Apparently the creature had been out of the cave for five hours. That wasn’t exactly long, but it would probably be enough for what Avery was doing. Even if she were doing the full version of the ritual, it would only take her an hour to cast the spell. Paring down the entire section on storage of the creature being possessed soul on its own was enough to drop the spells level of complexity significantly, though the gem storage method on its own was simpler and easier than attempting to wire two souls into two bodies simultaneously, and Avery could apply some of the theoretical knowledge gleaned from reading about extremely high powered necromantic spells that took months to bring to completion. One in particular was based around growing a body from a small section of the original and tying it to the person in question’s soul, at which point they would be drawn into their own body upon their death rather than any sort of afterlife. Avery had a basic sort of that contingency already in this spell, in the return to the gem upon the death of the body if it was in range, but if she could get her hands on a copy of the clone spell she might be able to apply it to this spell to make it so she would return to the gem regardless of how far away she was when the spell’s duration expired.

Or if she was killed, she guessed.

Unfortunately, that kind of spell was only cast by extremely powerful necromancers. There were at least three laboratories in the inner city dedicated to producing spare bodies for high ranking government officials, a few more that catered to noble who came into money early enough in life that they could afford to have a body commissioned while they were young and preserved until they died of old age, and one subsidized by the church of darkness to mass produce bodies of promising adventurers in the event of a hero’s arrival. There was no sign of anything like that coming about anytime soon, what with the complete lack of evil empires or existential threats of any sort coming around, but the church was perfectly content to pay any necromancer who graduated the college with high enough grades to be on call to produce copies of the hero’s party at a rate that would allow them to come to life and charge right back into danger to be killed again immediately, until the pile of bodies was high enough for the hero to leap off their own back into success.

Two hundred seventy thousand gold per year, just for being able to theoretically cast a spell. Avery wasn’t guaranteed to get to the top of the tower, or even up to the point where the church would hire her, but that was a dream job. If she could get there, forget animating kobold skeletons and pouring mana into weapons to make a profit. She could lay back and use nigh unlimited power to frivolously automate daily tasks, as is the right of a wizard with nothing to do. It didn’t do to attempt to use extremely high powered spells to cheat the universe though. A story that ran through the tower hopefuls every once in a while involved a wizard that attempted to use advanced time magic to eat breakfast without having to cook it, and ended up erasing an entire city from history, himself included. Complete nonsense, if you erased your own existence then no one would be talking about you. It was probably just the city.

While Avery had managed to figure out how to cut the time taken down to a half hour for the new specialized spell, which would probably only be applicable to this specific scenario, it had also taken a half hour to finish messing with the structure. Plus, since she hadn’t taken any notes while formulating this, if she wanted to cast it again she was going to have to re-do the modification from base principles and memory. Somewhat annoying, but if it worked like she thought it did, after she managed to write things down she’d be able to spend a half hour casting to get two hours of ‘being in her body’ time. Doubling her spells ‘time invested verses output achieved’ ratio wasn’t bad.

Before actually casting the spell, Avery demolishes the rocks littering the corridor, gaining six mana. She had lost far more than that in the time she had taken to mess with spell structure, but it was at least three minutes of mana recouped. As long as she got this whole situation ironed out before nightfall, or managed to find some sustainable method of refilling the core to the point she could just ignore the negative recovery, Avery would be able to leverage all of this in some way. Probably.

Deciding that she was probably going to have to do so eventually anyway, Avery opens up the ‘Construction’ menu and builds a corridor in each of the three directions from her core room. Thirty mana, probably worth the time saved trying to calculate the most efficient method of using deconstruct to cut away stone and regain mana from the left behind rock, in the short term at least. After that, sixty mana to put a room at the end of each of those corridors. So far, that provided eighteen mana regen for ninety mana invested, a twenty percent return on mana per hour to regular hour. That definitely had snowballing potential. If she were able to fill up the core’s mana entirely, using this arrangement she could get a seventeen hundred mana per hour regeneration increase just by alternating rooms and corridors. Before she could second guess herself anymore, Avery made another five sets of corridors and rooms, coming off each of the newly created rooms. Just to try something new, she also made a pit in the room just after the core room. No effect, but it was fairly cheap.

Eight new rooms, eight new corridors, and forty eight new mana regeneration gained, and two hundred forty five mana spent. Avery was starting to dip into her soul at this point, so she hurried herself through the ritual as fast as possible.

o o o o o o o o o o o o o o

The Mage of Magic kept running. Every bit of mana in their body was gone, but at least this particular kobold had a full stomach. It wouldn’t need to eat for three days with that much food inside of it. A kobold that didn’t have to worry about eating was a kobold that could do other things, whether it be the typical kobold maintaining the den, through cleaning the burrow of detritus and taking care of crafting and resetting the various traps set up to keep the animals, adventurers, and other monsters away, the miner expanding the caves and finding precious metals, a job the Mage had performed themself back before it had discovered the might of magic, or the sorcerers who would spar with each other and nap on piles of gems and gold.

Once the Mage had a good lay of the land, and figured out a safe spot to burrow in and hide out, it would be spending its time watching out for the adventurer types that knew how to do magic. It was usually pretty easy to figure out how a particular spell was done, assuming the kobold was able to watch it happening. It had most of the basic ones figured out, telepathy, telekinesis, summoning hazardous materials and throwing them, small scale time reversal, ventriloquism, and how to make pretty lights, but for the more powerful, interesting magics, it was going to need to investigate.

On the other hand, it looked like there were only the regular fighting type human-like things fighting that bear. Most of them were poking at it with their sharp sticks, which the bear would swipe at and break in half like they were made of something that was like the wood the things were made of, but less sturdy. Dirt maybe? The Mage knew that dirt came away from the tunnel walls with an errant tap, like those sticks were breaking when the bear managed to connect with one. Growling loudly, the bear steppes back with its hind legs, blood dripping from various scratches on its hide. It was large compared to the Mage, but only about the same size as the guards around it.

One of the guards was circling around the creature, and the Mage of Magic decides that it would help out the likely scared and trapped bear, and in doing so help the people of the town as well. If it could drive the creature back toward the forest, and keep the guard with a short blade from trying to stab a black bear in the back, probably enraging it and getting themself killed, it would be saving a guard’s life and protecting a lower form of life’s ability to exist. Really, that was all any creature wanted to do. It was one of the kobold central tenants, that as long as you survived everything could improve.

With a bit of effort, the Mage creates a temporary vacuum of mana in front of it, and aimed its arcane missile between the guards, bear, and other guard behind the bear. That being done, it scurries off to the left, into a convenient gap in the buildings. Directly between two greaved legs, up under the bear’s arm, and past the helmet of the guard sneaking up on the bear, the glowing ball of energy drew every creature there’s gaze. While all the guards were paying attention to how the bolt of magic coming out of nowhere probably could have killed any of them with how precisely it’s trajectory had to have been calculated to do all of that, the bear took advantage of the lull to bat aside the person behind it, drop to all fours, and lope away to safety.

Safety in this case was just a dozen meters away. There, it turned to glare at everything the town had to offer, at which point the vortex fired the second arcane missile. That one wasn’t aimed differently, but luckily enough for the guards none of them had moved into the path of the bolt. Forming themselves into a circle, the guards put themselves back to back, looking out for the mysterious magic user firing things with unerring accuracy from the middle of the road while invisible and the bear, carefully approaching the knocked unconscious guard to retrieve their comrade. The bear looks toward the circle of spears, like it was considering going after them anyway, before casting a wary glare at where the missiles had come from and walking back into the forest.

Satisfied at a job well done, the Mage of Magic pulled its pile of cloth over itself. It had worked a lot, all day. Kobolds were usually nocturnal, and nightfall was only a few hours away. Tonight, it was going to sneak around and search for magic.