Little Mia lay sprawled over the back of the sofa, watching Shade stand before the living room window and look out at the square. In the morning light, Shade casually picked up a leaf and held it before his right eye. As golden streams of light traveled along the veins and entered his eye, the first Thaumaturgy he mastered was "Corrupt Blood Mist."
"The effect is more or less what I expected. Another area-of-effect offensive Thaumaturgy."
Thaumaturgy - Corrupt Blood Mist corresponded to the "Flesh" Spirit Rune. Casting it required only a tiny amount of his own blood, and the resulting Blood Mist possessed extremely powerful corrosive effects on flesh and bones. In other words, whenever Shade needed to dispose of a corpse in the future, he could simply use this Thaumaturgy to dissolve it completely.
Of course, since it was a Thaumaturgy bestowed by Tree Father, it could not possibly be as simple as highly efficient corpse-dissolving fluid.
Shade could create the Blood Mist in three ways. The simplest was to spray it directly from his mouth. The second was to condense a compressed ball of mist in hand, throw it out, and let it rapidly expand into dense fog in all directions.
The most complicated method was for Shade to cast it by stamping his right foot on the ground, guiding the Blood Mist to erode the earth and form erupting "smoke pillars" over a certain area. By this method, Shade could permanently transform a patch of land so that it constantly bore the effect of "Scarlet Corruption," granting the earth itself the ability to corrode and devour flesh.
Once Shade chose to transform land with Thaumaturgy, even he could not restore the earth to its original state by "canceling the spell." After all, the effect of his