ch 4 ( immortal) the dragon bow

the bow is absorbing all my immortal mana. the bow has begun to glow, giving a very cool feeling, first pleasant and then suddenly becoming so cold, that I could feel a burst of heat. my body is becoming numb and the world is fading in my surroundings.

(by now I have lost consciousness. I was frozen in a cube of ice. the bow is capable of manipulation of heat and even without drawing it, it managed to freeze the area surrounding me. it has even more impressive powers, something I had yet to discover then.)

right now I can't move my body at all. I can't really see, but I seem to be frozen in ice. my entire body is freezing, mostly numb from the cold. my thoughts are also slowing now, steadily weakening my mind. well, I do have to shatter the ice surrounding me. well, since I can't really move my body, I will have to use a shock spell. calling it a spell is wrong. I just focus all my mana on a single point and then forcefully expel it, creating something similar to a wave attack. it is one of the few attacks that can be used by any kind of mana. after some time, the ice cube that has surrounded me, completely shattered. well, my body is still freezing, and sitting in front of a fire helps a little, but I am in the mountains, so it is the wrong place to heat my body.

That stupid bow has absorbed all my immortal mana. there are presently two kinds of mana in my body. the puppet mana inherent to this body and the immortal mana, that comes from my soul.

immortal mana has one function. it will force a burst of healing, capable of bringing my body back from any serious damage.

though the end result of this was quite useful. that bow, just by adding a bit of my immortal mana to it(in this new body, that bit is everything ), managed to freeze a region of fifty meters around me. the mountains are cold, but to do that in an instant even those of the frozen legions will struggle. I can feel that the heat has not disappeared but somehow stored in the bow. that is what should be charging the arrows in case the string is fully drawn, but I will be sucked dry before I can even completely drawing the bow.

well, if it uses immortal mana it will be quite a challenge to supply it. creating immortal mana is a physically draining job and with my physique, it is quite hard for me to do so. after all, my physical vitality is an ingredient for my immortal mana. creating personalized mana is always a challenge for us ability users. you need a detailed understanding of your ability and how it works to create it, a process that took me many years just to begin. then you need a book and understand their process of creating personalized mana. in my case, it was the book of the thousand armies. then I need to be to apply that theory in my own case. that is a long process and took me decades to complete.

now my body literally is not capable of creating immortal mana now. complaining aside, the dragon bow (that is what it is called )is quite a useful magic to use. I would really like to see its power at its most capable. I want to see the powers of the other weapons also, which I have a feeling are at the very least on the same level as this bow. well, I don't think I can use them any time soon, at the very least for a couple of years or if I have my dagger. I won't be able to achieve that level any time soon. it's fine since I do have a couple of ideas as to what exactly I can do without these fancy weapons and with the mana that I can find in my body. puppet mana is a new type of mana. I think the closest I can find is found among the necromancers.

anyway, taking a few of their ideas as the base I have quite a few ideas as to what exactly I can do with puppet mana.

the first spell that I want to attempt is a pretty rare spell among the necromancer's. I learned it from the erniksons. those guys were quite open with their libraries when they were hacking my limbs from piece to piece. it is called bone armour and a spell that I believe will have a lot of potential, in this case.

it is as it sounds. the necromancer's use the bone of the dead to craft an armour for themselves. a well-executed bone armour could have the bones of thousands of dead skeletons. while it is not particularly useful for the necromancer's. they are meant to fight from a distance, so having armour is useless, though I think some of the skeleton mage tends to use this as a garbage disposal spell.

it is also called as the bone giant spell due to how massive some of these armour get. the largest I have ever seen is with the erniksons and it was related to their project necropolis. it was another of their mad projects, they wanted to craft a city from the bones of the dead. it might not seem like much, but if they had completed it then it would have been a treasure at the level of the throne that guards us. I think that is the main reason that the nobles allowed the erniksons to be destroyed. the necropolis was just another project that the erniksons had. they had many such plans.

anyway, to complete such a project, it would have required too many corpses to craft. by my calculations, it would have taken us almost the entirety of our empire to craft such a treasure and that is only calculating with respect to volume. even then it would have taken them a couple of decades before they could gather the mana necessary enough to activate it. I want to make something similar to what the erniksons had planned.

they had their own sources of corpses, mostly the communal graveyards, that are used by the commoners and even some of the nobles. the throne never verbally allowed the erniksons to do such things, but the throne never really did seem to find the culprits of those very weird corpse thefts and it became one of the many open secrets that the empire has.

well, the relations between the nobles and the commoners would have been many times better if the erniksons just listened to their fellow nobles and did not get carried away by their research. they were the direct descendants of the family that managed to do the forbidden experiment, which created the demi-humans. I never did understand why they stayed in this land. they were the most unpopular figure that existed in this empire. well, they did create our worst enemies. you know how many people lost their families to the demi-humans. thankfully they never managed to do something like the forbidden experiment again. they never stopped the recreation of that experiment, though.

well, something grand like the necropolis will take a lot of time to complete. before that, I have to see if I can achieve something similar to the skeleton armour first of all.

well, time to get carving I suppose.

(after a couple of hours)

well, it has really become easier to make a sculpture nowadays. I am starting with a smaller sculpture. it is a statue with a somewhat human face. carving a human face is always so hard, so mine is mostly a blank face, with some dents mean to show the eyes and the ears. well, as long as I can have a practical use, it is not too much of a problem.

as for why I have begun with a small puppet, it is mainly due to how puppet mana works. the puppet mana enters inside the said puppet and moves it from the inside. I have discovered that if I pump enough puppet mana into the puppet, I can increase the size of the puppet while forcing all of its material to its outer layers.it condenses the material somewhat. with this small sculpture, the sculpture will be paper-thin by the time that it reaches my size. that is the main reason that I even had this idea. it is quite similar to how the skeleton armour works.

in skeleton armour, bone is condensed into a particular form, as chosen by the caster of the spell, so it is not particularly similar, but the skeleton armour gives me a particular path to follow. if I achieve something similar to their necropolis, it will be quite useful. In my case, I am planning to layer these paper-thin sculptures to form my new armour. I don't know how effective it is going to be, but this is the method for me to create an armor.

I also will need to do a lot of sculpting for these paper thing layers to even be visible to normal eyes, then I need to make sure that the individual layers stay connected to each other and stack up properly. after all, each of these layers are paper-thin, they will be breaking a bit too easily. if I do not layer them properly, they will lead to an average product.

(a couple of days after)

well, I have reached quite close to the wind city already and I have a prototype. it is not perfect, but it is possible at the very least.

the wind city is the fake name I have given to the city closest to the wind academy. that place's location is a secret to our enemies or it could lead to some heavy costs. me killing one person can make the throne weak for the next generation. a well-coordinated attack here, would completely destroy a fifth of the powerhouses the army will have (the nobles are not allowed into the army. there are a few in the army that supports them but it is a place where commoners prosper.) and with my power set, I am captured quite a bit, so I have to be extra wary.

anyway, I made an armour, of about one fifty puppets thick. it is roughly about as thick as my clothes. that is quite thin considering, I have used about ten trees, that were quite large to make the basis for my puppets. all of that mass has been concentrated in that area, so it is quite durable. the problem is mobility. puppet mana can change the structure of the wood, creating a pseudo-body. my inflated statues can't have that, but with quite a bit of focus, I managed to make it so that I can move somewhat in that armour of mine, at least somewhat agilely.

any more inflated statues and I would have really become slow and I might have considered adding more if I had some regeneration at the very least, but right now, it seems unlikely my regeneration will return anytime soon.

my only complaint is the face that resembles the squiggles that the nobles like to call as abstract art. even when I somehow make a normal face, it would be quite hard for me to actually make a difference in the expanded state(which I shall be calling the balloon state from now) and the second major problem is that I can not escape the armour. I have made it in such a way that it covers my body, and as you can imagine there is no way of leaving short of breaking the armour. that is another problem I will have to deal with. well, I am quite satisfied with this armour as a first attempt.