After twenty minutes of searching, Damien finally located his clothes, hiding away in a servant’s wardrobe.

He inspected the suit and noticed a bit of dust had accumulated on the shoulder pads. Looking at it resurfaced a few memories.

“Oh? Damien robbed a nobleman while traveling to this city for these clothes, since traversing the monster-infested forests while being naked was rather unpleasant.” He just laughed lightly at how ridiculous the memory was. “The poor nobleman fainted at the sight of Damien emerging from the woods butt naked. The man’s guards were terrified, so they gave him anything he asked for.”

Damien paused. “I should probably go to the city and buy some new clothes if I don’t want that noble coming after me.” He tapped his chin in thought, “I might as well pick up some weapons I could manipulate with psychokinesis while I’m at it.”

He then rummaged through the contents of the room a bit more. It seemed this was Fay’s room from the various items of clothing he came across. Sure enough, there was no silver dagger or money to purchase one stashed away.

“Maybe she really isn’t planning to kill me?” Damien mused, opening a side drawer to find something rather familiar from Earth: a pack of playing cards.

Damien took the pack and noticed that it was made of crude, cheap cardboard, with the pictures hand-drawn rather poorly. His eyes lit up as he thought of a perfect way to practice psychokinesis.

He quickly got dressed, using psychokinesis to tie his shoes and remove the dust.

“Imryll is still in bed recovering, and Fay will still take a few hours… This is a perfect opportunity to practice some magic.”

Damien went down into the basement of the mansion and injected some mana into a yellow stone. It lit up and bathed the room in a soft light. While he did have night vision as a vampire, it strained his eyes. Having some light to work with was better.

“Okay, I should be away from prying eyes down here,” Damien muttered while gazing around the small room.

He then opened his favorite gold-plated pocket watch to check which skills he should focus on leveling up.

[Psychokinesis (C+)]

Automatic Writing [F]

Telepathy [E]

Pyrokinesis [E]

===

[Blood Magic (D)]

Blood Contract [F] (New)

===

[Spatial Magic (F)]

===

Mana Control [D]

“All right, from my observations and experiments, I have confirmed the following things about the magic of this world,” Damien declared to nobody but himself. Talking to himself had become a habit since he was often left alone for days in his hospital room, and his family rarely visited. Well, except Hastings, but that fucker had driven a knife into his gut.

“The most important factor is how skills are leveled. Simply using a skill often will raise it from F- to D-grade. A skill isn’t considered usable in actual situations until it reaches D-grade, as F-grade skills require too much mana or concentration to use effectively.”

Damien then activated his Spatial magic. Within seconds, he crumpled to the floor, gasping for air as his mana completely vanished into the abyss.

“Holy…shit…” he shouted between gasps. Taking a minute to recover, he then began muttering to himself again.

“Spatial magic was always the most mana-hungry, but my god, that was intense!” Damien huffed the hair out of his face as he stared at the ceiling while lying on his back.

He looked at the floating pocket watch’s little mirror and grinned.

Spatial Magic [F] → [E]

“Spatial magic is a school of magic rather than a simple skill like Automatic Writing. By channeling my mana into Spatial magic, it converts my mana forcefully into Spatial affinity. The lower my level with Spatial magic, the more wasteful the process becomes.”

After ten minutes, Damien’s small mana pool had fully recovered due to his [Lazy] trait increasing his mana regeneration while resting.

“All right, let’s try that again,” he declared as he pushed himself off the basement’s hard stone floor.

Damien once again shoved all his mana forcefully into the Spatial magic affinity and crumpled to the floor, but in far less pain this time; it took only eight minutes to recover his mana fully.

“That’s strange. Why did it take less time to recover?”

Damien checked his status, but his Spatial magic was still at E-grade. Looking further down the list, he noticed,

Mana Control [D] → [D+]

“Ah, as expected, there’s no better way to train mana control than Spatial magic.”

Damien remembered using this particular synergy on another character in a previous playthrough. “Spatial affinity mana is incredibly unstable and hard to control, so forcefully converting all of my mana into Spatial mana all at once is bound to have some effects on my Mana Control.”

Damien repeated the process of emptying out his mana reserves through Spatial magic and then recovering on the floor. After three more rounds, he finally upgraded.

Spatial Magic [E] → [D]

Phantom Form [F] (New)

Mana Control [D+] → [C]

“Once a School of Magic reaches D-grade, the system awards the person with a skill from that school of magic. In my case, I unlocked the same skill Imryll used to enter my house.”

Phantom Form - D-grade. The ability to escape the material realm. Allows the caster to convert their body into an incorporeal form. The caster can pass through any material. However, the denser the material the higher the mana cost to maintain the form.

Damien activated the skill and converted a portion of his mana reserves into Spatial affinity mana. He then forced the mana through the skill and directed it toward his right hand.

The skill was incredibly mana-hungry, and Damien quickly worked to convert more of his mana reserves.

“It’s still at the F-grade…” he cursed, trying to justify the insane mana requirements to convert just his hand. Imryll had managed to convert her entire body while also walking through his front door with this skill. “Her Phantom Form was most likely at the C-grade or higher.”

Damien went through the repetitive process of converting his mana to Spatial affinity, channeling it into the skill, and transforming his hand into a ghost-like form appearance. Even after two hours, the skill only leveled up once, and his Spatial magic didn’t even increase an entire grade.

Spatial Magic [D] → [D+]

Phantom Form [F] → [E]

Mana Control [C]

Damien was sweating profusely from the repeated mana depletion and absorption. He felt his mana pool had maybe doubled in size, but there was no way to check since the game’s interface had disappeared. He missed the red-and-blue bar in his top left representing his health and mana.

“This…was…so…much…easier…in…the…game,” Damien wheezed while gasping for breath. Although he could level the skills without engaging in mortal combat with the monsters in the wilderness outside the city, training skills like this was incredibly slow and inefficient.

Although he was unimpressed with his skill growth, if a mage from the Mage Tower or Imryll heard him cursing about his rate of growth, they would faint on the spot from anger.

Learning and upgrading skills to the D-grade just took a lot of time and effort, something anyone could do. But increasing a school of magic was incredibly hard and painful.

The reason a mage couldn’t wield ten different schools of magic at the same time was that new mana paths had to be carved into the body. It was like creating more veins for blood to flow. Mana was directed to the brain, and then the mage used their own mental power to bend the mana into a certain affinity.

The problem was at this point, how did the mage direct that new mana away from the brain to the part of the body that needed the mana to cast a spell? The mana’s affinity had been changed, so if it was forced back the way it’d come, it would react with the null affinity mana and convert back into null mana before it was even used.

When a person was born, their body naturally came with two passages called mana circuits, one for the null mana and another for that person’s affinity. In Damien’s case, his mana circuit would be for Psychic magic. Blood magic was unique since it could be manipulated through the bloodstream and didn’t require a special mana path.

For Imryll, her born affinity was Spatial; if she was to try and learn a different affinity, she would be unable to as she didn’t have a mana circuit for any other affinity.

Damien, on the other hand, was cheating. His blood contract unlocked the Spatial affinity. During his sleep, after forming the blood contract, his body carved out a new mana circuit for Spatial affinity.

A normal mage would have to conduct many painful blood rituals on himself to carve out a new mana circuit, but Damien did it naturally while asleep and felt nothing as his body healed itself automatically.

Damien Nightshade was no ordinary villain, he had the body of a vampire noble and he planned to abuse that fact to get ahead.

“Right, that’s enough Spatial magic for the day.” He could feel his body protesting as it was actively trying to increase his Spatial mana circuit’s efficiency. “Any more practice would be detrimental to my progress… Time to practice psychokinesis.”

Damien retrieved the pack of crudely made cards from his pocket and threw them into the air. The fifty-two cardboard cards began falling, and he reached out to them with his mind.

He winced slightly as he only managed to grab twenty of them, the rest drifting to the ground. Considering that controlling two gloves was his limit a few days ago, controlling twenty objects at once was rather impressive. His constant practice of control with psychokinesis over the last week had paid off.

Damien made the twenty cardboard cards fly around him. He manipulated them into many shapes and formations.

“What if I made metal playing cards? They could be used to defend and attack if they were sharp and solid enough.”

He arranged the cards into a square formation before him, visualizing it as a barrier against an attack from an assassin or even an arrow from an archer. “I need to get creative. Spatial magic will enhance my survivability once it’s leveled up further and I unlock Teleportation, but I still require a way to attack and defend myself instead of just running around. Not to mention how demanding Spatial magic and Teleportation would be on my mana pool.”

After practicing for another hour, Damien’s mana pool ran dry for the tenth time today, and he lay on the floor, gazing at his pocket watch.

[Damien Nightshade]

[Noble Vampire]

Schools Of Magic:

[Psychic Magic (C+)]

Psychokinesis [C+]

Automatic Writing [F]

Telepathy [E]

Pyrokinesis [E]

[Blood Magic (D)]

Blood Contract [F]

[Spatial Magic (D+)]

Phantom Form [E]

=Null Spells=

Mana Control [C]

Damien let out a tired sigh. “I should ask Fay if she knows any blacksmiths for the metal cards. I also need to buy some new clothes… Ugh, but I have no money, either… Wait.”

He suddenly sat up. “The princess should be on her way soon.” A sudden glint of greed flashed across his eyes. “I need a wealthy person to sponsor my endeavors until I get paid for being a Head Professor and Head Librarian!”

A sudden knock on the basement door broke him from his trance.

Someone was here.