Once again, I was standing on the roof of a building in the middle of the night. There was a bit of drizzling rain, just enough to make the idea of venturing out into Racoon City an unpleasant one, even if I wasn’t trying to figure out a way to gather information on the Withered without endangering my group.

However, where the rain was unpleasant to be out physically, it had one major advantage magically. The air was completely saturated with water, both from ambient moisture and on a magical level, there was water everywhere. That meant I didn’t need to be creative or smart, I merely needed to use that original Water Mirror spell I had read in my grimoire and eventually reworked into the pool of darkness I could use to scry and its final form, the scrying constructs in the form of Shadow Ravens. Now, with the amount of water in the air, I didn’t need all that reworking, I could just use the original spell and project it through the air. At least I hoped that I could, I had yet to actually use the spell for more than the simple experimentation needed to understand its basics.

There was a grin on my face when I used a combination of Water and Ice Magic to manipulate the falling rain so it would freeze in the shape I desired, forming a simple shelter to keep the Zevarra Agha dry while I worked. I wasn’t sure how the book would react to water, a part of me was confident that it could just shrug off such mundane influences, but I wasn’t about to try. The book was priceless and I wasn’t about to take a risk here.

Lia stepped up next to me when I took shelter under the roof I had conjured, only she looked a little confused.

“Impressive, but why?” she asked, clearly unsure why we needed shelter after we had been walking through the rain long enough to get annoyingly wet.

“I need to work a bit of magic from my book, no need to get it wet. But you’re right, I should make sure we’re dry while I work,” I waved a hand, incredibly happy that I had mastered Water Magic to the point that I could draw the moisture from our clothes, bodies and hair with nothing but that. A small bonus to that was the effect my drying had on Silva, she turned from a drenched, pitiful-looking doggo into something that resembled a bottlebrush, her fur poofed out to the maximum. The sheer look of canine frustration on her face was utterly adorable, to the point that I was tempted to poof her up for my own amusement. I doubted I would, tormenting my dear canine companion felt like poor sport, but the temptation was there. And it wasn’t just there, It was easily doubled by the hunch that Hecate would find it just as amusing as I did, but I wasn’t certain. The faint sensations I had picked up while trying to dissect the miracle Silva had created gave me some insight but I had no idea just how accurate that insight was.

Though, regardless of the sensations, I was quite certain that trying to psychoanalyse a Diety by looking at the magic of their followers was a fool’s errand. The magic was, to my understanding, based on what the followers saw the deity as, though I had no idea how that worked with different worlds worshipping the same deity. Would the worship of Hecate, or any deity, here on Terra be encouraged to form in the same lines as the church worshipping that deity on Mundus, or on any other worlds that worshipped that deity?

It was a fascinating question, how much were the followers controlled by the deity, how much was the deity formed by the belief of their followers? Before the change, Churches and the faith they espoused, even when continually worshipping the same deity, had been in flux, slowly but constantly shifting to accommodate society, often twisting the words in their Holy Scripture to fit the reality they were worshipped in. The old scriptures couldn’t change, before the change, there had been no deities intervening with the world as it used to be. At least none that were worshipped, Pantheon Entertainment and Road to Purgatory certainly counted as an intervention in my book, but the only way they had been worshipped was as some sort of technological miracle. If only we had known back then what we knew now. Well, no, nothing would have truly changed, not really. Even with a warning, people would have died, maybe fewer people, but who was to say how much Pantheon Entertainment had actually known? Almost certainly the date, maybe even the concrete time of the change hitting Terra but I lacked the information to make the deliberations. Nor did I know what truly motivated the deities, what limitations they were working under or anything beyond the knowledge of their existence.

Pushing away my drifting thoughts, I froze some more water, forming it into somewhat comfortable chairs for us. Sadly, I currently lacked the skill to recreate the comfortable pillow of fine diamond dust I had generally used on Mundus but that would come with time. For now, these were the best I could do, so I offered one to Lia.

Once we were comfortable, I briefly closed my eyes, immersing myself in the Astral River to rapidly recover the Astral Power I had just used, before shifting my focus outward. A part of my mind remained in the Astral River, boosting my recovery and thus the amount of Astral Power I could use, but my focus was on the world around me.

The next moment, the Zevarra Agha was suddenly in my hand, as if it had been there all along. it was a rather amusing trick one that I had taken the time to master so I could perform it smoothly, even if it wasn’t really magic. The book was bound to my soul, less a physical object and more the magical representation of one, making me incredibly curious how that worked, how to create something similar. There were so many ways this could be useful, though sadly, I didn’t even know where to start. Maybe I’d be able to analyse the book in the future, but for now, it completely eluded me.

But I could read from it, could use it to cast the spells written within, even if I normally couldn’t. Reading the chant aloud, while slowly filling the dense runic formation on the page with my own Astral Power, I could feel the spell take effect. It was far easier to understand what was going on, I could even realise that the spell was a five-rune spell, with many connecting patterns linking the runes into an almost artistic-looking drawing while obscuring what exactly was part of a Rune and what was a connecting pattern. It was a fascinating way to hide the details of the spell while increasing its efficiency. Though, maybe the patterns weren’t really there to obfuscate but to make it so even somebody without the affinity or ridiculous levels of Astral Power could cast the spell.

Whatever the case, it was almost trivial to cast the spell, I couldn’t completely understand what it was doing, but I was able to feel how it formed and could easily direct where I wanted the two parts to form.

Again, I used the ambient water, forming the rain into a vertical screen hanging before Lia and me and moments later, the clear water that had been falling from the sky minutes earlier was suddenly no longer clear but reflecting from distant water. Distant rain, in this case, rain that was continually falling almost three kilometres away. It wasn’t easy to hold the spell, but I had been there before, so I had been able to form the location in my mind without trouble.

Grinning, I began shifting the view, enjoying the fact that there was water everywhere. Each drop of rain worked, one drop of water was like the other and all water was part of the same cycle. Magically, it was a fascinating concept, one that I wanted to study deeply at some point, but for now, I merely rejoiced in my ability to gather information.

Sure, I was unable to use abilities through the mirror, but maybe that was for the best. The lack of a direct link between me and the construct was both an advantage and a hindrance. I couldn’t Observe but I also couldn’t be Observe’d, couldn’t attack but also couldn’t be attacked.

Looking at the Withered Husks I could see moving in the rain, with a few Withered Hunters lurking in the shadows, I was quite happy that they couldn’t hit me. But I wasn’t doing this to see those, I wanted to go deeper. To see what had been denied from me before, so instead of studying the enemies I could see, I focused on a rooftop I could see through the mirror, focused on the water falling from the sky over there.

Focused, and shifted the spell, the reflection in the water blurring for a moment, until the spell showed us something new. And just as it showed us the new image, the spell exploded in a violent splash of water.