Demon's Virtue

Eiro slowly stood up, his body heavily slowed down due to the extremely cold temperatures he had been exposed to for the past few hours. At the very least it seemed to have worked, and Eiro's fury disappeared for now. That didn't mean that he wasn't angry about this whole situation anymore, just that he didn't need to worry about losing control as easily anymore.

And so, for now, so that he could properly get rid of the side-effects of freezing his body to temperatures that would kill anyone else, the Demon stopped pushing Ice Magic into the runic carvings and instead used Fire Magic.

Nearly immediately the cold air disappeared and instead started to burn, Eiro's whole body practically catching on fire. But Eiro didn't want to switch from relaxing in Ice to doing so in Fire, he really just wanted to warm himself up a little. And so, Eiro stopped with that and made his way out of this particular hidden room. When he was outside, he made sure that he could move alright, and especially that his prosthetic hand was doing alright after being subjected to such extreme temperatures.

While he was just standing there, Nelli floated up to him and tried to make sure that he was really fine, basically checking up on every inch of his body to make sure he didn't get some kinds of burns all of a sudden. Meanwhile, Gondos was interested in something else, "Actually, what do you think the former owner of this place did with a room like that? You two seem to have a similar level of eccentricity, but I doubt you were so similar that even he benefitted from exposure to the elements to the same extent as you did."

"You're right, he didn't. This was for something completely else." The Demon pointed out, "While I didn't find any documents pertaining to this room specifically, I have read about a few things related to permanent elemental infusion. Or something like 'nature transformation', where the literal nature of an object or material is changed. I don't know if it worked out, but the theory was that it would be possible to make the infusion of certain elements into some physical form permanent."

"Permanent infusion? Does that not sound just impossible? Infusing something requires a mass amount of mana and control over it, so having something permanent in the way that I am imagining seems like some mad dream." Gondos added, and Eiro slowly crossed his arms as he got dressed again, "Well, I thought the same at first, but then I did a little bit of thinking. Such permanent infusion may not be impossible if you think about it to an extent. You see, the theory is based mainly on a single concept. And that is the 'lowering of the threshold'. Basically, it says that certain objects have a certain threshold that needs to be overcome to infuse them with magic, and that threshold for a specific sort of magic becomes lower by a miniscule amount the more it is infused with that specific sort of magic. At some point, it would end up being fully infused with the natural magic of that sort that lingers in the air, at which point it will start absorbing more of that kind and basically start being infused permanently. It's as if you would set the point at which wood starts to burn to room-temperature. It would just combust out of nowhere, right?" The Demon explained. It was a concept that Eiro was pretty interested in.

After all, if it was possible to create certain objects that were constantly infused with magic, it might be possible to do something similar to living beings, and that way, Eiro would be able to gain some sort of naturally boosted agility, strength, and defense depending on what kind of element he would try and permanently infuse himself with.

While Nelli and Gondos were thinking about what this theory would mean if it could be used, Eiro continued, "According to the former owner of this place, this is what happens with specific monster evolutions. So if a monster evolves into an elemental variant of itself, like a Spark Wolf can evolve from the simple Magic Wolf, the lower limit to be infused with a specific element is lowered or practically removed, and the infusion reaches a new level and depth at the same time."

"So..." Gondos started, "That room was meant as a place to test that theory?"

"Yes, exactly. Actually, it seems to be something a bit more than that, something more developed. Right now it just creates an environment that represents that element, but it doesn't really infuse anything. I think it might be broken somewhere, or it was never completed, and it was meant to focus a huge amount of elemental magic right into a specific point for incredible levels of elemental infusion. I was already hoping to turn that into a new place to infuse myself to make that even more efficient than it already is."

After hearing Eiro's hopes, Nelli was reminded of something else, "Actually, when do you think you'll finally get the Nature Magic skill? I mean, you have both the Earth and Water Magic skills, and you even managed to do something as insane as awaken the advanced shadow element before even having any affinity for the darkness element, so..." Nelli pointed out, and Eiro slowly crossed his arms in thought.

"Yeah, honestly, that would be nice to know. I've been waiting for it, actually. You would think that I should already have it, considering how much I've infused myself with it already. But on the other hand, elements based off of two other elements are a lot harder to get than things like the shadow element. We don't even really know how a lot of this stuff works yet, so it's all just kind of chaos. It might be a coincidence now, but in a hundred or so years, it might be normal to get the shadow element first." The Demon pointed out, trying to justify himself somehow. But in the end, all three of them knew that this absolutely wasn't the case, and that Eiro was really just saying whatever came to his mind right now.

But either way, before doing anything else, Eiro made his way into the room that he picked out as his study. And it really was just a normal room. It had plenty of bookshelves, storage space, a nice desk and other furniture that the children could sit on when visiting, and there was just a pretty nice view outward.

Well, from inside. The room wasn't just a 'normal' room, as it turned out. Of course, Eiro knew this before picking it out as his study, but it was a place that was basically completely immune to any sort of Divination Magic or physical means of spying on whatever was going on inside.

Even the windows just showed an empty room when someone tried to look in from outside. As far as Eiro could tell before, that was even the case when looking through the keyhole of this room. And sound didn't seem to travel outside either, although sound could still travel in, and Eiro could see everything he wanted outside the window from in here.

In the end, all windows seemed to have some kind of similar distortion effect where it would be hard to really see what was going on inside from outside, but this was a bit stronger than in the rest of the manor, and Eiro really didn't mind. Here, he could just relax, concentrate on his projects, and do whatever he felt like.

And since this place had a slightly nicer arrangement for reading as far as Eiro was concerned, he preferred just grabbing a few books from the library and bringing it here instead of just reading it there. For the most part, Eiro was really just being distracted by all those different amazing things in the hidden library to fully concentrate on what he was reading.

That became far worse after Eiro's intelligence stat passed the 300 point range and Eiro's internal thought-processes became faster. It also made him better at multitasking, but it didn't let him have two separate lines of thought.

This led to Eiro being able to passively notice everything going on around him, but when something in particular beside his book caught his eye, he would pay attention to that instead and his reading would be interrupted.

And since Eiro didn't want that, and instead wanted to fully dive into his books whenever he could, he chose to make this study the place where he would spend most of his time. On top of that, while it had good places for reading, the library didn't have any particularly amazing places to take notes as there weren't any tables there.

On top of that, Eiro didn't want to just start randomly carving his practice figurines inside of the library. He still made those whenever he had the time, trying to either create carvings of new creatures or bring old ones to a whole new level of realism.

And that was Eiro's whole goal with this. He wanted to truly fulfill that which Jura wanted to give him, the ability to create life. Somehow, Eiro still had a slightly hard time creating things that seemed truly alive, probably because Eiro was focusing mostly on the actually physical aspects that Eiro could sense instead of what went beyond that.

Of course, to any other onlooker, these wooden figurines might look extremely life-like versions of different monsters, but in the end, they weren't perfect. People still instantly recognized them as what they were, figurines. And they definitely still would even if Eiro created life-size versions of those figurines, there was no doubt about that.

But what Eiro wanted people to think when they saw the figurines was that they were truly alive, that a wild beast was about to jump at them. And Eiro still wasn't able to do things that manipulated the 'vibe' of the figurines.

He had to be able to change the energy around them, and basically completely change their nature to the eye of the beholder.

But just as Eiro thought that, he realized something else.

"That's it! That's part of that stealth ability, to change the vibe someone gives off! He must have used that ability to get away from Bahlsen's door!" Eiro exclaimed, as if he had solved some kind of riddle. In the end, it really didn't help him all that much in figuring out where the 'Collector', that serial killer, truly was right now.

For that, Eiro had to meet with Bahlsen again and ask him a few more things.