Before a summoning ritual was conducted, the Wizard presiding over the site would evaluate it to determine its approximate summoning grade—that was, the highest level of lifeform the ritual could possibly summon.
The Fate Bone Die had an upper limit of fourth level, meaning that, in theory, it could summon a Level 4 Lifeform at most.
That alone showed just how extraordinary the Fate Bone Die was.
Even Wizards rarely obtained summoning items of that grade. Most ranged from Grade 1 to Grade 3, and those exceeding Grade 3 were exceedingly rare.
Since the Fate Bone Die's assessed grade had reached Grade 4, the fee was correspondingly steep: a full three hundred thousand First-Level Magic Stones.
This expense could not be spared. If he accidentally summoned some formidable being, Duke's current strength would be completely insufficient to handle it.
If he merely summoned an ordinary small animal, such as a toad, kitten, or puppy, then he could only consider himself unlucky.
This kind of summoning ritual was a gamble to begin with. Whether one gained anything depended entirely on luck.
Matthew had overseen countless strange and unusual summoning rituals here and had long since stopped finding them surprising.
The one he remembered most clearly involved a Third-Level Wizard who had been fanatically obsessed with fire elements. That Wizard had spent a fortune on a piece of Flame Amber, said to have been passed down from some fire elemental plane, to serve as a summoning medium.
When the ritual began, flames surged into the sky. The temperature throughout the summoning hall soared high enough to melt steel, and even the protective barriers warped under the scorching heat.
Everyone believed a powerful fire elemental lifeform would be summoned, perhaps even something like a Balrog.
Yet when the flames dispersed, only a small