19 – Water Stone

[Kaleidus]

After the battle at Newcastle, I retreated with the AAPV to a secluded spot to experiment in peace.

The Ring of Andvari was held in my hand. All along the flight, I could almost feel it calling out to me, waiting for a new master to take a hold of it. At the same time, it contradictorily felt cold and distant, as if it didn't want to show itself.

'Agate, stay alert. I'm going to try it on,' I thought.

'I'm with you, as always,' she thought back.

Through our mental link, Agate could take control of my nervous system and force me to take off the ring if this went badly.

'Remember I can't stop you from shutting me out though, now that you've got a magic circuit. If you get taken over and they figure out how to do it, I won't be able to do anything. Or a powerful enough magic might even take me over too.'

'You'll just have to be quick about it then. I trust you. You were made by Zelretch, after all. If something can take you over as well, then at least we lost to a worthy opponent.'

'OK! YOLO!' She conjured up the image of a V-sign.

Actually, I was quite wary of any potential traps. I could joke about it with Agate, but in reality, I was not ready to have my journey end here.

"Derflinger, you there?" I pulled him out of his sheath.

"Yeah. You gonna try that on?"

"I am. Is it safe?"

"Don't look at me. I'm no expert."

"Well, you've got more experience than me, at least. Any tips?"

"Try touching it to me."

I brought the ring to the flat of the blade. Derflinger hummed for a moment.

"Hoooly, this thing is actually a water stone! Haha, I take back what I said about the Water Spirit. There's no way she'll tell you anything!"

"What do you mean? What's a water stone anyway? Is it like the water version of wind stones?" I asked.

"Pretty much. There's stones for every element, except probably Void. Water's the rarest of them all though. Fire's second. Most people have probably never even heard of those two. Earth is relatively less common, but the nobles do use them. Wind stones can be found everywhere. I couldn't tell you why it's like that, but I can tell you that the rarer the stone, the more powerful it is. But you can tell already, can't you? The magic in this is on a different level from wind stones. And it's damn big too. You'd be lucky to find one the size of a grain of coarse sand, and the Water Spirit would fight you to hell and back for that, let alone a stone this big."

Looking closely at the ring, I could see the blue crystal on it was a pebble like round shape nearly a centimeter in diameter and half a centimeter thick. Compared to a grain of sand, it must have been at least a hundred times larger.

"Why is that? Why's it so important?"

"Because Great Spirits like her are born from a sufficiently large mass of smaller spirits and colossal amounts of magical energy. But before they become Great Spirits, the energy slowly accumulates over many thousands of years into these stones. So this thing is actually like a baby Great Water Spirit. It's not really alive or going to turn into a new Great Spirit anytime soon, especially out of water, but you get my point. If this belonged to the Water Spirit of Ragdorian Lake, she'll think of it as part of herself, so there's no way she'll tell you anything about how to use it. Remember that these stones are a limited resource. When it runs out of magic energy, it goes poof. She's not going to let that happen. You'd have a hard enough time convincing her to give up a single tear, which is also technically a part of her body, and this could be worth hundreds or even thousands of tears."

"That sounds pretty impressive. I assume the Water Spirit's tears are a rare reagent the nobles here use?" I did seem to remember something of the sort when Saito visited the Water Spirit in the story.

"Oh it's more than impressive. This really is a treasure beyond measure. I can't believe Myozunitonirun would even give it to somebody else. They must be a newbie, an idiot, or arrogant fool that thought they could take it back easily. I'd freely admit that this stone might well be more valuable than me. Heck, I'd trade me for one of these. Partner, you really lucked out on this one."

"So any idea how to use it? And there's no trap right?"

"No traps that I can see. Mind you, I already told you I'm not an expert. If there is a trap set by Myozunitonirun of all people, I probably can't find it anyway. As for using it, try to see if the spirits inside can help you out. There should be enough to at least understand you and do what you want, even if it won't be able to speak to you like I can."

"Alright then, I'm putting it on. If there is a trap, please use your ability to take over my body and remove it from my finger."

"Sure."

As one last precaution, I started cycling magical energy through my magic circuit.

Then I put the ring onto my left index finger.

As soon as I did so, I felt myself connect to an incomprehensibly great power.

I had the impression of an entire ocean being condensed onto my hand, but the impression soon faded into no more than a minor presence in the back of my mind.

'Doesn't look like it's doing anything to your mind yet,' Agate transmitted.

'But it is a little odd, isn't it, for it to have a presence in my mind at all? For example, Derflinger doesn't, and we have to actually talk out loud with him,' I thought back.

'That's true. I'll keep watching and try to find out what the connection is for,' said Agate.

I tried to send magical energy into it, hoping it would somehow give me an idea of how to use it or awaken some of the spirits Derflinger mentioned, but nothing happened. It rejected my energy and stayed stubbornly inert.

"Nothing's happening Derf. How am I supposed to ask spirits in it for help?"

"Dunno. Just will it?"

I did my best to 'will' the damn thing to activate or talk to me, but I couldn't feel anything different. Even if I focused in on its presence in my mind, no response came back.

Infuriatingly, after focusing on the presence for too long, it apparently retreated back into the ring.

"O spirits of water, please lend me your power!" I said.

Then I tried a few different languages and variations but, again, there was nothing.

Finally, I tried the words that Cromwell uttered when he erected the protective ward.

Still nothing.

Agate spoke up then, and phased out of her position in the Armoriont. "When the elves use spirit magic, they have to make some kind of contract with the spirits, right?"

"That sounds about right, yeah," Derflinger responded.

"But you don't know how they do the contract?"

"I probably do, I just can't remember. Haven't been owned by an elf for a few hundred years, I think."

"We have some contract spells of our own. Why don't you try that, Kaleidus? Let's modify a familiar contract spell, using the one you have me with as a base," she said aloud, so Derflinger could hear it.

"That's not a bad idea," I said.

"There's one nice thing about having a stone like this. You can skip the part where you have to summon strong enough spirits to you, because they're already in the stone," said Derflinger.

"Do windstones have spirits too?"

"Technically, yes, but they're too weak and dumb to do spirit magic with. To find any that are good enough, you'd need to go a lot deeper into the windstone deposits. The ones you're carrying definitely don't have any you can use."

Without further ado, we got to work on devising the spell.

It took almost three days of non-stop experimentation, aside from sleep, before we successfully contracted the spirits of the water stone.

When we did, a whole new world of possibilities opened to me.

The ring didn't actually come with any built-in spells, nor could the spirits cast any automatically without my will directing it. But I was already used to trying to invent spells with Agate, and I had some idea of what the ring was capable of.

It would only be a matter of time before I mastered it.

The only drawback was…

These spirits had a will of their own. They weren't exactly intelligent, but they definitely had some kind of instinct—one that aggressively urged me to protect the stone, and protested against anything that would exhaust the power of the stone and make it smaller. And because it had a will, if it became angry it would refuse to do anything for me.

It constantly tried to pull me towards large nodes of water elemental energy, such as lakes, where it could slowly—excruciatingly slowly—recover its power. So slow that it seemed almost meaningless to make the effort, as neither Agate nor I could not tell the difference in it after hours of waiting, but it did make the spirits happier.

For their help in casting magic, these spirits demanded a price on every use of the water stone. The preferred one was to give them a net gain of water elemental energy, which was not possible for me. According to Derflinger, the elves had a method of artificially creating windstones, so they might know how to do something like that, but he'd never heard of them creating the other types of element stones. He thought it was simply too hard to gather the requisite energy for the other elements.

The alternative price was vital energy and life force, and the drain was proportional to the great power of the stone. That would be scary for anybody else, and I imagined that Cromwell had traded many years of his lifespan to use the ring.

Fortunately, I had plenty of that to spare because of my unique biology and could regenerate it indefinitely. As long as I didn't overtax myself within a short time period, I could recover by consuming enough nutrition with the help of the Bionanite Swarm and Armoriont, and suffer no long-term consequences.

Sadly, vital energy was not the same as water elemental energy, so the water stone would still shrink over time. It was unclear what the spirits needed this vital energy for, but it wasn't unique to these spirits. Derflinger told us that all spirits except artificial ones like him generally accepted vital energy as payment for spirit magic contracts.

So I called it a contract, but it was a rather loose pact rather than a contract with clear terms and conditions. It wasn't as though the spirits could understand legalese, even the magical kind, if I wanted to establish terms. I give them some energy, the spirits would help me if they felt like it, and that was that.

'You should break the ring!' Agate thought to me.

'What? Why?'

'So you can take the water stone out and put it in the Armoriont. The ring itself doesn't do anything. That way it'll be harder to steal.'

After thinking about it for a bit, that made a lot of sense, so I did as Agate suggested.

It was actually quite hard thanks to the amount of Mystery on it, but Derflinger was sufficiently powered up to cut it.

I kept the silver ring band for future use because it had decent Mystery thanks to being pretty ancient.

As for the water stone, I went a step further and implanted it directly into my body instead. My bionanite swarm used the Armoriont to grow a new organ beside my heart to hold and integrate the stone within the circulatory system.

At the end of the day, the Armoriont was also something that could be detached, even if it was more or less a layer of my body now. So putting the stone in my actual inner body was even better.

In fact, there might even be a benefit to integrating it with my body. The water stone was a very powerful natural nexus of water elemental energy. You could say that it "breathed" water elemental energy like humans breathed air.

It was a process that went both ways, absorbing water energy from outside, and releasing it back. And because the human body was made of 70% water, and it was directly connected to my bloodstream, I hoped that by osmosis, I might eventually gain a personal affinity to water, or just gain Mystery quickly as well. The stone was even older than the ring band.

To an extent, windstones did this "breathing" too, but they weren't so much nexuses as mere deposits of mana, the density being too low, and they tended to dissipate in the open air instead of drawing in more energy in a sustainable fashion.

Finally, there was the fact that if there existed a hidden trap, it was more likely to be on the ring than the stone. The ring was after all, artificial, while the stone was a natural thing that also had spirits protecting it. It was also more likely to activate while worn as a ring because that's what you'd expect people to do with rings.

Now that it was implanted, I just had to drink a lot more water and absorb a lot more moisture from the air to compensate for the stone's thirst.

With that done, it was time to consolidate my control over Albion.

O O O

By the time I made contact with General Fairfax again, he had successfully taken control of the main fleet and the majority of Reconquista's forces.

I could tell that he did not like what he had done, and he only stayed 'loyal' to my cause out of fear. Nevertheless, he was a competent military man, and even with Agate I found no evidence of him conspiring against me, so I had nothing to complain about. Perhaps, eventually, I could persuade him that serving me was not such a bad thing.

He moved efficiently to capture Londinium first, which was taken essentially unopposed, bringing the court nobles under control.

A number of nobles elsewhere unsurprisingly refused to submit immediately, so the civil war continued for a few days.

However, resistance was weak and with a few more appearances by Muurleth and judicious use of non-nuclear explosives and chemical weapons, any overt opposition was quickly crushed. In some ways, the resistance worked to my advantage, because crushing these nobles militarily would allow me to force through more reforms to centralize state power, and it would be seen as less tyrannical to do this during a power struggle than to start a fight during peacetime.

However, despite the novelty of ruling a country, I had no real interest in administering it. Prior to finding out that Cromwell could protect himself from spying, my plan was to steal the ring in secret, then use it to control Cromwell, and by extension, the whole of Albion, from the shadows.

This was because the glamour and prestige of ruling meant nothing to somebody like me, who could travel the planes at will. I wasn't going to live out my life here. I was only interested in the material benefits that ruling a kingdom could give me.

The most important benefit was the army of mages under Reconquista's control. There were lots of things which would be more efficiently done through the use of subordinates than for me to deal with in person.

Things like the long-term research of the nobles' magic and spirit magic. Not only could the mages do the research for me, they were also a readily available source of experimental specimens. Of course, I wasn't a comically evil magus, so I wouldn't be using my own subordinates as experimental subjects. Good management rewarded loyal and competent subordinates after all. But the criminals and enemies of the state who rebelled against my rule would have no such protections.

To inspire loyalty, I picked a few of the top mages like General Fairfax and persuaded them to commit to Geas oaths. I found out unfortunately that the stronger the magic they had, the weaker the compulsion of the Geas on them, and Triangle class mages and above could basically completely ignore it. I couldn't even keep them immobilized or force an involuntary action for an instant, unlike with Saito or the people back on Worm. Still, I did it, if only for the psychological effect.

Another important consideration was the wind stone mining operations in Albion. This was a massive source of magical resources that may prove useful to me in other planes. It still had to be confirmed once I plane shifted, but considering that magical energies and magic circuits seemed to work on Worm just fine, I figured that a crystallization of mana would have a good chance of still being useful as well.

While I could extract it myself, it was clearly more efficient to simply take the refined stones from Albion's existing operations whenever I needed more. They even had techniques for extracting, refining, and using it that I wouldn't need to otherwise steal or re-invent.

The same concept applied to recharging Derflinger. With an army at my command, I could simply order a bunch of mages to attack me in a "military readiness exercise" or some such nonsense and quickly charge him up.

Finally, it's never a bad idea to set up more power bases in case anything happened to my other ones, which were all concentrated on Worm at the moment.

It would be even better if eventually, through the Shaitan's Gate connection to Saito's Earth, I could acquire modern tech supplies and magical supplies, with only one plane shift instead of two.

At the site of the battle, nuclear fallout unfortunately contaminated some of the area and caused radiation sickness in the residents of Newcastle. The nobles were mostly fine as the water mages healed the symptoms, but many commoners had already died.

The nuclear missile launched by the AAPV that I pretended was a spell had been manufactured on Worm's Earth M2 base by Offensive Bias in conjunction with Bakuda. Similar to our highly advanced nuclear energy tech, the weaponized version was also quite advanced. Due to the very limited size of the AAPV, it was necessary to maximize energy density and yield to weight ratios on all our weapons, so nuclear was an ideal fit.

The missile we detonated was only about 5 kilotons, weighing in at just 12kg. That was one-third the yield of the first nuclear bomb ever detonated on Earth, but a hundred times smaller, achieving a yield-to-weight ratio near that of the highest ratio ever recorded. If we made a larger bomb, we could actually exceed the previously thought theoretical maximum for thermonuclear devices at 6 megatons per ton, but miniaturization to this level and converting to a missile was a substantially more difficult task, resulting in a worse ratio.

We had made adjustments to minimize nuclear fallout and concentrate direct explosive power, but in the end, eliminating radiation simply wasn't possible without a major technological breakthrough, one which we never achieved.

Nevertheless, I was happy with the result. Some ships and mages had to be sacrificed, but it was worth it to cement my control and reputation.

Aside from control of the military, I devised a new religion centred on Muurleth. In the short-term, there would be great chaos and resistance, but in the long-run, I could not expect to maintain control during long periods of absence off plane without some extraordinary methods. While fear was still fresh and strong, now was the best time to make religious reforms.

Equally important was the fact that by making Muurleth out to be a god instead of a mortal man, it would give a sense of familiarity when I gave a mortal king the divine right to rule. Rather than being a faceless person taking over the kingdom, it would seem as though they had merely changed religions. And if Brimir gave the nobles magic, Muurleth would give them knowledge. Considering that Brimir wasn't around to give any more divine gifts or do much of anything visible for the people, wouldn't many people find the enlightened Muurletheism more appealing?

The only problem was the inevitable conflict with the existing Church. I didn't want the kingdom to get embroiled in any pointless foreign conflicts, especially not when I was away and unable to provide support, so I'd have to find a way to stave off any crusades coming our way.

/ / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / /

[Agate]

It was supposed to be my chance to shine but I was totally defeated before I could do anything!

But now the Ring of Andvari has been broken apart! Hahaha, revenge is mine!

Since Kaleidus is busy with politics and other boring stuff, I'm in charge of our magic research.

There's so much to do!

We know the water stone is capable of many incredible things. But Cromwell, a natural water mage, had years to figure them out and Myozunitonirun to help.

We have to start smaller and decide what to focus on. Many of the more complex spells like mind control, anti-scrying, and resurrection that we saw Cromwell using might need to have more basic skills mastered first. For example, the resurrection spell also healed the body, and that kind of healing is already an advanced water magic.

Each time we use the water stone even in training, it will use up the energy inside.

So let's get to work on mental influence and warding!

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A/N: The MC POV portion took much longer than I expected, and it is quite important so the reactions will have to wait until next chapter.

The magic training will happen in the background with some progress comments by Agate. This part is actually a quest vote, which you'll have to look up on SV if you want to see, as it's not allowed on FFN (my profile for the link). I'm going to update this chapter once we have the result. It's minor and shouldn't have too much impact on plot though, so you can just wait until Agate reports on it next time.

SalemTheSpeakerOfTruth: Ah, you guessed it!

FerunaLutelou: Maybe you're right, but it's not quite that simple either. Brimir came to Halk with a whole existing civilization of noble mages, all of whom were very powerful compared to current mages. He isn't necessarily a common ancestor unless his descendants intermixed a lot. Earth has a guaranteed common ancestor sometime in the distant past because you can keep tracing it back to the origin, but Brimir wasn't the origin point. It would be like saying everyone is a descendant of Gilgamesh...it might be possible, but not necessarily. Even for a 5000 year civilization like China I would doubt claims that the Yellow Emperor is actually a common ancestor of all its dynasties, even if they existed.

Athreya: He likes it xD. Well, he assumes a new identity whenever he doesn't want his activities to be linked to his other ones. The Kaleidus Axion identity on Halk is supposed to be a hero. Muurleth isn't acting heroic at all.

Reishin Amara: MC just has higher priorities atm. We'll see what happens to her a bit later.

Kalm: There's a description of some of his facial features in SS 1 when he reveals it to Henrietta. I think there was a description way back in the prequel too. Right now he's almost always armoured, and there's a couple of descriptions for those, one in the early chapters when he was at the Academy and made the golden scale hero armor, and one for the black Muurleth armor. As for his height, it varies, because like with everything else, he's capable of modifying it now. He usually stands around 6'5" with armour and helmet. If I find a good place I'll write about the next time we see him out of armor.

And looks like most people figured out he was just pretending a nuke was his spell. Thanks for the reviews!