“The principle of making a curse vessel is not hard. The difficulty lies in choosing the right ritual material and formula.”
Old Vasily looked at Annan, who had just finished setting up the ritual area. Under the altar, he provided a detailed instruction, “Typically speaking, we add the ‘base material’, ‘influence’ and ‘curse material’ into it and carry out a ritual based on the formula.
“The base material itself can’t participate in the ritual. Otherwise, it will ruin the ritual. The ‘curse vessel formula’ will list the proper material and influences that protect the base material from being consumed.
“If the base material is chosen correctly, you can get a curse vessel after the ritual.”
Following the formula given by Old Vasily, Annan drew a seven-pointed star under one stroke on the ground. Given his strength attribute, his hand was firm, keeping the lines straight.
But even so, for a heptagram to be qualified, each angle must be greater than 24 degrees. So even if Annan had drawn on scrap paper dozens of times before, he couldn’t guarantee that he would succeed this time.
If I still can’t make it work this time, I have to summon the players to help me draw it… Annan complained in his heart.
While he was concentrating on drawing the line, Old Vasily was still explaining eloquently,
“The influence determines the properties of the curse vessel. It may be consumed, but not necessarily. It generally plays a catalytic role in the designated realm. The remaining unused curse after the ritual directly determines the power of the curse vessel. According to this principle, if you want to improve the quality of the curse vessel, you must either use a stronger curse material or use a ritual with the lowest possible consumption.
“In the process of making a curse vessel in a neutral realm like the Blade Realm, the most commonly used ritual is Lady Luck’s ritual series with ‘seven’ as the key number.
“The Lady Luck is the deity of luck and accident. All the rituals in the luck realm have a fixed failure rate of 7% every minute. So what we have to do is trigger the ritual successfully, communicate with the deities, and extend the ritual’s time so that it fails and terminates itself.
“With ‘Basic Influence: One Step Faster’ as a sacrifice, we need to sacrifice ‘uncoagulated blood that affects Transcended’ as a catalyst and apply the curse materials of ‘rust extract of rusted bronze swords that has stained with blood’, ‘ seven pieces of air-dried heart valves from any Transcended creatures’, ‘the bloody saliva of a freshly decapitated pigeon’, and ‘a piece of nape’s skin from a lynx that has lived for more than ten years.
“First, fill the area in the center of the altar with your blood, then stack the heart valve on the blood, and use the pigeon’s saliva as the glue between the heart valves. Then, add another layer of pigeon saliva on top before adding the nape’s skin of the lynx.
“After that, drop the rust extract on the top to designate a ritual area. After registering a ritual area, the ritual can last for half an hour. To prevent failure, use any sharp tool to penetrate it immediately, activating the ritual. The blade must be fixed vertically until the ritual is over, so it is better to make the blade fixed on soft ground.
“If all goes well, you can proceed to ‘Ritual: the Lucky Sanctuary’, a simple sanctuary ritual where you designate the effect to take place in three consecutive hours in the coming week. If you would have been assassinated within those three hours, then coincidences will keep appearing around you for these three hours, avoiding the people who are trying to kill you.
“But this ritual is only valid for those who ‘use a weapon’ to assassinate you. If it is an indirect method such as poison, curse, etc., it will not trigger. If someone hires an assassin, Your Highness… this ritual only allows you to know the hired thug instead of being able to detect the real murderer behind the scenes. Though, it’s of great use as a warning beacon — telling you that there are assassins seeking your life.”
Old Vasily reminded fluently, “I shall repeat it again, Your Highness. The base material that can participate in the ritual without being destroyed is the ‘blood-stained weapon’, which is added at the final step. As long as the blade is soaked with blood before it touches the two other liquids, the ritual won’t destroy it until the blood is dried.
“Your Highness, after connecting to Lady Luck, remember to keep silent. When the ritual fails automatically, the curse vessel will be finished.”
“I see.” Annan nodded, carefully covering the seven air-dried heart valves with the nape of the lynx. Old Vasily had provided the Trascended materials, but the pigeon’s saliva must be fresh after death.
To collect the saliva from the dead pigeons, he had to urgently buy a large number of pigeons from the merchants in Green Water Street, enough to hold a pigeon feast at night to feed everyone in the viscount house.
As for the blood-stained knife, Annan did have a weapon here that could be used as a base material to “forge”.
That was the curse vessel he got from [Nightmare: Gallery], the Blood-stained Kitchen Knife.
Following Old Vasily’s instructions, Annan dripped the extract onto the nape.
Before getting to this step, Annan didn’t see any indications. If it wasn’t for Old Vasily asking him to continue, he even thought he had failed somewhere.
But after the extract was dripped on the nape, Annan suddenly felt a strange heat.
There was a burning sensation at the back of his heart, but there was no pain. Instead, it felt more like the warm burning sensation of taking a bath with pepper water.
After the heat settled quickly, it began to flow upwards to the back of Annan’s neck.
Strictly speaking, this was Annan’s first ritual.
“Quick, Your Highness!” Old Vasily hinted.
Without a second thought, Annan nailed the already prepared “Blood-stained Kitchen Knife” through eight layers of material and nailed it straight into the ground.
Boom.
The steady stream of heat on Annan’s neck suddenly disintegrated. It was like being pierced through the abdomen by a knife… A warm feeling soaked through the back of the neck.
The heat that poured into his brain put him into a strange hallucination.
A slideshow of fast-flowing images appeared before his eyes.
Even though Annan’s Perception attribute had attained the Transcended level, he could barely see a few snippets.
The ground in front of Wandering Child melted and collapsed;
Delicious Wind Goose squatted in the dungeon, and in front of him was a skinny old man;
Annan stood in front of Kafni, with his right hand slightly sticking out;
Philip Noah gulping the candies;
Then, the final scene stopped with a teenage girl Annan had never seen before.
She had a square sketching board and held Annan, whose height only reached her chest, with her right hand.
As if noticing the prying eyes, she frowned slightly and glanced back.
Annan noticed that she had icy blue vertical pupils and long, smooth silver-white hair without any other color or mess. Her face was somewhat similar to Annan’s, but her temperament was rather cold.
The most striking feature was the two white dragon horns on her forehead that protruded upward like lightning.
