Blessed Time: A LitRPG Adventure

by Cale Plamann

  Once again, he’d have to go through all the awkwardness of puberty while working out and trying to temper himself. He certainly wasn’t excited about another four years of body aches, hormonally destabilized moods, and cracking voices.

  Still, having to start from scratch was better than being trapped by the Royal Knights. Micah had learned his lesson there. Without backing, if he revealed the extent of his gift, some powerful force would swoop in and exploit him. He couldn’t let that happen again. This time, he needed to find a way to defeat the Durgh alone.

  It was time to see what tools he had to work with this time around. Micah called up his status.

  Micah Silver

  Age 13 [ERROR] / 23

  Class/Level-XP

  HP 8/8

  Attributes

  Body 4, Agility 3, Mind 9, Spirit 8

  Attunement

  Moon 4,Sun 1, Night 2

  Mana

  Moon 8/8, Sun2/2, Night 4/4

  Affinities

  Time 10

  Wood 6

  Air 5

  Blessings

  Mythic Blessing of Mursa - Blessed Return, Ageless Folio

  Skills

  Anatomy 7

  Enchanting 6

  Fishing 1

  Herbalism 5

  Librarian 4

  Ritual Magic 14

  Spear 7

  -Wind Spear 2

  Spellcasting 20

  He tapped his chin contemplatively. His skill levels were high, even for someone at the 20th level. As awful as the Knights were, their methods were effective. Being forced to repeatedly cast rituals and spells that should have been beyond his abilities had done wonders for his skill growth. In fact, he was fairly close to the skill requirements for becoming a Thaumaturge. He just needed to upgrade his Enchanting skill by 4.

  Summoning and opening the Folio once again, Micah turned to the page detailing Karin Dakkora’s ritual on energy transference and his theorized permutations to it. The three major uses he’d speculated on were using temporal energy to fulfill some or all of the attunement cost in enchanting, using temporal energy to fulfill some or all of the life force requirement for a summoning, and trying to find a way to weaponize Temporal Transfer.

  The final method was well beyond his meager store of mana at the moment. After all, he’d need at least enough mana to initiate Temporal Transfer in order to begin siphoning temporal energy into a target. That said, the other two might be just what he needed to fight off the Durgh incursion.

  In his last life, Micah had focused on ritual magic, but he had managed to develop enough of a base in enchanting at the Academy due to the similarity of the two fields to know that attunement was an enchanter’s primary problem. Almost every enchantment took at least a half-point of attunement, with more powerful enchantments taking multiple full points.

  He could gain a point of Moon attunement fairly quickly by “learning” a first-tier spell, but beyond that, as a thirteen-year-old, Micah didn’t really have a good way of gaining more attunement. Goods were given to youths for free, but by the same token, no one in their right mind would buy an object from him lest they incur Luxos’ wrath for undermining the monetary system.

  If he was going to become a Thaumaturge, Micah would need to gain 4 points in Enchanting without earning a single level. That meant perfecting his modification to the temporal transference ritual. The only way he would be able to gain those skill levels was by dramatically decreasing the attunement cost of new enchantments.

  Sighing, Micah closed the book. The worst part was that he’d need to do all of this while maintaining a normal schedule. His family would wonder if he didn’t get an apprenticeship, so it would be off to Keeper Ansom’s library once again for him.

  Despite being productive, the following months left bags under Micah’s eyes. The library contained the basic books on ritual magic and enchantment theory he needed to finish adapting the ritual, but beyond that, they were more or less a waste of time. He’d already learned most of what he needed at the Royal Academy, and almost everything he hadn’t already committed to memory was safely transcribed in the Folio.

  The nights, on the other hand, were of great use. Almost casually, he set up teleport beacons in his bedroom and at the dire stoat’s cave, the large weasel posing almost no threat to him. Air Knife wasn’t a particularly powerful spell, but at his level of Spellcasting and skill level in the spell, even with the meager handful of mana available to Micah as a classless Blessed, he easily murdered the creature from a distance.

  Defeating the dire stoat and reclaiming the cave was tedious rather than a challenge due to Micah’s skill levels. Once he set himself up in the cave, Micah began procuring the animals he’d need to further his experiments.

  Night by night, he accumulated creatures, either by catching them in a series of live traps or by purchasing them at the market and ferrying them out to the forest. They weren’t powerful magically, generally being young and inexperienced, but with practice, he was just barely able to touch the temporal energy in them.

  Surprisingly, he gained an extra point of Moon attunement the first time he successfully performed the transfer ritual. Somewhere out there, Mursa was watching and rewarding Micah for his research.

  It wasn’t as much of a success as he’d hoped, dropping the price of enchanting a bolt of his father’s cloth to make it more lustrous and durable from one-third of an attunement point to one-tenth of a point, but Micah took it as a sign that Mursa smiled upon his efforts. Strange, really—he’d expected a more negative response from the stories told about Karin Dakkora.

  After that, he replicated the ritual as often as possible, transferring the age and experience from his collection of geese and raccoons—two months at a time—into enchanting a series of knickknacks.

  Without a class, Micah didn’t have the mana to make anything truly powerful, but that didn’t mean that his efforts were fruitless. After almost two months, he’d gained 3 points in Enchanting and developed a collection of costume jewelry and cheap blades that could perform minor but useful effects.

  Nothing too powerful, but enough to catch a merchant’s eye if Micah could risk the attention. A ring that would pulse in the presence of poison. A belt buckle that would aid digestion. A necklace that created a bubble of air around the user’s head on command, letting them breathe underwater for a period of time or avoid gaseous attacks.

  Unfortunately, Micah had a problem. He was beginning to run low on attunement, having burned through most of the points he’d gained from successfully “learning” ritual magic and enchanting. He couldn’t afford to waste more attunement on minor enchantments powered by inefficient transfers of temporal energy from younger creatures.

  Luckily, he had a goal. In a nearby grove lived a great stag. Once upon a time, it must’ve been a king of the forest, chasing any other buck from its does with ease, but now, age had caught up with it.

  Its former red-brown coat was gray, fur falling off in clumps due to sickness and malnutrition to reveal the wrinkled skin beneath. It was more than a match for Micah physically, but then again, what wasn’t? With the aid of his magic, Micah hoped to capture the creature in order to use its temporal energy in a grand enchantment that would push his skill level up to 10.

  The Saturday of the hunt began like any other, with Micah making an excuse to Trevor and Esther about why he couldn’t play with them despite being off work at his apprenticeship followed by performing the teleportation ritual out to his cave. Almost immediately, he began working on a very particular ritual, one he’d seen Brenden perform dozens of times but had never tried himself.

  Regretfully, he dragged over the cages he’d made for the pair of badgers that he’d trapped almost a month ago. He preferred using temporal energy to the more traditional way of performing rituals, but the first time through a dangerous casting wasn’t the time to substitute. After all, if this didn’t go perfectly, he would almost certainly die without someone on h
and to protect him.

  Opening the Folio, he began the ritual, slashing open his forearm to drop blood all along the outside of the circle. His voice took on a strange resonance as it began to mix and interact with principles far outside the visible world. A strange pressure began to build around Micah, and reality thinned. For a brief second, he glimpsed into a formless and chaotic beyond, just a sideways step from Karell, but Micah closed his eyes and refused to let it distract him.

  Then it came time for the sacrifice. He plunged the dagger into one badger after another. Over the past month of him continually rejuvenating the animals, they’d become tame, almost pets. It pained him to betray them, but a ritual of this magnitude called for blood and life. The weak souls of the badgers wouldn’t provide much of an anchor, but they were by far the best medium he had on hand.

  The darkness of the page parted like a curtain as a large, hairy hand reached out from somewhere else and grasped onto empty air. With a bestial howl, it pulled itself forward, staggering onto its hands and knees. The gap in existence winked out behind it as it stood up, almost nine feet in height. The Onkert daemon was just as he remembered it, with the snarling maw of a wolf placed on top of the huge and well-muscled body of a gorilla.

  Micah sighed, only to quirk his mouth slightly when he received a point of Moon attunement. The ritual was successful, and the Onkert would follow his every command until its anchor—the anima of a pair of badgers—faded.

  He had between fifteen and twenty minutes. He’d have to hurry if he planned to catch the stag that quickly.

  30

  A Third Class

  Micah gasped for breath as he tried to follow the galloping Onkert daemon. He’d gotten close enough to the stag to wound it with an Air Knife, slashing open its leg and leaving a blood trail for the daemon to follow, but his tiny body couldn’t keep up. The Onkert barreled through the forest, digging its armored knuckles into the soil as it shouldered past old-growth trees and trampled underbrush.

  Already he was only following his summon by sound and its path of destruction. The Onkert was far ahead of him, occasionally howling as it sought its injured quarry. Micah stopped for a second to catch his breath, his rail-thin arms and legs trembling from exertion. Idly, he hoped that the sound of the Onkert barreling through the forest scared away whatever else might be nearby. His tiny, sweat-soaked form wasn’t in any shape to fight off a particularly aggressive rabbit, let alone a boar, wolf, or monster.

  A howl of triumph interrupted Micah’s panting. With a grunt, he pushed off of the tree he’d been resting against and began jogging down the trail left by the daemon. Hopefully, it would follow its commands and only subdue the stag. He’d never seen the Onkerts disobey Brenden, but this was also his first summoning. Only the Sixteen knew if the incantation binding its will was done completely correctly.

  About four minutes later, Micah staggered into a clearing, sweat streaming down his body and his breath coming in short, ragged bursts. The daemon held the stag pinned to the forest floor, its slavering wolf jaws whining and snapping at it, but Micah’s will held it back. No matter how it tried, the daemon was unable to harm the majestic but aging creature.

  Mentally, he assessed the time and sighed. There wasn’t energy left in the summoning ritual to drag the stag back to his cave before the Onkert dissipated. Micah began quickly pulling ingredients out of the backpack that had become the bane of his existence on the jog over. He didn’t look forward to it, but he would need to make a priority out of cardio once again. Getting winded from even this minor piece of exertion was downright embarrassing.

  As efficiently as possible, Micah set up the transference ritual around the stag. It had given up struggling, exhausted from the chase, but now it was still, trapped under the Onkert’s weight. It eyed him warily as Micah traced a circle of quartz dust around it and began placing the reagents. He made his adjustments on the fly, judging the time of the ritual from the angle of the sun and hoping that his calculations were correct. Rituals weren’t meant to be performed without hours or even days of preparation, but Micah would only have one chance at this.

  One minute left. Micah threw his spear into the center of the circle. He needed to enchant something, and it was all he had on hand. Hopefully, it would serve as a proper medium for the massive torrent of energy he planned on drawing from the stag. He’d prefer it if his enchantment didn’t end in an explosion and singed eyebrows.

  The words came easily. With a dab of blood from the stag’s injured leg on his index finger, Micah rapidly traced the necessary runes onto the haft of the spear. Another smudge of blood, and he traced the other set on the weapon’s glittering metal head.

  The spell reached its crescendo just before the Onkert dissipated. Micah’s hand on the stag pulsed as he mentally reached into the core of its being. Unlike the smaller woodland creatures, it had gravity and purpose to go with its age. The temporal energy was just under the surface, clustered around the creature’s withered muscles and poorly healed wounds.

  With the help of the ritual, Micah drew the energy from the stag, pouring it into the hasty runes inscribed in the animal’s blood on the spear. For a second, the blood glowed white-hot before evaporating and leaving behind intricately patterned char marks on the spear. Temporal power built in the weapon, contained for now by the ritualistic bindings he’d inscribed on it.

  Then the Onkert faded, turning translucent and immaterial in the blink of an eye. The stag, partially rejuvenated by Micah’s magic, stood up and bounded out of the clearing, but he didn’t have the time to look at it. The entirety of Micah’s focus was concentrated on the small chisel in his hand. Almost in a trance, he layered inscription after inscription on the weapon as the temporal energy thrummed down its length, waiting for a mistake to release it in a fiery blast.

  He worked on, blind to his surroundings, grabbing reagents from the backpack absently as the layers of enchantments on the spear deepened. Finally, with the sun low in the sky, Micah sank a full point of Moon attunement into the spear, finishing his work. Without the stag, this project would have cost him at least 5 full points, functionally crippling him as a spellcaster.

  For a brief second, nothing happened. Micah cursed himself as he stared at the inert weapon. He didn’t have the spare attunement to waste on failed projects. Then, starting with the butt of the spear, his rune carvings began to glow. Slowly, greenish-gold light traced up the intricate curves and whorls until they hit the head of the spear, which burst to light in a strobe of white energy.

  Micah fell back, an invisible wave of force knocking him off his feet. He stood up with a manic grin on his face, ignoring the persistent pain in his lower back, and picked up the spear. It was lighter, pulsing with latent energy.

  Setting himself, he performed a simple thrust. He felt a small portion of his mana flow into the weapon and a focused jet of air shot out from it, boring a hole into a nearby tree deep enough to reveal the plant’s pale wood. It wasn’t as powerful as his Air Knife, but the enchantment gave him a ranged option while using the spear.

  Walking up to the tree, Micah placed his thumb in the hole. It was still warm from the friction of the air against the tough bark, but the scar from the Wind Spike was almost deep enough to get his entire finger into it.

  Micah nodded in satisfaction before taking a step backward. This time, he swung the haft of the spear horizontally at the tree, like a staff. It pulled more mana, and the weapon writhed, wrapping itself around the tree before hardening once again. Micah gave it a quick, exploratory yank, but it held firm.

  Flexing his will, the spear softened, released the tree, and hardened once again into its traditional shape and length. It looked like the enchantment had been a complete success. In addition to the usual minor strengthening and sharpening runes, he’d managed to infuse the weapon with two low-tier elemental effects. Wind Spike and Vine Capture weren’t the most powerful or useful enchantments that he’d learned in his time at the Royal Academy, bu
t they were the only two that he thought he could pull off unclassed and at his present skill level.

  Of course, if he were willing to sell it, the spear would probably be worth between 12 and 20 attunement. A small fortune to someone as impoverished as Micah, but to a warrior, a weapon was their life. Adding magical utility abilities that the average Blessed soldier wouldn’t have the affinities to access except through an enchantment made enchanting a lucrative art.

  Checking his status sheet, Micah smiled. Whether it was the rushed circumstances of the casting or the complexity of the enchantment itself, he’d reached 10 in the skill. Now it was only a matter of returning to his cave and utilizing the class crystal that he’d stored there. Once he had a class, he could start earning levels and unlocking his higher-tier spells. Given the liberal rewards Ankros gave for clearing dungeons and killing monsters, especially without assistance, Micah would be on track to earn back the attunement he’d spent on Enchanting in no time.

  He began walking back, spear over one shoulder and a much lighter backpack slung over the other. Behind him, the sun began to dip below the horizon, spurring Micah to move faster. Even if the forest hadn’t been dangerous after dark, he needed to get home by sundown or his mother would be upset.

  Really, given his mental age, it probably should have bothered Micah that his mother would still scold and ground him, but instead, he found it endearing. Having to pretend to be a child once again helped keep his focus on what truly mattered and motivated him.

  Adventuring was more than watching numbers go up on his status sheet. The average people, the forsaken, and those with common blessings, they too deserved a chance to live their own lives free from the constant risk of death. Society needed people like his father just as much as it needed the “legendary heroes” of the Royal Knights.