there were a lot of things he wanted to try out.

After 10 minutes of training, Evin immediately noticed two negatives.

First of all, were the increased emotional effects of the Worlds had on Evin. After he received his perk from Two Tales, Evin never had problems of emotions even when his mana-core was filled to the brim with World energies. Not to mention the fact that there was never a moment when Evin was completely infused with one specific World, except of course, the Dark World.

But after his new power-up, Evin could notice that the emotional effects were much stronger now, compared to before. It was similar to how Evin tried to cast spells without Two Tales' perk.

But since Evin was much more experienced now, there wasn't a big problem. But what would happen if he became a half-core? Wouldn't it be much harder than now? And what would happen when Evin reached the age of 15 and Two Tales' perk stopped working? At that time, the effects of the Worlds would be ten times worse for most of the Worlds and 100 times worse for the Heavy World.

Evin decided that he should start addressing this problem and actively searching for solutions, even temporary ones.

The other negative aspect of it was Evin's mana-core circulation period was much longer now. Before, Evin had to only wait 10 or so seconds, before his mana-core could recover from a big spell. But now Evin had to wait at least 50 seconds to be at full capacity. He could obviously cast smaller spells during that time lapse, but it still hurt Evin to wait so long.

The reason for this was because Evin's mana-core became big too fast. Before, it got bigger and bigger naturally, so Evin could exercise it to keep up with the size increase, but this time Evin didn't have any time to acclimatize his mana-core.

But the problem could be easily solved over time, so Evin wasn't worried. And compared to the negatives, the benefits that Evin received were huge.

Firstly, Evin could last much longer in fights now that his capacity increased by 10 times. He could probably fly indefinitely now, but he was thinking that it was high-time to upgrade his floating spell.

Evin had some ideas on how to go about it, but after thinking about his choices, he decided to visit a scroll-making shop to have Hector's scroll identified. He would be able to understand the thought process of the mages on Alvox and see if he could improve it with knowledge from Earth.

Talking about the Heavy World, Evin could make objects and himself heavier for longer times now. Moreover, he could maintain a spell that allowed Evin to change an object's weight freely.

Before, Evin could only switch from one weight to the other and commit to that weight. So, if Evin increased his or Karan's weight while floating, he couldn't return to being weightless immediately after. He had to hit someone hard and then attempt to connect a combo, so he could finish the fight with that momentum.

This lead to a problem with his spars with Arza, where if his initial heavy hit was blocked, or rendered useless somehow, he would be forced to commit to close-quarter combat, in which Arza was very adept. Evin would obviously try to create distance afterwards, but most of the time it didn't work against an opponent like Arza.

But now, he could easily fly away from Arza thanks to this new spell of his.

As for the World of Thoughts, there was not much Evin could do aside from just training diligently. The illusions did not take that much mana to create, and the only thing gating Evin from creating better, or more realistic illusions, was Evin's proficiency.

Evin was currently working on countering the method to discern illusions in Unabach's book for beginner mages, which applied an ability on the caster's eye to see which object was made out of Thought energy. So, Evin's current task was to create an illusion that could fool such abilities. Through this, Evin began to understand that becoming better at Illusions meant to simply learn how to better deal with the various methods that were meant to discern illusions.