"????"
The Appraisal yielded nothing useful, leaving Lucian caught between laughter and tears. The gap in their levels was simply too vast — his accumulated knowledge in spell identification fell far short.
"Nothing?" Natasha noticed the shift in his expression.
The demigod lich wouldn't appear for another day and a half, and they were alone, so Lucian didn't bother masking his emotions.
He gave a grunt of confirmation. "I'm going to attempt a preliminary analysis. Keep watch for any changes — the moment something feels off, sever my spiritual connection to the ring."
"Be careful." Natasha didn't waste words, just offered the briefest warning before gripping her longsword and moving close to Lucian's side.
Lucian extended his spiritual power, cautiously making contact with the unadorned black ring that bore no gemstone.
In an instant, he was plunged into an illusory realm. Beneath his feet lay cracked, lifeless earth. Around him stretched withered, yellowed grass and ashen rivers, while overhead brooded a dark, oppressive sky in which a milky-white sun radiated a dense aura of vitality.
Scattered across the landscape rose countless graves — black tombstones jutting at wild angles, packed so densely they resembled a sparse, stunted forest spread across a wasteland.
Yet in Lucian's perception, the scene's surface appearance fell away. Each tombstone, each grave, each river, each taint of cloud — all interconnected through a spell model of such complexity that it surpassed anything he had ever encountered in Arcane Magic. Simply gazing upon it left him feeling drained of spiritual power, his head spinning.
Shaking off the illusion, Lucian began performing fractal decomposition on the model, slowly parsing it apart. He didn't seek to fully map its structure — only to grasp its general function. Combined with the Appraisal spell, it took him half an hour before he finally located the ring's control nexus.
Withdrawing his spiritual power, his soul and brain pushed to their limits, Lucian turned to Natasha with visible exhaustion. "I need fifteen minutes to rest. Then I'll stimulate the control core with my soul to draw out the spiritual imprint sealed inside. You seize the moment and use Pale Justice to forcibly destroy it."
Over the past three years, Lucian had been working alongside Levsky and the other Grand Archanists at the Tower on numerous frontier problems in mathematics. The legendary-tier spell model within the ring wasn't beyond his comprehension — he could even devise more elegant approaches to analyzing it. But the gap in their ranks was simply too vast, and his knowledge of necromancy was insufficient. Even with his mathematical prowess, he had no choice but to rely on brute-force decryption. That said, having achieved even a rudimentary mathematical understanding of the model made the brute-force approach considerably easier.
"You can actually trigger the imprint? This is a legendary ring." After Lucian's Appraisal had failed to yield any information, Natasha had reined in her earlier excitement. Sometimes the better the loot, the less useful it proved — what mattered was whether it matched one's own level and capabilities.
Lucian managed a slightly pale smile. "Why not? I'm the man they say could become a Grand Archanist before thirty. A legendary spell model might make other high-level mages recoil in terror, but it won't scare me. At the very least, I can figure out the broad strokes."
Every man — regardless of age — loves showing off a bit in front of the woman he admires.
"When I first met you, I really couldn't tell you had this kind of mind." Natasha rubbed her chin thoughtfully. "Honestly, every time I watch you mages breeze through problems that make my head spin just looking at them, I'm genuinely impressed. I never understand what's happening, but I just know it's something remarkable." Then she reached over and deliberately tousled Lucian's hair, adopting a patronizing tone. "I hear that overusing your brain makes your hair fall out. Don't go bald on me."
Her childhood education had been comprehensive for a Magic Apprentice. Her mother had taught her everything except how to Meditate, cast spells, or recite incantations — mathematics, geometry, elemental theory, electromagnetism, force fields, and astrology had all been instilled in her, with the aim of shaping her into a well-educated noblewoman.
One might say Lady Natasha had graduated high school — excluding history, swordsmanship, music, heraldry, statecraft, and court etiquette.
Lucian looked at her with amusement. "You think a mage can't solve the problem of hair loss?"
"Hmm, fair point. But plenty of nobles worry about going bald. Lucian, aren't you dedicated to bringing low- and mid-tier Arcane Magic to the masses? This could be another avenue." Natasha had long been in the habit of letting conversations with Lucian meander off-topic.
When she'd first heard about this "ambition" of his, Natasha — as a high-ranking noble — had found it quite admirable. She couldn't very well view things from the commoners' perspective, but it didn't take a genius to see the enormous tax revenue it would generate, the national prosperity it would bring, and the handsome profits that investing nobles stood to make.
The sudden thought of something like "Evans Hair Growth Tonic" darkened Lucian's expression, and he shook his head firmly. "All right, let's begin."
Natasha didn't know why Lucian had reacted so strangely, but she didn't press the matter. Her smile faded, and she tightened her grip on the longsword.
Lucian took a deep breath and once again extended his spiritual power toward the ring. This time he didn't linger on the surface — he plunged deep, charging toward the dense, unsettling cluster of graves. Drawing on his preliminary understanding, he bypassed the outer defenses and slammed directly into an unremarkable black tombstone.
The tombstone suddenly sharpened into clarity, and blood-red epitaphs materialized upon it:
"There is no place better for imprisonment than this, for every soul shall surely be confined within this little coffin."
"Congus."
One by one, the crimson words twisted violently, like the gaping maws of monsters, and tore through Lucian's spiritual power, obliterating the majority of it. From the grave behind the tombstone drifted a hazy specter, its eyes blazing with emerald light.
"Now!" Clamping down on the agony of his spiritual force under assault and on the verge of collapse, Lucian sent a sharp warning through their mental link. This was the best chance they would get!
Natasha had been poised to strike all along. Regardless of the fact that the ring hadn't yet shown visible signs of disturbance, she followed Lucian's instructions to the letter. Her longsword descended in a clean vertical slash, landing on the ring with a resonant clang.
The ring — which had previously shown no change whatsoever — suddenly erupted with ashen-gray smoke, and a mournful wail emanated from within. But beneath the power of Pale Justice, the smoke rapidly dissipated, and the black ring itself seemed to shed a layer of color, turning dull and lifeless.
Lucian eased the pain a little and began inscribing his own spiritual imprint. At the same time, he reminded Natasha to remain alert, fearing Congus might still harbor some hidden trap.
As the final stroke of the imprint was completed, the ring suddenly transformed into a maelstrom, frantically devouring Lucian's spiritual power. In a matter of seconds he was utterly drained, unable to sustain the effort, and forced to tap into the reserve spiritual power stored in his Holme Crown Ring, Origin.
Lucian seized the brief pause to shift the black hole within his cognitive world to the forefront, pitting suction against suction.
The "black hole" warped the illusory spacetime around it, and the rate of spiritual drain immediately slowed. With a snap, Lucian heard what sounded like the severing of his spiritual link, and the frenzied suction within the ring vanished almost instantly.
"What happened?" Seeing Lucian's ashen face, Natasha asked with concern.
Lucian let out a sigh. "I've inscribed my imprint, but this ring isn't something I can use at my current level."