Mok Fan blinked. “That bad?” he asked warily.

“Yes,” I nodded, staring at him intently. “I know you are a Dark Mage, but please do not do that.”

“I, uh, well...” He swallowed at the intensity of my gaze. “Well, I only know how to do it with Fire and Lightning Mana, anyway...” he trailed off.

I reflected that I was going to have to be using some Miracles to make sure the Dark Elements didn’t combine with the others, and quickly. I was pretty sure there was no way to stop him from trying it as an intellectual exercise, and anyways, if this Meshing Method was released, others would certainly start attempting to do so.

“What about Dark Element on Dark Element?” Mu Fuxian asked calmly, thinking ahead.

Ah, yes, he had the Poison and Curse Elements. “It won’t have the deleterious effect on the Manafield that crossing Dark and Normal Elements would, and will no doubt prove fantastically deadly. A lot of the Dark Elements start overlapping naturally at higher ranks, especially Shadow and Undeath, so there is a deadly synergy there. Being able to administer tenacious poisons directly to the soul, or deliver them with a Curse as the vector, would no doubt be extremely dangerous to anyone who crossed you.”

“Uh, what sort of things could I do with Shadow?” Mok Fan asked, his dark eyes glittering expectantly.

I turned to look at him with a baleful gaze. “Set someone’s shadow on fire and burn them to death?” I hazarded.

His dark eyes flashed with greed he tried to hide and could not. I was going to have to use those Miracles quickly! ‘Just so I can defend against it!’ would no doubt be his defense of the matter.

I lit off a barrage of fourteen Novice Spells, two from each Element, each tagged with a separate set of three Elements on top of them, verifying that it worked between all the basic Elements. I didn’t even try any other Elements, as I didn’t want to give them ideas, and he could do the work himself.

There was one exception to the Advanced Elements, one I already knew about it, as from the Wizardry side of things it was just an Aspected Summoning spell.

“If you do this with a Summon, you should be able to Summon more powerful creatures restricted to the Element you mix it with,” I murmured, flicking up a small Portal that danced with spirals of frost.

A flight of glittering crystalline Birds fluttered out, soft white wings trailing lines of frost in the warm air of the place. Their feathers glittered like white crystals, their beaks and talons like diamonds, and the flock of them settled down everywhere, looking about with interest and alertness.

“Diamond Snow Ravens!” Mu Xuehua breathed out in astonishment. The flock was dozens strong, looking to me for direction, but naturally the powerful Ice user also caught their attention. To everyone’s astonishment but mine, they spread their wings and bowed to her once, before resuming their stations. “For Warrior-strength Summons, their strength is incredible! They are extremely rare...”

“It was a minor spell. I don’t think you wanted me to Summon a Diamond Star Fire Titan or something and ruin your décor.”

Xuehua smiled at my droll comment. “No, that would indeed have been a little too much,” she agreed. However, she was certainly capable of imitating what I’d just done on her own, with a little effort. Many Beasts tended to be more neutrally-aspected, with Earth being the most common. Beasts who strongly embraced an Element tended to have noble Bloodlines, and were naturally more powerful than other, equivalent Summons!

It was the equivalent of Templating Summoning Spells, but the Summoning Element instead grabbed nobler Bloodlines from the Beast Plane!

“What other methods do you know to add other Elements to spells?” Mu Fuxian asked, frowning a little. “You said there were several...”

“Ah. Well, the first way is to have an Implement that does so for you.” I flicked out the spare Mace of Disruption I carried around, the glowing crystalline Weapon drawing their instant admiring attention. “This toy, for instance, adds a Light-based Disruption effect to all spells cast through it. Wands and Staves that add Fire and Lightning to basic spells are common among Coralost’s battle-mages, or the vivic fire that burns away the dead so that the Beasts do not feed on them, and the dead do not pile up on the shores.” I stowed it back in my Pocket before they could ask to hold it, although both Mok Fan and Mu Fuxian had been forced to turn their heads away and look at it out of the corner of their eyes, a fact not lost on Mu Xuehua.

“Then there is simply to design the spell so that multiple Elements are applied during the Casting of it. This is my most basic Shards attack spell, a spell derived from the Force Element.”

They were all about to ask what the Force Element was when the twenty-eight Greater Shards materialized around me, and instead they all flinched back.

The silver missiles themselves were like long crystalline Earth/Force spear-points, but they were wreathed in Undead Banefire, unwhite Vivus, Holy Fire, Primal energy, Firefrost, silvery Lightning, and the melancholic Sound of the Lovelorn Seed wound about them in streams of rippling Air currents.

So, seven Elements they could mostly figure out, and four they had no idea on.

There were a lot of stacking Seed effects there, and even at its most basic level, the Shards were absolutely seething with dangerous levels of energy. This was a Novice-level spell, but right now it would hit harder than an unmodified Mage’s attack spell, and they could tell. The expressions on their faces told me they could tell just how tightly the energies bound in the Shards were, and what would happen if I tossed it at something.

Just like the Mace, Fuxian and Fan were having a hard time looking at the spell, too.

I flicked the Shards away absently. “A minor attack spell. The Sage-level version is naturally far more dangerous than the Novice one. Now, tell me the name of the person who invented this method, and I will publicize it under his name, first to Coralost, then to all of Coralost’s students, then to any who care to learn it. If his wish is to disseminate it to the world, we will help.”

Mok Fan sighed and nodded. I had definitely made an impression, and none of them were under the illusion that they were a match for me, although Mok Fan might have been thinking it.

I hadn’t shown him Counterspelling or Dispelling, or he might have been really depressed...

----------

Sometimes I got so focused on doing the right and best thing that I forgot there were totally moral alternate ways of doing the same thing.

Case in point, Miracles.

Miracles were directly granted by a god, titan, or similar being with Divine power. If not that, then a profound force of equal or greater stature, such as the Alignments themselves. Divine power was all wound up with Faith, as the easiest way to reward people for following their dogma was to return their Faith to them.

Of course, if they wanted the power, the deities involved would just absorb the Faith and use it to bolster their own power. I was pretty sure the Lords of Light were doing just that. The Netherlords might be doing the same, but I also believed the majority of their power came from ripping the essence out of the spirits condemned beneath them, and any Faith was a small and amusing trickle that they didn’t rely on.

There were no gods in Heaven yet, even if the number of residents there had increased by tens of millions and was growing every day as more Celestials spontaneously manifested among them, and the Archons and Angels escorted ever more souls to their true destination and afterlife. Warriors who’d died fighting for Good causes, bolstered by the souls of those they’d loved, were usually the first to evolve as Heaven grew towards what it was meant to be.

Celestials themselves couldn’t grant a Miracle, either, instead calling on Heaven for the power, and really, I’d be a total idiot to draw on the power of Heaven at this time, right?

Which was about when I remembered that I was an Ur-Priest, not a Priest, and my ability to wield Divine magic was not actually tied to any deity or force. I had devolved to Ur when it was needed to draw any Divine power at all from Heaven, the Faith energy there waiting there without direction to be drawn on. Happily, my Heavenbound Pact had found no issue with my using it for Good purposes.

The Lords of Light, with their stolen Faith gained from falsehoods, and the Netherlords, with their cults of pleasure and self-gratification cloaked in words and rituals that disguised what they were and did, could also grant those Miracles. I just had to steal their stolen Faith away from them.

I wouldn’t have done this if there were no false pretenses involved. Faith going to the Netherlords because THEY were being worshipped was theirs, even loathsome as it was. Likewise, if the Lords of Light declared themselves true and their goals, instead of trying to siphon away the power of misdirected Good souls with their obedient servants, I wouldn’t have done anything.

But stolen Faith was up for grabs by those who could take it, and that was what Ur-priests could do: tap the Faith of any Divine power for their own use.

Naturally those churches considered this the highest affront, and the gods looked on it as stealing from their dinner table. The idea that an Ur-priest could draw on the power of a god and religion they didn’t actually believe in and perform all the blessings and miracles of a full priest of the faith rankled the heck out of them, and so Ur-priests tended to get hunted down by organized religions as a matter of course.

Unfortunately for them, Ur-magic was actually older than worship of the gods, stemming all the way back to when humanity worshipped spirits, natural forces, Fey, and even Aberrants, things that often couldn’t even process the Faith coming to them. The Ur-priests had tapped it without restraint, able to conveniently move from worship of one entity to another without compromising their own powers at all.

The older paradigm meant that the power to tap Faith was untraceable by Divine power. The gods could suspect, but they couldn’t actually prove anything... and my public use of Divine power was always from Heaven, where they had no sway.

Reaching out into the streams of Faith from the deluded and misguided souls of the peoples in Europe and Asia who still worshipped the Lords of Light and tapping into that well of Faith was actually, well, sinfully easy. Filtering out the Good people feeding their power to uncaring Nirvanic lords was not that difficult.

With that done and in place, there was only siphoning off enough Faith to Cast the Miracles one by one, taking it slow and patiently by drawing away the Faith they could barely process anyway. The loss of it was akin to people losing belief in the hollow words foisted upon them. That was opposed to an abrupt theft of a chunk of Faith, which might be noticed, and which I could certainly do if I was of a mind to.

So, about once every three hours or so, I started Casting Miracles, adding them to the daily grind.

With my Caster Level, I could totally overclock them and Cast them at True Emperor level, spending twenty-four thousand Mana a shot to give the magic the power to filter into the very Laws of Magic here, backed by a Caster level in the 70+ range and the full backing of Heaven’s approval.

I ask that the Dark Element of Shadows not be able to mesh with the Element of Light...

I ask that the Dark Element of Undeath not be able to mesh with the Element of Lightning...

I ask that the Dark Element of Curses not be able to mesh with the Element of Fire...

I ask that the Dark Element of Poison not be able to mesh with the Element of Water...

I ask that the Dark Element of Balefire not be able to mesh with the Element of Earth...

I ask that the Dark Demon Element not be able to mesh with the Element of Ice...

I ask that the Dark Element of Blood not be able to mesh with the Element of Air...