Hiding in a certain state unique to Astris, Mathias Calypses then looked down at Hua Tai Zhang Li’s laughing figure.

“Ha, ha, ha. Wonderful. Phew, now that’s out of the way. You of course get all the trinkets carried by the fallen daoist.” Zhang Li said

Dressed in a vermillion flower robe, the old elder stroked his magnificent white beard with a resounding chuckle, “Yes junior Zhang Li, this elder will collect his dues.” The white bearded elder said

Not soon after he said this he continued with a beckoning motion, causing all the shiny silver and gold artifacts on Mathias Calypses’ body double landed in the hand of this elder.

At that exact moment, Mathias thought that his beard was ugly.

With a smile, the Hua Tai elder and Zhang Li headed back to the interior of the clan house and Mathias Calypses followed suit in a hidden fashion, right behind them.

While walking secretly with his would-be assassins, Mathias started to examine everything this elder did to try and discern his level of sorcery. He can’t see through my hidden state. Mathias Calypses thought.

That made Mathias want to think that he definitely wasn't an Ascetic, Sage or Disciple. As for Evangelist or god, it wasn’t even in the question.

Due to the fact that Zhang Li called him elder, it can be suggested that he’s an Adept, like me. Although it’s completely possible that he’s a very experienced Initiate instead.

Mathias Calypses continued to follow them into the main house and didn’t encounter any problems with passing by the other clan members, which gave him certain hints about the power levels of the other cultivators within the clan, as well as the clan’s general power level.

He still didn’t wish to meet the clan head though. Mathias considered that it carried an unnecessary level of risk.

In the following days, he continued to tail the elder and other people in the clan he discerned as being at the Adept level.

He sometimes would take food from the baskets when people weren’t looking. He did this to cause a commotion. Mathias felt that if the clan members were in too much disorder that he could get away with far more without being noticed.

Eventually the elders called a meeting with the leader to discuss this event. Mathias himself still wouldn’t dare to show himself there out of fear of the clan leader’s possible discernment but he still had certain guesses on what they would discuss and implement.

Not soon after the meeting was adjourned, all the clansmen were ordered to stay in their rooms, This was obviously to see if any of them were the culprit of this chaos or none of them were.

This development was, of course, within the realm of one of Mathias Calypses’ guesses.

In accordance with his previous plan if they were to take this route, Mathias would stop moving anything or doing anything. He had already stockpiled food and water for this scenario.

Discovering that the chaos stopped as soon as the clans members couldn’t act, highlighted the notion that one of them was the causer. Mathias thought they really had two separate ways to go about this.

One, they would keep them locked up until they started to hate it. Using this as punishment to the whole group for one person’s actions. Thereby making them remember the punishment for causing chaos as to not do it again. In this case Mathias Calypses would periodically cause physical sickness for the most enraged prisoners until they all got really sick.

Two, they would periodically release individual clansmen to see when the chaos would be caused. In which case Mathias Calypses would frame everybody, using times where the elders weren’t looking to move certain objects and if the elders’ were looking he’d move nothing.

Not soon after Mathias realized they were going for the first option. He came upon this realization when nobody was being released.

They had set up aether sealing arrays around each individual room, as to prevent the clansmen from breaking stuff out of anger but they had inadvertently prevented Mathias Calypses from breaking into the rooms to make them sick.

Mathias thought this might happen but there wasn’t really anything he could do to prevent it. He could set up anti-aether sealing arrays, he knew how to perform such an array but arrays require constant aether input, causing him to lose more aether than he would gain.

This went against Mathias’ original purpose for doing all of this.

So the great Mathias Calypses decided to sit on his ass and do nothing, it wasn’t like he couldn’t deal with the arrays when they were set up.

So now he constantly thought of ways to bypass the array without alerting it or the people inside.

His hidden state would most likely come undone if he were to blatantly walk or teleport in.

Thinking about it for some more, Mathias came to a solution.

He identified the part of the array that would undo his hidden state and used the unique properties of Astris to hide it from the rest of the array so that it wouldn’t alert the elders of something being wrong.

Shortly after doing this Mathias sighed, Perfect. I’ll be done soon. He thought to himself.

He was getting anxious of wasting time here, worried that the Alchemists of Law would do something irreputable here as well and he’d be too late to stop it. He was very aware that he as an Adept could not stop a Sage or Evangelist directly, he just felt that as a survivor of that massacre he was somewhat entitled to at least do something about it happening in front of his eyes again.

Mathias walked up to the door of a room, knowing that physically opening this door was a bad idea, he instead opted to walk through it.

“Astris Temptus” Mathias muttered in his hidden state.

He reached his hand out and touched the door, phasing through it. This was a more common form of sorcery among Astris sorcerers.

All the 27 different branches of sorcery can for the most part create the exact same sorceries, disregarding certain exceptions. In their journey most sorcerers come to an age old question:

What is the point of the different branches of sorcery if at the end of the day, they all can accomplish relatively the same thing?

Mathias too, came to this question and if one asked him his answer would be, that question itself is flawed and are you really asking me what the point of a furnace is when you can just go to a volcano to cook your dinner?

The elders of the Hua Tai clan have never encountered an Astris sorcerer before and as such they didn’t have preparations against their more unique forms of sorcery.

The principles of Astris Temptus are quite simple, all it does is hide the sorcerer from certain laws of physical contact within the surrounding space, the prerequisite being there are no extra restrictions on hiding in the surrounding space and that the sorcerer in question is at least at the Adept stage.

Astris Initiates cannot perform sorceries regarding laws, one can only do that at the Adept stage. This is one of the many major differences between Adepts and Initiates. This rule is true for 22 out the 27 branches of sorcery.

Mathias was soon standing over an Initiate level cultivator huddled in the corner of his room, this was the clan member who was taking his isolation the hardest. Mathias suspected that he already had mental illnesses which were exacerbated by this containment.

He soon cast an incantation under his breath, one of the major incantations of all sorcerers, Energia Furari.

This incantation did not possess an elemental prefix, denoting that it could be used by any discipline.

Energia Furari literally translates to Energy Steal or Energy Theft, energy in this case meaning aether. It is the first sorcery cast by a sorcerer, one which enables them to use aether. In the world of cultivation it is called ‘The Demonic Path’ but Mathias Calypses himself has a saying he uses to describe it,

To experience the miracle, one must take it from others.

Energia Furari was a lethal sorcery, but Mathias knew that it was too early to be discovered so he had slightly altered the incantation by setting a time limit and making the extraction of life energy gradual. This is how he planned to create sickness.

He once told Hua Tai Zhang Li that a sorcerer cannot dual cast without a physical medium. This was true but also deceptive, a sorcerer can dual cast without a medium if they combine both spells into one spell. This action of course, puts higher strain of the structure of a sorcery and for an Initiate this might cause the structure to collapse completely but as an Adept level sorcerer, Mathias can comfortably fuse 3 spells into one using this method and if it’s something that doesn't need to be stable for a while such as an offensive sorcery like Astris Fulo, Mathias can fuse 5 spells. This is of course under the prerequisite that he is detonating the sorcery in less than 3 seconds after the sorcery is completed.

Mathias cast the modified Energia Furari on all 43 imprisoned clan members in the coming hours. All of them being at the Initiate stage since all the Adepts were clan elders. He, according to his aforementioned plan, started with the most mentally distraught members.

This was a pattern he had purposefully hidden for the elders’ to find. Mathias had hoped they, upon finding this pattern, would come under the assumption that this plague targeted the mind and would look in the mind of their juniors to help them rather than where they should have been looking. Significantly slowing the progress of helping their fellow clan members.

Sadly though, due to the stress of the situation or some other unknown internal factor, the upper echelons of the Hua Tai clan failed to recognize Mathias’ pattern trap. At this reality, Mathias could only sigh.

Overlooking all of the gathered sickly clan members in the clan garden attended by their Adept elders, a small smile painted his face.

He put both of his hands on the wooden balcony, Mathias had thought long and hard about this day.

The day the Hua Tai clan fell.

The hardest part about all of this was the Ascetic clan leader. Mathias had seen Ascetics and didn’t ever wish to fight one. Ascetics possess personal domains, the ability to take out the interior world inside their soul and project its influence outward.

This was not a real domain in the truest regards, it was like a shadow of one or a semi-domain. An Ascetic’s domain can not perform the miraculous feats shown by Julien Watson’s domain but it would still be extremely difficult to go against.

Which caused Mathias to seriously contemplate on how he could kill an Ascetic. He first realized that the Ascetic had to be alone or at least be unable to receive help from anyone or anything. This included the neutralization of all magical artifacts as well as the complete knowledge of their sorcery branch.

Mathias himself was too frightened to interact directly with the Ascetic for the fear of his hidden state being revealed.

While having ran away from Ascetics before he had never ever truly fought one. Sorcerers of a lower level should not hope to understand the level of power a higher level holds. It’s something close to a different set of logic and rules they have to follow. It’s completely incomprehensible to anyone who hasn’t reached that state.

But unlike most wild sorcerers, Mathias held a unique advantage in this department, he was once told about the average Ascetic’s powers by an Ascetic themselves. This meant that Mathias Calypses did somewhat understand the broad limits of an Ascetic’s powers.

That Ascetic told Mathias that there is only 3 things to take into consideration about an Ascetic’s powers,

One, the jump between Adept and Ascetic is quantifiably greater than the jump between Initiate and Adept.

Two, An Ascetic’s main new power is the domain. When fighting Ascetics don’t waste time and energy trying to not get caught in it because it is useless. If an Ascetic deploys their domain on a lesser sorcerer, they will be caught in it. The preparations the lesser sorcerer had made doesn't matter in this instance. So prepare knowing that you will be caught in it.

Three, An Ascetic’s domain takes an ungodly amount of aether. Their domain can only overwrite natural laws pertaining to their own sorcery branch. Making it extremely unadvisable to fight an Ascetic hailing from the same branch as you. The domain can also alter other natural laws that are just connected to their sorcery branch but cannot completely overwrite them.

Due to these handbook rules Mathias was supplied with he came to the conclusion that one cannot make a guidebook against all Ascetics, since their greatest power is their imagination and imagination is by its very nature, unlimited.

Mathias also didn’t truly believe in the validity of the second rule. Thinking that there are always preparations that can stop things even if they are ‘absolute’. This was a way of thinking that Mathias Calypses arrived at from fighting a large amount of sorcerers and stealing their aether, paving his way to adepthood.

Mathias, in his hidden state, pulled out a silver-inlaid moondial and tapped the center piece with his left pointer finger.

He had tied this moondial with the augmented Energia Furari he had cast of the junior members of the Hua Tai clan.

He had originally segmented the Energia Furari sorcery to only drain a little bit of aether and cause sickness in the clansmen but within that sorcery he had hidden a portion of the sorcery using the unique traits of Astris. It was through an identical manner that he had bypassed the anti-aether arrays in the young cultivator’s personal rooms.

This hidden portion was a complete Energia Furari sorcery that when activated hid the other parts of the sorcery that were originally active and using traits of space unique to Astris, instantly teleported all the aether in their soul to Mathias’ soul.

Mathias of course recognized the danger of having a direct connection to his soul which is why he had the connection to his soul in the hidden segment of the sorcery and then quickly fully destabilized the sorcerous formation the instant the aether was transferred, preventing any of the elders who were at the same level as Mathias from instantly discovering the connection to his soul and dealing massive damage to him.

Due to observations in the past week, Mathias didn’t truly consider the elders quick-witted enough to perform such an attack but after his experiences in his home dimension he really couldn’t underestimate anyone.

Mathias then sent a true body double he had been working on all this time outside the area of the clan.

The first stage of his plan was complete, he put the moondial back in his azure blue priestly Astris robes and smiled discreetly.

The bodies of the young cultivators then went pale in a blue ghostly fashion, falling apart into light blue dust.

The Adept elders then all jumped back in fear and apprehension before one of the elders who had a long white beard yelled a phrase denoting the sacrilege before him,

“Demonic techniques! Lock the perimeter!”