Looking at the crimson substance Lia had delivered to me, I couldn't help but be impressed. I could easily sense the power held within the liquid, similar to the way I had started to sense places where Divine Power was concentrated, places where dungeons might form and even areas where the air was saturated with Astral Power and could easily turn into Wild Magic but classifying and understanding said power was a difficult, if not impossible challenge.

Either due to knowing what it was supposed to be, by simple colour association or thanks to my fairly acute senses I could feel a connection to Blood Magic but that was about everything I could tell without interacting with the substance. Out of curiosity, I tried to use Identify and got a notification telling me it was called Crimson Ink and, for once, there even was a description, adding the information that it was a Blood Magic Reagent. Which, in and of itself, was curious, the system didn't add information like that all that often, making me wonder if it was because I could use the Blood Magic skill at a high enough level to make full use of the Ink, thus getting the information without too much trouble. Or the information might be visible because Lia had made the stuff and I was her Mother, possibly giving me the information my daughter would usually share. Or there might be a dozen other reasons. For all the time I spent traversing the Arcane Path, the system remained an utter mystery to me, arcane in a very different sense than the usual one.

However, with nothing but the words 'Blood Magic Reagent' I couldn't do all that much. I needed to know more, so experiments were needed. Those, in turn, needed test subjects and given that I was far from knowing what might happen to those subjects, humans were too precious a resource to use, as were canines due to Silva's continued presence.

However, there were a lot of squirrels in the forest around us, most of them lethargic and slow thanks to the reduced food they could get in the winter. That, in turn, allowed me to scoop up a few with relative ease, though that was ease for me, not for them. The moment they came out of the Mind Magically enforced stupor, they frantically tried to escape, only to realise that the cage they were in was wrought from stone and crystal, strong enough to contain creatures multiple times their strength. They were, at the end of the day, only between levels two and ten, with the vast majority sitting below level five.

A part of me wondered if I should look for stronger, sturdier creatures, just to make it easier on myself. With these, if I pushed the Blood Magic just a fraction too far, it wouldn't matter how good the Crimson Ink was in making it more efficient, the power would be enough to tear these fragile creatures apart. Hel, even something as simple as Regernation could become something along the lines of super-cancer, while the simplest Blood Magic approach to healing, namely increasing the ability of their blood to clot and thus seal wounds, would become an instant heart-attack or stroke, or an infarct wherever the blood decided to clot and block circulation.

Alas, sturdier creatures were harder to find and, maybe more importantly, something that often ended up on our dinner table, so if I took a few too many, we might go hungry. Not something I fancied, meaning I would have to be cautious instead.

Whistling to myself, I started the first, somewhat amusing task I had to accomplish in order to experiment on the squirrels. Namely, I had to shave them, otherwise drawing Blood Runes on them, or carving them into their flesh, would be quite difficult. I didn't even try to do so while they were conscious, instead knocking them out one at a time and getting rid of the fur. Once that was done, I picked one at random and carefully painted a pair of simple runes on the naked skin, using a mix of the squirrel's blood and the Crimson Ink.

When that didn't yield the results I wanted, I continued to try different methods and even runes, going away from the simple runes to Strengthen the squirrel and working on means to improve it without damaging the thing.

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Soon, I decided to call in Luna for help, hoping that her Life Magic would allow a few of the squirrels to live through the procedures I was putting them through and not end up as broken bodies. However, even if I didn't manage to figure out how to do these particular Blood Runes, I was getting a few interesting ideas in regard to curses. Not necessarily efficient or practical ideas but interesting ideas nonetheless. If only I could figure out why a particular rune cluster, placed in that spot managed to turn the squirrel's internal organs into a bloody pulp I might be able to replicate it in a useful fashion, by making it applicable to humans and usable from a distance. That way, if I ever wanted somebody to die in what looked like horrifying pain, I would have a good method to accomplish it. Curiously, it seemed that the brain, for whatever reason, had been unaffected, only the organs in the squirrel's rump, likely due to the runes' placement.

Sadly, despite the numerous fascinating ways of killing squirrels, I discovered, fairly little progress was made in regard to the efficiency of the Crimson Ink. Sure, I could tell that it contained and regulated the effects of Blood Runes but not by what amount, meaning I would have to do some testing on sturdier animals, even Luna's help didn't change that. Maybe it was a problem with the runes themself or maybe I lacked the precision to tune them low enough so they wouldn't tear a squirrel below level ten apart in seconds, either way, they didn't work as intended.

Finding bigger test subjects was a bit of a pain. Sure, getting a cat or two was simple, as was catching a few foxes and similarly sized critters but their levels and different physiques made comparative testing fairly difficult. But maybe that was for the best, I wanted my solutions to work on as many beings as possible, so testing them on a wide variety of beings was necessary.

After shaving another batch of critters, I had Luna assist me from the start, just so I could get a successful experiment and work from there, hopefully reducing the need for her healing as I went.

Again, runes were drawn on skin or carved into flesh and once they were prepared, a bit of Crimson Ink was added before magic was infused into the mix. The results, again, varied but by keeping control of the initial amount of magic infused into the runes, I started to get controllable results.

At that point, I realised there was another problem.

While I managed to carve runes into one of the felines and not have the creature die a fairly violent death immediately, partially thanks to Luna's Life Magic, I wasn't certain how to test just how effective the result was. Sure, I had a fairly good idea of how agile and strong the cat had been beforehand, but that didn't tell me if the cat could influence how much of its power fueled the runes, now that the initial power I had invested to jumpstart them had run its course.

For a simple test, I isolated the runed feline in a box of its own, setting a few targets into the enclosure before pushing and prodding with my Mind Magic, trying to trigger a violent frenzy. It wasn't something I had experimented a lot with but at the end of the day, the cat was already frantic after getting captured, having its fur shaved before enduring a, most likely, incredibly painful procedure, so there might have been little need to magically trigger the frenzy, it might have been enough to let the cat be a cat. Though that might have involved more pushing fragile off ledges than going insane and attacking everything in sight.

Whatever the cause for the frenzy, things worked out beautifully when the cat started to tear around the enclosure I had put it in, the newly added runes dimly glowing with ethereal light while a measurable increase in the cat's power and speed quickly became apparent.

With that increase, the downside soon became apparent, too. At least Luna and I could already detect the problem and I had little doubt that Lia would realise soon, too. While the current rune cluster on the feline increased its Strength and Agility, it did nothing to make sure the body could keep up with it. Without the constant influx of Luna's power, the cat would have already died, though I had a feeling it could have caused some serious damage, a feeling soon confirmed when I noticed the gouges it had somehow carved into the rock. Sure, it had lost its claws in the process, but there were lines in the stone. Quite impressive, and, despite the cat's demise soon after the frenzy started, a step in the right direction. Only many more to go before we can start enhancing humans.

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