Chapter 033OdditiesMarcus sat in his office at the top of the tower and stared at his table, lost in thought. There were two objects placed on it: the soul amethyst, and the fruit he’d gotten from the tree in the frozen vault.The two items were key to accelerating his advancement to next rank. While most people marveled at Marcus’s fast growth in power, the truth was that he actually possessed certain deficiencies which were holding him back. The first was that he lacked sufficient soul power for the next step, and this was a hard thing to rectify. The soul grew slowly in power. Simply using magic regularly strengthened it, so souls of adepts naturally grew more powerful as they rose in ranks and kept practicing their skills over the years. However, this growth was almost an unintended byproduct of magic use, and one couldn’t focus on it to speed things up. Methods to strengthen the soul directly were rare even in the Outer Planes, and typically the domain of necromancers and other death-aligned mages. They tended to be parasitic in nature.The flow of soul seeds from animals would speed up Marcus’s soul growth, but the effect was by no means enormous. At this rate, it would still take a few years for him to reach the next rank. However, his intuition was telling him that the soul amethyst in front of him could be used to accelerate his soul growth to a far greater degree… if only he knew the right method to do so. In fact, after examining it for so long, Marcus was certain that he could use a certain ritual to shatter the gem and absorb the energies trapped within to receive a small but instant growth in soul power. However, he didn’t want to do that because the process would be very inefficient and most of the power would be wasted. There had to be a better way to do this…Alternatively, it just occurred to him that he could involve his students into the ritual and let (...)