Loki looked at Nicholas a little confused.
"How did the spell know if I was lying or telling the truth?"
Nicholas gave Loki a deadpan stare and just said one word, "Magic.".
Loki stumbled at the answer as his knees suddenly weakened.
"What did you think? Obviously, it was because I used the ability of a True God! The True God of the White Tower pathway to be precise." Nicholas patiently explained.
Loki still felt something about the entire thing was off, "How did you get the God to agree to let you demonstrate the spell? I didn't see you make any preparations and your spirituality only made the symbol of the Reader Pathway in my spirit vision, along with a few side runes supporting the entire thing, nothing else."
"You're not wrong. But you're also not right. Can you see something that's missing from the scene?"
Loki looked around but paused immediately as soon as his eyes fell on the now empty plate on the table near them.
"The Crepe Suzette?" Loki was doubting himself.
'A True God accepted that as an offering? I mean the food that Prenelle makes is good, good enough that I would accept performing the small magic trick too, but a True God? Don't they have better, more important things to do with their time?'
Loki looked at Nicholas and found him smiling.
"Is that it? But-"
"Didn't expect that right? I didn't too, but that's one of the tamer True Gods. Some of them require more than just a good meal, it'd probably be right to say they require a slightly different kind of 'good meal'."
"For example, the True God of the darkness pathway likes to know a secret before he'll agree to bless your spell. But all that's only because I was indicted into the system by a True God and I'm doing the same for you, even though I'm not one."
Loki was still stumped.
"The seven True Gods that are rather consistent with their rules and agree to bless most spells are the, 'God of Combat', 'God of Wisdom and Knowledge', 'The Eternal Blazing Sun', 'The Hermit', 'The Paragon', 'The God of Eternal Darkness', and 'The God of Death'."
"These are also the Gods under whose domain the magic that is considered 'white' falls into. All magic corresponding to the other Gods falls under 'dark' magic since they use a more botched-up version of this system."
"Is it true?" Loki asked immediately.
"Well, not entirely. But the risk of corruption is much higher and the other gods demand much more. They sometimes want you to do things that are inhumane." Nicholas said with a serious tone.
"So always beware of what you want to ask. Don't ever try to get them to do something that will risk them in any way. Always remember that they are Gods and not someone who lives down the street from your house."
Loki felt a little scared but nodded in understanding.
"So with that let's officially start learning Runic Spell Casting."
Loki agreed and for the next twenty days, along with alchemy, Runic Spell Casting was added to his schedule.
His days turned into an endless bore of absorbing as much knowledge he could from Nicholas while he spent his evenings unwinding with Prenelle who was excited about finishing the book with Loki.
The book was a short novel about an alchemist detective who solves supernatural cases around the world, it wasn't anything groundbreaking but it was something Loki definitely had fun making.
Especially since the detective's character was based on Nicholas and it was fun teasing him about various things in the book.
Prenelle even worked on adding an enchantment to it that would allow the book to use various origamis to perform a play of the story that was written in it.
What bothered Loki the most was Fleur's spiralling depression and so he finally worked up the courage to ask Nicolas to help her one day.
"Can't you just help her? I mean you haven't even told her a clear no and rejected her! Why are you torturing her like this? Is it because Fleur's pathway belongs to an evil god?"
Nicolas frowned for a while since he didn't want to explain something to Loki, but after a while, he finally gave up when Loki continued to be persistent with his questions.
"No, if it was because of an Evil god, then Prenelle and I would've never invited her here. The reason we can't help her out is because she won't tell us what she did wrong to anger the True God of her own pathway. Especially because she is a vessel that is prepared to be able to take on 'Her' descent."
'Well I suspected that much after seeing her special ring….but that makes even less sense. Why abandon your descent vessel so easily? Is 'She' that afraid?'
"This means that helping her without properly understanding the situation will put us in the line of fire too. Do you want to fight a True God simply because of a Sequence 5 or 4 Beyonder?"
Loki frowned, since according to him the reason Fleur was currently being shunned was because he'd scared Cheek a little too much.
But he didn't have a way to prove it directly and it was annoying him since he felt sad each time Fleur talked about her sister in her sleep or woke up due to nightmares of her dying.
'I mean what do I do?'
'Summon 'Her' for a new ritual and while acting as the Error God and pretend to 'forgive' 'Her' for harming 'my blessed'?'
'But if I did that, I could probably curry favour with Fleur and eventually form a connection through her with the primordial demoness.'
'While I don't know what I would do with such a connection yet, it wouldn't really be a bad thing to be able to communicate with someone like 'Her''
'Like Mr. Moon did in the original tarot club for his pathway's goddess.'
'But why isn't 'She' talking to Fleur to fix 'Her' mistake if that was the case anyway!?'
'Shouldn't 'She' have responded to the other rituals Fleur performed to fix the first mistake?'
Loki spent quite a while thinking about this problem and finally came up with a good solution when he saw Nicolas making a simple mistake when he and Loki were helping Prenelle make food.
Nicolas had chopped the potatoes much smaller than Prenelle had asked for which caused him to panic about them suddenly. But when Prenelle accidentally missed the mistake while talking to Loki, Nicolas never brought it up since he was embarrassed.
'So 'She' is just being shy?'
Loki couldn't believe it.
'But there's no other reason for her to ignore Fleur if Fleur didn't make a mistake in her ritual!?'
This gave Loki a strange idea, but one that was bound to work if he pulled it off convincingly.
"Yo Fleur!" Loki said bumping into her shoulder as she looked distracted while cutting a few roots to make some potion that Prenelle had instructed her to finish for the rest of the students studying under her and Nicolas.
Fleur who was snapped out of her musings looked at Loki with a frown.
"It's dangerous to use the knife while not looking at what you're using it for isn't it?" Loki asked.
Fleur didn't even have the energy to scowl or say something snarky like she usually did with Loki, instead, she just looked back down on her chopping board and started chopping the roots with the same hollow look in her eyes.
Loki rolled his eyes before he spoke calmly and clearly, "I have a way for you to get 'Her' to respond to you."
Fleur's head snapped in Loki's direction faster than lightning. Her eyes had a small spark of recognition in them as she searched Loki for a proper answer.
So Loki spoke to her-
"Why don't you want to explain to Prenelle and Nicolas what you did that caused 'Her' to blacklist you?"
Fleur's eyes trembled and her breathing quickened before she shook her head.
"I'm soh~rry. 'eiI don't know."
Loki nodded since he'd predicted this, instead, he used their physical closeness to her to perform a simple act.
It was not a theft.
It was the opposite.
Loki donated to her pockets a simple slip of paper that had extremely detailed instructions written in them.
No one noticed Loki doing this and the day went as normally as it could but Loki was nervous about when Fleur would read what was written inside it.
Fleur however, still lost and broken wasn't in a hurry to check her pockets.
It was only at the end of the day when she was taking a quick shower before going to sleep that she found the letter as it fell out of her pockets.
Fleur picked it up after examining it with her spirit vision before unfolding the paper.
'Another proposal?'
But as soon as she read the first line her eyes widened as she started paying attention.
"I have a way to help you out."
Fleur frowned as various thoughts crossed her mind.
'A prank?'
'Did someone think zhey can marry me by trying to bait me?'
But being desperate, Fleur carried on reading as she wanted to grasp at whatever pathways showed up in front of her to save her one and only sister.
"If you cannot use the help of Evil Gods, do not continue reading."
Fleur's grip around the letter only tightened as she closed her eyes for a few seconds before nodding as various thoughts flew past her-
'I don't believe in Gods being Evil.'
'My Goddess 'as been called Evil many times. As long as it helps Gabrielle I will do it."
"Perform the following ritual…"
During the night, Fleur slipped out of her bed after making sure Loki was asleep, before using a simple charm made out of mirror shards to put him into deep sleep.
The charm shone a vague pink as it activated before it shimmered, causing various small microbes that would sap his spirituality and put him to sleep.
What she didn't realise however was that Loki could easily break the effects of the charm because of the Sefirah Castle.
And so Loki was awoken instead of put to sleep as soon as the microbes entered his body.
Fleur left the room anyway and quickly moved into the warehouse of the Flamel's large house. She set up an altar, lit up three special candles on it, unfolded the paper that Loki had given to her and began memorising what was on it.
After a few seconds, Fleur calmed her tense nerves by biting on her lips hard enough to draw blood before she lit up the candles from left to right as she spoke.
"I"
"I pray for the power of time."
"I pray for the power of errors."
"I pray for the God's loving grace."
"I pray for God's great powers to remove the error on me which is breaking my connection to the Primordial Demoness."
"Beetle grass juice, a herb that belongs to the domain of Error, I pray for you to bestow powers to my incantation."
"Twilight dew, a fragrance that belongs to the limbo of time, I pray for you to bestow powers to my incantation."
Fleur kept her eyes closed as she finished her incantation but her vision suddenly shifted.
Her eyes glanced at everything in the spirit world as it moved at a rapid pace, zooming to its top where the Seven Lights sat and then above even that as it reached the grey fog and then soon rose beyond that to reveal a single figure sitting on a large stone chair.
The figure whose face was partially obscured by a plague doctor mask and partially by the grey fog spoke in a deep rumbling voice that rippled across the entire grey fog without even moving a single finger.
"I'm Aware."
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