Chapter 248 - The Loving Bride illusion

Souls and ghosts did not behave like normal, living beings, no, regardless of how they may sound at first sight. Ortana and Gustav discovered this first hand, after they found a tavern where they could have a drink at. The Fleshling drinks were strong, so it helped reveal the most raw version of the entities around them!

In a word, everyone was simply terrified. At some point they even were scared of one another, because the alcohol they drank managed to shorten their memory severely, and they couldn’t remember what they were doing here, in the ghost city to begin with. However, somehow they did remember that they were ghosts, or transparent entities, and so were the others around them, so they got scared beyond the grave from one another, as they were reminded that ghosts were real, and not a fairy tale! It was apparently very common for everyone in the tavern to scream as much as they could.

“They’re probably remembering that it’s weird for all these ghosts and souls to work together,” Ortana pointed out, as she wasn’t quite drunk yet.

“Their rogue past follows them like death,” Gustav added.

Order, and belief for a greater good was what held this city together, that was a fact, but this belief had also strained its people greatly! Deep inside, they all knew that this city shouldn’t be as tightly knitted as it was, not with all the low rank entities living in it, at least, and this was what made most of them quite anxious. Deep inside, most low-rank entities believed that they didn’t belong here, and pretending to belong had taken quite a toll on them!

Their wild side was showing, and this was especially the case for ghosts, who by nature were stronger, and more rabid, they did not feel like they belonged here.

Considering their behaviour, Ortana and Gustav decided to not drink as much alcohol as everyone else around them. They didn’t want to get traumatized before even exploring the phantom world properly.

“This damned city is a couple of mistakes away from exploding… We’re sitting within fancy gas clouds, after all.” Gustav sighed.

…

Skendus was introduced to reality altering spells, by the Reality Mockers Sect of Illusion, and he loved every bit of knowledge that he was obtaining! He was ecstatic!

In its basic definition, he could kill his enemies, slowly, by drawing the lifeforce out of them with illusional abilities that created alternate realities for his targets! The concept of what the sect teached was simple, but in practice, however, things got a bit more perplexing.

Skendus had to work with magic that was exclusively found here in the phantom world, and unsurprisingly, abilities surrounding the branch of illusion were all the more difficult for the average entity! Having entered the Tamed Entity realm of phantom mana just today, he was hardly the ideal candidate to pick up on the abilities that the sect offered!

The sect had to start with the simplest abilities they could find, just to assess what he was capable of. The sect master promised that if he, Skendus, showed promise, then he would get rewarded with multiple potions that encouraged flash upgrades, so this was the time to put up the best performance of his life!

The sect taught him a simple spell, or in other words, they had him absorb the essence of the spell, which was a much easier process for him, because he could just absorb the spell, and then study its features afterwards! The sect members were excellent spell crafters.

The ability he absorbed was called the Loving Bride ability, and as unusual as that name may seem, its uses mainly featured brutality! If he casted this ability on an unsuspecting target, that target would experience their ideal, dream wedding, except, their loving bride, or groom would get slaughtered off in the end, each time in a creative way that Skendus would decide on! He could keep this illusion on a loop, for days even, without attending to the target all that much, or without pouring any more mana points towards them!

This ability worked on entities, and living beings as well. It was universally horrendous!

One of the sect members created a fake entity for Skendus to try his new ability on, and it played out exactly like he expected it to. The entity seemed really happy, for about two hours, and then, a sudden terror bloomed across its face, featuring horror, and great sadness!

Skendus was hesitant to try this ability on real opponents, but when push comes to shove, he might just use it on opponents that he developed a unique hate towards! Dark powers such as this one, gradually grew on a mage such as himself, who oftentimes was in tiring positions where the most brutal of abilities might come in handy!

This ability used up most of the phantomized mana points that he accumulated, and in fact it strained his mana pool quite a bit, but he was successful in the trail nonetheless. Despite those couple of disadvantages, this new ability felt very familiar to him, he found it easy to use.

“Good job, you seem to know what you’re doing.” The old sect master said, “We can teach you two more abilities, if you’d like, but that’s how much we can spare for non-sect members. If you choose to learn them, please be warned that your mana pool, be it in our world, or in the physical world, will contain dark mana, about five percent of it, to be exact! Do you agree to these terms? The influence of dark mana is irreversible.”

“Five percent is nothing, let’s do this!” He answered, excitingly.

A moment later, one of the older members of the sect crafted two abilities for him, and it took them a couple of minutes to do so. They seem quite accustomed to the manipulation of phantomized mana channels!

Skendus absorbed these couple of new abilities, and was ready to try them out. The sect members also gave him a fragment of a captured soul, which gave him a couple of thousand mana points once he absorbed it. Unlike the Loving Bride illusion, these ones were far more brutal in comparison, and therefore, also more expensive! He needed more mana points if he was to try them out properly.

“In any real encounter, you’d be able to harvest your enemy’s souls, as soon as you manage to kill them with the abilities that we gave you! You can use their souls to fill your phantom mana pool, that’s their main purpose, and these powers can work on just about anything that’s conscious, be it physical or not, as long as they’re weaker than you.” The sect master explained. “Are you ready to try them out?”