The purification ritual was far more complicated than the ritual of stillness. Evidently the sick bay wasn’t actually large enough to carry out the ritual Madam Trebella had in mind, so with the help of Malzar, Vin moved his friends over to the dedicated ritual room, laying them on some prepared bedrolls. By the time they got there, Madam Trebella and Xaril were already hard at work drawing out the runes for the ritual, and Vin could only look on in awe at the sheer scale of their magical working.

  The ritual room was more like an underground bunker located deep beneath the manor, and it was large enough that Vin was pretty certain he would have gotten winded trying to sprint from one side to the next before he’d gained access to the System. It was so big in fact, that from what he could tell it looked as though the ritual of purification was only going to take up a fraction of the allotted space.

  Madam Trebella had forbidden Alka from entering the ritual room, so Vin found himself sitting on a bench lining one of the far walls, watching the infernals at work.

  “What was it like?”

  Vin snapped out of his rune induced daze, blinking and looking over at an eager Malzar. The young infernal was practically bouncing on the balls of his feet, looking up at him with excitement.

  “What was what like?”

  “The cave,” Malzar said, rolling his eyes. “Come on, Madam Trebella doesn’t let us apprentices go anywhere near it. Only our top warriors and Gatherers were allowed in there, and since the relocation, not a single person’s dared venture inside.”

  After his near death experience with a swarm of monstrous insects and the current mana headache he was suffering through, Vin was in no mood to deal with the infernal’s questions. He was just about to brush the kid off and go back to watching the ritual get set up when he caught a flash of something that stopped him dead in his tracks.

  It was his eyes.

  Vin stared at the infernal’s strange black eyes, the golden rings within shimmering with wonder as he waited with bated breath to hear all about the monster-filled cave that only their strongest were allowed to travel within. Malzar’s eyes were foreign and about as different as physically possible from his own human ones, but Vin could never have missed that look of hunger and desire he saw deep within them.

  How could he when it used to stare back at him in the mirror every day back on Earth.

  In that moment, Vin felt a strange sense of kinship to the young infernal, realizing something that only a fellow person plagued with wanderlust would ever have picked up on. He knew without a shadow of a doubt that Malzar would one day risk the ire of everyone around him to go out and explore the object of his fascination regardless of what anyone told him. It might not be today, or tomorrow, but sooner than later the infernal would head out to explore the dungeon he didn’t even know was a dungeon.

  And almost certainly die doing so.

  Vin said nothing as he continued to watch the apprentice, trying to formulate his thoughts. Despite his excitement, Malzar seemed content to give him all the time he needed to gather himself, no doubt just happy to finally hear more about the source of his fascination he’d been starved of the past few months.

  The problem, Vin found, was that he was struggling to merge together his new thoughts on exploration with his old. Ever since he’d been little, Vin had felt the burning desire, the desperate need, to see and experience what was just beyond the next hill. If someone had asked him a month ago back on Earth if they should go check out some new landmark they were interested in, or a cool spot they’d heard about, he would have told them to go for it without hesitation. So long as they avoided any overeager property owners that shot first and asked questions later, what was the worst that could happen? Getting chucked in the drunk tank for a few hours?

  On Edregon though…

  The thunderous hum of thousands of insect monsters bearing down on him echoed in the back of his mind, and Vin shuddered at the thought of the infernal’s bright eyes dimming as the boy died to a thousand small cuts, or had his face melted off by globs of acid. Yes, people had access to magic and insane powers on Edregon that people on Earth would have killed for, but things were far more dangerous as well.

  Sighing, Vin scratched the back of his head, wincing as he felt what remained of his already poorly done hairdo.

  “Look, Malzar… I’m not going to tell you to stay away from the cave or anything. God knows that wouldn’t have stopped me from going anywhere when I was younger.” He paused, chuckling at his many memories of his parents, his teachers, and even his friends trying to stop him from any of his many early ventures. “All I will say is you need to make sure you’re ready when you finally head into that cave. I’m a prestiged Explorer with some pretty decent magical defenses in my opinion, and look what happened to me.”

  Biting back a hiss of pain, Vin spread his arms wide, showing off the acid burns and countless small lacerations covering his body. He didn’t even have the mana to use Renewal on himself, meaning he was stuck with the constant, searing pain, at least for a while.

  Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

  “The monsters in that cave will quite literally eat you alive if you go in unprepared. Honestly I have no idea what a Witch or Warlock is capable of, but make sure you either have some method of killing a lot of monstrous insects at once, or some way to hide from them. Otherwise you wont be leaving that cave alive.”

  He briefly considered mentioning that the cave was also a dungeon, but the fact of the matter was he still didn’t really know what that meant, and he had a feeling saying that would only make Malzar more determined to go check it out before he was ready.

  “Is that what you did?” Malzar asked, his eyes scanning over Vin’s body as though the secret were somewhere on him. “How were you able to hide from them? Could you teach me?”

  “As to the how, I got rather lucky that someone I didn’t even know was watching was both waiting and willing to yank my ass out of the fire,” Vin chuckled, reminding himself he needed to tell Shia to thank her master once she was finally healed. He’d cut it a bit close on learning his newest spell before the insects had finished getting through the wooden walls, but he had pulled it off. “If I can teach you… I don’t actually know,” he admitted, glancing once more at the monstrous ritual currently being constructed. “Can Warlocks learn regular, non-ritual spells?”

  “Yes, but we’re only supposed to learn very specific ones,” Malzar frowned, glancing at Madam Trebella and seeming to hesitate for just a moment. Leaning in slightly closer, he lowered his voice. “I didn’t even want to be a blasted Warlock you know... But I have the stupid golden eyes, so I didn’t have a choice.”

  “What do your eyes have to do with it?” Vin asked, lowering his voice to match the infernal's.

  “Infernals born with golden eyes always go to the manor and study to become a Witch or Warlock,” Malzar explained, his tone sour. “Technically anyone could study ritual magic, but our eyes allow us to better see what materials have innate magical properties that make them useful for rituals, even if they are so small they’re practically nonexistent.”

  “Can’t you just flunk out or something? What happens if you suck at being a Warlock?”

  “Then you become a Gatherer. Which honestly does interest me a bit more, except for the fact that Gatherers almost always gather at the whims of the actual Witches and Warlocks. Rarely are they allowed to go wherever they want,” Malzar admitted, sighing at the thought. “I wish I could be an Explorer like you. Getting to wander around and not have to listen to anyone sounds amazing.”

  “It definitely has its benefits,” Vin said, smiling at the thought of all the crazy things he’d seen. Not just here on Edregon, but back on Earth too. The insane depths of the Grand Canyon… The awe inspiring size of the giant redwoods… Sadly he’d never been able to scrounge up enough money to actually leave the states, but while he’d regretted not being able to explore all the amazing places around the world, at least he’d never had any issues finding jaw dropping sights right where he was. He’d been fortunate enough to have been born in a country large enough to have so many different types of environments to choose between.

  “Still though, the farther you go, the less you’ll be able to keep in touch with your family and friends around here. For some people that’s a huge plus, but for others, it can be rough.” Vin had witnessed far more than one person suffering from homesickness during his travels. Just because it wasn’t something he’d had to deal with himself didn’t mean he wasn’t well aware of how much it had to hurt.

  “I wouldn’t mind putting some distance between myself and Aunt Agne,” Malzar muttered, absentmindedly rubbing one of his horns. “Though I suppose I would miss my family. I promised my little sister I’d figure out a ritual that would make her entire body glow whatever color she wanted once I became a powerful Warlock.”

  “Seriously? That sounds awesome! If you figure that out, I want to be next in line!”

  The two of them looked at each other for a moment, before they both cracked up laughing.

  “Malzar!” Madam Trebella barked, causing the boy to cough and snap to attention. “If you’re not doing anything over there, go fetch me two dozen mana stones! We’re going to need a lot of power for this.”

  “Yes Madam Trebella!” Giving Vin one last grin, Malzar ran off back upstairs to the manor proper.

  “And you! Catch!” Vin looked up just in time to see four strange doll looking things flying his way, and he let out a curse as he tried to catch them with only one hand. Barely managing it, he frowned at the Witch, but she was already back to working on her ritual.

  “Go fetch a drop of blood from each of your friends and put it on a doll. Make sure not to mix them up.”

  Vin scowled at the Witch before examining the strange dolls. Each one was about the size of his hand, and made of a strange clay that seemed both wet and dry at the same time. None of them had any specific features besides small arms and legs, so Vin was very careful not to confuse which doll was which as he went about collecting blood.

  Realizing his magic sword may be slightly overkill for collecting a drop of blood, Vin used his knife to prick each of them in turn, angling the blood to fall upon the dolls and watching the strange reaction. Each drop of blood seemed to get sucked into the dolls like they were made of sponge, and the brown clay immediately took on a reddish tinge.

  Reginald gave him a small squeak of thanks as Vin finished up with a drop of the rat’s blood, and Vin brought the dolls over to Madam Trebella as she checked over the completed ritual. The complex array of runes looked like two large diamonds inlaid within one another, creating an eight pointed star.

  “Is it going to be a problem that Reginald’s a rat? Or that Scule is smaller than his own creepy blood doll thing?”

  “No, neither of those facts matter. The humanoid shape of the dolls merely represents intelligence, so as long as your unconscious friends and the rat are capable of basic thought, they should be fine. The binding of the blood is what’s important.”

  “Now then, no sense wasting time,” Madam Trebella said, nodding at her own handiwork and pointing at the four outer points on the array. “All the preparations are complete.”

  “It’s time to enact the ritual.”