Chapter 100 False Wisdom and True Wisdom

The next morning after getting six mana potions from the slaughtered lamb, he planned to take the brat Saeuno with him to practice the new spells he had learned – Arcane Wisdom and that Weakness magic he had stolen from Naga.

Outside of Stormwind, on the shores of Spiegel Lake, in a small wooded area with not much in the way of people, Jace found a clearing and had the Kid stand across from him.

“What do you intend to do with me, Master?” Sëanor asked, bracing himself.

Jace looked at the little brat, who was on fire, held out his hand, and said, “Here, be my test subject.”

The little ghost was still smiling face immediately changed color: “No, no, no …… master, no, it can be, but won’t you be heartbroken when I feel the pain? Can you tell me is want to try what magic on me?”

“And you’re afraid of pain?” Jace said, “I just wanted to try a weakness spell I learned from that naga on you, I couldn’t even hold my arms or legs after I got hit with that spell, I couldn’t even walk, but I memorized the spell for it.”

“Anunigi, Dulzara, Khanna.”

Jace pointed at the brat with a full gesture of releasing fear magic, and the brat let out a startled “wow”, but nothing happened.

“Kaner is not a demonic language, master, it doesn’t sound like a demonic language at all!” The Kid said, “If I’m not mistaken, the shadow magic the Naga use originates from the Shas’ar language of the Void Interface, which is the curse of the Shas’ar language! It sounds right too!”

“Shas’ar language?” Jace hesitated a bit, he had heard of the language, but in a previous life.

Shas’ar is the language of communication between the evil god that parasitized Azeroth in ancient times and its dark dependents, and not many NPCs in the game know it.

And how was Jace to figure out its pronunciation in a world where he’d never heard of the language from human lips, and where he couldn’t find any textbooks on the subject in the library (which he certainly couldn’t have)?

“Since you’re so familiar with it, do you know Shas’ar?” Jace asked.

“I’ll be damned if I can!” Sëanor jumped up and replied, “Those who master the Shas’ar language are either pure Shadow creatures, dark flesh and blood born of parasites, or …… are Shadow believers who have mastered powerful Shadow energies! I, on the other hand, am just a weak wretch! No one will teach me the Shas’ar language, and I have even less power to master it!”

Since there aren’t any teachers, how should one go about correcting the voice?

Jace looked out over the lake, recalling Naga’s pronunciation as he picked up a rock and hit the water.

Various pronunciations, pauses, and accent adjustments of “Anunigi, Dulzara, Khanna.” After he had pronounced it for I don’t know how many times, suddenly after one sentence, he felt that something was not quite right.

Even the brats looked this way. Is it a gathering of Shadow energy?

Jace made sure to read that way just now and said, “Saeuno, get over there!”

The Kid bounced back to his original position and stood back up and yelled excitedly, “I’m ready!”

It was only afterward that he remembered that he seemed to be standing here as a target for some kind of painful magic, and the expression on his face changed from one of excitement to one of hard feelings.

“Try not to pronounce it so standardly, Master.”

“How can I possibly pronounce standard Shas’ar?”

Jace flirted, then followed the chanting that seemed to have interacted with Shadow earlier, and then paired it with the remembered gestures of the Naga banshee …… of one of her opponents, of course, and pointed at the Kid.

“Anunigi, Dulzara, Khanna.”

A dark shadow coursed through his body, making his arms tingle a bit, and he watched as the brat’s expression began to look off, and he stopped bouncing around, instead his legs trembled.

“It’s …… it’s ……” The Kid even muttered with much less force.

But Jace felt soothed, the Kid’s sudden weakness giving him the thrill of condescension, a sense of superiority that tormented the weak.

After all, he was already in the relationship between the two dominant, he is the master, and the kid …… is the servant, is the minion, is the tool that says no one. Then, reason rushed back, letting him out of that “enjoyment”, and the shadow energy that brought a tingling in his arm quickly dissipated.

The side effects of Shadow Magic were no longer a surprise to Jace.

Still, it was so much better than the hand-wringing he’d felt when he’d first been introduced to Shadow magic, and now he was able to realize what part of his emotions were coming from the Dark Force and what part were coming from itself.

“It’s working …… cough!” The Kid couldn’t even stand easily now, “It’s the Shadow’s Curse, master, it’s the Weakness Curse.”

“I know.” Jace said, as he took out the pen and paper he had already prepared, and jotted down on it, in the universal alphabet, the process of pronouncing this last spell he had attempted.

He was going to teach this weakness curse to those warlocks in the slaughtered lamb …… Gagin and Galdus must have other spells they hadn’t taken out.

Since the warlocks had access to the dark practitioners of the Black Iron Dwarves, it was unlikely that they had heard of only one type of magic, the Dread Arts, from there.

The first time Jace went to that basement when he met Erland and Sulenna, they used the Curse of Pain on themselves, and speaking of which, Jace hadn’t learned the Curse of Pain spell until now.

The reason he hadn’t been interested in the Curse of Pain was because he had thought at first that Sulenna had heard the spell from somewhere.

Spells that don t have a standard source that can be corrected in the process of learning will definitely become more and more crooked, just like this time, this Weakness Curse …… He doesn t have the original text of the real Shas Yar spell, and he doesn t know the original text’s recitation, so he can only make a poor imitation. He still remembers that when Naga used the Weakness Curse on himself, he couldn’t even stand up and directly fell to the ground, and even the simple action of taking out the medicine bottle from his bag was incredibly difficult.

And the Kid was the weakest creature he’d ever seen physically, and the fact that even a little guy like that couldn’t do anything to make it fall showed just how much the spell had been weakened from Naga’s to Jace’s.

It’s either a problem with the spell or the casting action, or maybe even some other condition.

Jace suspected that Naga, as a servant of the Ancient Gods, might also have some special advantage in shadow casting that he just didn’t know about yet.

In any case, this second-hand curse of weakness could be the first step in elevating yourself in the basement.

Especially since one of Gagin’s requirements when he asked himself to join the group was that he be able to resist the strong and powerful Erlang, and the Curse of Weakness, as a weakening spell, must have been very much in Gagin’s favor.

“Next, the second spell, Saeuno.” Jace puts the note away as he does so, then pulls out the “Felix – Beginning Arcane Spellcasting Techniques” that Marin gave him, and flips it open to find the chapter on “Arcane Wisdom”.

He also flipped back a few pages, and then realized that there were so many variants of Arcane Wisdom, almost dozens of pages describing all sorts of Arcane Wisdom, durations, sustained effects, and even offensive variants, similar to some sort of mind-disturbing that would make the opponent take in too much information all at once to the point where his consciousness would collapse.

What Marin had taught him was the most conventional kind – an introductory version of a spell originating from the elves that had been refined by Dalaran.

“There’s a second spell?” The still double-strung brat roared with vigor, “You spare me, master!”

Jace turned to point at Saeuno and shouted, “Mistis, Yupeli, Shininger!”

A cloud of arcane energies instantly surrounded the Kid, who jumped in fear, yet they dissipated before he could escape or react in any other more complex way.

It was still the same problem, and Jace was having a hard time finding that feeling of converting free mana into infused energy.

“What kind of magic is this, Master?” The little ghost asked.

“Arcane wisdom.” Jace said.

“Ah …… Arcane Wisdom, I know that spell!” The kid says, “You’re going about it all wrong.”

“By the way, you know the Seal of the Blood Deed.” Jace says, “You tell me how I can transform magical energy into a spell with enhanced effects?”

“I was born knowing it, how am I going to teach it to you?” The Kid said helplessly, “But I know that Arcane Wisdom shouldn’t be that hard!” The Kid was right, Arcane Wisdom was considered an introductory magic, otherwise it wouldn’t be in Felix.

Jace felt that he had been too eager to pursue mage armor immediately after learning the Light spell, always thinking of shortcuts, always thinking that he might be able to learn it more quickly as he understood it.

But unlike Shadow, he had little talent for arcane magic, so following the rules and following directions was a better option instead.

Flipping through Felix again Jace compared his pronunciation and movements a little bit to the instructions above for the basic version of Arcane Wisdom, and then repeated it over and over again to find a feel for it.

It had been a while, and he was already feeling a little tired.

Perhaps practicing the Curse of Weakness earlier had consumed some energy, and some more had been wasted just now by summoning an errant cloud of Arcane Wisdom energy.

Want a mana potion?

These potions can be hard to come by, so if you’re not already particularly fatigued, try not to use them.

Jace stood up, forgetting as much as he could about the lessons he had learned from practicing his light spells, and took his stance without any thoughts of his own, casting Arcane Wisdom with a single stroke.

When the spell casting maneuver was complete, he jolted to hear a crisp bell of arcane energy ringing in his ears, and a strange experience began. The field of vision seemed to widen a bit, like it was at a wider angle than before.

But it was an illusion, and he knew it well, simply because his ability to recognize the images in his field of vision was stronger, and his attention wasn’t focused on a single circle within the center of his field of vision as it had been before, but rather expanded out, an increase in his powers of observation.

The sound of the wind between the leaves, the rippling of the water in the lake, the chirping of the birds …… No, that’s not accurate.

That’s the call of the Black Tern.

Jace remembered vividly noting the call characteristics of this common bird of Aerwen as he casually scanned the kingdom’s geography in Marin’s study.

The original text reads – Three song-like, continuous chirps from high to low are typical of the Black Swallowtails.

How does he remember these details?

Is this the power of arcane wisdom? Is this magic even capable of extracting hidden information in the mind that has been overlooked?

Upon feeling this memory, and observation, far beyond his norm, Jace truly felt what Marin meant when he said – if you abuse arcane wisdom, you’ll soon have a split personality, and gradually begin to hate the one who wants to be stupid, the real self.