The four circles that were held together solely by the sheer force of will looked hypnotizing to Orou. Once more, he failed to construct the smallest circle that would bring him oh so close to completing the spell. The more he worked on the formation, the more he thought that the spell wasn’t any sort of illusion magic or magic that would affect the mind, but a spell similar to his spirit vision. If there were a regular world and a world of spirits, could there be more worlds for Orou to see and explore? This thought process drove him to wrack his mind about how he could compress the spirits into a star shape.

The first thought on his mind was to simply push the two spirits and merge them into one. He split his concentration in half and manipulated two spirits, making them float some distance away. The two noble and brave spirits charged at each other like knights, but in the end, they crashed and like two magnets pushed each other apart. Orou pushed his mind to its full extent and willed for the two to merge, but no matter what he did, his will was never strong enough to do it. The worst thing was that Orou could see that if he pushed harder, it could possibly work, but he could never push hard enough.

The next idea was something that he had theorized a while ago when looking at the spirit strings, that is, to simply shape a single spirit into a star. He imagined his will as an invisible force approaching the spirit and surrounding it just like he would constrict around his prey, he tried to flatten the spirit. It gradually began to deform and flatten, instead of a sphere, it looked more like an oblate. Orou was getting close to finishing the first step of his plan, but just as his concentration slipped for a moment, the spirit escaped from his grasp and regained its spherical shape.

Orou’s anger knew no bounds towards this particular spirit as he kept tormenting it for hours, flattening, elongating and deforming it, but try as he might make a star, he simply couldn’t. His head was beginning to hurt from his extensive use of his will, but a little bit of pain has never stopped a snake. If the spirit had a mouth, it would surely be crying as Orou did his best to try and chop it in half and take a smaller piece of the spirit with himself. Thankfully for the spirit, Orou didn’t succeed in splitting in half.

He gave up on this idea after several more hours had gone by. Grizz had returned back at some point, but Orou was so entranced by his research that didn’t notice him come in. He was writing something with an exhausted look on his face and Orou wondered what he had been up to in these last few hours. Orou felt a bit bad that he couldn’t contribute to whatever Grizz was doing, but it was probably for the best anyways.

Orou slithered over to the couch and looked intently at the book that was lying there. It was the same book that Izz had read when Orou first met him, the book about various spirits and what they look like. It was currently closed shut and Orou had to stare long and hard at it before he realised that it wouldn’t magically open and he had to do something about it. He awkwardly used his two fangs to try and open the book and he succeeded, after about five minutes of trying of course.

Using his tongue to flip the pages, he searched for the page that illustrated the regular, blue spirits that he was currently dealing with. Several more minutes of page flipping passed before he finally stumbled onto the page he needed. He regretted not being able to read the writing as this would be the time he needed it, but ignoring his lack of reading skills, he looked at the illustration on the page. There was a small blue spirit that he saw all around him, but there was also a bigger spirit that had a deeper shade of blue. The illustration depicted the small spirit bowing before the bigger spirit, and that was what Orou was looking for.

He carefully examined the bigger spirit for distinctive marks or something that would make the regular spirit obey it. The spirit was what Orou imagined multiple spirits, all squeezed into a single spirit would look like. Recalling the spirit he had seen residing in the chandelier, he compared it with the illustration and found it to be exactly the same. He recalled the big spirit making every other spirit obey it as if it had its own domain. The closer Orou got to the spirit, the harder it was for him to move other spirits. Perhaps if Orou could borrow the ability from the big spirit and make the others obey him, he could create the star he needed for the spell.

Taking a hold of the book by using his fangs, he slowly slithered over to Grizz, making sure to not drop it along the way. Grizz was taking a break from writing and was staring at something on the table when he saw Orou plop down the book next to him. Grizz looked over to find Orou using his forked tail to flip the pages to the spirit he had found earlier. Grizz looked like he wanted to give Orou a hand, but wasn’t sure if he should, so he simply watched as Orou struggled with the simple task of flipping pages.

Finally, Orou found the page he was searching for and used placed one of his fangs on the big spirit, looking excitedly at Grizz. He was confused for several seconds as Orou kept tapping his fang against the drawing, but he eventually got what Orou was trying to convey. Unfortunately, it wasn’t an answer that Orou was expecting. “You’ll have to ask Izz about everything regarding magic because I have no clue what that spirit is or where to find it. Finding Izz is going to be difficult now that he’s gone, but we should see him in three days. You should be able to ask him what’s on your mind then.”

Orou dejectedly slithered away from Grizz, leaving the book on the table and not bothering with the regular spirits anymore. He knew that he was likely going to fail, but he pushed down on the door handle and exited the room by himself, hoping to find either Izz or the big spirit. The beastmen looked over at Orou, but once they saw that Grizz wasn’t coming out of the door, they gave Orou strange looks and withdrew a bit to themselves, though they didn’t do anything to provoke him.

Although Orou hadn’t noticed it before, he spent the entire day practicing spells. The ever-burning lanterns illuminated the streets and the beastmen around him didn’t pay him any attention, either too drunk or too busy with something to notice. Orou used his spirit vision to look all around him, though nothing besides the Moonhall casino stood out to him. Even the casino has some sort of barrier spirit, nothing that would aid him in his pursuit of knowledge.

Orou slithered through the alleyways of Ophilia, witnessing colorful powder being traded around, screams of help and someone being murdered in cold blood, all things that might have interested a regular beastman, but certainly not Orou. From what he had learned simply by living in a human city and travelling with Grizz, these were things that the rest of the beastmen frowned on and they would get punished in some way if they were caught. In some regard, Orou agreed on the fact that Kris had to be the one to put this city in order, but he couldn’t sympathize much with the victims.

After an uneventful hour or two of searching, he started to head back and encountered something that made him remember a few unpleasant memories. A young beastman, lying in a pool of his own blood but still barely breathing was whimpering to himself, crying and rocking himself to sleep. He was well out of the way of any guards or any lanterns that would give him away, so it would be easy to devour the beastman and end his suffering, but for some reason, Orou opted not to do it.

Perhaps he had been with Grizz and Izz for too long or perhaps he was getting too much into the mindset of a beastman, but even the thought of eating the beastman caused Orou to be slightly repulsed. If he was in the forest where he had to fight for every single one of his meals and where you didn’t know if you would end up in the jaws of another beast, he wouldn’t have hesitated, but he was safe from any harm and he had plenty of meat to eat back at the gambling house. Deciding to leave this beastman to his own, Orou slithered back to their lodgings, wondering when he had changed so much.