Abomination

Like how the wisps originally spawned around every hour, the echoes started spawning once every hour in their place while the wisps began appearing much sooner. All of the wisps were now darkened in some way as they spawned two or three times an hour, clouding their initial affinities with the death and darkness of the echoes.

I could only hope that these darkened wisps would use up all of the other alignment energies similar to how I originally speculated the purple wisps were using up dark impurities. Now, the other energies were impurities as far as I was concerned and the dark was what I needed. For the others who had returned from hunting small game, these darkened wisps with alternate affinities were everything they could have wanted.

These darkened wisps could strengthen physical abilities, consume energy used against the owner, and still increase the affinities of the owner. If they were to be captured in vials and jars like I had contained the original echo, they could probably sell for a great deal.

However, I was more interested in selling their stardust rather than trying to confine them to enchanted glass.

Echoes had a vague physicality because their instinctive attack was a physical one, but wisps had no corporeality whatsoever and thus would require greater magic for confinement. Their stardust was the physical evidence of their existence once they died, which was much easier to deal with than the actual wisps. Of course, hypnotizing them was fairly easy, but managing bulk numbers of entranced energy beings would eventually become troublesome even for me.

Sadly, as each new echo was dealt with, not only the wisps spawned more frequently but so did they. The first three echoes after the first spawn all appeared roughly an hour after the other. The fourth appeared within half an hour. Number five spawned an hour later, but six and seven once again spawned within half an hour of each other.

By late evening of our first full day of farming, two echoes spawned at once side my side in the center of the pool where all the echoes had been forming. The increase in their numbers was downright exasperating, even their proximity within the thickened mana field made it hard to distinguish them from each other.

Hell, it was nearly impossible to distinguish them from the mana field itself at this point because of all of the death energy and darkness element present.

They died the same way all of the others hand, from a blind slash of kinetic energy that passed through the entirety of the mana field. Just like the others that came before them, as well, they disappeared into the mana field itself. Which had grown so dark that the only way to know a wisp was present was to sense the fluctuations of their spawning.

Everybody outside already had a darkened wisp and those who followed Gryn's advice on what herbs to gather and use had strengthened themselves enough to acquire second familiars. Really only Carth and Hilda we good enough in magic to manage binding a second wisp to themselves, but this did not stop Eman and Layla from trying.

Even I was a bit impressed with the effort they were putting into a project we could always come back and repeat in the future. With the magical benefits of their wisps, though, by the time we came here to do this again everybody would have become strong enough to use offensive magic. This would shorten all of our hunting and traveling times in the future.

Personally, I was something of a wreck.

While the mana field was now so rich with energies I did not even have to consciously pull mana from the air to replenish myself, I had still been on the hunt for most of the day without moving from my current location inside. Standing here for hours on end was becoming as arduous as my martial training.

However, I did not necessarily have the luxury. Just like the wisps who would continue spawning for as long as the mana field was active, the echoes would also just keep appearing. I did not want to go to sleep only to wake up with some unknown number of evolving echoes drifting about my mana field.

As well, if one of them ate a true shade wisp then all of my efforts up til now would have been for naught. I have never been an outrageously angry person in either life, but if these echoes ate my shade then I would probably lose my shit and destroy the array right then and there. Then I would have to start all over again.

After purifying the area of death energy to remove the echo spawn point, of course.

"It's getting pretty late,"Gryn calls out from the side of the array only a few yards away from where I was posted. "Are you going to be okay in there? Should we take shifts through the night?"

"I'll be fine, I can use the mana field itself to stay awake," I reply earnestly. Even though the echoes were completely passive until touched, there was no guarantee that they would only spawn in the center. I could not even begin to fathom what Gryn's magic senses were like, but I was already pushing myself to my limits to continue sensing them in the same place time and again.

"We'll be sleeping in shifts, Eman and Layla have the first shift," Gryns reports in reply. "Just yell if you need anything."

They now spawned two at a time every time roughly every forty-five minutes. This pace had been steady for nearly three hours now and I was anticipating another change in the phenomena. Wisps, on the other hand, spawned randomly three times and hour.

At this point, every batch of wisps carried one darkened wisp, one normal wisp, and one wisp of random alignment. We had already filled up the normal wisp jar and has begun gathering a darkened jar. The energies of the impure alignments did not have much reaction to one another in the same jar, mostly due to the fact that everything was overwhelmed by dark element.

The others had fun passing the time learning about herbs and other sources of wild magic from Gryn as well as naming the types of wisps. Hilda's golden yellow wisp was called a Sun Flare wisp and the darkened fire wisp Gryn had passed up for her was a Hellfire wisp. Gryn's own wisps were both a darkened earth and a darkened lightning wisp he termed Unhallowed Ground and Hellectric.

Their naming was honestly not that bad and I did not really plan to go into details about how variant species were actually named, so I was more than happy not to correct anyone. So I basically just considered these the wisp's personal names.

Carth had held out and lucked out for a pair of matching but opposing wisps. His darkened life variant and lightened dark variant were called Undead and Undying because they had opposing quantities of the same black and gold energies. Just the overall affinity boost from having two wisps baring the same types of mana was worth the effort.

Eman and Layla, though, only managed to contract a single wisp today and they were darkened water and darkened wind wisps. One was Drowned wisp and the other was Darkwind. Eman's Darkwind was kind of my favorite name so far.

Because a pure darkness or even a pure death wisp- possibly the rarest wisps of all that many people simply considered to be echoes- had yet to spawn, I had yet to claim a familiar and give it a name. Since both pure dark wisps were called shades, then I would simply name mine Shade. However, if mine was a high enough concentration of death energy, I might name it Grim.

A sudden rippling of energy from nearby brought me swiftly out of my time passing reverie. The booms of energy caused by the spawn of an echo had become multiple ripples with the increase in numbers. However, this ripple contained three waves and instead of individual signatures they all carried shared energy.

I did not even have to try hard to wrap my mind around this enemy in the blinding mana field, it was so strong and overbearing that its presence sought me out. The source of this abomination was pretty simple once I could concentrate past the sudden drop in temperature that chilled my body through my leather clothes.

Three echoes had unanimously spawned on top of each other, triggered one another, and ate each other. Because of the physical attack and relatively equal power among them divided among them, instead of a dominant being consuming one or both of the others all of them had just fused together into a ten-foot tall mass of gaseous death.

The pool over which they all floated was not that large, only ten or so yards out in every direction from the wall of the fall.

Their body took up at least half of the surface area of the pool.

They were so close to me I could physically feel the distortions in the air and mana flow that the density of their body created. This unholy abomination was basically standing right on top of me where I waited just beyond the pool by the rock wall. Even outside the array the young archers on watch duty were alarmed by the immense mana distortions and then again when a mass rippling of fluctuations took place.

The fusing of the echoes and the immense aura of their magical worth inside the array triggered a mass spawning of over a dozen wisps at once. Thankfully, this was actually somewhat helpful to me despite the absolute terror that it instilled in me. Up above, a vague light from moons overhead was filtering down into the array through the mana.

So many wisps had spawn at once that its used up large concentrations of the energy within the field. Sadly, the increased visibility did little to allay my fears to rest. It was usually around the pond that the wisps would spawn, possibly within reach of the abomination.

Deciding it was more than the right time to purify the array, I sucked in a deep and slow breath to emphasize my will with body magic to soak up even more mana from the array than the wisps had. Throwing all of this and my awareness into the water of the pool, I channel the myriad energies into the pool itself to make the water and its billowing steam toxic to the echo.

Sealing it and its sudden rampage of attacks with this storm of attacking energies and elements, I gather up half of my own mana and will it into the holy life and light elements before flooding the area above the pool with a blinding flash. Caught within the density of the mana field and refracted about by the cloud of steam in the array, that single flash turned into a residual laser light show of rainbows.

To the naked eye, it was an insane blur of multi-colored lines that filled every inch of view with dazzling light. Because of the magic involved, every beam was basically a healing ray coupled with dwindling thermal and light energy. It restored my physical stamina more than it troubled my clothes.

To a being of death and dark like the abomination, this was an ultimate AOE style attack to ensure even the residual smoke of its existence was burned away. On top of this, so much mana in the air was either used or purified that I could see outside once again. It would probably now only spawn normal wisps.

Hopefully the eruption of my initial attack through the pool was enough to push the mass spawn of wisps out of the array. Because of the purification, I would have to settle for whatever darkened wisps actually survived.

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