For two days, I remained in the shrine, sorting through the dense package of information I had received from Lady Hecate. As with so many things with Her, the entire thing was a remarkable combination of homework, headache and boon, all mixed into a painful delight. If it wasn't so useful, I would reconsider setting up shrines in Her name, and I'd certainly not allow the use of my image if I could help it, but given the benefits I was reaping, I couldn't complain all that much.

In this particular case, I could see just how much more advanced the working She had shared with me was. I doubted it was of Her design; it lacked the amazingly complex simplicity I had seen in other things She had shown me, simplifications added to the spellwork so mortals could use the spells, even if they didn't understand just what they were doing, but here, these simplifications were missing. This meant that the spellwork was mindbogglingly complex, to the point that I doubted I'd be able to perform it on my own or even with my daughters to help me. This looked like it would require a team of trained spellcasters, all working together to imbue a person with the essence of another being. An animal of some sort, most likely a canine, though that was mostly based on my understanding of Lady Hecate. The spellwork itself should work with any donor animal, though results would greatly vary.

The parts where the elements of an animal were worked into the physiology of a human, or likely near-human, being were incredibly fascinating. Complex beyond measure, yes, but deeply intriguing and affecting the person on such a fundamental level, the only things I could think would come close to it was the transformation into a vampire or something similar. This spellwork couldn't just enhance a person's body and allow them to channel their magic into it directly to empower themself; it was much more. The process, at least as far as I could understand it from the information I had been given, could completely reshape a person's body, altering what the system would describe as their race.

With that reshaping came a variety of traits and affinities, though as was so often the case with the system, nothing was truly for free. Some of the traits, at least from what I could glean, would be negative, limiting the target's external magic, in addition to something quite similar to the vulnerability to certain mental magics I had put into my enchantment, only that this would likely make the target loyal to an organisation, namely the Temple of Hecate. Or rather, the temple where they had received the enchantment, essentially binding them as guard dogs to the temple.

A huge trade-off, but I had a feeling there'd be a lot of people who'd happily take the chance and become some sort of canine therianthrope, similar to enlisting in the military to escape poverty, which had been a chance many had taken before the change. This was just a little more binding and life-altering, quite literally.

In the meantime, while a large part of my mind was occupied with the process of decoding, dissecting and analysing the knowledge transferred to me by Lady Hecate, Lia and Luna had decided to meet with Jack, Murray and Jonas. Amusingly, they had decided to hold their meeting in the shrine, completely missing the fact that I was kneeling on the other side of the altar, hidden by the perpetual darkness, only broken up by the flickering lights we had installed. That I was wearing my cloak might have added to my concealment, but that was hardly my problem.

"So, you've got us here; now, why don't you explain why you deliberately excluded the two who study this sh… stuff?" Jack asked, sounding equally curious and annoyed, even as he deliberately censored his crude language, likely because Luna looked like a teenager. A part of me was curious how he would react if he knew she was, in actual chronological age, nothing but a child. Though, by now, I wasn't quite certain how one should measure age and maturity, did the time I spent on Mundus count as a single year, the time I had lived on Earth, or as two, the time I spent on Mundus and in the capsule? Similarly, should the time Luna spent since I had adopted her only count as about a year, or should the time she spent in Lady Hecate's realm be counted differently? If it should, at what rate? As far as I was aware, Lady Hecate didn't bother with a constant flow of time within Her realm; Her lessons took as long as they needed while within her realm and the span of a dream for the body outside of it.

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"We, that is, Jade and I, have been keeping the occasional eye on you and your group just to see if we need to change the lessons Daniel and Samantha received from us. We noticed that the more the two of them learn and the further they advance, the greater the difference between your abilities and theirs become," Lia explained, her voice calm and dispassionate. Maybe it was because of that calm voice, but none of the three men reacted negatively, even if she had effectively just told them that they weren't pulling their weight, even if she hadn't stated it outright.

"Indeed," Murray spoke, his voice equally placid, "But you would not mention that simply to amuse yourself. You most likely have a reason why you did so."

"Indeed," she echoed his apparently favourite word back at him, "We do have a way to attenuate the problem, but, as with most things, it is not something that can be done without cost," she told them, pausing for a moment, likely to try and find the right words to describe what we had been doing without it sounding utterly immoral.

"Well, not like we can pay you, there's no cash around," Jack snarked but I had a feeling he knew it wasn't money we were after, even if such a thing was currently issued.

"No, of course not," Luna spoke up for the first time since they had started to talk, "Money wouldn't be an issue anyway, no, the price you would have to pay is two-fold."

"The first part of it is the simple part," Lia took over again, "It's not so much a price you'd have to pay us but one the system requires for some reason. We have tried a few things, but regardless of what we did, if that particular price isn't paid, the process we came up with doesn't work." I could almost hear Lia shrug, even if I couldn't see her due to my closed eyes.

"It annoys mother something feirce, she knows why the price was initially necessary, she understands how the necessity could be changed but if she does, the process turns out wrong, and often times in fairly troublesome ways," Lia explained, sounding both amused and helpless at the same time.

I knew which price she meant; the pain caused by the procedure was that price. After we noticed that the bodies seemed to try and reach some sort of ideal state, we tried to see if that would work to undo the problems we'd face if we did the procedure on an unconscious person. As it turned out, it didn't work. For some unfathomable reason, that regeneration towards an ideal state could only occur if the patient underwent the procedure while conscious or unable to feel pain. One of the animals we had tried it out on had fallen unconscious from the pain, and that, too, hadn't worked, with a similar effect if we had numbed the pain after we started our work. Thus, we decided the pain was some sort of price demanded by the system and left it at that, at least for now. Maybe Lady Hecate's information could shed some light on the issue.

"That first price is one of pain. The procedure we came up with is painful and we are unable to remove it, believe me, we have tried," Lia explained and I heard a soft curse from Jonas, quickly suppressed and silence reigned again.

"The second price is that you would be asked to defend any Shrines of Lady Hecate if you are nearby and a shrine of Her's is threatened. I have a feeling the Lady would encourage such behaviour with quests anyway, but that would be between you and Her," now it was Luna's turn to explain, and, again, silence followed in the wake of her words.

"That's all nice and dandy, but what is that thing you are offering?" Jack asked, his voice unchanged from earlier, curiosity and annoyance warring with each other. It made me wonder if he deliberately talked like that, maybe to conceal what he was truly feeling.

"True," Lia allowed, "What we came up with is essentially an enchantment on your person. It allows you to use your Astral Power at much greater efficiency than you currently can, but, in turn, you are limited to its internal applications. Basically, you can't cast spells and such, but you can use the Astral Power you have to boost your body, and you get a fairly decent regeneration-factor out of it," Lia explained, speaking quickly enough to keep the three from interrupting.

Moments later, after they had a second to think, they immediately bombarded her with questions, which Lia tried to answer to the best of her ability.

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