Back in his secret lab after inducting Ais and Filvis into his merry band, Nox began to pour over his new obsession.

Even though the time that had passed since his last big project was not that big, his period of forced inactivity after a huge stressful and even traumatic moment made Nox miss his favourite past time of magical research.

In fact, he who liked to think of himself as a man of culture, who could appreciate the "finer things in life", could only admit that when he immersed himself in his research, all of his perverted tendencies went away somewhere far . . .

Well . . . perversion related to lust went far. After all, other kinds of nasty obsessions and perversions took over Nox when he was far to into his experiments.

He was very confident in the feelings his closest girls had for him but if they new what his favourite past time of magical research sometimes included . . . No love could survive the atrocities he committed in the name of progress.

'Maybe a crazy enough waifu though . . .' Nox fantasized for a short instant before his experiments took over his attention once again.

As for what said experiments were . . .

Achieving Lichdom involved several steps, each carrying the risk of crippling him at best and utterly obliterating the entirety of his being, body and soul.

Needless to say, regardless of how great his simulations were, they were not perfect when it came to such delicate procedures and so, live testing on adventurers the world would not miss too much was required.

Unfortunately, it wasn't as if Nox had an inexhaustible supply of tests subjects even though he had a few black market connections with incredibly crappy Familias from the world beyond Orario that purposefully recruited orphans, gave them a falna and basically raised them into slave adventurers.

Fortunately though, Nox's incredible perception towards the magical, boosted by several specialized spell he had developed, some solely for his current project, he could massively improve his spell formulae after every single test.

This heavily reduced the numbers of sacrifices required for Nox's greater good and let him conduct his research without causing too many waves in the world of DanMachi.

Funny thing was, due to the fact that a god or goddess could feel it when their "child" died due to the disappearance of their falna after death, the god or goddess of the undisclosed familia of slave traders was deathly scared of Nox.

They were special in the sense they could sense a bit more about the deaths of their "children" and their vague understanding of how Nox tested his horrible spells and concoctions of them, left them terrified of their mysterious client.

Moving on to the actual research and experiments Nox was performing, they were basically his method of perfecting each step of the Lichdom Ritual he devised through what he called Adventurer Trials.

Constructing a phylactery, a repository to hold his soul was both the easiest and the most costly. The biggest loss Nox would suffer was the temporary loss of his Philosopher's Stone as it would be the core of the object.

It was a cage like structure made of Divine Orichalcum with a slotted pedestal ready to accept the Philosopher's Stone.

Having one in hand allowed Nox to make another in order to to remove his from his body but there were two main reasons he did not go in this route.

The first was that creating another Philosopher's Stone this way, while not needing any materials, required an outrageous amount of Excelia or a proportionally smaller amount of Divine Energy.

As opposed to the energy cost for allowing the Stone he already possessed grow, the cost for making an entirely new one was far too much. Even if he was willing to pay the price, he simply lacked the funds.

The second and most important reason however, was the fact that keeping a Philosopher's Stone fused with his body would hamper his Lichdom Ritual.

Part of of the procedure to achieve Lichdom involved a ritual death and the almighty Philosopher's Stone would never let the concoction that was supposed to take care of that part work. Never did Nox think a day would come where he would regret being as unkillable as he was.

There were also advantages however. After ther fusion, the Philosopher's Stone became the core of Nox's existence, the foundation for not only his body but also his soul which was one of the reasons Nox suspected his soul was able to withstand all the abuse he put it through.

Why was this a good thing?

Well, Nox's soul was already bound to the Philosopher's Stone and as such, he would not need to bind it to the phylactery through magic as the phylactery's core the Stone, already had a connection to Nox's soul.

Was that was required was to sever the connection between the soul and the physical body through ritual death and it would automatically inhabit the phylactery as soon as the effect of Nox's Unbind Soul spell ceased.

Unfortunately though, there was still two big challenges left. The making of the concoction to cleanly sever his soul's connection to his physical body, which Nox considered to be the less difficult of the two and the perfecting of the Unbind Soul spell.

Nox who had already quite a great deal of experience dealing with souls and their source energy, Excelia, quickly created a basic Unbind Soul magic to test out.

Unfortunately, he wholly underestimated the difficulty of getting the spell just right for its intended purpose.

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P.a.t.r.e.o.n is officially up!

The link is: https://www.p.a.t.r.e.o.n.com/lusoba  without the extra dots of course.

You'll get to read up to FOUR weeks ahead, a full month, but I'll still post here.

There's also my other novels Kage of Kages and FATE of DxD, do check them out!

I would greatly appreciate any support since this is going to be my breadwinner.