Chronicles of the True Wizard

Chapter 192 - Book 9

The next item on his agenda now that he had killed a bunch of creatures was to hand in the corpses for points and take a look at experimenting with his body. After that, he wanted to track down the weird whispering on the ambient anima he had been hearing. He knew he was close to it and he had every intention of figuring out what the hell it was.

Felix dropped a temporary anchor where he stood and also measured and memorized the coordinates just in case. With that done, he opened a portal back to the evaluation chamber and stepped through.

Looking up, it appeared to be morning as the sun was just rising over the horizon, not visible yet but the horizon sported a colorful gradient band.

There was no one else in line so Felix walked right up and knocked on the door. It opened just a moment later and he stepped inside where he saw Orav holding the door for him.

"Ah, the Pocket Home and Demitium, right?"

Felix nodded, "Correct."

Felix walked over to one of the walls that was out of the direct line of sight and opened his Pocket Home. He used a series of Force spells to move balls of corpses through the portal as big as he could fit through the opening.

Orav didn't even question him hiding the portal and once Felix had completely emptied his Pocket Home of corpses, he personally walked over to the desk and offered the chunk he had carved out of the Leviathan.

Orav immediately took and examined it then smiled widely, "This is a great find. I appreciate you leaving enough for us to re

Nova hasn't had any issue with that though?

Neither do most sprites as soon as they bond with a sapient humanoid.

I see. For Nova specifically, her mana control also isn't terrible.

Correct.

You think I have any amount of control over matter yet?

We can test it out later but I suspect by the end of D grade, if you practice, you might be able to fly without any spells. Maybe not quickly or with any significant force, but maybe.

Only because my control over the matter in my body is going to be higher, right? I couldn't lift another person?

Correct. Your precision is going to be abysmal too.

Does Nova do that now?

Remember her eating the Demitium?

Oh right.

Felix briefly dissected and separated out small pieces of the Phoenix wing making sure he had a small piece of every cell using cells from Test Subject #4 wherever possible. He tugged on his soul bond with Nova and felt them rocket towards him at a ridiculous speed.

With his new eyes, he was able to see them pop out from behind a coral pillar way off in the distance then bound across the ground, pillars, plants and the air itself. Felix was scared for a second they would smack into him or the tower and started preparing spells but they decelerated as soon as they passed through the portal.

Nova stopped right in front of him, a black Dire Wolf who's head reached a couple meters off the ground.

Felix pulled out the cells he had isolated and handed them to Nova who happily sucked them into her soul space. Before Felix had a chance to communicate what he wanted though, Nova sent him a few images of them eating his body.

He was concerned for a few seconds until he figured out what they wanted. Nova could see all the different cells on his body that he had integrated. Instead of letting them just gnaw on him a little, he told them to wait a minute.

He quickly isolated as many unique cells as he could and severed a small section of his flesh and fed it to Nova who was elated.

After that they were very receptive and when Felix communicated that he wanted Nova to reproduce the cells he had first given them, they seemed confused. They didn't refuse though and instead, Nova leapt out of his Pocket Home and started sucking in massive chunks of the coral pillars and ground.

They looked like a vacuum cleaner that sucked up everything, regardless of whether or not it was tied down. Like a black hole, they simply removed large chunks of everything.

Felix was astonished at how much they consumed but they just kept going. After almost a half hour of this, they hopped back over to Felix's feet and communicated to him that it was going to take a little bit of time then started napping.

In the meantime, Felix started testing the abilities he had gotten from Nova, to move matter. He started with a pebble that he held in his hands and simply tried to lift it up a little bit. He had no frame of reference for what the feeling was like so he simply focused and imagined it. He pushed his will as much as he could but it just wasn't moving.

He tried picturing it moving, relaxing, straining and focusing until finally, he got frustrated and the pebble suddenly shot out of his hand smacking into the edge of the pocket universe. If he hadn't felt the burst of mana coming from his own mana core, he would have thought he had finally gotten it.

What the fuck.

Remember when you were fighting Damoth?

Those were spells though, right? I felt the mana.

I don't know what they were, don't ask me.

Fuck.

Felix retrieved another pebble and tried to replicate the feat but just couldn't. He eventually gave up and went back to figuring out the Nova bond powers he should have by now. In order to figure out how it felt, he briefly woke Nova up and had them lift the pebble into the air.

They shrugged and complied though were very confused. While they circled the pebble in the air in front of them, Felix fully tuned into their soul bond and let their feelings, emotions and experience wash over him.

He was immediately bombarded with all kinds of senses he wasn't used to and some he had never experienced at all. He felt things in and around his body that he didn't actually feel but were being passed along from Nova. He felt hunger that was mostly sated but ever present and felt her willpower fighting against it.

Most of all though, he felt matter itself. He could feel everything around Nova. All the air, ground and Felix himself. It was all there as a sense in the same way he felt mana all around him at all times.

It took him a few minutes to process everything and despite the head ache, isolate the feeling of Nova moving the pebble. Instead of anything he had tried, it felt just different. He wasn't sure he ever would have figured it out on his own. It was like when he first learned to sense mana. He just needed any idea of what to look for.

Tuning their soul bond out again, Felix returned to his own body and let Nova go back to napping. He caught the pebble from the air and held it in his hand then just focused on feeling it.

It took him almost an hour of staring at it before he felt a small spec of a brand new sense waking itself up. He couldn't discern the stone's composition, weight, or even it's shape. He could however, feel a fuzzy blur in his palm, and that was more than he had felt before.

He continued to hone the senses for another hour or so until Nova finally woke up. Unfortunately, he hadn't really gotten any further than a fuzzy feeling.

Nova immediately hopped up to their feet and vomited out a completely dry chunk of flesh that was almost as big as Felix was. It looked like a ball of flesh and it was completely disgusting in a body horror way. Felix didn't mind at all though and excitedly stuck it in The Blood Ring.

Before he could go back to trying to integrate the phoenix cells, Nova approached Felix and asked him a question through their soul bond. It took them a bit of back and forth for Felix to realize what they wanted but he eventually figured it out.

He did his best to imagine what a phoenix might look like, considering the movement of Test Subject #4 he suspected they weren't actually on fire all the time. Grim stopped him short because though he had never actually seen one himself, he had seen a picture of them in one of the bestiaries Felix had scanned.

Felix quickly pulled up the memory and saw a beautiful bird that was no bigger than an eagle. It had an angular, trapezoidal beak and a mane of long colorful feathers that matched the feathers on it's tail. It's body was slim and covered in sharp looking feathers that were mostly blue some red feathers along the edges of it's wings and neck.

Felix pushed the image through to Nova as best he could through their soul bond and he watched as they morphed themselves on the spot to fit the image. He had provided feedback and helped them adjust as soul bonds weren't ideal for communicating detailed images. Eventually though, Nova managed to get themselves to perfectly match the image as far as Felix could tell.

Nova happily flew around the Pocket Home for a bit but didn't eat anything despite the desire Felix felt from their soul bond when they sniffed at the sapling. Nova resisted though and happily bounded over to the Demitium chunk where they continued eating it.

Inside The Blood Ring, Felix replicated the wing as accurately as he could and simply attached it to his back. Unlike all the other cells he had integrated recently, the phoenix wing wasn't fueled by energy at all, it exclusively used mana. Unfortunately, it didn't seem particularly strong by itself.

Felix got used to the additional limb as he flapped it around and even forced it to grow feathers which were not in fact blue but rather a light purple.

Finally, he fed it a burst of mana and launched himself into the edge of the pocket dimension with a massive explosion of fire. The outside was squishy and absorbed a lot of the impact but he still broke his own neck. He fell to the ground then waited until he regained full control of his body as his neck healed.

Nova immediately flew over and Felix was touched that they were worried about him until he realized all he felt through their soul bond was curiosity at what he was doing. They poked at the wing on his back while he healed and demanded an explanation which he did his best to provide.

Once they were satisfied, they flew off into the under-coral and started eating the ground again.

Felix ignored them for now and turned his attention towards his back. Though he had only intended to supply a couple thousand mana, it seemed as though phoenixes didn't pump mana to their wings but rather, the wings pulled mana out of their core.

Looking at his pool which The System kindly estimated for him, he had actually spent almost a quarter million mana. After that, he spent a few hours trying to find a way to control how much mana he spent. At first, he simply manually held back the mana with his mana control.

Unfortunately, in a fight if he wasn't able to focus on it, he didn't want to have any potential to kill himself. He messed with the cells until he finally found a specific set of muscles that contracted to shrink the mana channels in the wing. He carefully took control of those nerves manually with his soul and limited control over his body and forced them to shrink.

This time, he leapt into the air with a small burst of fire but didn't hit the edge of his pocket universe and instead fell back down gracefully with a simple Feather Fall. He had only consumed a couple thousand mana and was very happy with the result.

The next step for him was incorporating it all into his muscles so that he could augment any movement with the same effect. Luckily, Test Subject #4 was a great starting point for Felix.

He spent the most time trying to combine both Damoth's muscles with the mana fueled ones with the phoenix cells. He didn't want to always use the phoenix cells and wanted the option to use his body normally and not be weak. The phoenix cells, when they weren't producing bursts of fire, were rather weak. Since he didn't want to be trailing fire everywhere he went, he needed something in between.

He also looked into Test Subject #7's muscles which seemed to be a variation of the Phoenix cells in Test Subject #4. According to Grim, #7 was an attempt to replicate #4 which was the lab's greatest accomplishment that they never quite managed to replicate or improve on.

#7's muscles relied on Lightning adjacent attunements and seemed to increase Agility more than Strength.

What he ended up with was a hybrid approach that he was ultimately pretty happy with. He twisted all the muscles together in a way where the cells were mostly separate but relied on each-other to a certain degree. He was giving up almost 20% of his raw Strength in favor of doubling his Strength when he pumped mana into his cells. That 20% was easily made up though from the fact that he used more mana instead of just energy. He could now push the muscles harder without worrying about exhausting himself.

Unfortunately, he was also convinced he would never move these muscles over to his real body, they just weren't clean or elegant enough. If he found a way to remove the Fire and just use mana to generate Force, he would consider it though.

He still hadn't created mana channels yet but he figured he needed more time to design them. Now that he had more organs and parts of his body that required mana, he had plenty of requirements he could rely on to direct his design. He figured he would spend some free time on it back in Telviras.

Felix briefly waited for Nova to finish gallivanting around the under-coral while training his matter senses. Once they were done, he closed the door to his Pocket Home, had Nova revert to a Dire Wolf and opened a portal back to Telviras.

He presented his Persona's registration, which wasn't readable in his soul space, and flew off towards Inscripticae. Instead of heading for the entrance though, he instead flew down into the parking area beneath the building and opened his Pocket Home against a wall. He stepped inside with Nova and close the portal.

Nova immediately reverted to their cat form when given permission and returned to eating the Demitium chunk. Felix reverted to his own body as well and checked on the sapling and everything else just to be sure before he left.

Lastly, as he was walking towards the edge to open the exit, he quickly looked back and identified Nova.

[D - Cursed] Nova, Ravenous Matter Spirit (Lvl 467)

Felix chuckled when he realized his familiar was still surpassing him in level then opened the door and left. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .