Forbidden Splicer: Infinite Spellcraft

Chapter 4: Commerce of Shadows

Cold sludge dripped from rusted iron pipes above, splashing onto Jaroth's hooded mantle. He pulled his dark wool cowl lower over his forehead, obscuring his face in shadow. In his pocket, the wooden rat-skull token felt cold against his fingers.

Following the shift schedule carved into Ren's ledger, Jaroth slipped into the Sub-Level 3 Waste Drain. The air here was heavy with moisture and the sharp tang of stagnant alchemy runoff. Up ahead, a sweeping ward beam cast a pale blue grid across the stone tunnel every six seconds.

Jaroth waited behind an iron support beam. He counted the beats. One, two, three. As the blue grid swept past his boots, a guard leaned against the wall ahead, his helmet resting against his chest while he snored softly.

Instead of stepping into the guard's field of vision, Jaroth willed

Displacement Sheath

into action.

Spatial light warped around his shoulders. In a breath, his physical body shifted five paces forward, silently clearing the patrol line. Behind him, a brief, hardened afterimage of his silhouette stood in the shadow before dissolving into thin air. No mana alarm triggered along the archway walls. The Splicer's external execution left no energetic footprint for the warding array to register.

He descended the damp stone steps, leaving the sterile marble halls of the Citadel behind.

The air grew warmer, thick with the smell of roasted meat, cheap pipe tobacco, and ozone. He stepped through a cracked archway and into the Sunless Quarter.

Catacombs carved into ancient bedrock stretched out beneath the Imperial capital. Luminescent moss and flickering glass lanterns cast neon purples, harsh greens, and deep ambers across crowded alleyways. Smuggling gangs shouted prices over iron tables. Rogue mages with scarred faces sold forbidden potions out of leather satchels. Disgraced alchemists boiled glowing monster organs in copper vats while street thieves picked pockets in the crowd.

This was the underbelly of the Empire—a place where bloodline status meant nothing and gold bought whatever the Citadel banned.

Jaroth moved through the narrow market streets, keeping his hands tucked inside his sleeves and his gaze focused ahead. He turned down an alley choked with sulfur steam and stopped before a narrow wooden door. A brass sign hung from an iron chain, bearing the faded carving of an owl with its eyes shut tight.

The Blind Owl.

He pushed the door open. A small bell chimed above his head.

Inside, glass display cases lined the stone walls, filled with cracked spell crystals, ancient bone daggers, and dusty scroll canisters. The shop smelled of old parchment, dried herbs, and bitter sulfur.

Behind a reinforced iron counter sat a woman with sharp silver eyes and short black hair. Leather armor fitted her torso, lined with narrow pockets containing throwing knives and spell chalk.

Lyra looked up from an open ledger, her gaze instantly locking onto Jaroth's cloaked frame. She reached under the counter, her fingers resting on a concealed trigger.

"New face," Lyra said, her voice dry and even. "This shop is by invitation only, stranger."

Jaroth did not speak. He stepped to the counter and placed Ren's wooden rat-skull token onto the glass.

Lyra glanced at the carved rat skull. Her eyes narrowed slightly. "Ren's token. Old Ren never missed a trade night unless he was dead or locked in a cell."

"Ren was careless," Jaroth replied, keeping his voice low and raspy. "I inherited his business."

"Careless people bring guards to my doorstep," Lyra said, leaning back against her chair. "What do you want?"

"I need Matrix Crystals," Jaroth stated. "Raw expansion cores capable of increasing spell capacity."

Lyra let out a brief, sharp laugh. "Expansion cores are military assets. I do not sell high-tier goods to nameless cloaks who walk off the street with dead men's tokens."

She reached into a brass box beside her ledger and pulled out a rolled parchment bound with a cracked red seal. The edges of the paper were blackened, emitting faint wisps of white frost that hissed against the ambient heat.

She tossed the damaged scroll onto the counter between them.

"This is a Tier 1

[Frost-Bite]

scroll," Lyra said, watching his face beneath the cowl. "A scavenger brought it in two days ago. The core rune is cracked, and the parchment is decaying from structural instability. My artificers said opening it will detonate the frost matrix and freeze the room. Stabilize the rune without destroying the scroll, and we can talk business. Fail, and you can pay for my broken glass."

Jaroth looked down at the freezing scroll. He did not reach for ink, chalk, or a spell wand.

He extended his right index finger and tapped the cracked parchment seal.

To Lyra, it looked like a reckless novice touching a volatile bomb. To Jaroth, the world slowed down as his interface activated, overlaying glowing lines of code across the parchment.

[Scanning Damaged Matrix: Frost-Bite (Tier 1)]

[Status: Core Node Fractured — 68% Decay.]

[Deconstructing Unstable Elements...]

The system stripped the decaying frost nodes, absorbing the corrupt energy into the interface. A void remained in the scroll's central rune structure. Jaroth pulled a fragment of light matrix left over from his memory bank—residual energy stored during his previous deconstruction—and inserted it directly into the missing node.

[Matrix Stabilization Complete.]

[Synthesis Applied: Glacial Flash Scroll (Tier 1 High-Purity)]

The hissing white mist vanished. The blackened edges of the parchment smoothed out, turning a crisp, icy blue. A radiant silver rune burned into the leather tie, humming with cold, steady power.

The entire process took less than three seconds.

Lyra stood up from her stool, her silver eyes wide as she stared at the glowing scroll. She reached out with a gloved hand and picked it up, feeling the smooth, perfectly balanced mana pulse beneath her palm.

"Impossible," she whispered, her voice losing its calm edge. "You didn't channel mana through a wand. You didn't even use a stabilization array. This structure is cleaner than an Imperial scribe's work."

She looked at Jaroth with renewed focus, her posture shifting from suspicion to deep interest.

"Who are you?" she asked.

"Call me the Splicer," Jaroth replied smoothly. "Do we have a deal?"

Lyra took a deep breath and opened an iron vault beneath her counter. She pulled out a small, jagged crystal that glowed with a faint violet aura, along with a thick bundle of pristine, high-grade parchment.

She placed both items on the counter.

"A low-grade Rune Expansion Core," Lyra said, pushing the items toward him. "And ten sheets of refined monster-hide parchment. If you can craft scrolls of that quality, I will buy every single one you bring me."

Jaroth took the glowing crystal. As his fingers closed around the stone, the system absorbed its energy.

[Rune Expansion Core Absorbed.]

[Matrix Storage Capacity Increased: 2 Slots $\rightarrow$ 3 Slots.]

[Current Slots Available: 2/3.]

Jaroth gathered the parchment sheets, tucked the bundle into his cloak, and walked out of The Blind Owl.

He turned into a narrow passage choked with gray mist and dripping condensation. The sound of the market faded behind him, replaced by the hollow echoing of his own footsteps against wet cobblestones.

He had walked fifty paces when three heavy shadows stepped out from a dark doorway ahead, blocking the exit.

A burly man with scarred knuckles stepped forward, wearing a studded leather vest and holding a broad, serrated iron blade. Orange sparks danced along the flat of his sword, fueled by a low-tier flame rune.

"Hold up, cowl," Jax said, his voice deep and raspy. He tapped the flat of his burning sword against his palm. "Nobody trades in Lyra's shop without paying the street tax. Hand over your purse and that parchment bundle, or I will bleed you right here."

Two thugs stepped up behind Jax, drawing heavy iron daggers.

Jaroth stopped walking. He did not reach for a weapon, nor did his breath quicken.

"Move aside," Jaroth said, his voice flat under his cowl.

Jax laughed, stepping forward with a swift horizontal slash aimed at Jaroth's neck. The serrated blade whistled through the mist, trailing red embers.

Jaroth triggered

Displacement Sheath

.

The world shifted. Jaroth instantly appeared five paces behind Jax, stepping softly onto the damp cobblestones.

Where he had been standing a millisecond before, a hardened, illusory copy of his body remained. Jax's flaming sword struck the decoy squarely in the chest.

THUMP.

A hard kinetic shockwave exploded outward from the illusory afterimage. The backfire force slammed into Jax's arms, shattering his grip and causing his elbows to pop with a loud crack. Jax stumbled forward with a roar of pain, dropping his burning blade as numbness spread through his shoulders.

Before the two thugs could comprehend what happened, Jaroth turned his head.

He raised his right hand and flicked a tiny, pinpoint spark of dark-violet light onto Jax's fallen sword.

Sun-Blight Eruption.

The moment the purple droplet touched the iron, the serrated blade turned bright gold before quietly disintegrating into gray dust. The rot spread instantly to Jax's iron shoulder guard, melting the metal plates into gray ash that rained down onto his boots.

Jax fell to his knees, clutching his numbed arms, staring in horror at the pile of dust where his weapon had been. The heat of the invisible decay scorched his leather vest, turning the leather brittle and black.

"What... what kind of magic is that?" Jax gasped, his face pale as death.

Jaroth took a single step toward them.

The two thugs dropped their daggers, grabbed Jax by his collar, and dragged him backward down the alley as fast as their feet could carry them, vanishing into the mist without looking back.

The first light of dawn filtered through the narrow iron grate of Jaroth's cell as he returned to his quarters in the Citadel basement.

He locked the heavy oak door and threw back his dark cowl.

He sat at his desk and smoothed out the high-grade parchment Lyra had given him.

His mind worked through the numbers. A standard scribe earned three copper coins a day sweeping dust and logging ruined texts. A single stabilized scroll in the Sunless Quarter sold for gold.

He held the key to an economic loop. He could scavenge broken, discarded spell remnants from the ruined archives above, use the Splicer to forge forbidden hybrid matrices in secret, inscribe them onto blank scrolls, and sell them below to build an underground fortune.

He dipped his feather quill into a jar of black ink.

Willing his system to open, he selected the crafting interface.

[Crafting Interface Activated]

Selected Recipe:

Sun-Blight Eruption (Scroll Form)

Estimated Market Value: 500 Imperial Gold Crowns.

[Initiating Inscription...]

Jaroth lowered his pen to the paper, his eyes gleaming in the dawn light.