The next morning started with the new lair being graced with groans of frustration. While the lair had been built inside a mountain and using the layout of a previous dungeon, it had been enchanted to allow the sun, moon and stars shine inside. Now a ray of sunlight, golden and bright, shone suspiciously on his eyes.

  This caused the distraught mage to slowly wake up while rubbing his eyes of any sleep lingering. The bed was large, capable of fitting three people and on it were sheets made of the same silk as his robe and having the same color scheme.

  They slid off his skin smoothly and left a bout of cold, which caused goosebumps to breed on the skin. Marcus let out a small curse at the cold before he willed his magic into being.

  The stars in his eyes glowed a burning white for a moment before the air shook and heat permeated it. Looking upwards towards the mirage of the sun, he could feel the same calling. A voice silently whispering in his ear, far enough that he would never know what it was saying, but close enough to torture him endlessly. He had dubbed this sound the voice of the stars.

  He had spoken to the only other celestial mage he had met, locked deep inside the earth. Where the voices couldn’t reach him but that had effectively crippled him. His class was a powerful one albeit fraught with the constant irritation of hearing the very stars talking. While the sun above shielded the voices during the day, at night it felt as if millions of voices were trapped inside his skull.

  “Status.” He called out almost out of habit.

  Name: Marcus Albacore Helixes

  Race: Human

  Class: Celestial Mage

  Rank: Two

  Level: 125

  A window appeared before him and he let out a soft grunt. All was as it should be, no witch had cursed him in his sleep nor had any of the other countless ways one could die in their sleep happen. He knew he would survive them, as his lair had been filled with magical countermeasures, but everything is possible with magic.

  “Even Michael did have a few times where he would lose.” He reassured himself while thinking back to the roommate he had when studying. An accomplished mage and one with great incite into how the world works, he had even made and published a theory of how the existence of magic led to the growth of chaos as magic in itself was the practice of introducing chaos into order.

  He never could understand the thought his friend had , or any of the many mages and wizards and sorcerers or magical beings that seems to agree with him.

  “He does have the blood of Malechis, so I guess his thoughts would gravitate towards him.” He reassured himself once he remembered that Michael was the son of a god. He honestly had felt jealous of his friend as not only was he a demigod, he had the ability to manipulate luck to the extent he can understand the concept. This was also followed with the system giving him the class of weaver.

  The boy was talented and loved by the heavens themselves. Marcus was sure that if he hadn’t challenged him in the graduation ceremony, right after being granted the weaver class, them it would have been Michael that would have passed and not him.

  After Marcus had finished his morning routine, consisting of bathing, cleaning and eating, he now stood before the spear of the stars. He had no use for this object, even when it would probably strengthen his spells. He could see the curse festering underneath the hilt that now shone as if stardust had been used to forge it.

  “Let’s try celestial mana.” He injected his mana into the spear and saw as the curse coiled along it in a path that seemed to be predetermined. The curse acting as the method with the tip acting as the mouth. Slowly his mana was channeled inside and controlled so that it wasn’t just fed but funneled.

  This led to the spear achieving five fold increase in strength as opposed to the two fold that that level of mana would have allowed.

  “I didn’t know curses can be used like that.” He mumbled to himself as he wrote down the findings. It all came down to one line.

  ‘The curse seems to act as a funnel and transporter to the mana towards the tip.’

  This had been all that was needed as soon the page was filled with, ‘whys’. This was his method of research and one that had allowed him to discover many things over the course of his life as a mage apprentice.

  The first thing he needed to figure out was the reason as to why the wood didn’t deteriorate from the presence of the curse and he had an idea that the reason was the passage he had noticed.

  To test this, he would need to copy the curse and place it in many other types of woods. Both magical and mundane. He reached for a shelf and called upon a low level artefact shaped like a red tinted monocle with an arcane circle across the glass.

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  Made to view spell circles but his glasses were enhanced to view the runes that made up the spell circles. When he placed them onto his eye he was assaulted with the deconstruction of the many traps, enchantments and flavor spells that had been in his study.

  He took a deep breath in and as he was letting it out a thought was born in his mind, causing him to swerve towards the place where the system had opened the void. There he was met with it, a bleed in space and reality with a hole of emptiness meeting him.

  The voice of the stars grew the more he looked at it as he was essentially looking at the highest plane theorized. Without missing a beat a spell was slung towards the opening, and a voice from nowhere announced it like a mandate from the heavens, as the stars were the ones to speak of it.

  Celestial Barricade.

  It lingered for a moment before fading into obscurity. This was a perk that mages connected to either the eldritch or his class could enjoy. Every time a spell was cast, we were spared the nuisance of the voices and they were subjected to those targeted or if the spell wasn’t targeting anyone then all those near the mage would hear it.

  A pale and thin shield, that looked like moonlight, surrounded the hole and smothered it’s influence leaving only the barrier present. With that done he turned back to the spear.

  With the monocle on he could see the various runes surrounding it but he focused on the only mature spell circles in his vision. A twisted thing, just as all curses were, with many jagged pints like serrated teeth and a mixture of ever changing runes.

  The very sight of them caused an agitated groan to escape his mouth as he could foresee his future for the next few months and the gods forbid years. “I hope that this is at the very least helpful.” He muttered before every thought in his mind faded and his mind hyper focused on the ever changing runes to find any semblance if a pattern.

  A day had passed before he saw one of the jagged edges change. He stopped what he was doing before horror filled his young face. The entire spell circle was changing, not just the runes but the very foundations of the runes.

  “What kind of sorcery is this?” He muttered in disbelief as he watched a brand new spell circle replace the old. The new one, seemed to have taken on affinities of fire and earth on top of the dark affinity curses are curved from.

  “Dear gods, even the runes are different.” He watched as all the runes he had memorized gave way to new ones. While the ones that made the spell circle were easy to understand, he could see a rank two rune mixed with the others, this one acting as a point of focus for this new spell circle.

  Normally to create a spell circle with ever changing runes, you need to duplicate the spell circle and in each duplicate adding different runes that cumulate to the same effect as the original. This would lead to the focus of the duplicates, the spell circle that acts as the glue holding the contraption together, to switch among the different versions of the spell circle once a rune is damaged or low on magic.

  However this abomination before him could only be made if there was something higher than a spell circle, and that object was stacked with duplicates each containing a different spell circle, with different runes.

  “Pure madness.” He muttered as he looked over at the notebook before him with a record of twenty different runes with only two of them having a descriptor underneath them. “It had cycled five times before the entire spell circle changed.

  He took a deep breath and placed the monocle on his eye again and looked at the curse again. He spent two weeks watching the runes and spell circles change as he recorded them and grouped them according to what cycle they appeared in and what spell circle they appeared in.

  The spell circles changed three more times. With the fire, water, nature, earth, dark and life affinity runes being added. With each addition, the runes acting as a focus increased by one and they were all dark affinity runes. This gave birth to a theory.

  “it seems for the curse to continue being a curse in the new spell circles, dark affinity runes have to act as the focus.” He had noticed this when in the last spell circle, only water affinity runes existed but there was five dark affinity runes acting as the focus. “It also seemed like the number of focuses increased with the increased spell circles.” He came to his first true observation in his research. All others he had relegated them to assumptions that while he didn’t dismiss them, as the truth is born from the combination of many assumptions, he reminded himself that they were just that, assumptions.

  In neat letters he wrote the observation, at the top of a new page away from the chaos of his written thoughts.

  “That was a respectful bout, I just have to watch it gain to make sure I didn’t miss any cycle, or rune.” He said with exhaustion clear in his voice. With that he placed the monocle on his eye before delving back into the cursed curse in time to watch the third cycle become the fourth.

  This mind numbing, soul sucking advent went on for two months. Where he watched, drew, was awed and finally double checked everything.

  When he was finally done, with one hundred new runes with only twenty of them making sense, and preparing for bed he heard a voice. Looking at the void rift, he saw it still encased in the barrier and with its foul energy already cleansed.

  “Mage, we need your assistance.” A gruff voice filled with exhaustion called as a group of now four individuals came from his bedroom. The three newly rank two individuals he had placed at the mercy of the system were back and they had a strangler with them.

  They looked different as the boy was now a few inches taller with two swords at his waist and a dark uniformed armor. It had some metal parts that were sewed over the fabric on his joints. The other two seemed not to have changed as the paladin was still wearing the Order of Light armor with a longsword on his back and the warlock woman still had the dark purple robe that seemed tattered at it’s ends.

  He turned to look at the stranger and saw obvious signs of demon blood, with the dark, almost charged skin, pure red eyes and the ram like horns with small embers at their tips. He held a spear in his arm while his other hand had a concealed blade now unconcealed.

  “Mage, we need your help to defeat a wyvern.” The paladin spoke again. He seemed to be out of breath, as were the rest, but his words were coherent enough. Marcus looked at them silently. He was trying to thing if the level of manipulation the system would have had to pull, to make a simple task as collecting flowers and fruits into fighting the off distant and shunned cousin of dragons.