Hh

I wish I could say I waited through the next few hours with a reasonable level of relaxation and calm. Unfortunately, like usual, I could feel the rising anxiety concerning how I would spend my charges, and what my freebie would be this cycle. I wasn't quite as neurotic and panicky as I was for the first, and honestly, the second time. I was thankfully a little more used to the stress, at least enough that I wasn't thoroughly embarrassing myself. Still, I sure as hell wasn't about to sit still and wait, so I eventually got up and started working on the compound, trying to keep myself busy.

I spent some time refining the wooden paths around the compound, as well as some of my detailed work in the bunkhouses, before settling down in the common area. There, while enjoying a large mug of coffee, I used wood shaping and some of the crafting spells I got from arcane focus creation to carve out a chessboard. I then had the golem gather up a bunch of rocks, which I carefully carved into the chess pieces. I also made checker pieces, since I already had the board and they were easy to make. The process was actually kind of fun, no doubt in part because I could skip the difficult and tedious parts of woodworking with my magic. I made a note to try my hand at magical woodwork in the future when I had some free time. I had been looking for a hobby beyond casual reading, and it looked like I might have found one.

As I was putting away the chess board and its pieces, tucking them into a custom-grown cubby along the common area, I could feel the approaching end of the current cycle. Once I was done cleaning up, I made my way to the fire pit, warning Alya and Kali that the renewed cycle was approaching. Once the fire was sufficiently fed, I sat down and closed my eyes, waiting silently for the last few minutes to pass, the warm crackle keeping me calm.

Finally, midnight hit, and the usual sensation passed over me, my charges slowly refilling. When it was done, I could feel seven filled charges in total, just waiting to be spent. As always, however, I continued to sit as patiently as possible with my eyes closed, waiting for my free subject. As it approached, I could instantly tell that something was different. I was used to the charges being more loose, ready to purchase two separate levels of a single subject. This time, however, I could feel it was all one conglomerate.

It felt more like… three charges linked together for one purchase...

Suddenly, I could feel the charges latching onto druidcraft, and my knowledge expanded. My confusion at the freebie being spent on a pre-existing subject was scattered immediately as dozens and dozens of spells, rituals, and even some real enchantments settled into my mind.

As the download settled into my brain, I dove into the new knowledge, eager to see what it contained. Immediately, I could tell that a good chunk of the knowledge was about better control, more complicated creation abilities, and spread manipulations. I could now maintain a large, heavily enhanced orchard at once rather than maintaining the trees individually. Potentially even more useful, I now had spells that created basic plant life, trees, vines, and mosses without any seeds or starter material.

And then there was what I could do with seeds.

Combining, mixing, and matching, I could make a redwood tree that grew as fast as bamboo, or make a bed of grass filled with the thorns of the acacia tree, dripping with poison ivy oil. I could even take natural mutations and push them further, cultivating tomatoes the size of my head in a few rapid harvests, rather than decades of work.

Pushing past what was natural, I realized my abilities allowed even further enhancements to some fruit-growing trees. I could now make several different kinds of magically steeped trees, each growing their fruits with noticeable and permanent effects on those who ate them. I wasn't quite capable of making a peach of immortality, or one of Idunn's apples, but a pear that refined and reinforced someone's muscles, pushing them a few steps closer to their peak… Damn, if that wasn't exciting.

Of course, being capable of this took me from the edge of what could be considered being a Biotinker and punted me all the way to the deep, dark pit itself.

I eagerly shared what I could now do with Alya and Kali, who were both very excited. Alya was excited to hear my power had grown once again, while Kali was fascinated by the idea of my enhanced trees. I was already making plans to plant my magical fruit orchard at the compound so Kali could watch over it, and the Genus Loci was extremely excited about the idea. Something about her Loci being the location of an enchanted orchard made her very eager.

Once the excitement for the new level of druidcraft had passed, I settled in for what was really causing my previous nervousness. I fed the fire, warming me up slightly as I sat down and pulled out my notebook. Over the last few days, I eventually managed to narrow my investment idea to two concepts, one of which I was eager to try.

My safe option was to simply invest in golem-making, which would no doubt branch off of ritual crafting. I was pretty sure that, at some point, an investment into golem-making would become advanced enough that it would rise above the knowledge I already had from my previous spending. With any luck, just three levels would be enough to do it, hopefully pushing my knowledge far enough to develop golems that could think and reason independently.

Unfortunately, there was a rather glaring problem. If making golems that were "alive" was possible, then it was not going to be something I found on the first and second levels. That meant I would have to invest multiple levels just to test the hypothesis. That was a huge potential waste, and I couldn't just throw charges at it and move on, especially with how low-yield this cycle's quest had been. I had one charge to "spare," which wasn't enough. Thankfully, golem-crafting was just my backup option.

My primary idea, something that I learned about from the many books I had bought, stemmed from a concept called animism.

Animism was a vague word that described the concept of spirits and essences that are tied to objects, locations, beings, and more. Some cultures, like many Native American tribes, believed that almost everything had a spirit and that by appeasing that spirit, you would have a better connection with that idea, object, or living creature. This type of animism was not what I was interested in.

The aspect I was interested in was a more modern idea that items could be imbued with spirits and energy, simply by being used. It had ties to a lot of different cultures, with ideas ranging from weapons coming to life once they had killed enough people, to treasured objects taking on emotions from the people who held the object dearly. I was hoping that I could find magic that would let me find, strengthen, and give life to these spirits, somehow empowering them to protect and act as heroes.

It was vague, varied, and unspecific, but I was hoping that by focusing on the concept and modifying it to what I really wanted, Marvelous Mage would do the rest and find me something close to what I was looking for.

It was a risk, a real gamble, but I had one "free" shot to test it, so I was willing to try.

I closed my eyes and focused on my envisioned version of animism. I didn't name it outright, as while my idea of animism might be my inspiration, if druidcraft had taught me anything, it was that wherever I was getting this magical knowledge from, their naming conventions did not match mine.

As I fed the idea, layering it with what I was looking for, trying to focus as much as possible, I slowly fed it a single charge. The idea latched on and sucked it in, a good sign as far as I was concerned. As I purchased the new subject, knowledge flooded my mind, securing itself to me.

Spiritual totem magic. It was, as far as I could tell, exactly what I was looking for.

According to what my new subject was telling me, spirits are naturally occurring entities that arise connected to objects, places, plants, and even animals that exist for enough time or have enough emotional energy put into them. In some ways, the most potent and powerful of spirits were the first step to creating natural Genus Loci. Thankfully, here, in a world where magic was so sparse, almost naturally non-existent, spirits could never really get to that point. Instead, powerful places might gain a slight mind of their own, acting in extremely small, subtle ways, barely affecting the physical world.

And that was only the most extreme cases.

With only one level unlocked, most of what I could do was use magic to scan for and get a feel for spirits tied to various objects, locations, plants, and more. I could also feed them magic in order to help them interact with the real world to an extent. I could also do the opposite, draining a spirit of its power to quell it, even severe it if I could muster up enough power. It was that manipulation of the spirits that embodied the totem parts, at least at this low level.

I would take it to the grave, but I now had a weapon that could, technically, maybe hurt Kali.

I looked around the camp before turning to focus on the trees around us. I stood and slowly made my way to the outskirts of the clearing, the edge of the compound space. I let out a long breath before raiding my hand.

"Ostendite mihi spiritus qui sunt coram me," I chanted, gray lines of magic appearing around my arm and spinning down past my hand, forming into a circle before flashing once with two arcane symbols appearing for just a moment.

I blinked away what I thought were spots from having looked at a relatively bright flash in a mostly dark part of the compound. For a moment, I was worried I had actually damaged my eyes before I realized that the spell had worked, and I was looking at spirits.

Slight, wavering bits of energy dotted the forest around us, each one centered in a large tree. Each of them varied in shade, but they were all flickering black and white, like a color-shifted flame. They ranged in size, with the smallest no bigger than the flame you find at the end of a match, while the largest was no bigger than half a playing card. I only saw one spirit that large, growing inside the oldest, mightiest oak I could find around the compound.

When I first stumbled on that mighty oak, I reached out and ran my hand along its bark. A quick druidcraft spell told me this tree was ancient, already starting to succumb to its age. And yet, in a world like this one where magic was so sparse, what should have been a great guardian spirit of the forest, one of many, barely had a flicker of any consciousness at all, no more aware than an ant.

I used my druidcraft to heal the tree, doing my best to add a few hundred years to its life. I was tempted to feed it some mana to try and wake it up more, but I held back. This was not a power I should engage with, at least not without thinking about it first.

I made my way back to the compound, scanning the iron-oak trees I had grown myself, happy to see that they contained no spirit inside them. Even with only one purchase, I was already seeing some connections between druidcraft and spiritual totem magic, and what I could see told me that what I had done to the trees to grow the compound would have been very much not fun for a spirit. I found myself very happy I had settled in the clearing and not hunted down an ancient tree to serve as my home.

"Well… The good news is I think I've found what I needed," I said, plopping down by the fire. "With only one charge, there is only so much to go on, so I might be wrong, but I feel good about it."

"Are you able to create sentient spirits?" Alya asked.

"I could. Feeding energy directly into a spirit is crude, but it works," I responded. "The problem is that spirits are by nature not human. Their minds are alien, and waking up, say, a tree spirit might make the forest hostile to humans. There is no way to know."

"Then… that doesn't sound like it works," Alya pointed out, her voice filled with confusion. "You can't work with something if you're worried about fae-style miscommunications."

"Well, first, it wouldn't be that bad," I assured her. "They aren't going to try and steal my name or trick me out of my firstborn. They just won't be easy for me to understand, like how a night owl doesn't understand an early bird, but a few times worse. But that doesn't really matter, because the spells I know now are clearly precursors to more precise and human-friendly methods later. It's pinging off of rituals pretty hard, as well as druidcraft, and I'm getting the idea that in the next few levels, the totem concept really flourishes."

"Why does the ability to put energy into spirits exist at the level at all?" Alya asked, sounding genuinely curious. "If it is such a bad idea, should it not be higher up the learning curve?"

"Well, for one, I don't think that's how this works. The Marvelous Mage system isn't censoring me until I'm ready for certain dangerous knowledge... at least as far as I know," I pointed out, scratching my cheek. "And two, investing energy into a spirit can give whatever its inside special effects. A sword with a powerful spirit cuts better and swings faster, while a castle with a healthy, kind spirit will feel happier and its occupants healthier. You can even curse people with it by finding something with a negative spirit and charging it up before dumping it in their home or their village. You can imagine how bad dropping a spirit that hates humans into a well or leaving it in a hospital would be."

"How potent would these spirits be?"

"It can vary depending on their strength, both in how much you feed them and their own inherent strength," I responded, leaning back and closing my eyes. "Now, hold on, I want to spend my points."

With only a spare thought or two, quickly reviewing what I had learned with one investment, I promptly fed two more charges into spiritual totem magic, quickly followed by another three. I let out a long breath as the river of knowledge poured into my skull, connecting and bridging between my other topics. When it was finally done, I couldn't help but quickly stand and clap my hands in excitement.

"Good news, we fucking nailed it," I said with wide smile. "Time to show it off."

After my rather dramatic statement, I rushed to the ritual platform, immediately diving into the first storage tree. I cast the spell that let me see spirits as I went through everything I had purchased, including some of the things I had specifically bought for this moment. Animism had been floating around in my head for around a week, so I had more than enough time to snag a couple of things while I was shopping. Most of them were useless, simple guesses I made at what might carry the kind of spirit I was looking for that I could now see did not. Two of them, however, had exactly what I needed.

The first was a military service medal, a Purple Heart. I had been pretty shocked to find it in a pawnshop during one of my random stops on my way to Boston, but I immediately bought it. The man behind the counter claimed someone had sold it looking for a quick buck, but that it was genuine and had been given to a soldier that was now dead.

In all honesty, I had expected it to be fake but had bought it anyway just to be safe. I could now see that it was very much genuine. The spirit inside the medal was powerful by this world's standards, and the medal had clearly been well loved and honored before being sold, as the spirit was well defined, not the hazy wisps that made up the trees around us. I held the medal in my hand, resting it in my palm as I held my other hand above it, palm down.

"Ostende mihi altitudinem huius spiritus," I chanted, a small gray circle of three arcane symbols appearing under my empty hand, shining down on the medal.

I held the spell for a full minute before the spirit inside reacted, swelling slightly as it absorbed my mana. As it did, my mind was filled with feelings and images, flashes of thought that were too simple to include words. Without my experience dealing with Kali, I would have been quickly overwhelmed. In fact, I still might have been if she hadn't slid into my spell, acting as a clean and much more controlled buffer between us. I let out a sigh of relief when she did.

"Thanks, Kali," I said, shaking my head a bit. "That was a lot more intense than I expected… maybe I should have started with something smaller..."

She sent me a chastizing metaphorical look before working with me to explore just what this spirit felt like.

I immediately noticed the… echo of the man who the medal had been given to. I could even glimpse parts of his life. He was the oldest of four, with a younger brother and an even younger set of twin sisters. He played football as the running back, and when his brother declared he was joining the service to fight Nazis, he had joined as well to keep an eye on him. By some miracle, he managed to do so for a good chunk of the war, all the way until his brother was injured and sent home. He fought like hell even after that, eventually earning the medal by saving his squad by drawing fire from an MG32 that had been positioned on a hill.

He wore the medal with pride and eventually passed it to his son, who showed it to his family with pride and told stories of his father.

Beyond that echo, I could feel honor steeped into the metal, the desire to fight for what was right and to put your fellows before yourself. The drive to sacrifice in the face of impossible odds. There were some more bloodthirsty thoughts in there, especially towards Germans and Nazis, but I could curb those down to reasonable levels. I might hate Nazis as much as the next guy, but as a hero and as a construct, I needed my creations to adhere to an even stricter set of rules than I did.

And wholesale killing of an entire gang was definitely not within that set of rules.

The next item was a Brockton Bay Police Department badge, one older than I was by a good few decades. It was dented, worn, and had a small crack along one corner, which I fixed with a quick, small-scale metal manipulation spell.

This time, as I cast the spell to get a feel for the spirit, Kali was ready, helping from the get-go. As I cast, the flashes came slower, steadier, at a pace that I could actually follow. I could see the badge actually had two owners, the first of which was a cop. He served well, working to protect the city for almost his entire life. He was a bit of a hard ass, and the spirit would have reflected that further, if not for its second owner, a young kid who had somehow found the discarded badge. He wore it as part of his imaginary games, playing both a police officer and a western sheriff, running around his home catching imaginary bad guys. It gave the spirit an underlying youthfulness and optimism I couldn't help but want to strengthen.

"I think for the first one, I'm going to use the police badge," I said, carefully putting away the purple heart, treating it better now that I knew it was real. "I think the combination of the police officer with the kid will actually balance out, plus it's tied to the actual city, something the Purple Heart doesn't have."

"Are you sure you can handle the child-like aspects?" Alya asked, watching as I started grabbing materials from the storage tree and laying them along one of the counter surfaces I had grown along the platform.

"I'm pretty confident," I responded with a nod, pulling out a stick of electrum chalk. "It's all standard stuff for this sort of magic."

Working with spirits was only half of the subject I had chosen, the process of turning them into totems of protection, or offense for that matter, was the other half. It leaned heavily into rituals but deviated enough from the standard sort that I had very little knowledge of it before. Now that I had unlocked the subject, the two were heavily connected, branching together significantly. The fact that I had both gave me a level of flexibility in my totem crafting options that someone who focused only on spirit totem magic alone could only dream of.

The first step was to awakening a totem was making sure the spirit wasn't going to go rogue the moment you did so. This was a cleansing ritual of sorts, though there wasn't anything holy or healing about it, just using a ritual to curb any negative attributes. I focused mostly on the child-like echoes that the badge had gained while the young boy owned it. To be clear, it wasn't like I was chaining up parts of a living creature or carving things out of sentient mind. At this stage, the spirit was just echoes and unconnected emotions, with no thoughts or real feelings.

If it had developed any further, then what I was doing would absolutely raise several moral questions, but as it was, it was like training an ant to not bite, if such a thing were possible.

When I was done, seven small rituals later, the spirit inside of the badge was a bit more solid and a lot less fragmented. I had worked the lines and echoes together, preparing the spirit for its final awakening by stabilizing it significantly. The next step was to provide it with a vessel to inhabit. For now, the spirit was contained inside its home artifact, the policeman's badge, but once I awakened, I could merge the artifact with a totem of some kind.

As one might imagine, totems could vary greatly. They could be a stationary totem, like a large rock or even a wooden pillar, like many imagine when you use the word "totem." You could fuse it with a piece of armor, or a shield, letting the spirit lend you physical strength, resilience, or whatever else it could provide. I was already planning on how to weave some lesser spirits into my getup to increase their resilience, strength, and other abilities. You could even fuse the artifact with something more mobile, like a boat, cart, or even a car. Normally, working with a car would be difficult because of the technology, but because spirits could inhabit just about anything, finding a car spirit and binding it to another car would work just as well as anything else.

You could also bind them to a golem, custom-made to allow the spirit to manipulate and control it. With a sufficiently powerful golem core and a properly awoken spirit, I could create a fully sentient being of strength and will, determined to fight alongside me and other heroes to protect the innocent and put a stop to the villains.

Rather than moving on to awakening the spirit immediately, I wanted to have a body ready for it to inhabit so that it didn't have to suffer from not having control of itself. Thankfully, I still had enough metal left over from a previous visit to the junkyard to make a large golem, including, for the first time, an actual head since I wanted them to be able to speak.

Once I was sure I had the materials, I got to work on the golem core, which took until very early the following morning. The result was not my usual "follow commands and don't kill anyone" golem. This was a work of art, pushing my golem-making knowledge to its limits and incorporating everything I had learned about totem crafting from my newest subject acquisition. Not only did it have control over the four cardinal limbs, but it also had extensive control over the head, which would allow the golem to emote as it got more and more used to its vessel.

Once the core was done, I got to work on the frame. Rather than making it look like plated metal, I worked hard to form the appearance of muscles and normal human limbs. It took a lot of work, at least a dozen attempts, but I finally got it right. The end result was a six-foot-tall frame with a stable, muscular body that looked natural and not overly sculpted.

When I was done with the body, I tackled the head, which easily took just as long. I formed the face based on the original cop, mixed with some of the features I had seen on the young kid. I specifically wanted him to look about my age, with a clean, shiny face and a strong chin. The result was a pretty decent-looking face with recognizable, maybe even well-formed features.

After I finished the frame, I performed the preparation ritual before I had my headless, normal golems move it to the corner of the platform. With the golem materials finished, it was finally time to awaken the spirit inside the badge completely.

I placed the badge at the center of the platform and got to work, drawing another relatively simple ritual, which I knew by heart because of spiritual totem magic. The ritual had four spots for materials, one of which I put a few drops of my own blood into. This was to ensure loyalty, but not anything more than that. I could have added to the ritual to make the bindings harsher, locking them to my every word, but that wasn't what I wanted. I knew I needed to have some influence over them, but I wasn't nearly prepared to lock them into complete and utter servitude. They would listen to what I said and follow my orders, but if I told them to start punching babies and drop-kicking the elderly, they would tell me to get lost.

Of course, as with everything I made, since their magic was my magic, I could un-make their golem form with a mental yank, but the awakened spirit wouldn't be tied to me like that. Any magic I fed them would be converted into their own essence, removing it from my control.

Other than the blood, I also needed bone ashes, which I made from deer bones I found about a ten-minute walk from the compound. It also required a single diamond and a cup of some sort of drink, in this case, a cup of apple cider, which Kali actually made from the apples I grew from the orchard.

The ritual was a slow one, specifically designed to trickle my mana into the spirit to keep it from being overwhelmed by the energy. A spirit of this size could only convert a certain amount of mana at a time, and overwhelming it would affect its awakening negatively. So I knelt there for two hours, the sun slowly appearing on the horizon as I did. Finally, the ritual clicked over, and the final part started, the materials disintegrating and feeding into the old police officer's badge. For a long moment, the only sound was the steady breeze Kali used to wash away the ash marks left behind by the ritual.

I slowly stood up, wincing and casting a quick healing spell to fix the deep ache in my back and knees, before walking forward and carefully picking up the badge. Even without casting the spell, I could feel the difference. Before, it was just a thing, but now my mind seemed to instinctively know that I was holding something important, something more than just an old hunk of worn metal. I quickly cast the spirit vision spell, revealing the final nature of the spirit inside the badge.

What was once a flickering gray and black flame the size of my thumb now engulfed my whole hand, growing past the confines of the badge itself. The flickering was now stable, less a candle in a windstorm and more of a carefully maintained pilot light. Even the colors were less washed out, with the black and grey colors more defined and consistent.

"Did it work?" Alya asked. "I cannot see what your spell allows you to."

"It did. It's dormant at the moment, but the spirit is awakened," I confirmed, whistling to my mindless golems. "The last step is to fuse them all together."

The golems carried the frame to the center of the platform, and I carefully inserted the golem core in a prepared hole an inch or so below the construct's sternum. I then carefully sealed it shut with my metal control spell before putting the badge in a similar hole, this one right where their heart would be. Ordinarily, the symbolism probably wouldn't matter too much for a golem, but adding spirits into the mix and the line started to get a bit more blurry.

"Alright, get ready, everyone. I'm gonna wake them up," I said, looking around to find Alya in her physical form and Kali inhabiting her own golem construct. "There's a chance this is a little disorienting for them, so… get ready."

I waited for them both to nod before turning back, raising my hand and holding my palm out to the waiting golem.

"Exsurge, spiritus!"

The simple spell sent out a single pulse of mana focused through an arcane symbol that flickered on the back of my hand. It expanded to a wave, passing through the construct before quickly fading. For a moment, nothing happened, silence reigning over the compound as I lowered my hand.

Finally, after what felt like a good thirty seconds, the construct suddenly moved, tensing and shifting as if it were a normal human being shocked by a large surge of electricity. After a second or two, it finally sagged, staggering a step forward, nearly falling over. I stepped forward as well, prepared to catch them, but they managed to catch themselves. The spirit construct suddenly looked up, locking eyes with me.

"Hhhhhhyyyyyyyaaaaaaaalllllloooooooouuuuuu….hhhhhheeeeEEEElllllllooooooooooOOOOOOo. HheeeeelllllLLLLooooo… HeelllllOOO…Heeelllloooo… Hello!" It shouted and screeched, its first attempts at a greeting barely recognizable before it finally managed to control itself.

Watching the metal in its face shift and move as it tried the first few times made my skin crawl, but as it got better, the movements normalized, becoming more natural-looking.

"Hello, I am… I don't know what my name is… I don't think I ever needed one!" They admitted, their brow furrowing as they scratched their chin. "Do I have a name? I remember… Peter… But I also remember Christopher… Could those be my names?"

It was hard not to notice the spirits... looseness as it talked, tilting its head back and forth as it spoke, asking questions and sounding excited.

"I don't think it would be wise to use those names," I advised, stepping forward again, trying to appear non-threatening. "They belonged to other people, people who helped form you. But now that you are here, and you deserve a name for yourself."

"I think… I think you're right," The spirit nodded, considering my words and seeing the logic. "I am something new, so I need a new name! I… do not know what other names I could have."

"We can help with that," I assured him, stepping forward with my hand out. "My name is William Kalus."

"Hello William Kalus, you are the source of my… thoughts… my thinking… my consciousness!" He said, ignoring my hand. "Why have you given me thoughts? They seem… solid, yet lacking."

"That's because I built them solid, but you're still new," I explained gently. "Slowly, your sentience will develop, and the empty parts will fill in with your personality. As for why… I need help. Your spirit was full of desire to help those who couldn't help themselves, to protect the innocent. I need desires like that. Brockton Bay is struggling, and I can't help her without more people standing by my side."

The spirit stood, silently processing my statement. It looked around for a moment, before locking eyes with me again.

"What gives you the authority to… fight for justice?" the still-nameless spirit asked. "Are you part of the police? Vigilantism is a problem all its own."

"No, but that is not as big of a problem as you might think," I explained. "I promise, I am not some rogue mage, spurning a perfectly good establishment to seek my own justice. If I could be working with the authorities, I would be. I could explain it to you, if you let me."

"Yes… please, that would be helpful," They said, before finally reaching out to shake my hand. "If it is as you have said, I will help you fight for justice."

I could feel the great strength of the golem frame as he shook my hand, even through my geomantic enhancements. I nodded, a smile on my face at his response.

"Come, then, let's talk about the situation that Brockton Bay and even the world has found itself in."

Charges So Far

Geomancy: [x][x]​

Healing Spells: [x][x]​

Lightning Spells: [x][x]​

PM Enhancement Spells: [x]​

Druidcraft: [x][x][x]​

Ritual Design and crafting: [x][x][x]​

Arcane Focus Creation: [x][x]​

Spell Crafting: [x][x][x]​

Quick Casting: [x][x]​

Spiritual Totem Magic:[x][x][x]​