I became a legion lich

102 Corruption

“Now that you’ve agreed to work for me, I have a job for you. Hi, bring the swords here.” Athos ordered Emilia, who quickly withdrew from the room and went to get her weapons.

“Hey, that’s mine!” Treevor screamed as Emilia returned, seeing the white wooden swords in her arms. Emilia quickly placed her swords on the table between them and returned to her position as Athos’ guard.

“No, that was yours. Now that it belongs to us, I need you to help me make them usable. The sword wood is from glowing willow and has light enchantments, I want to know if it’s possible to alter these weapons in any way.” Athos explained his idea, causing Treevor to sigh.

“That’s impossible. The glowing willow wood is full of the light element, but it still has the other elements and maintains a balance. The mana of “you” undead on the other hand, is completely unbalanced. Even if I made weapons with enchantments of darkness, which I don’t know, your mana would still corrupt it. Corrupted mana and pure mana are different things.” Treevor spoke, refusing to call himself undead.

“I’ve already managed to corrupt a tree, so I think it’s possible to corrupt the willow glow, but I need your help to deal with the enchantments.” Acts have spoken.

“How does your magic work?” Treevor asked, his scientific curiosity piqued. Athos explained how his raising undead spell worked, as well as the differences to transforming a tree.

“That won’t work. The runesmith technique requires a mage to use his own mana to manipulate the material’s energy to form a sequence of runes. Depending on the pattern of runes used, different enchantments are created. Feeding those runes anything other than pure mana or world energy would damage the runes, rendering the weapons useless.” Treevor said and Emilia nodded, the only one in the room with any runesmith knowledge besides Treevor.

“Are runes made of pure energy? I thought you carved the weapon.” Athos spoke in shock, but Emilia corrected him.

“Master, if the runes were carved on the surface, a single scratch on the surface would destroy the enchantment and make the weapon explode.” Emilia explained politely.

.....

“My grandmother used to tell me stories that in the old days weapons were made by carving the runes on the surface, but not only is it dangerous, it also didn’t utilize the material’s full potential.”

“I think we got off topic a bit. The important thing is that it’s impossible to turn sword wood into corrupted wood without destroying the enchantment. If I corrupted it anyway, how long would it take you to enchant it again?” Athos asked after confirming that it would be impossible to use the weapons immediately.

“I have no idea. The only way to find out is to try, but it takes me about 30 minutes to form a single set of runes and these weapons have three patterns each, so it should take at least an hour and a half to make a weapon.” Treevor explained, making Athos frown at the unexpected delay.

“Why so long?”

“Runesmith required both fine control, a lot of mana and a high quality material. The more mana I put into the process the stronger the weapon will be, but it will also take longer to make.” Treevor spoke.

Athos asked no more questions and just concentrated on corrupting the wooden sword. It was a much more difficult process than transforming an ordinary tree, despite the difference in size. The excess light on the wood strongly rejected the corrupted mana, but all it took was a single rune to corrode for an entire pattern to crumble.

The sudden burst of light element stunned Athos and nearly caused the weapon to explode, forcing Athos to inject his own mana in a panic to suppress the light. It only partially worked. The corrupted mana prevented the explosion, but because it possesses Athos’ signature it cannot replace the lost energy.

Before Athos could think of a way to deal with it, the second rune pattern broke and the weapon began to glow, threatening to explode.

“Shit!” Athos immediately conjured a corrupted barrier around the sword. The barrier shook for a few seconds and cracked into several pieces, releasing a beam of light that nearly severed Treevor’s skeleton arm, but the avatar pulled him out of the way in time.

“Fuck! What did I do wrong?” Athos swore and removed the barrier, looking regretfully at the pieces of wood on the table.

“I can see at least some mistakes in what you’ve done.” Treevor spoke softly, making Athos almost growl at him.

“Say.”

“First, the sword has a total of three enchantments, two light and one without elements. You should have started with the non-elemental standard, it would corrupt without too much trouble and the corrupted energy would spread evenly throughout the weapon, hitting all light runes all at once, rather than focusing on just one and causing an explosion while the others were still at full strength.” Treevor spoke dryly, but Athos tried to refute him.

“I can’t control where the corrupted world energy moves. All I can do is flow the corrupted energy to the sword. If I try to blend my mana to control it, the energy will be rejected rather than replaced.” Athos explained the obvious and Treevor just nodded.

“It’s true that you can’t control corrupted energy once it flows into the sword, but the entry point is a different story. You held the sword by the hilt and flowed mana from there. The closest set of runes was of the light element, with an enchantment that created a layer of light over the blade, increasing its size to that of a zweih?nder.” Treevor couldn’t see the runes without mana vision, but he remembered the runes patterns you usually use.

“You should have started at the middle of the blade, where the non-elemental runes are.” Treevor explained, before remembering. “By the way, the last set of light runes is just above the non-elemental set and extends to the tip of the sword.”

“You could have explained that to me before I wasted a valuable sword!” Athos shouted indignantly.

“I didn’t know how the enchantments would react until you tried it.” Treevor shrugged in response.

Athos grunted in response, but picked up another weapon and proceeded to corrupt it without complaint. It didn’t consume a drop of mana to do this, the only thing Athos needed was focus to channel the world’s energy and separate light to make it corrupt. It had only been 6 days since Athos turned undead, but he practiced extracting corrupted world energy whenever he spent mana, so he was already getting familiar with the process.

Athos fed the sword lightly with pure world energy, causing the runes to light up for a moment and memorized the position of all of them. Afterwards, he placed his fingers under the non-elemental runes, spreading the entry point as far as possible while injecting corrupted world energy.

Normally, a mage’s brain would fry when trying to split a single energy stream into ten different ones, but Athos just let the energy he could naturally absorb flow through his body, using his fingers as conduits.

Corruption was much simpler this time. The non-elemental runes didn’t last long and quickly dispersed. As all the runes were corrupted at the same time, there was no energy explosion this time. The white wood began to darken starting from the middle of the blade and quickly spread to the hilt and tip of the blade.

The runes of light gleamed visibly in rejection of the corruption that surrounded her, their glow even more accentuated by the dark wood. Athos continued to flow corrupted world energy, so the runes of light would wear out and explode, but the corruption that surrounded it stifled the explosion.

Light runes were made of pure mana and light element, so the mana turned to corruption as soon as the light disappeared. As soon as Athos felt that the sword was full and was no longer accepting extra energy, he sighed in relief and leaned back on the sofa.

“You know, I never understood why people are so envious of the mana body feature, at least until today.” Treevor muttered suddenly, reminding Athos that he was not alone.

“What are you talking about? A wizard with a wand could do the same, only with greater difficulty.” Athos did not understand the reason for the sudden envy, but he had too much headache to think. He began circulating mana through his body to clear the headache, Treevor’s voice flowing in one ear and out the other in the process.

“You may not know this, boss, but controlling mana using a wand is much harder than it looks. A normal mage would be unable to replicate what you did. The wand would just draw the world’s energy, the mage would need a magic item that split the energy into several parts and another that flows into the sword. It’s an incredibly complicated process...” Treevor continued to explain passionately, but Athos only gave generic answers so that Treevor would think he was listening.

‘He seems to be saying something important, so write it down for me without him noticing.’ Athos ordered Emilia mentally.

“In front of you, master. I grabbed paper, ink, and a pen just as he started to explain what you’d gone wrong with. Emilia sends back. It was only then that Athos realized that she was actually writing down every word Treevor said. The latter mistook Emilia for a novice runesmith taking notes, so he made sure to explain the differences in detail.