“By the Grace of Heaven, I desire that my fundamental insight and wisdom be enhanced to the maximum limit permitted to mortals of my people.”
Magic swirled again, gathering into my thoughts, and I felt an… accumulation was all I could describe it as, like a tiny advance towards a step that could be taken. I had memories of Enhancement, Inherent, and Sacred bonuses to mental Stats taking effect, and this was none of those.
Instead of adding something on top of what I already had, it was more subtle, like it was reshuffling and enhancing how I already thought and regarded things, clearing out inefficiencies and redundancies.
I eyed my Assay again, and now there was a gleaming marker next to my Wis: 16 Stat. Focusing in on it, there was a (1) next to it.
I’d never heard of anyone wasting a Wish to be aware of Wish accumulations for themselves, so this was both new and affirming that the rules for Wishes and Miracles here were indeed different from what I knew. My awareness was in place, but it hadn’t told me how many Wishes I was going to need to complete this, only how many I had accumulated.
A separate Miracle? Why not?
“By the Grace of Heaven, I desire to know how many Wishes or Miracles it will take to accomplish my goal whenever I Cast such spells and accumulations of them are needed to accomplish something with their power.”
Magic swirled within. I stayed focused on my Assay, and watched the glowing (1) there pulse and grow into (1/17).
I had the impression that Earth Spell was working on my behalf with its auto-Raise as long as I was touching the ground. At least, I was not feeling any sense of real resistance to what I was doing here, as long as I was careful and not grasping for too much.
Sixteen more Miracles required? I could do fourteen a day, and had already spent three. I assumed I only had a short time to accumulate these things.
Good enough, the Slots were there to be used.
I began the process of raising my Wisdom score in earnest, furthermore wondering if all the powerful mages did this… and if they didn’t, why not?…
Well, something to discover in the future.
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It would take only two days to profit from this, but I was left bereft of my highest-level Divine Slots… which didn’t bother me in the slightest, I had plenty of magic to fall back on.
I was not going to be probing that Bug Pyramid more closely for now, but it didn’t mean I couldn’t keep up my practice in some of the other side caverns with over-sized insects who didn’t belong in the world, magical or just plain too big for their carapaces.
I had to keep the Karma flowing, after all.
I effectively had four different paths I was advancing along and paying full Karma for, much to my amusement. My Arcane and Mystic Theurgy allowed me to pursue multiple Paths, but I had to pay full price for them. Furthermore, the accelerated Ur-Priest Progression cost exactly as much in total to advance as an Elf-Priest’s slower increase to power, just compressed into fewer Levels.
I had already reached the top of Ur-Priest’s spell progression. All that was left was Caster Level and Class abilities. That meant that Mystic Theurge did almost nothing for me in Ur-Priest… but it still gave me a level of Elven Wizard, and so I was totally going to take it, enhanced costs or no.
My ‘rest time’ I used to fix up the Thisbean Inn.
Cleaning it from front to back with up-Cast Prestidigitation spells. Slapping new coats of paint up on the outside, polishing and cleaning all the furnishings and attachments, slapping on stain and varnish if required. Taking inventory of everything, studying the reset mechanics of the temporal magic in there to see what worked, and what did not.
I cleared chimneys, I dumped a LOT of dust and dirt and gunk in the privies, and soon enough the whole building gleamed like new, not just the reset places.
Pointedly, I used a Distance Distortion spell, tied it into the Inn, and doubled all the interior dimensions.
Already wrapped up in the fourth dimension, the building actually accepted the insertion of the increased dimensions without much trouble.
Suddenly the interior was twice as wide, tall, and deep as before, including the basement and the attic. The main eating room was three-quarters empty, and all the apartments were huge, with plenty of wasted room in them. I had the ‘height’ aspect affect the exterior walls, but not the interior walls, resulting in having two extra floors and more of empty space above the existing rooms, and a basement twice as deep as before.Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
The spell was nominally good for weeks, but anchoring it into the temporal reset basically meant it renewed at daybreak like everything else, and there’d be no chance of it failing unless someone found the locus of it to Dispel somehow amid the crazily-intertwined magic already present here.
It was a lot of extra space, space that was made to be filled. There were now walls to put up, rooms to be reconfigured and moved around with Shape Wood spells, and a lot of furniture and accessories to be purchased and tie into the magic of the place.
Basically, with my revision, the former interior now occupied one-quarter of the interior space of the place, with floors literally hanging out open as the exterior walls they had been connected to were now not touching them. In effect, I now had to build an inn… inside the Thisbean Inn!
Which was an amusing challenge. Permanent Illusions so the windows looked out on the outside, and even wind effects which would blow in exterior air were all on the docket, tied into the existing magicks of the place smoothly, and even helping clear up some of the knots and inefficiencies of whatever mad idiot had put the current set-up in place.
Outside I began to make changes, too.
Massive Hallucinatory Terrain effects were put into place and Permanenced, complemented with other Permanent Illusions, Veils, and Mislead effects that would make locating this place with physical senses nearly impossible, any wanderers being led around the outside and away from it without realizing what was here.
Doing that allowed me to work on the grounds, reshaping the sun-blasted stone and leveling it off, turning areas to mud and then mixing in tons of compost to create layers of black earth and clay that could be planted with grass and trees and flowers and gardens, restoring the surroundings of the Inn to something worth looking at in this blasted wasteland in the middle of nowhere.
If a roc or dragon swept by overhead occasionally while I was working, they didn’t see anything here but some very twisted and broken terrain not worth investigating, move along, move along…
Of course, a lot of empty room and rooms without walls meant I had a lot of walls to replace and furniture to buy, among other things. Stuff that couldn’t be bought down in the Underdark.
I was going to have to go out into the surface world, start accumulating money, dealing with surface societies, and so forth and so on.
I guess it was a good thing I had a lot of Simulacra who could help me with that part of the problem, right?
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“By the Grace of Heaven, I desire that my fundamental insight and wisdom be enhanced to the maximum limit permitted to mortals of my people.”
On my Assay, (17/18) next to Wisdom clicked over to (18/18), then faded away as the 17 changed to an 18.
Like the full shift from 16 to 17, I could feel a barrier breached, an accumulation and efficiency reached that finally gelled and came into full being. It was a sense of patience and calm, awareness and experience coming to bear, understanding and insight without needing to go through all the laborious intellectual machinations that I normally used to buttress my reasoning.
I could also distinctly feel that it was as high as I was going to make it.
“By the Grace of Heaven, I desire that my fundamental personality, force of will, emotional strength, fire of purpose, and personal magnetism be increased to the maximum limit permitted to mortals of my people.”
On my Assay, the ‘Cha: 17’ gained a (1/18) next to it. Also, the ‘Co: 20’ next to it gained a (1/18) next to it, indicating it was a dependent Statistic.
It wasn’t Nogging, it was better than that. I imagined that just coming to this universe if you were a spellcaster was a very good use of your time, if you were powerful enough to take advantage of this mechanic.
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The closest surface nations to the Bleaklands about me were the elven forests of Sidheduiche to the southeast, which the King of the shadenelves had his sights set upon; the human nation of Federyn, which mother’s notes indicated were a simpering nation of traders and pacifists of the crude human species; and the dwarven nation of Rukheim, which was carefully avoided by the shadenelves and not antagonized, despite loathing the squat and hairy species for the plagues they had brought onto my people, and for the fact they eagerly mined the gemstones my people had been bamboozled into thinking held the souls of the unborn.
Slightly further to the northwest was the human magocracy of Zanzyr, the rather chaotic realm full of wizards wherein mother had done her work on behalf of the king and met my father, whose native Principality of Transyvia I actually had the most knowledge of any surface realm.
There was no doubt about it, I was going to be doing a lot of Scrying work to familiarize myself with each of those lands, their peoples, and especially their languages and accents.
Given my own origins, I was already affecting a Transyvian accent for myself, as nothing contributes to edgelord-ness like speaking like a Slavic noble, yes? Polyglot always made me thirsty for new languages, accents, and dialects, so Scrying into a tavern or public area where people were talking was anything but boring. I’d just close my eyes and let the words drift over me, starting the process of deciphering them and encoding them into myself with Comprehend Languages. In an hour I’d have a new language down, and in two I could imitate any regional dialects and terminology I’d heard perfectly.
That was going to come in useful.
In the meantime, I was going to have to accrue some surface-worlder wealth in some form or another, which shouldn’t be too hard to do, given how much I could pull up out of the ground in short order as needed. I’d have to smelt me down some trade bars or something… or go after some monsters who had some loot in their caves.
I blinked, and looked up at the sky.
They had dragons up and around out here. The only dragons known down below were some dragon turtles in the largest cavern lakes, and some red dragons who’d found their ways down to the lava pools.
But they had dragons around here, and dragons… had hoards.
They also had dragon bodies, which were worth a lot all by themselves.
Ah, ah, I didn’t think I was going to have any problems acquiring some of the local currency. Gods above, I was going to go through enough goldweight if I could get my Inherents, too...
Well, there was nothing for it. I was going to have to Locate Creature and see if I could locate some of the local dragons, then cleanse them from the landscape and appropriate me a hoard or two.
A dislike of dragons had accompanied me from Aelryinth, and the drakes I’d met in the Underdark hadn’t helped matters. If I could find them, I’d clean them off with very little hesitation...