MTLNOVEL Chapter 466: Alarms Are Better!
The distances between the mystical items scattered around the astral world were all messed up.
Loki could feel that each item was almost directly opposite to the other if he considered their positions in the real world.
Yet in the astral world, they appeared to be just a few meters away from one another no matter what angle he looked at it all.
In the first place, the symbol too felt special in its presence.
The symbol of the peak of the Fool pathway didn't just feel like a simple symbol carved out of spirituality.
No, it felt more like a puzzle that the knocker of the Ravenclaw house would ask its students as if to say that the picture was the question and Loki had to provide it with an answer.
But with this visible and recognisable, it was what troubled Loki about what he was seeing.
'What do I do now?'
Loki tried to study the mystical items that had come together from all across the astral world and formed the Fool pathway symbol and felt confused.
He couldn't even reliably 'steal' them.
Since the distance in the astral world was so wonky, Loki's theft range didn't seem to cover the mystical items even though they were right in front of him.
As such-
'Nothing's happening…'
-Loki could only feel that the symbol was waiting for some sort of key to open up and move on to the next stage.
Loki had a guess as to what he had to do at this point, but he found himself hesitating for the first time in a while since he couldn't guarantee that his solution was correct without reading the runes on the items asking for the answer.
Especially since revealing the answer was very risky for him to do so blatantly and openly.
So Loki gave up.
'I should've planned this before hand, but instead of doing it directly, I'll just pretend to perform a ritual?'
Loki quickly knelt down and set up a quick altar with three candles and lit them all up using his spirituality and 'prayed' to the Error god.
It wasn't even a few moments later when an elaborate gate opened up in front of him after he used his deepened influence over the Sefirah Castle to respond to his prayer with the Sequence 3 Characteristic.
Emerging out of the door into the astral world, Loki looked at the still-waiting symbol of the fool pathway and simply guided the Grey Fog to rush in its direction.
And something miraculous happened-
Instead of staying away like before when he tried stealing the items from far away, Loki suddenly found that the items were much closer and could be wrapped in the Grey Fog.
Loki extended his hand to steal the items once again before they were wrapped up by the grey fog flooding out of the Sefirah Castle but he failed still.
'This…'
'Did I make these items?'
That was the only reasoning Loki could figure out for the items being able to ignore his will so easily.
'But that means I'm involved in all this somehow?'
'...but I don't feel any spiritual significance at all…'
'...'
Before Loki could think much more, all the mystical items had been wrapped up in a thick cocoon of the Sefirah Castle's grey fog, leaving almost no room for anything to interfere with them anymore.
Loki tried controlling the grey fog that had made those cocoons but failed to do so.
This shocked him only more and so he quickly shook his head to keep calm as he brought out Tom's body and laid him on an altar specifically prepared to keep him unconscious.
The altar was blessed by Salazar Slytherin himself.
Even still, Loki didn't trust Tom so Loki embedded the Sequence 3 Mentor of Deceit Characteristic into the altar to keep all thoughts of escaping away from Tom's mind.
It included all other variations of the thought as well, like contacting Voldemort or trying to perform self-harm so that Loki's plans would fail, etc.
It didn't work on checking Tom's mind, if it would have, Tom might've simply made a concealed compartment in his body of heart and mind in some twisted way.
But Loki was one step ahead.
The altar worked by measuring the deviation in Tom's fate.
As soon as his fate deviated from being eternally bound to the altar, all his thoughts would be stolen and he would be forced back to sleep.
With the altar and Tom set up, Loki brought out the last thing needed for the ritual to succeed.
The potion that had been manufactured using the Sequence 3 Blatherer Beyonder characteristic and had to be dripped onto Tom's forehead for the rest of the month, counted from one full moon to the other, one lunar cycle.
Then Loki finally left a vial of Walburga's blood at the altar since blood from a member of the Black Family was also needed.
Loki looked around the area for a while.
Performing several more rituals and setting up a multitude of mystical items in the area so that he could detect intrusions of any kind.
Loki even made sure to leave a tricky trap that would destroy a Worm of Time as soon as anyone entered the area so that he would be notified of the intrusion as immediately as possible since he would feel a change in his Mythical Creature form.
To anyone else, the entire setup would've seemed like an overkill.
But to Loki, it all seemed very reasonable.
Several high-level Beyonders were after Loki or at least his alter personas and he didn't want to take any risk.
'I'll be very mad if something goes wrong after all of this…'
'Especially those mystical items wrapped in a cocoon of grey fog.'
'They directly reveal the Sefirah Castle.'
Loki was only cool about letting them hang around in the area since the Grey Fog itself should have the effect of concealment.
So Loki took a few deep breaths and made sure that everything was set up correctly before releasing a long *sigh* as he made his way back to the Room of Requirements.
Loki sipped on his special tea to regain his energy and calm his mind as he took to turning his efforts towards his next task for the time being.
'I need to figure out where the damn Chaos sea is…'
And so Loki started casting a variety of spells, studying each and every bit of runic circuitry in all of them to figure out how they were all connected to the Chaos Sea.
He had the inklings of a method in his mind, but it wasn't very grounded in reality for now.
As such, Loki kept searching for a spell that would meet his criteria.
'If possible I could make use of a spell that had a rather long cast time so that I could hijack the intent of the spell with an intent that would hijack the chaos sea from the inside…'
'I have no idea how I'll make sure the chaos sea is hijacked by my intent alone…but it's an idea…for now.'
'Things would be so much easier if I had some way to connect directly to it.'
'But I doubt the founders left behind any such convenient item.'
'If they had, Dumbledore wouldn't have been doing such a silly dance trying to please me to learn the location of the Chaos Sea from me through Snape.'
'*sigh*....and after this I have to figure out how to wake Helga up too…'
'What are these guys? Children? Couldn't they have simply set up alarms to wake up at the right time?'
'...wait now that I think about it…why didn't they do exactly just that!?' Loki thought as he looked at the two last remaining crystals in the room with a frown.
'....will I ever know…'
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