The Divine Wolf... or?

Chapter 223: Insufficient Mana.

After he had gotten an idea about the amplification his soul power provided to his magic, Ark decided to try out his new skill [Sovereign's Howl]. Since he had no real idea about the power of the skill yet, Ark wanted to use it without amplifying it with his [Chaos Soul].

As he had a bunch of other magic he also wanted to try out, he decided to use up about 10% of his total mana to try out how effective the skill really was.

He felt like he needed to spend at least that much to get a good idea about the destructive power of the skill, without going overboard. Since it was a skill that could be combined with other skills, Ark decided to combine it with ice magic since he felt like he had a pretty good idea of the power of his ice magic.

"I'm going to use a rather large move next, so you should probably take a few steps back."

If anyone else had said this to them, Ephine, Thufrat and Atar wouldn't have thought much of it, but since it came from Ark, they all quickly backed off, so that they wouldn't get dragged into it. After they had retreated a bit, Ark turned back around and faced the forest in front of him. In the next moment, he let out an earth-shattering howl.

Strangely enough, even though the howl was loud enough to shake the clouds in the sky, Thufrat, Ephine and Atar couldn't really feel it. Instead, they felt a weird surge of strength in their bodies.

In comparison, the forest wasn't as lucky. In a truly massive area in front of Ark, all you could see was a frozen world. After a while, the frozen trees all cracked, before exploding into little pieces of ice that scattered across the cracked ground. As Ark watched the widespread destruction he caused, he felt deeply satisfied.

The power of the magic itself wasn't that strong, but what was truly remarkable was how little mana he had used, as well as the massive range. If he had used just ice magic on its own, there's no way he would get that kind of range.

The next race skill he wanted to try out was naturally his newfound [Chaos Magic]. Since he could only use basic magic because of his low skill level, Ark decided to try casting a regular chaos arrow. With basically no cast time, a dull grey arrow soon materialised in front of Ark, before flying out and hitting a tree.

Normally, something like a fire arrow would be able to blast a sizeable hole in a tree trunk, but as soon as the chaos arrow hit the tree, a small explosion that consumed the entire tree took place.

After seeing this, Ark couldn't help but smile again. It seemed that [Chaos Magic] was a good skill after all. Although it expended a bit more mana than normal elemental magic, the destructive power more than made up for it.

If he levelled the skill up some to the point where he could start casting more advanced magic, then it could truly become a trump card in the future if he faced an opponent that could resist his attacks.

What Ark wanted to try out next was his new affinities to see what kind of power they had. The affinity that Ark was the most excited to try out except for time, was an affinity he had gotten a long time ago, namely spatial affinity. Now that he had an absolute spatial affinity, Ark wanted to see if he could use spatial magic to teleport around or to use space itself to attack his enemies.

After messing around for a while, Ark realised that it was possible for him to teleport, but it came with some risks, and at this point in time it wasn't very convenient.

Although he could create a tear in space and travel through it, the void he travelled through wasn't exactly safe. If anyone without a spatial affinity tried to travel through it, they would get torn apart in the blink of an eye. Even though Ark could travel through it relatively safely, it wasn't stable. The instability of the portal he opened meant that he could run into spatial turbulence.

If that happened, not only would his body be ripped apart, but perhaps even his soul would perish.

The reason why the portal he opened wasn't completely stable was simple, he just didn't have enough mana. If he had more mana, using more advanced magic was pretty easy, mana was the basis of magic after all. Since he couldn't teleport around for now, Ark tried to use his space magic to attack instead.

Like with the wind blade, Ark tried to conjure up a blade made of spatial mana and sent it flying forward. In the next moment, the blade seemingly disappeared, before reappearing in the distance, slicing a few trees apart.

As he witnessed the result, Ark realised a few interesting points, and he couldn't help but make another experiment, this time attacking a tree that had some magic resistance. Although the wind blade didn't manage to damage the trunk of the tree much, the spatial blade still sliced through the tree as if it was made of butter.

This made Ark realise that the spatial magic was stronger than he had imagined. Not only was it unpredictable and really hard to dodge, but it had amazing penetrative power, especially against magic resistance. This was naturally because spatial magic could destroy space itself. It was of a higher level compared to elemental magic.

The only problem, yet again, was the mana expenditure. Since there was barely any spatial mana present in the atmosphere, Ark had to supplement with his own mana. However, unlike time mana, at least there was a minuscule amount of spatial mana in the atmosphere. Time mana was practically nonexistent.

Because of this, Ark also realised that using time magic to attack would be almost impossible with his current mana pool.

Even though that was the case, Ark was still happy to be able to use time magic to make his daily life easier. And since it was only a problem of mana, he would be able to solve it by levelling up, and getting a larger mana pool. The last experiment that Ark wanted to perform was using spatial magic to restrain enemies.

He wanted to see if he could essentially lock a part of space itself, and make it impossible for an opponent to move.

Although there were no opponents around, he could always try it out on animals. After doing so, he realised that his conjecture was correct, the only problem was how strong his opponents needed to be before they could break free. The easy solution to his problem was simply to get Thufrat to try it out.

To Ark's surprise, as long as he kept the mana supplied, he could easily restrain Thufrat without him being able to break free at all.

Although he wasn't sure if Thufrat would be able to break out if he stimulated his bloodline, Ark felt like that would be a bit overkill for a simple experiment.