Rapid growth

To be fair I had been rather distracted with the cat itself and hadn’t really understood the implications behind it’s birth. I was understandably horrified now at knowing that in a weird sort of way I was it’s father and Hephaestus was it’s mother though perhaps not exactly. 

‘Fucking cursed energy and it’s love of symbolism!’ I thought with a sigh as I went to my workshop.

So obviously neither Hephaestus or I were actually the parents of the cat since that’s not how that worked or maybe we were since I wasn’t exactly fucking fluent in the creation of spirits by gods.-

I was unsure if a spirit made by the efforts of two different gods counted as their child or not. I obviously wasn’t a god but the idea was close enough to be bothersome if nothing else. I DEFINITELY wasn’t going to ask Hestia about it either as if that was true she was going to lose it. I could possibly ask Freya but my gut told me that was a VERY bad idea for some reason and decided not to.

‘Why can’t this shit ever be simple?’ I complained mentally as I grabbed a handful of magic stones(low level of course) and started feeding them to the cat on my shoulder.

Cursed spirits much like monsters didn’t need to eat actual food but rather consumed energy to grow stronger over time. They were also more or less semi-immortal in that they didn’t technically age at all but could be killed. Ignoring the whole weird ass parental symbolism with the thing the cursed spirit on my shoulder would also grow by consuming energy hence the magic stone feeding. Most of the energy it had consumed as pure fire had been consumed in the sublimation stage of it becoming a cursed spirit so even this small amount of mana from these stones caused a huge shift in it.-

In five minutes of eating the kitten had turned into a fully grown cat and was starting to grow even larger. After feeding it twenty stones however I cut it off as I didn’t want it to grow too fast. Much like a monster variant that grew the more stones it ate with no known limit the same held true here as well. In theory I could feed this thing infinitely for an equally infinite amount of growth though naturally the energy cost to cause a change in it would go up as it’s power did.-

The cat however didn’t like being cut off at all and tried to steal my stones but I scoffed at it as my storage chests were specifically imbued with protection against my own flames so it couldn’t break into them even if it wanted too. 

“I’m not going to starve you but don’t think you’ll be getting more than what I feel you deserve.” I said and the thing soon got bored of the attempt and went to find something else to entertain itself with.

It eventually settled for an orb of bone that it batted with it’s paws before chasing as it rolled away on the smooth floors. Seeing as it was good and occupied I closed my eyes and began to focus on piecing together the restrictions and and techniques needed to pull off my barrier plan. First and foremost I knew I needed to create a large scale formation of cursed tools that would form and control the barrier itself. One would assume the siphoning mechanism would be the more important of the parts but that was incorrect.-

In truth making that part was easy and something that I could slap together in like an hour but if I did the problem then became what to do with the energy being siphoned since I absolutely could not store it, not even if I fused fifty Goliath stones together. When I said that it was a sea of cursed energy floating over the city I fucking meant it. The sheer amount of energy up there was enough for me to likely erase the city itself and everyone in it a hundred times over.-

This wasn’t even that strange since that cursed energy was made from the fears and negative emotions of everyone who had ever visited or lived and died in the city for it’s entire history. That is to say over a thousand years of gods, normal folk and adventurers combined to form that sea of energy. Frankly speaking I had a suspicion that that energy was enough to raise a single cursed spirit to godhood or at the very least uncomfortably close to it if absorbed. I had thought of using it for myself in that regard but I feared that the residual emotions of those who created it in the energy would overwhelm my mind and turn me into a true monster.-

To clarify even this barrier plan of mine was likely to only drain a laughably small amount of the sea’s energy to function and thus sustain it’s longevity. Well that is assuming I don’t try and make something to purify the energy before I absorb it but I can say for certain that was definitely not even going to cross my mind for quite some time if ever. Anyways the formation tools I was going to create needed to work together while being separate and I don’t mean like the jukebox I made either but truly and completely separate.-

I knew it was possible as JJK had shown something similar during the Shibuya arc. In that case it was several items that each strengthened and maintained the barrier around the area but were very fragile and vulnerable in order to increase the strength of the barrier. The trick was that these items were outside the barrier as weak points to target and thus needed guardians to protect them. It was a trade off as the risk of leaving them outside the barrier worked to make the barrier stronger than normal because cursed energy loved it’s risky trade offs.-

It was sorta like how binding vows worked but on a barrier instead of a person. Speaking of vows I had been recently thinking about setting one up for myself to improve my crafting ability but I was still hashing out the terms I wanted for it. While it wasn’t strictly necessary for me to do so I realized that I was not using my cursed energy to it’s fullest out of my avoidance of the vows.

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