After explaining several precautions and potential danger, Sunders provided an initial tutorial on how to cut off a nightmare domain from a nightmare tunnel.
“Let me see... First, I should know an Acoustic Illusion spell, the ‘Black Requiem’. Wait, what?”
Spells were for wizards only, and they had to spend several years at least to finish all necessary studies. Until today, there were no known tricks or cheats for learning spells faster.
This was bad news. Even if Angor somehow achieved the level of a wizard in time, Jon would be long gone by the time he learned the spell.
This was a dead end.
“Perhaps I can ask for help. If Sunders is not here, I can talk to Sumesh...”
He wasn’t sure whether he should drag someone he never met before into this matter. And besides, if entering the dream wasteland would always render someone powerless, could they cast the required spell to break the tunnel at all?
He kept reading. Maybe there was more than one way.
“Black Requiem is mandatory if one wishes to separate a nightmare domain from the Nightmare Realm. On top of this, the user must prepare enough ingredients...”
The materials were listed below. Apart from several types of relatively common ones, there was a main component called the “zoning crystal”. When working on Angor’s current nightmare domain, Sunders used a lot of fragments that looked like broken glass. Those were zoning crystals.
[The crystals are used for determining the accurate coordinates of the nightmare domain, as well as building a new plane barrier that encloses the domain. The amount of crystal shards required varies depending on the size of the tunnel to be destroyed.]
Things said, Angor should ready at least 50 crystal shards no matter how small the tunnel was.
Zoning crystals were known to be extremely valuable. Telling from his past experience, Angor remembered that each piece would cost him about 2,000 magic crystals. But as the book explained, the price was mainly caused by the lack of alchemists with good skills who were capable of producing the crystals. The raw material for crafting a zoning crystal was a type of mid-tier mineral called the “void ore”, which was not that expensive.
Sunders’ book also described the basic process for making zoning crystals. Angor was glad to notice that he could definitely do it himself and save all the money.
As for other side components such as black dense stones, plane corrosion fragments, and greyspace microbes... These were all used for making personal space storage containers. Angor happened to have a lot of them stashed.
“When the zoning crystals are in place, leave several drops of—huh?”
According to the instruction, the zoning crystals had to work together with “diluent extracted from Fragments of Eternity”. And this made Angor want to give up this plan.
Fragment of Eternity was a rare element scarcely found in this world. Each time any fragment showed up, there would be huge groups of wizards going after it.
Such fragments were generated during the initial stage of a plane fusion, from random space ruptures that raged around the area of the ongoing fusion. Wizards had another name for a plane fusion, which was the “Garden Aquarius”, because Fragments of Eternity also happened to be the core material for building Sorcerer’s Gardens, which were tactical assets that every organization would go after at all costs.
While shocked by the difficulty of his plan, Angor suddenly remembered something else.
When Sunders helped him secure his current nightmare domain, Sunders asked for a payment to cover all the materials consumed in the process. The price was 150,000 magic crystals.
But 150,000 wasn’t nearly enough to buy Fragments of Eternity!
“Or was the professor being generous, so he provided the fragments for free?”
No way. No one in this world was rich enough to be “generous” when it came to those things.
He calmed down and kept reading. He then noticed that the situation wasn’t as hopeless as he thought. The “fragment diluent” was created by adding a tiny portion of a Fragment of Eternity with other materials. One fragment was usually big enough to produce several hundred units of diluent liquid.
Sometimes, smaller wizard organizations might get their hands on a small or perhaps impure Fragment of Eternity by accident. Since such a fragment was too hard to sell or being useful, they made it into fragment diluent, which could be used for other purposes.
A bottle of diluent might cost anywhere between 4,000 crystals to 10,000, depending on its density. Now, this sounded a lot more affordable.
With this problem solved, he had to figure out how to study Black Requiem.
He knew nothing about this spell yet, so he decided to read on and at least find out its effects before making his decision.
Tick, tick...
When a hanging clock nearby told him that he had spent half an hour reading, he finally put the book down with a big frown.
Instead of describing the spell in detail, Sunders used his past experiences when he dealt with nightmare domains as examples and showed why this spell was a must.
It was an Acoustic Illusion spell that generated certain sound frequencies that activated the hidden properties of nightmare energy. By using the spell, the caster could expand, shrink, or even erase nightmare energy.
Angor had to use this spell to send nightmare energy into specified materials during the start of the job. He could then create an area free of nightmare energy to protect the zoning crystals. Since there were no other ways to physically control the movement of nightmare energy, he needed Black Requiem to guarantee success.
However, Angor currently had another idea in his mind, which might help him bypass it.
His “Shava’s right hand” had those green marks constantly floating around it, which were also capable of manipulating nightmare energy freely. There was one time when Sunders took him to the nightmare tunnel inside Pocratee, when they did several tests and discovered three “functions” on Angor’s new hand.
Firstly, illusions channeled through this hand would carry nightmare energy and grow more potent.
Next, the green sigils could constantly generate nightmare energy like a nightmare stone.
The last property, and what Angor was thinking about right now, was that the hand could absorb nightmare energy from the surroundings rapidly. Sunders could not figure out where the energy went, but he did make sure that it didn’t stay inside Angor.
The purpose of Black Requiem was to create an area devoid of any nightmare energy. So, what if he used his right hand to absorb all nightmare energy from the environment?
As he saw earlier, his right hand did not lose its special effect in the dream wasteland. If he could tackle the last challenge in this way without the need to study Black Requiem, he would have everything he needed to secure another nightmare domain.
Taking materials into the dream wasteland and finding them there might be a problem. But he already had an idea on how to solve it. It seemed objects he pulled into the dream wasteland using the Dream Whelk would remain at where they first appeared. He could simply place the materials together with his Gondola and pull them all into the wasteland together, while he would enter the wasteland repeatedly until he “spawned” somewhere close to the Gondola.
Hopefully, the Gondola could also help him reach the nightmare tunnel faster.
Thankfully, since the “Dream Gondola” always crashed to pieces by the end of each test, he could freely summon it into the wasteland again instead of looking for it.
As for where to find the rest of the materials...