Capítulo 52: Contact, news and experiments
It has only been 1 week since we left Valyria so it is normal for us to encounter other ships, as we are still on the sea route used by everyone. I tell one of the men to stay on one of the small scorpions as a precaution and then we signal contact as well before approaching.
After we signal the Valyrian port, the ship responds that it is also from there. We kept our distance and sent one of the men with a small boat inviting its Captain to have breakfast with the ship's owners Rafael and Omar Velaryon. It doesn't take long before the small boat returns with 2 men. One was Valyrian and had nice clothes, but you could see reinforced leather underneath, and the other was a muscular, tanned man. Definitely the Captain's bodyguard.
Omar and I greet him when they arrive and go to Henry's cabin for coffee. When we sat down, the man introduced himself as a Port Captain from the northern district, his name was difficult to pronounce. He asks us if we already know about the disaster and we confirm it, he then says that he was a few hours away that day and that he saw everything, in addition he confirms the death of all 39 families, leaving only a few dragon lords scattered in the colonies.
He delays a lot before finally saying that several surviving ships are thinking about attacking a certain island that has a lot of resources and invites us to participate. At first Omar and I didn't refuse and I tried to get more information.
—The colony is on an island 15 days' travel northwest from where we are, it is protected by 10 knights and 100 Valyrian soldiers... We confirmed that it has a silver mine. After we capture the island, the rights to the mine will be divided equally among those who participate in the attack. Said the Captain.
"I'm sorry Captain, 15 days to go and 15 days to return will be very problematic for our ship. We have perishable food cargo and many civilian passengers, as we said at the beginning of the conversation, if it were closer we could consider it. But we wish you luck friend, and in the future we can even do business when you are one of the lords of the island."
The man smiles at the compliment of "lord of the island", but inwardly I say "lord pirate". Then he says goodbye and thanks for breakfast before returning to his ship. He doesn't try anything funny and heads towards that island.
It seems that the piracy problem is quite serious, he could have attacked us if he had more ships on his side, but he is also very bold. He probably heard from the survivors that many dragons have died and that few will contest the small island. But now, without the source of gold from the 14 flames, any silver and gold mines from other colonies will take priority, it will take many years before all the dragonlords die and until then it is a risky game to take anything that belongs to they.
We follow our route, but Omar reinforces the Captain to pay extra attention to any ship that gets too close.
The next day, I begin several tests involving my skills. But before that I try to follow the water element minor healing spell step by step. The spell uses a small blue-colored sapphire about the size of one worn in a small ring. I have some of these and I decide to follow the procedure, the first step would be to draw a rune in a container and dip the gemstone and ink inside them, after that the ink takes on an unnatural magical blue color, then I go to the second part where I need to draw another rune, this time on the palm of my hand, but when I reach this stage the ink loses its shine when I try to put it on the skin of my hand before a system message alerts me.
[User does not have water elemental affinity]
Failed! So this is a way to find out if someone has the necessary affinity... Then I'll test it with other people to see the effects. All I can confirm is that the paint is still glowing, but the sapphire is gone. What a valuable ink, looks like I'll be poor quickly if all the spells are so costly. At least you can try 6 times before the ink runs out.
I continue with the experiments, this time with the Synthesis spell. I use it in the alchemy room and follow all the necessary safety procedures.
I first try simple chemical combinations, the spell allows me to combine several elements into a new one without the necessary long processes of boiling, cooling, etc. Then I take out two fresh fish that I kept in my inventory, and take off their scales which are different colors and put them together before using synthesis again.
The result is a scale of a completely new color. This excites me and amazes me at the same time, if I use this on two different animals will they combine instantly? But then I remember the system's warnings about diseases and mutants. I decide to do more complicated tests when I have a safe place where I can incinerate everything immediately in case something goes wrong. But to finish the tests, I also combine 2 drops of blood, two pieces of small thorns, two eyes and at the end I combine two pieces of meat using Synthesis and creating a third meat. I take the opportunity to fry the 3 meats, but there haven't been many changes, the smell of all 3 is identical to me, of course, I don't dare eat the combination of the 2 fish, but I decide to save these 3 fried meats before getting rid of the other results by burning everything in a metal bucket with a fireball that almost melts the bucket with it.
What I noticed is that these Blood Mage system skills don't have a cost or daily usage limit. I thought they would need something like some kind of energy or mana in the spells of this world. But after seeing the example of the sapphire I used and the totems in the volcanoes, I see that the skills seem to use natural energy or other reagents as a cost. If there is such a thing as a disadvantage, it would be the dangers of such combinations and the fact that they can't be used in combat since the usage time is quite long. The only thing that tired me was using the microscopic vision, in which case I needed to check the bacteria and parasites in the fish's body. And all of them were also fused during the process. They were all killed during the frying of the meat, but the others that were in the eyes, spines and blood remained alive after being fused, which is why I got rid of everything by burning it. This made me extremely worried, causing me to stop using Synthesis on living beings, since new parasites and bacteria could be the beginning of a new and dangerous disease.
The next day I do the Alteration skill experiments, again using other fish, but this time using some that I asked to be caught and kept alive. The first thing I try is to try to change their appearance, I use the skill to change the pigmentation of their scales and their skin, in another, I lengthen their whiskers so that they are bigger, in a third I increase their teeth. I don't notice anything strange other than their now different appearances. This time I try to weigh them before the experiment and after the experiment and finally I discover that their body weight has decreased almost imperceptibly, but the change is still there.
Then I make more severe changes in 3 different stages, and all 3 undergo drastic changes in their weights. Only then the one to which I made the biggest change starts to float in the water dead. I decide then to extend the experiments for more days. To be sure that the other fish won't die too. But first, I make temporary changes to more fish, increasing their fins or tails abnormally for 30 minutes. All the fish survive, but some are quite static in the water. I decide to keep them alive in some "aquariums" that I improvised. When I put food in, they all devour it quickly as if they hadn't eaten in days, especially those that survived the most drastic changes or had more brutal temporary changes.
Over the next few days I will continue to observe the fish and make some more changes. Based on the entire experiment so far, it is possible to modify any part of an animal or even a person that I want, as long as I have an understanding of the part I am changing. It may seem simple, but there are things like life expectancy, genetics, reproduction and even aerodynamics involved in the process. I am not sure if what I have done will be beneficial to the fish in the long run, it may take away its ability to swim and even the speed it previously achieved, until I understand if it will pass this on to its eggs I cannot consider it a success. Furthermore, whenever I change something I need to remove mass from somewhere. I cannot add a larger fin without reducing the size of another place. If I do not specify a simultaneous change, the body will consume fat, and when there is no more fat it will consume muscles or even bones and internal organs, leading the creature to death.
Let's get to the real use of the change and what I could gain here. Technically I could modify a guard dog to become a wolf or as fierce and powerful as a giant wolf. But I would have to spend a lot of time studying the animal's hormone levels and genetics, as well as its own life expectancy. Modifying an adult dog could cause very serious damage to its motor coordination because its brain would have to adapt to its new, larger and stronger body. This could be changed by getting puppies from the altered dog that would already be born with the alteration, but this would involve something I still don't understand about genetics and would take me many years or many experiments before I could guarantee true success. This makes me admire even more the Valyrian Blood Mages who managed not only to create dragons, but also to ensure their enormous power, long life expectancy and perfect reproductive capacity.
On the human issue, if I were 100% human I could make changes to myself with 100% guarantee, but I am not. I need to understand my own biology and Valyrian anatomy. The Valyrian biology books I've collected from libraries can help with this, but I don't know if I'm a pure Valyrian since I don't know my true maternal origins, which adds more problems to the equations of my own genetics.
If we include the strange rune on my heart that I've been studying recently, I must already be a human altered at birth by my mother. So at the moment, I can only try to test it on humans first and see the side effects on someone who can talk and give me more data. Some unfortunate pirate will certainly have a hard time if he tries to attack my sailboat hehe.
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In this chapter there is a very subtle hint related to a spoiler for the end of the dance of the dragons. It is not related to any character, but rather to the direction that my own novel will follow and the events behind it all. I'll let you think about it...
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