A Serpent's Tale
Chapter 272: Astromancy Lessons

Chapter 272: Astromancy Lessons

We quickly made our way back to the guild to hand our quest in. And we got lucky because we arrived at about a quarter to ten at night, which is when it closes.

And fortunately for us, there weren’t many people at the receptionist desks, only three of them were open and only three people were using them, nobody else waiting in line.

So, I gave Lily some money to buy herself a couple of drinks and went to hand in our quest.

Luckily for me, just as I got over to the receptionists, one of the other adventurers just finished up, leaving that receptionist free to help me.

"Hello, are you here to hand in a quest?" she greeted with a light and joyful smile.

"Yes, it’s this quest right here." I handed her both the quest paper and the bag containing the monster corpses.

She took a moment to read the quest paper and then check the contents of the bag before nodding.

"Okay, you have officially completed this quest." She said as she stamped the paper with a stamp.

She then took a moment to count the coins for my reward before giving them to me, "Here’s your reward, one Gold and ten silver."

I took my reward and went to pick up Lily who had already drunk two whole litres of alcohol in the time that it took for me to go over to the desk, hand in the quest, receive my reward and then come back over here.

Her pale skin was flushed pink lightly from the influence of alcohol. I sighed and picked her up like a potato sack and asking where she wanted me to drop her off for the night.

"I wanna go back to the *hic* sexy time place!" She demanded.

"Okay, red-light district it is."

_

After dropping her off at the red-light district to have her fun for the night I went back to the orphanage but found basically everyone there already asleep save a few individuals.

Deciding to explain things in the morning, I took a quick bath and then went to bed.

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The following morning I woke up early to explain everything to my friends when they came into the dining hall.

They never actually seemed too worried the past couple of days since they knew that I would be fine. Plus, it wasn’t that long a period of time.

After I talked to everyone, I went back to school and found that my private tutor had been found but it would take a couple of weeks for them to get here since they were two cities over and were travelling by land.

With that sorted, I went back to learning as I had a second Economics class the tomorrow day. Today I had nothing once more and whilst I could go and enrol in the combat classes, I’d rather do that next week.

No real reason as to why, I just don’t feel like it this week.

Anyways it was weekend time and I told my friends that I had plans on Florilith and Stellithar so I wouldn’t be available for a period of time on those days.

Lily asked to tag along after I told her that I was meeting up with Eric for my Astromancy training. She wanted to tag along but couldn’t come up with a reason why other than to watch, which wasn’t much of a reason in my opinion so I said no.

She whined for a bit but after a night of passionate sex she let it go and I left her in the red-light district to have her fun fucking everyone she wants or even sees.

Either way, I was now making my way through the slums to our meeting spot after making sure that nobody was following me, I met up with Eric.

"Hello teacher Eric."

"Hey there sport. Ready for your first day of real training?" He asked with a cheery hop in his tone, as if he was excited about this.

"Yeah. You seem awfully excited about this, almost unusually so." I commented as I grabbed his hand and we teleported out of the city to a random location in the desert.

"Well, I found that one of the people part of a secret organisation working against me was working undercover in the guild, which I never knew before, and has recently been dispatched!" He told me excitedly with a smile on his face.

His facial hair was also now cut back and he now looked like a dashing gentleman, minus his black cloak used to hide his identity and his personality.

"Anyways, let us get started with your lesson for today, shall we?" he clapped his hands together

"Mmm, lets." There was something I wanted to say to him but I’ll just tell him later.

We begun our lesson and the first real thing he taught me was control.

"The first thing you need to learn about [Astromancy] or even just [Space] magic in general is that it’s an extremely volatile power, one wrong move and you could end up destroying everything around you, including yourself."

"And to that end, you must learn to control [Space] itself. To start this of, you need to cut off a small section of space with your power over it, then slowly increase the amount of space within and also keep compressing it."

"What will compressing the space do?" I asked as I followed his instructions, basically creating a sealed off space. Making it bigger and denser at the same time.

"It will make it a lot stronger, AND it will also make it more deadly. If you lose control of it, it will turn into a black hole. Don’t do that." He admonished as his face seemed to grow sharper in an effort to warn me.

"O-Okay... What’s a black hole?" I asked ignorantly. I’d never heard of such a thing before.

Eric sighed and started explaining, "A black hole is basically one of the most terrifying phenomena in the entire world. Capable of destroying literally anything and everything. It sucks in all its surroundings into it and devours all matter. The more it consumes, the bigger it gets. And the bigger it gets, the more powerful its pull."

"O-Oh... O-Okay..." That’s fucking terrifying. Scratch that, that’s the most mortifying things I’ve ever heard.

"Yah. Terrifying... Anyways, how are you getting along? You should be able to see how expansive it is so long as you just focus on it for a bit."

"Okay..." I decided not to think about that and just do as he said.

I focused on my orb of [Space] and put my will into it and found out how big it was "Around twelve kilometres."

He must have been shocked by that answer as he blinked rapidly and pulled his head back.

"That’s... A lot more than I was expecting. Though, given who you are, I’m not all that surprised. Still, you’ve only been going at this for a few minutes and are already at twelve kilometres." He was astonished but not quite surprised, praising my hard work.

"Now that you’ve got it to a good size, you should try compressing it. This will create layers in space, making it more stable and make it harder to break through also." He instructed.

"I’ve... been doing that the whole time though?" I told him with some scrutiny as I looked at him funny.

"Y- ... You have? How?" He asked with disbelief.

"Slowly?" I responded with even more scrutiny.

"..." he just blinked rapidly at me in extreme confusion. "Whatever. How many layers do you have?" He just gave up trying to understand and just moved on.

"Uh... Three, I think." I answered after taking a moment to look inside the space.

"Okay, considering everything, that’s pretty good." He praised as he came over and observed my actions.

"For now, just keep going until you can’t go on, okay? We need to see what your limits are." He instructed, and I followed his instructions and kept on going.

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After a several hours, noon had passed and it was now around five o’ clock. And I was feeling a little tired but nothing else.

In that time I had increased both the amount of space within my... Space, as well as the number of layers in it also.

From twelve kilometres, up to seventy-five kilometres. And from three layers, all the way up to eleven.

And all this while, Eric was just observing me create this sealed off space of mine, only giving me some tips here and there.

At some point he told me to speed this process up since he felt I could do it and I did as he asked.

It didn’t actually affect me in any way and I even sped up of my own accord at one point.

"Alright that’s enough. You clearly have more control than I though. Let’s end today’s lesson here." Eric said with a sigh.

"Okay... Umm, how do I get rid of this?" I asked, referring to the spatial orb I now had in my hands that I couldn’t dispel.

"Huh? Oh, right. There are two methods of dealing with this. The first of which is basically do what you did in reverse." He explained.

"That would take too long." I told him.

"Yeah, I know, the larger it is, the longer it takes to both create and dismantle. The second is to incorporate it into yourself somehow. You have all that space now. So, if you haven’t already, you can create your own interdimensional storage with it." He suggested as he gestured towards the ball of open space.

"I already have [Spatial Storage]. I had my Succubus friend that I summoned a while ago try to teach me something called [Succu Storage] and accidentally learned the [Space] variant instead." I explained as I demonstrated my skill by opening it up.

"That’s great, just toss that thing in there and you’ll have more space. Bear in mind, if you ever want to increase the size, you’ll have to create an even bigger space inside also."

I nodded at his words and proceeded to do as he said.