Within the seemingly boundless mental power space, starlight glittered across the dome overhead. The brightest star was naturally the permanently embedded spell, Foul-Smelling Skin, in his zero-ring spell slot. The most mysterious and profound was the Silence Magic Seal revolving slowly beneath it. Its five gradually lengthening demonic marks seemed to need only a little push to plunge into the seal's winch-like core.
Ruger quietly gazed up at the starry dome of his mental power space. It was beautiful, but still somewhat dim and monotonous. There were not enough shining things up there yet.
The slightly dimmer, lower stars were the ordinary spell models he had finished constructing and mastered. They drifted lazily and freely, though most preferred to gather around the demonic marks and circle them.
A spell model with just nineteen nodes drifted lazily along. It was Ruger's target: the Shedding Spell, which had always been highly compatible with him.
Having nineteen nodes did not mean those nodes were the only places he could modify. That, too, was something he had learned this time.
Back when he permanently embedded Foul-Smelling Skin, seeing a bare white tree with a holy aura had caused the spell to change, adding one more node to its original count. That experience had misled him into thinking that modifying a spell meant working on those nodes alone.
Just as he had later discovered that the white tree in the well at the Rabbit Cottage seemed to be a skeletal hand, this minor modification to Demon Body had overturned his old assumptions. Spell modification went deeper than he had imagined, involving changes on a more microscopic level, far beyond anything as straightforward and observable as nineteen nodes.
Ruger approached this old friend he so often used to tease his enemies.
As a highly compatible spell