CHAPTER 173: CURSES AND BLESSINGS

"The method to turn magic into divine power is both very simple and completely not intuitive – in order to do that, you need to feed your magic to your domain."

"You mean like feed it to the flame?"

"Yes, you don’t actually need to manually change the type of energy, the domain will do the process for you as long as you can provide it with fuel."

"Does it work with other types of energy?"

"Yes, but not all of them – for example you can’t do this with aura as you can’t ’spend’ it in the same way as magic, but you could in theory learn to absorb heat and turn it into divine power. The process is obviously very inefficient, but is technically possible."

To test whether it worked, Calen sent about a tenth of what he had available into the flame, just to see the results.

As soon as the magic disappeared his divine power surged – but not as much as he expected.

When converting divine power to magic the amount he received was about the same as the one he put in, but here it was halved.

"It’s because of the nature of your domain." Sylara explained when he asked her about it. "Divine power defined by ’perfection’ will naturally discard the ’imperfect’ parts during the conversion process, and unfortunately for you magic is already the most efficient source. But it all won’t matter soon."

"How come?"

"Well, because you will have enough of both that you will rarely ever run out of course – you’ve already tripled your capacity from the time you’ve left two weeks ago. That aspect of your power is almost as important as its potency, but it grows substantially quicker."

Calen frowned.

"So why am I learning this exactly?"

"Because emergencies can always happen and it’s better to be prepared." She shrugged. "Let’s move on to our last topic, which also happens to be the most difficult to grasp due to its esoteric nature. What do you know about curses and blessings?"

"Unlike magical effects they are always created by humans, and can take countless forms and vary greatly in power. Curses obviously have more negative effects than blessings, but they are very similar."

"Mostly correct, though it’s not much." Sylara nodded. "It is true that blessings and curses are as varied as humans and they are always bestowed by someone – but they are similar only on a surface level."

"Meaning?"

"There’s quite a lot of differences between the two, even outside of their obvious opposite purpose."

Sylara then launched into a rather lengthy explanation, from which Calen understood a few things:

The biggest difference was how they were given – a curse can be given by anyone to anyone or anything, there are no requirements to create them, and in fact vast majority of them were created subconsciously without the knowledge of the curse-giver. Power of a curse was dependent solely on the caster, and its effect was determined by intentions of that person.

In contrast, blessings could be given only by people who had a lot of power themselves, or had the authority to borrow the power of a higher being. The Power and effects of the blessing could be freely adjusted by the caster, within the limits of their own power of course.

Another difference was their duration period – blessings worked either for a limited, pre-determined time or were permanent, whereas curses were a tad more complicated; as a rule, they did not have a expiration date, but they could be broken.

Whenever a curse was made consciously, the caster could decide what the condition for its breaking would be.

The reason to do this was that if there were no conditions, the curse would be ridiculously easy to break through brute-force methods, such as overloading it with magic. However the more specific conditions you added, the harder the curse would become to break through conventional means.

Since there was no requirement to tell the person being cursed about the curse or the conditions, you could just make them very random and the curse would never be broken. The only requirements for the conditions were that they would have to be possible, otherwise the curse would work as if there was no breaking method specified.

There was one more disparity, somewhat connected to the previous one – a blessing could not be taken back unless a condition for it was specified during the initial bestowing, while a curse could be revoked at any second the caster desired, with no reason needed.

You could also not curse the same person with the same curse twice, but you could easily bestow the same blessing to them as many times as you want.

Finally, some curses held elements of blessings, and vice versa – things like that were usually called contracts, and were something like a deal for power in exchange for following a set of rules, or suffering from debilitating effects.

"Any questions?" Sylara asked.

"Curses seem exceptionally useful, and yet I only seen a handful of cursed objects despite working with magical items for most of my life, and even less people seemingly affected by one. Why is that?"

"Well, there’s one more element to curses that I sort of glossed over – everyone and everything has a level of natural resistance to them, it’s the reason why everyone isn’t cursed all the time. That resistance grows with your power, and with really strong people it turns into a near immunity."

"So there’s no point in trying to curse the Serakhiin?"

"I’m afraid so, many people tried throug the centuries, but nothing seems to stick. Interestingly enough, they’re fully capable of recieving blessings like any other person."

Calen raised an eyebrow at her.

"Who would try to bless a Serakhiin and for what purpose?" He knew the answer of course, but he still asked.

"Me, naturally." Sylara smiled. "I did it while we were purifying Kaerith, thought that a minor blessing of good health would help with the operation."

"He’s alive I guess, so maybe it did..." Calen admitted with a chuckle. "So how do you make a blessing like that then?"