Right now, I feel like punching somebody. The issue is with my left ankle. I seem to have got it twisted in my escape from the inn. Normally, it should have healed already, but the damn thing is still aching. I just need to put my weight on it, and it feels like somebody is pulling all of my nerves out of my body.
I think it has healed wrong. That is why it is taking so long for blood mana to heal me.
Other than that, though, I have managed to heal myself quite well. Well, I have been using my sword for the last couple of days. I still can't activate it fully, or it would be detected. The little that I dared to use was because they wouldn't be looking at me. Right now, the Bloodfire gang has other worries.
Well, all of these injuries have been worth it at least. After all, the prison break has been more successful than the people expected. I am sure that even Trevor could not have predicted that it would be this effective. The Bloodfire gang has lost almost all of its influence in the city. I guess that I should elaborate a bit more on that.
There were two main types of prisoners in the inn, the first were the guards of the Mayfire castle. They were the people who maintained order in the castle before. While they are not particularly skilled at fighting, they are familiar with the city.
They make use of their familiarity with the city to set up ambushes for the Bloodfire gang. Any time the Bloodfire gang has a group going on a raiding session, they find the guards of the city in the process. They are stripped of everything on their body, especially their weapons.
Whenever the gang tries to send a large group after them, they disappear like ghosts. Due to this, the Bloodfire gang has taken to moving in groups of at least ten to twenty people. This has greatly reduced their reach in the city.
This has also stopped their mad rampage in the city. Even if they wanted to pull off something like that, they simply don't have enough people to spare anymore.
The reason for that is the other half of the prisoners. The other half of the prisoners in that group are the merchants. They were merchants who made the mistake of fighting the Bloodfire gang. Most of them are ex-mercenaries or ex-guards who had retired to become merchants. They are the type to still hide their weapons in their shops, meant for folks like the Bloodfire gang.
The goal of the gang must have been to intimidate the folks of the city. That means whatever happens to them is nothing pleasant. Being fed on by a vampire is not a pleasant experience if they don't want you to enjoy it. The fangs of the vampires contain a kind of toxin that numbs their victims.
It is supposed to make them feel a sense of pleasure. A person would be smiling as their life is drained out of their body. I have seen people stumbling from a lack of blood, trying to get bitten by their master. They can feel that ecstasy warp their heads even as their life is being drained out of them.
It is not a pleasant sight to witness. It is even more terrible to experience without this poison, though. It feels like they are taking your spine out of your body. That is why vampires do not find it that hard to take over towns. The damn bastards can finetune the art of the stick and carrot to extreme degrees. Any merchant who had experienced that would want revenge. They must be itching to fight the creatures. They are attacking the Bloodfire gang with a mad fury.
There are not that many deaths in the Bloodfire gang, but for every person killed by a guard, the merchants are killing three.
All in all, the influence of the Bloodfire gang is completely wrecked in the outer keep. They are nowhere near defeated, mind you. They have just focused all of their power into one location, and they are not moving away from that place.
The place where they have made their base is the guardhouse of the outer keep. It is supposed to be a place that is built to withstand an invasion, and that is all I know about the place.
As for why I know so little about the place. Well, all of this is something that I have just been hearing from the mouth of Trevor, to be honest. The man is completely quiet about the place. He is of the feeling that I am better off not knowing about them until I recover enough to participate. Seeing that my recovery is going to take another week at least, that man is not going to tell me anytime soon. (It is entirely due to my ankle, by the way.)
From my side, that is fine. I do need some time to heal. The only problem with healing is just how boring it can be. Right now, I am waiting for my ankle to heal and don't have anything worth doing at this moment. If I had my formations at the very least, I would have something to do.
The pain is enough that I don't feel like studying my notes. Working on my cultivation at this time would be equivalent to suicide. If the pain were to flare up at the wrong time, I might just end up poking a hole in my mana core.
The only thing that I can do is to study the sword I looted from that lady vampire. I have dubbed it the "rock sword" until I can think of a better name for it. Well, I have seen a vampire artifact only once in my life. It was the spoils of war from one of our missions.
It was a spear, with the spear tip being made from the bone of a vampire count. It was a particularly bad mission, too. This group of grunts was trying to get possessed by a vampire from the court. It was a proper cult as well.
We can't be sure exactly which vampire it was, but we are sure that it was a countess. It was a proper blood bath. You see, the stronger a vampire is, the more costly it is to summon them, even using possession.
A basic vampire soldier (the stage beyond the grunt.) can possess a grunt directly without much extra cost. Those higher up in the court require a lot of blood sacrifices to be summoned, even as a spirit. In this case, the cost was an entire village.
We did not manage to protect the villagers. We did end up destroying the countess, though the process was long and drawn out.
The instant that we recovered the spear, we destroyed it within the week. I had been studying the thing without permission, you see. They were sure that I had fallen under the thrall of the vampire. It was one of the reasons they finally let me come under the master. Well, it was kind of useless as I didn't learn anything from the spear.
Well, the sword that I have at hand is about as useful as the spear. The problem with both of them is the same. The thing is that with a vampire artifact, I simply have no idea how to activate the damn thing.
I have been probing around the entire thing for almost half a week now, and I have gotten nothing useful. It is full of runes that I am barely able to detect. I have been probing their functions for a week now. The only thing that I can tell is that the damn thing doesn't accept my vital mana. (Even my vital blood mana hybrid.)
The only thing that it accepts is blood mana, and the little I have is not even enough to activate even a single rune fully.
Well, that is also the reason that I have not managed to activate the petrification effect. I didn't expect to anyway. Well, it is essentially dead weight in my hands. The only thing that I can use it for is to study the blood magic. Right now, I am trying to activate each rune and see how it works. I have barely been able to do that.
Even if I could activate the formation now, figuring out a different branch of magic is not easy. Now the problem is that this is not going to happen easily. The scholars have to study for centuries to figure out one of the spells of the elves. They have one of the most detailed records on the continent for elven magic. Still, it takes them that long.
With blood magic, I have nothing like that. I have nothing at all. The court made sure of that. My problem is that figuring out the purpose of a rune is not easy. Every rune has a particular purpose.
Every rune brings about a particular change in the world. The only problem is figuring out that particular change. Let's say you get a book from some ancient dead era. To decipher that book, you need to guess the mood of the person who wrote the book. A symbol written in anger would mean something different from a word written in boredom, and so on.
Working with runes is kind of like that as well. The problem with runes is that, beyond the shape of the runes, you also need to figure out the intent of the rune.
Figuring out the intent is always the hardest. For example, a spark spell with an offensive intent will absorb as much mana as possible. It will output as large a spark as possible. The same spark rune, if given the instantaneous intent, would burn all the mana provided to it to create a spark.
Just the spark rune has seventeen runes like that. All of these would have the same shape, with the only difference being in intent. At least figuring out the intent is straightforward. I just need to feed the rune with my mana and try to predict their behavior from the way that they react.
It is not particularly dangerous. It is just very time-consuming, and the possibility of making errors is very high. I just need to make sure that I am activating only single runes. If I were to activate a set, there is a possibility that the sword might explode on my face. The chance of that happening is pretty low since I will be very careful about it.
Now the truly dangerous thing would be to build something on my own using these half-formed ideas. The chances of that sword exploding on my face are pretty high. Well, I have nowhere near enough information to attempt something like that.
Now I am not the type to take such a risk, but the potential benefits of it are worth it. Right now, the blood mana in my body is still pretty low. That is not going to be the case forever. Soon enough, I will have enough blood mana to activate this artifact. I will be going beyond that soon enough as well. I need to have something ready.
The only way that I will be able to make full use of that mana is to learn blood magic. The problem is, where exactly am I supposed to learn blood magic from? I could sell myself to a vampire, but then becoming a grunt would be the better option in that case.
This is the only way that I have. Well, studying runes is something that I will have to learn anyway. There is simply no way that my master will skip teaching that. The man loves learning new runes too much to skip that.