Nighttime is a period of rest for ordinary people, who, after a busy day, tidy up their personal hygiene early and lie down in their warm beds, sweetly drifting into slumber.
But for Necromancers, nighttime marks the beginning of their work.
Although they delve into necromancy, Necromancers can substitute sleep with meditation and do not tire from the lack of sleep.
In ancient legends and myths, demonic creatures always fear sunlight. When the sun rises during the day, all demonic creatures must hide in the shadows to avoid being scorched by the sun's blazing rays, or even being incinerated.
In reality, this is true as well; according to the definitions of necromancy, the sun is an aggregation of positive energy. Its radiance deals great damage to all kinds of undead creatures and ghosts. Even very powerful higher-level undead creatures are impacted and weakened by sunlight, only the truly top-tier undead have the ability to ignore the sun.
This is precisely why Necromancers mostly research and practice necromancy at night or on cloudy and rainy days, to avoid the interference of the positive energy emitted by the sun. Necromancy spells even include ones like the dark canopy that shields the sky, creating environments suitable for the existence of lost souls.
With Chen Yu's current ability and level, obviously he could not create a dark canopy to cover the sky. Not to mention the amount of resources it would require, just the impact from obscuring the sky alone—in this age where the heavens are full of satellites, would it not be discovered by those satellites constantly monitoring the Earth within twenty-four hours?
Dismissing these extraneous thoughts from his mind, Chen Yu took out the molds and materials he had prepared earlier and started his work for the night. He needed to make a ritual candle before the evening was over.
Ritual candles are specially made and are not intended for illumination, but rather to attract ghosts. Although ritual candles also emit light when lit, that light is mainly very attractive to ghosts. Moreover, as ritual candles burn, they release a scent that ghosts find irresistible, unwittingly drawing them towards the candle.
For Necromancers, ritual candles are mainly used for various summoning rituals or particular spell rituals, as an indispensable and important prop. This is much like how ancient Chinese Taoist priests conducting ceremonies always needed items such as incense and talismans.
Making a ritual candle isn't complex; it only requires mixing prepared materials in certain proportions and then pouring them into a mold to set. Even without a mold, shaping them by hand isn't out of the question. For ritual candles, the materials used in their creation are key to the quality of the final product. Depending on the quality of materials, the efficacy of the ritual candles produced can vary greatly.
As recorded in the "Multiverse Universal Necromancy Spell Compendium," a standard ritual candle requires a mix of corpse wax and the ashes of a cat's bones as the primary materials. Grave moss, graveyard grass, and grave soil are added as supplements. And if a candlewick made from a dead person's hair soaked in corpse oil is used, the effect will be even better with a skullcap as the candle holder.
While these materials are not exactly evil, they are also not something ordinary people can accept or understand. It is the use of such materials that have led even well-intentioned Necromancers to be ostracized by mainstream society, forced to hide in the darkness.
Although the materials for making ritual candles were not very complicated, nor were they particularly hard to find, both corpse wax and corpse oil were not things that Chen Yu could obtain. After all, in modern law-abiding societies, bodies are almost never left to the stage where corpse wax can form, as they are discovered and then sent for cremation or burial, so he had no way to acquire these materials.
Moreover, Chen Yu couldn't exactly put a corpse in his own home and wait for it to produce corpse wax, so he had to substitute with other materials.
And the substitute Chen Yu chose was... paraffin wax.
Initially, he had planned to use beeswax, a natural product, but unfortunately, in a place like Tokyo, it was not easy to come by natural beeswax. In contrast, paraffin wax could be industrially produced and mass-produced, so naturally, Chen Yu chose to use it.
Even though the materials were significantly inferior, after experimenting, Chen Yu successfully made ritual candles from paraffin wax. Of course, the effect was indeed much reduced, but as far as Chen Yu was concerned, having something to use was already quite good.
As for the other materials, cat bone ash was not so hard to come by. Although it was somewhat bothersome, with some money, one could still get it. Chen Yu even used high-quality black cat bone ash, which was considered top-grade. Grave moss, graveyard grass, and grave soil were not too difficult for Chen Yu to collect either, given the cemetery next to his rented apartment. He just needed to go to the cemetery at night to collect them.
As for hair soaked in corpse oil, being a student of the University of Tokyo Medical Department, Chen Yu knew some channels to obtain hair from the deceased. He was not lacking in this, and even hair from the living could be used as a substitute.
When it came to corpse oil... heaven help us, a body yielded only so much oil, and to avoid detection, one could only collect a little from each corpse. Though this little bit could accumulate over time, it was nowhere near enough.
So Chen Yu also considered using other materials as a substitute.
Extracting hair soaked in the oil with long tweezers from a jar full of fishy smell, he quickly placed it into a pre-prepared glass dish. He hurriedly covered the dish with a lid, resealed it before daring to breathe. However, the room's air was still filled with an unbearable stench of dead fish and rotten shrimp, even though the jar had been open only a short time.
This was the substitute method Chen Yu had thought of. Corpse oil refers to the fat on a body turning to oil as it decomposes. Corpse oil can be found on a body left untreated in summer for several days, and such bodies appear as though they have been soaked in oil. However, it hasn't been specified that corpse oil must be collected only from human bodies; using animal carcasses can work equally well. In Japan, fish markets throw away a large number of unsold goods every day, especially in the summer. Just by collecting a little and leaving it for a while, one can naturally produce corpse oil, although the smell was undoubtedly... extremely pungent.
After airing out the room to disperse the smell, Chen Yu melted the paraffin wax buried in the graveyard for a month in a small crucible. He then poured various crushed materials into it, stirred in necromantic power as required, and mixed evenly. After pouring the mixture into a mold and inserting a wick made from human hair, he waited for the wax to solidify. Once removed from the mold, the candle that burned with a green flame was a successfully crafted ritual candle.