Gaining a title was always something to look forward to, but for once, Arthur had some reservations. Doing 50% additional damage to beings of a higher tier was great, more damage was always welcome, but what did it mean he'd been marked, and by someone called The Unmaker no less? He'd somehow hurt Razaloth Ornaklon, which could only mean that the Reflective Shield he'd cast on his body extended to his aura too.

  Whatever the case, worrying about it right now would get him nowhere. At least the Dimensional Holder title came with no strings attached. Arthur read through the latest System notification he'd received one more time.

  His ritual skill was ultimately a piece of magic that would do some advanced surgery on his soul; it was the only way he could pay the permanent 3% loss to his Draconic Vitality stat. It also meant that he'd need to lower his natural defences personally. The inner core of a soul was inviolable, so his permission was required. Still, Arthur prayed it wouldn’t be as painful as he feared. He selected yes.

  At first, nothing seemed to happen, but Arthur knew his luck wouldn’t allow for something so easy. As expected, thirty seconds into the ritual, the pain began to set in. It started as a dull burn, like putting your hand too close to an open flame for an extended period of time. Annoying, but manageable. Then the ether began to rapidly drain his ether reserves, stealing it from his fingertips and pouring the energy into Wovan's core.

  The pain ramped up with the sudden change, exponentially so, and he gritted his teeth as he felt the ritual begin to carve out a part of his soul. It wasn't the most painful thing he'd ever experienced, but it was certainly the most invasive. There was something fundamentally wrong with soul damage, as if you were harming your very identity and here he was, willingly cutting a part of his off. The things he did for power.

  Outside his cottage, the battle continued to rage. Arthur's assistance had given Alyssia wings and the tide was slowly shifting in her favour. It wasn't to last, though. With the primary limitation of her build accounted for, Alyssia ran into a problem she rarely faced, the exorbitant stamina expenditure required to maintain her top speeds for extended periods of time. With the lightning mage out of the way, she was free to dismantle her attacker's combat strategies with near impunity.

  At least for the first three minutes. Now she was forced into a more defensive position, using her full speed only when it looked like someone was about to make a run to the cottage. In such a high-stakes fight, inattention for even a single second spelt disaster, a crime punishable by a swift death. It meant, for the time being, she had all the bounty hunters at a stalemate.

  The aura coming from Arthur's cottage was a convoluted mess she couldn't make heads or tales of, she knew little of what he was doing or how long it would take. All Alyssia knew was that she would fight for however long was necessary, and endure until the job was done. Arthur meanwhile was facing a battle of endurance of a very different nature. This ritual was now well and truly operating on his soul, using a surgical scalpel formed from his ether and blood to carve away a part of his very being.

  Despite being a soul mage, this was Arthur’s first true foray into the arcane art. He was in uncharted waters now and knew little of what to expect. The pain, at least, he knew was coming. He’d braced for it. Prepared for it. Arthur thought he was ready.

  He wasn’t.

  The ritual worked quickly, astonishingly so, a single clean incision to the core of his soul that took a fraction of a second like the clean snip of a lock of hair, only the soul wasn’t a clump of dead cells. It was his identity, his being, his very existence, his name, his every experience that made him who he was: Arthur Ward, and mundane human elevated and refined into the Perfect Homunculus he was today.

  He couldn’t help it. Arthur screamed. A sound of anguish and pain that sounded foreign even as it left his mouth. He hadn’t cried out like this when his body was disintegrating a few minutes ago, nor had he when his soul was fixed by the dragon’s core. He’d made a mistake, something had gone wrong. There was no way he could complete the ritual while in so much-

  Arthur blinked. The pain was gone, so abruptly that that he wondered if he’d imagined it. It took him a moment to realise what had happened. The ritual had worked its magic and applied some form of magical anaesthesia to his wound. No, that wasn’t all it was doing. Without the debilitating pain clouding his vision, Arthur was now cognisant enough to observe the ritual magic as it operated on him.

  A link was being formed between his soul and the splinter that had been cut off. He couldn’t tell much beyond that but it did answer one of his questions. He wondered how the ritual would go about permanently reducing 3% of his highest stat. It stood to reason that if the splinter had been cut from his soul when he was merely level 102, it wouldn’t account for all the growth he’d see as he continued to grow stronger.

  I guess the link solves that, Arthur mused. The soul splinter would always be the equivalent of 3% of his Draconic Vitality and grow along with him. Did that mean the soul splinter couldn’t grow on its own? That would put a damper on his plans. The soul link continued to grow stronger, consuming his ether rapidly and draining his pools of blood to fuel the process.

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  The ritual was doing a hundred things at once, injecting energy into seemingly random parts of his soul, forming stunningly detailed spirals of energy one second and then destroying them in the next. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to his magic but Arthur knew there was a method to this madness. He trusted his skill, he trusted Iris, and he trusted himself.

  Wovan's core had turned bright red and it started to swell in size, pulsing rhythmically like a beating heart. Augmented Recovery had been running for a little over a minute now, which meant that Arthur was fully recovered, or at least his body was. His soul was still smarting a little but things had improved significantly in that department too.

  The instant the System notification flashed across his vision, everything changed. The formerly chaotic ritual became a streamlined piece of magic focused entirely on Wovan's core. Copious amounts of ether began to funnel into it, drained first from the nearby towns and cities before rapidly growing to affect the entire north of England. The ether density once again began to creep upwards, straining the capricious equilibrium Arthur was maintaining with his aura. Without his most recent title, Dimension Holder, Arthur was certain he would've failed already.

  This ritual was far stronger than anything he or Iris had predicted. In retrospect, using a thousand litres of a potent epic-grade perfect catalyst in conjunction with a legendary grade one was perhaps a little overkill. Alyssia's battle against the bounty hunters continued to rage on, though a few of them now had a shadow of uncertainty colouring their actions. Magic suddenly becoming more difficult to cast was always a cause for concern for the powerful, though the players on this field weren't quite strong enough to understand the severity of what was taking place. Neither was Arthur.

  Solana, however, was. She was a master craftsman, someone who had made her first legendary product half a century ago. She stared at Arthur's cottage, eyes wide open in shock, mouth agape. Her palms were damp with sweat and she had goosebumps all over her forearms. The privacy wards Iris had set up had long since failed and Arthur's magic was laid out for the world to see. Ritual magic wasn't her forte, but even a fool would know that something special was about to happen.

  Thirteen light minutes away, Lady Sleyca looked up from her paperwork and glanced towards Earth, a frown marring her otherwise beautiful features. Across the Chrollo Empire, similar scenes were taking place, a World Lion turned away from her kill, an elder dragon woke from his slumber and glared at the heavens, and an elven celebratory feast was brought to an abrupt halt. For a single eternal moment, it was as if the universe itself had paused for breath.

  Three things happened at once. The mythical grade phoenix blood perfectly fused with Wovan's core, Earth's Blessing was finally consumed in full and Wovan's core started to pulse like a beating heart. It was accompanied by the release of a red wave of energy that crashed into the basement walls with the force of gale winds.

  The next beat of Wovan's core released force equal to Earth's most destructive EF4 tornado, instantly destroying his basement and the cottage beyond. One moment, he was working with the comfort of a familiar roof over his head and the next, he was under the open sky. Everyone in the grasslands was now focused on him, their battle momentarily forgotten.

  Arthur glared at Wovan's core. What the hell was this thing doing? The only reason he hadn't been sent flying back yet was because his body was anchored to the ritual, something he only realised when he felt a jolting force in his shoulder joints. Had he been an ordinary man, they would have been wrenched right from their sockets. Does this damn spider want to kill me before she's even born?

  Thankfully, the monster core didn't beat with the regularity of a normal human heart, only one beat every ten seconds or so, but the energy blasts were still annoying. That and they were growing stronger. Thirty seconds in, and they started to hurt. A minute later, they were leaving cuts on his body.

  Alyssia wasn't faring too well either. Seeing the Originator in the flesh seemed to have rekindled the hunter's desire for his blood and they attacked with a ferocity she struggled to keep up with. By the time his ritual hit 50% completion, Arthur was well and truly worried. Whatever he was creating was far, far beyond even his wildest imagination.

  Thankfully, the core no longer released omnidirectional waves of energy; instead, it was all focused in a vertical pillar that pierced the clouds above, and probably far beyond, a beam of light that could be seen from hundreds of miles away. If there was any chance that he'd somehow gone unnoticed before, that was no longer the case.

  The sky above rapidly darkened so much so that it appeared night itself had come early to England. The sun refused to shine on the birth of something so profane. Arthur didn't have it in him to be surprised anymore. Neither did the bounty hunters who continued to try and slip by Alyssia. She looked like she was seconds away from keeling over. Arthur didn't have the highest perception in the world, but he could sense the gazes of hundreds of powerful beings trained in his direction. They too waited for Wovan's rebirth.

  Arthur swallowed dryly. He had no idea what he'd created. If he'd made a mistake? The aura of terror surrounding the ritual far surpassed anything he'd felt coming from an apocalypse beast. This was something new. A creature that should have never been born. Would Arthur come to regret this decision? Only time would tell.

  Etherious: Originator

  Etherious: The Locus of Power has gone live. As a self published author doing everything myself, my novels success lies entirely on my shoulders. As such, the first day of a books launch is by far the most important time that determines how well my book will do.

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