Gestation by John Gold (love books to read .txt) 📗

Malefics work on the mental body. The stronger they are, the shorter their duration. Your mental body influences your physical body, so boosting its resistance to damage and your morale lessens the chances of getting curses and debuffs, while also blunting their effect. Some classes can remove buffs, though that’s mostly healers. Buffers work against malefics.

The book on mysticism is old and mostly philosophical. There’s some information about cults and the symbolism of the ancient gods, neither of which interests me.

Artefactorica is the science of artifact creation, and it’s related to craftsmanship. Artifactor mages are highly valued, though it’s really hard to boost that skill. The higher it gets, the more demands it places on the quality of your work. The different kinds of material all have their own nuances, too. Spells barely work on wood and bone, since they already have their own aura. But if you really want to… Gems can store mana and give you additional bonuses. Also, the quality of the material influences its durability. Then there’s the fact that artifactors can mix materials when making a single object, only enchanting it when they’re done. The creation boosts its owner’s attributes or offers some other effects depending on the spells that were cast on it. It’s a tantalizing hobby. I need to do something with all the junk from the imps, too.

Necromancy, on the other hand, is legally banned. Raising a fallen foe or summoning his soul as a ghost is a bit unethical. There are ways of attaching a summoned soul to armor that you control, though necromancers have to know chimerology if they want to create the dead, flesh horrors, or bone hounds - any undead, basically. It’s dirty, unpleasant work. On the other hand, they’re an invaluable military resource when you’re at war. The higher their intellect, the more undead they can raise and the stronger they can make them. Every undead takes mana to exist. If the level of the summoned soul or raised dead (or their intellect) exceeds that of the necromancer, they can attack him. Bone dragons are the pinnacle of the dark art.

There’s a reason that ways of working with the mental body are kept hidden. Superior mages don’t want the secrets behind their power to get out, after all. The introductory course raises mages’ energy structure to the point where they can go on from there themselves. Getting to work is actually the second level. The physical body is linked to the mental body, which is why you can accelerate metabolism and therefore boost morale. Under a certain level of stress, you’re hungry enough to eat the neighbor in an hour, and that hits you with a bunch of debuffs, exhaustion and overwork, for example.

Working with the mental body can fuse you with your element. The mages get a hybrid body that is both primary element and human, with an immunity to attacks of that type and a 100% boost to their spells. The most valuable information for me is that mages can “boost the damage they do by working more narrowly with the energy of their element.” That means that mages theoretically understand the difference in structure between various world orders.

These methods are used to create familiars, which are responsible for creating a second stream of consciousness or supporting a second spell.

There’s only one chapter devoted to working with the astral. According to the descriptions I read, the astral is a three-dimensional space which only the soul can inhabit. While there are small, closed islands of calm, they look like bubbles in what otherwise appears to be a world not unlike ours with soil, sand, water, and all the rest. Via the astral, the soul reaches other worlds or goes back to the respawn point. The farther you are from your respawn point when you die, the more time you spend there before you can respawn.

There are all different kinds of beasts in the astral, most of which are neutral. Some are aggressive, however. The astral is a world of souls, from the simplest to the most complex. Even the gods spend most of their time there, though they can also appear in the physical world. The creation of an avatar is the physical embodiment of the god’s astral projection.

Interestingly, time there is three times as slow as in game reality. I can only assume that this refers to a deeper immersion into the game. It was via the astral that I was sent to Hell, incidentally. Moving between worlds takes an incredible amount of energy, which is what the demons noticed. The funny part is that I didn’t die. When my health hit zero, my body and I were sent together to the Fields of Ash. It’s just that a portal like that takes so much energy that archmage Tiberius Sen is probably the only one who could have opened it.

It might seem like mages are all-powerful, but swordsmen give them a run for their money. With the help of alchemists and artifactors, they can do the same kinds of things: altering their body, boosting their resistance, and increasing the damage they inflict. Master swordsmen, like healers, improve their bodies to become faster, stronger, tougher.

Black obsidian daggers are the most dangerous weapons. They do incredible amounts of damage to the mental body and accompany that with long-lasting debuffs. Swordsmen are designed to kill all things living. Mages consider them worthy adversaries, and both have hidden classes that can combine areas of expertise.

The book on magic sieges is boring. In a word, mages join forces to push back on their opponent’s shields, and then create particularly powerful spells. There haven’t been that many sieges like that in the past, as they cost tons of energy, and most shields are taken down with normal spells.

Three days later, I’m still sitting next to the lava river killing imps every once in a while, only my resistance to fire isn’t going up anymore. Every new stream