Eat, work, eat, study, sleep, and repeat. Yet again I say, truly the most fun isekai adventure one can imagine. “That time I was reincarnated as a min level office worker in another world!!” I could picture the anime and its deserved 1/10 rating. It’s just like being a normal office worker, but with the constant threats of severe corporal punishment and being smited by the gods.

  Regardless, for six months I went about my familiar pattern, making sure to keep my head low, but only low enough that there wouldn’t be a repeat of what happened in Fionn’s office. Today was slightly different. After dinner I made my way back to the dormitories. I stood outside Sofia’s room for a moment. It was worrisomely quiet. They were a few days late from their last charity trip. It was starting to get concerning.

  Creeping down into the basement, I gently pushed aside the crate that covered an area of dirt in the otherwise stone wall. Pulling out my grimoire, I flipped to a familiar page before touching the dirt and channeling some mana into the spell glyph on the opened page. A small hole to the catacombes began to form and I crawled in. This had become a strangely familiar practice. A key part of ‘keeping my head low, but still as high as I safely could’.

  My enemy, besides the gods, the random slum thugs, and probably others I’ve made, was the Severance Knights. In their eyes I was meeting with an unsavory sort. The fact I was still associating with Sofia even after their ‘punishment’ and threats already put me in their crosshairs. Though, most of my time with Sofia were in places outside of their purview, or at least it was to the best of my knowledge. The last thing I needed was for them to connect everything together. They’d likely escalate.

  I don’t know if Bishop d’Acron was a member or they were currying favor with him, but that was hardly a meaningful distinction. From their punishment they wanted me to learn obedience through fear. Instead I learned both deceit and that I wasn’t changing or dismantling the church anytime soon. To do so required overwhelming individual power or moderate institutional power. Any sparks of hope for the latter were snuffed out by Fionn’s complicity in the whole affair.

  Anyways, it’s always fun musing on how you might die when surrounded by bones. A very normal and relatable experience. My walk through the catacombs, thankfully, wasn't too far. Crawling through another hole, I arrived at the dorm for Stultvultan’s sect. Having one god in my corner was certainly a boon. Or at least insofar as I could leverage their followers to help me. The only real problem was which god it was. Stultvultan’s sect here was small. His following on the whole of the continent was likely similarly small compared to the other Severance Gods.

  Stultvultan was the black sheep of the Severance Gods on Aelia because of his draconic blood and the continent’s long history of wars with dragons. As if to highlight that point, the symbol of the Severance Knights, a tear drop with a sword down the middle and six smaller tear drops to its side, had Stult cut off while the other six gods were represented as the smaller tear drops. Which was to say a boon, but the worst option for where I was.

  A cougkin wizard was waiting for me. Jsvil was rather lean and laying down lazily on some crates while he waited. While his head was covered in brown fur, there was some white around his mouth and black around his eyes. The latter of which made him look perpetually tired. He was one of the more plainly, or lazily dressed among Stultvultan’s sect, wearing a simple cobalt robe.

  “I have the designs for the ritual,” I said, passing over the paper. The cougkin had served as my mentor for magic, though it was somewhat short lived. In truth after he helped me overcome my shortcomings it’d been a lot more collaborative than him simply teaching me things. He wasn’t an archmage by any means, or anyone overly accomplished. Yet, he knew what I needed, that that was enough to get me over the hurdles I was running into.

  “There might be some aether interference with the binding spell, but otherwise I see no issue,” he said, assessing my design with some thought. “How long did you calculate the collection period to be?”

  "For which portion? The initial collection for the summoning might only be around five minutes. We'll then need roughly forty-five minutes for the spirit to manifest, ten minutes shaping its form, five minutes to bind it to said form, and lastly another five minutes to add the telepathic bond. So seventy minutes assuming we’re properly charging the subsequent spells in time.”

  “Ah, I see now.” Jsvil turning between some of my pages of notes and back to his own version. “We might need to make some minor positional adjustments to address the aether interference still, but I can see this working.”

  As he kept examining my design, I couldn’t help but think that, even though he’s supposed to be a cougar or cougar adjacent, the humanoid form makes him look like a brown furred house cat. Not that I would ever vocalize that thought. Yet, I could already see myself getting into trouble from misreferring to different beastkin people. Beastfolk would be even harder since they’re mostly human with only some animal features.

  This was my first foray into ritual spells. In some ways it reminded me of when Jsvil was first helping me with tiered spells. It was both vindicating and deeply annoying that the main reasons none of my tiered spell designs worked came down to a bunch of small technical details: the ink I used was too low quality, my lines were too close together causing interference, the shapes of certain runes were copied incorrectly by a scribe, my design got too greedy trying to convert mana into power and overloaded. Careless mistakes I should’ve caught on my own. Though the biggest mistakes tended to be from me not doing a good enough job transcribing the runes and sigils myself. In a way, despite how much I hated it, I’ve come to appreciate the fact that Reginald, my archivist mentor, had me doing penmanship training.

  Tiered spells were very very finicky when it came down to it. There were a lot of factors that went into how much mana energy a spell would use and a strict threshold you had to be under. As soon as the energy capacity went over the threshold the spell would need to be cast as a spell of the next tier. In other words: if a first level spell costs 1 mana and a second level spell costs 2 mana and you mess up the first level spell so that the glyph requires 1.000000000001 mana, then you’d need to spend 2 mana and cast it at a second level for it to work. With almost 1 mana worth of energy just sort of dissipating into nothing if you're lucky and recoiling if you weren’t. In my case I wasn’t at a point where I could activate a second level spell so I couldn’t channel enough mana into it causing them to fizzle out. A truly absurd system that, while I didn’t explicitly make, could definitely have seen myself making…

  That’s not even mentioning adding controls to a spell. Let’s say you want to shoot off a giant fireball, well how does the magic know it should blow up? Your intentions? Ah sweet summer child, if it’s not hardwired in the spell you need to add a vocalization or other control module which costs a ton of extra mana. Binding a wand or staff and letting it shoot a set distance from whatever direction it’s pointing works as well, but then you’re telegraphing your attack.

  If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  The real kicker was that you couldn’t even just use someone else’s design. No, you had to adapt it to fit your own unique mana signature because in most cases a normalization circle cost too much energy to be practical. If you don't adapt the spell, it causes even more resistance and requires extra energy to compensate. That was all to say, being a wizard actually requires being a nerd, it wasn’t simply an aesthetic choice.

  I’ll be stealing so much paper from the church when we leave. The amount of math I needed to do for this was absurd. Note to self: reinvent a calculator at some point. Though the more ‘traditional’ definition, a room of women doing math for me, wasn’t exactly unappealing…

  Ritual casting wasn’t much better or too different. The only main difference being you’re collecting ambient mana, called aether, to fuel multiple spells chained together. The downside being it takes a longer time to work and you still need to contribute mana for the aether collection. The brightside is that every drop of mana you contribute aether can contribute four times. In other words in this case I was going to contribute a first tier spell worth of mana and seventy minutes and get four first tier spells fueled by aether and more complex structure.

  “Thoughts on these changes, hmm?” Jsvil asked, breaking me from my thoughts.

  I looked over at his adjustments. “Might add an extra minute or two of charge time.”

  “You really care? For a ritual this long?” He stared at me blankly.

  “Yes, but I’ll let it slide for now.”

  “Crazy woman,” he muttered, shaking his head. “I suppose we should get on it before the Haze messes with your calculations, hmm? We’ll cast it twice for each of us, hmm?”

  “Do you want to draw the design or prepare the collector and catalyst?”

  “I’ll draw. You’ve done plenty of that.” Jsvil took my design and collected the mana conductive chalk. He began to trace out the patterns.

  I turned back to the table we had and started combining the slew of components we had. It took longer than expected. After crushing, mixing, and shaping the two sets of materials I turned back to Jsvil. He’d already finished and was idly resting on his boxes for me to finish.

  “You know you could’ve helped when you were done,” I said, unamused.

  “Who am I to take your practice, hmm?”

  “Ideally someone who wants us to get this done before the Haze.”

  “The spell and materials are in my basement, I can do it after you leave.”

  “You just want me to test the ritual to see if it’s safe don’t you?” I sighed at the lazy cat for him to wryly smirk back. “Fine. Let’s get this started.”

  I made myself comfortable on the stone floor the best I could. I’d be here for a dreadfully dull hour. Jsvil watched as I channeled my mana into my chalked out design. It glowed ever so faintly as I was hardly providing it with any energy. The first aether collector started filling, a cool white light emanating from it.

  Jsvil watched on for the first minute or two before falling asleep on his side, chin being propped up by his hand. Whatever, cats do be napping. Wait… I was hoping to make a cat familiar, but would he find that offensive? Eh, he’ll get over it.

  The annoying thing about this ritual was that for the first fifty minutes I sat there doing nothing, but channeling a small amount of mana into the chalk. It’s job was to help with the aether collection. After five minutes the first two spells were charged, the remaining fourty-five minutes were needed to keep the mana stable so it wouldn’t over or under charge. A short gust of air wooshed out and a faint translucent red blob hovered in the middle of the ritual.

  The slight gust seemed to have woken Jsvil up as he started laughing seeing it. “How ripe is that! One of the dragon’s chosen summoning a devil spirit. Not what I’d’ve guessed, but certainly better than a demon.”

  I rolled my eyes, not that he saw. “Well the ritual worked and I didn’t see you complaining over me cutting corners to make the type of spirit random.”

  “Well obviously, the telepathic bond is certainly a better outcome for a first tier familiar summoning. A devil though… I’d assume you’d’ve summoned an elemental spirit or nature spirit. Far more common those. I’d restart the ritual if I were you. Fizzle it out, hmm? Trying to hide it from the other sects might be trouble.”

  “The other sects huh?” I sighed for a moment, yet another thing seemingly pitting me against them. I’ll worry about that later. My expression turned to a joking grin as I looked back at Jsvil. “Here I thought the ‘dragon’ fought the most against devils.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Pray the little guy won’t try to slit your throat while you sleep,” he said jokingly. “Is that better, hmm? Though, truthfully, I’d’ve picked an obedience spell over the telepathic bond had I known this was what you’d get.”

  “Fuck off with that, I’m not about to do magic mind control. It’s a lost spirit anyways it shouldn’t have any memories or an identity until it starts developing one through its new form.”

  “Try and assure yourself all you want, I’d not trust a devil to not have tricks,” Jsvil said, starting to get up from his boxes. “Are you certain of this? I can cut the ritual and we can start anew.”

  “Don’t bother, I think a devil could be interesting.” And by interesting I meant very cool. It should also be stronger in the long run than more ‘basic’ spirits which I’ll take everything I can get. Though Jsvil just sighed and went back to his boxes.

  For the next forty-odd minutes the glowing translucent blob began to glow brighter and became more opaque, its shifting form never settling on any one shape. The room was bathed in the eerie red glow. With one hand channeling mana through the chalk the other started moulding clay into a cat-like form. It didn’t need to be perfect, only close enough. The binding spell would ensure the body was adjusted for the spirit’s needs.

  I placed the roughly shaped cat into the middle of the ritual and activated the fully charged binding spell. The spirit blob started spinning like a vortex, its energy entering into the clay, which in turn began to glow. Slowly becoming more bright until it was hard to look at. I activated the final spell and braced myself for some kind of static mental feedback from the developing spirit which never came. Instead the glow faded. In the middle of the ritual circle a black cat looked up at me. It had sharp glowing red eyes and two small horns that sprouted from its head right behind the ears that pointed upwards.

  “Hello buddy,” I said telepathically to the cat who in turn tilted their head to the side. “I’m going to call you Nox ok?” I opened the palm of my hand and channeled a bit of mana into it. Nox walked forward and smelled it before starting to eat my offering.

  I looked over to Jsvil who gave me a not so amused look. “Well it worked I suppose. If you don’t mind taking that thing to the side now, I believe it’s my turn, hmm?”

  I scooped up Nox and moved out of the way while Jsvil started his summoning. The horns made Nox rather difficult to pet on the head, but that wasn’t really the point. I held Nox closely while he surveyed the world. In theory, Nox had cat-like instincts, the experiences of a newborn, and the brain capacity of at least a human adult. Likely greater because they were formed from a devilish spirit.

  I started teaching/training Nox while Jsvil started his familiar summoning. It was all going fine until the basement door opened.

  Father Yelgris popped his blue draconic head down. “Maeori! Sofia’s back and they’re throwing her in the Penance Hall for a month.”