BXBX NOVEL Chapter 15: Soul Marking
\'Damn... that\'s high.\' Tyr thought to himself. Now that his adrenaline calmed down, he felt a wave of fatigue wash over him.
He stumbled back, stepping off of the wolf\'s corpse and digging his spear into the ground to hold himself up.
His eyelids were attempting to close. He hadn\'t realized it, but the top layer of his skin was slightly burned all over his body.
Even the breath of the Charwolf was powerful enough to have this effect.
His limbs wanted to buckle and yield, but Tyr wanted to know one thing first before he would allow himself to fall.
[New spell: Soul Marking]
\'There it is...\' Tyr smiled, his left eyelid loose and nearly closed.
[Description: Ability to form a bond with a beast by marking both the user and the creature with a shared soul mark. This mark allows the user and the beast to share a fraction of each other\'s power and communicate telepathically. The process involves physically touching the creature and attuning to its heartbeat, transferring a part of the user\'s life force into the beast.]
[Spell Criteria: The beast must be in a calm, subdued, or heavily weakened state for the mark to be successfully applied. The strength of the bond depends on the user\'s willpower and the creature\'s resistance. If the bond is broken, both the user and the beast will suffer significant consequences.]
[Sub-spell: Soul Marking comes with the sub-spell: [Infinite Domain.]
[Description: Ability to store multiple living beings within a mental dimension created by the user within their brain.]
[Spell Criteria: The living being can not be human or any sort of intelligent High-Species life. The living being must also be tamed by the user.]
[Infinite Domain has a creature limit of 2 living beings.]
\'Wow... awesome.\' These were Tyr\'s last thoughts before he passed out--just kidding!
Right before his brain shut off he felt a warm, comfortable feeling culminate all around him. He felt like he was next to a cozy fireplace, his body relaxing rapidly.
The excruciating burn marks on his face and body be erased and healed--his exhaustion vanished out of nowhere.
[Stamina: 1/14-->8/14-->14/14]
When he opened his eyes, he saw the Pixie from before hovering above him.
She had her hand out, releasing some sort of glowing green energy.
"Aura..." Tyr said out loud, mesmerized by the light. After all, this was the closest thing to magic he had ever experienced.
\'No. Aura is even greater than magic, which was created by humans. If anything, Aura inspired magic.\'
He paused before saying: "I want to use it too."
The Pixie retracted her hand, having finished healing the boy.
"What? Aura? Don\'t worry about that right now. What you should worry about is..." She paused, looking to the side.
Tyr confusedly squinted his eyes.
The Pixie abruptly turned back toward Tyr and screamed in his face: "Not trying to kill yourself!" She yelled, balling her fists up and squeezing her eyes shut.
"Do you know how close you were to dying right there? Do you think I want to see the death of an innocent creature that isn\'t supposed to be in the cycle of the forest to begin with!? It\'s foolish! Simply foolish!"
Tyr chuckled: "But... I killed it though, didn\'t I?"
The Pixie calmed down, letting out an exasperated sigh.
"Although I want to scold you more, I have to admit that what you did is unheard of. Never in my lifetime of a thousand years did I think I would see a boy as weak and Aura-less as you come and slay an Apex Ranked Beast. A Charwolf, no less. There was indeed some luck... but that still doesn\'t take away the fact that you defeated it in the end."
\'A thousand years!?\' Tyr exclaimed, astonished at that number.
The Pixie rose up into the air after a few seconds.
"Stay out of trouble, young boy. Fate seems to want you alive for its whims in the distant or near future. No normal being without the shoulders of that deity would have survived an encounter like that. Do not take it for granted." With these words, the Pixie turned and flew off into the forest--shrinking into nothing but air in the distance.
"Hey! Thanks for healing me!" Tyr shouted in her direction, the Pixie having already disappeared.
However, a small ball of green Aura flew toward him, slamming into his forehead and pushing him to the ground.
"D-damn... so that\'s her goodbye gift? A punch to the face huh."
Tyr looked leftward at the Charwolf corpse. Without delay, he dug his hands into its body, beginning to look for a core orb.
Sure enough, he found a bright red orb near the beast\'s heart. It was as large as a cherry, about double the size of the normal gray cores.
It was iridescent as well, shining its various shades of dark and light red hues at different angles.
Tyr stored it and salvaged the orbs of the rest of the fallen beasts.
In total, he now had 54 gray orbs and 1 red orb.
\'GG, open my status.\'
┏━━━Status━━━┓
Name: Tyr Evolion Thalonis
Bloodline: Almighty Thalonis + Unknown
Age: 15 Years
Level: 22
Vitality: 14/14
Strength: 18
Stamina: 14/14
Speed: 14
Aura: --
[Stats remaining: 6
Rank: --
┗━━━━━━━━━┛
[Vitality: 14/14-->15/15]
[Strength: 18-->20]
[Stamina: 14/14-->16/16]
[Speed: 14-->15]
\'It seems I\'ll need to focus on stamina more and more. Especially if I want to use Blink Step multiple times during a fight in the future. And my Strength is still pretty bad. I\'m stronger than a lot of gray orb beasts. After all, I started with only 7 Strength points. But I still barely got that spear into that wolf.
I think If I had closer to 30 strength, my spear throw would have pierced into its skin for sure.\'
Tyr returned to the stream near his base to clean himself up.
It was quite shallow, covering about half of his body. There was also a 20-foot-tall waterfall next to it that had a calm and steady flow.
As he bathed here, he thought about his future goals.
\'Level 50 is when I get my next spell. That\'s way higher than my previous level benchmarks. Maybe that means I\'ll finally get an Aura spell. A strong one at that.\'
Right now he was looking at the description of his most recent spell again.
\'But... I think this will keep me busy for a while.\' A smirk appeared on his face.
[Soul Marking]
***
2 Months Later...