Magic Skills of the DungeonVerse

There is more to magic than casting spells. Make no mistake, the casting of spells is pretty much the point, but there are other magic-using skills that aren't throwing fireballs, summoning monsters, and hitting slime-girls with that wink wink nudge nudge charm spell.

1. Reliquary Process

Also known as the Looting Power, the Reliquary Process is a magic skill set based around rendering defeated monsters (AKA essence using foes with cores). There are three ways to loot a monstrous corpse: general looting, extraction, and the reliquary process. General looting is pretty much just mugging a corpse for what it has in it's pockets, and in the case of dungeon mobs, that's generally not a lot. Demihuman mobs have weapons, armor, and the like, but that's usually more important for noobs in the tunnels, or when a legendary boss-raid level foe is dropped. The Extraction method is the non-magical technique of cutting a monster up for it its potentially valuable parts. This is typically spell components, hides for leather, meat for curing, organs and blood for spell components. There is nothing wrong with this, but it is messy, requires sharp tools, containers for the monster guts and gore, and a strong stomach. Most people today wouldn't know how to clean a chicken, let alone gut and break down a manticore for its useful parts. 

The Reliquary Process is a magic skill that has to be learned by magic users (or cultivators in the case of the typical LitRPG/Cultivator/Isekai genre). It allows a practitioner to automagically render a monster down into useful items. There are several factors, the most important being the skillset of the cultivator. A monster with an essence core can literally have ingots of valuable metal and coins drawn from it's remains, but it requires the magic user to know how to work metal and make coins. With no supporting skills, the raw MAGIC DO AS YOU WILL is going to rock along at a 2% chance of hitting that sweet loot. Apprentice skill users can bump that to a 15- 20% chance. Grand Masters in a craft can get a 100% drop rate and much higher chances of rare and epic drops. 

Can multiple magic users cooperate on a reliquary ritual? You bet your sweet mimic treasure chest they can. Cooperation pools skills, reduces difficulties, and increases the loot recovered in this method. A party with a metal worker, gem cutter, leather worker, scribe, and a butcher could see a monster popped into several dozen ingots of appropriate dungeon metal, a jewel grade core and bonus core shards, prepped and ready to work cured leather, jars of ink and reagent containers, and packaged cured meats ready for travel. 

The Reliquary power, along with dungeon mining and exploration, are the cornerstones of the material economy of the DungeonVerse

2. Auspex

Not the best term for it, but Auspex is the magic skill of using one's magic potential, and associated ability to sense essence as a fundamental sensory organ. At the basic level this is nothing more than a hunch, gut feeling, or odd sensation as the according ability to really understand the flow of essence is very basic. Once a magic user becomes increasing refined in their power and ability, they have a greater sense of essence and its movement, and the things that mess with its movement. 

This surly comes across as abstract, and it is. We, modern mundane humans, have no essence, no sense of it. In the DungeonVerse, essence and magic are living things, and have taste, pressure, scent, sound, and perspective. Explaining auspex to the mundane is explaining a bird's sense of air and temperature in terms of flight to a fish. From the LitRPG and game side it is easy to hand wave away this power as the minimap, quest marker system, sneak, and the rest. That is not my intention. Instead, a novice magic user in a dungeon might notice an eddy in the flow of essence, and know that there is something coming. An intermediary essence manipulator will know that the thing coming is a large goblin, in the same way a meteorologist will see a hook echo or the signature for airborne debris on radar and know that's a twister on the ground. A master essence manipulator will know that the creature approaching them is a Goblin Rag-Picker (level 2) and has no gear or treasure of value to them.

Auspex specialists would read auras, function as if they had minimaps, essence detectors, and otherwise being the Sherlock Holmes of magical observation.

3. Aura-Manipulation

The counter to Auspex is Aura-Manipulation. Everything creates a shadow in the flow of essence, like a rock in a stream. Aura manipulation is the willful and deliberate shaping of the essence shadow cast by an essence user. 

Concealment - auras can be hidden to make the magic user invisible. Powerful magic users HAVE to learn this skill because otherwise their power is uncontrolled and harmful to others. Dragons do NOT have aura concealment, which is why they generate an aura of dread. Same with powerful undead and most monsters. An archmage with no aura control would be forced to live in isolation, or solely in the company of those he had dominated or magically controlled.

Domination - a powerful essence user can project their aura over others as a tool of intimidation or domination. A normal non-magic person facing a potent essence user will be as frightened of their aura power as if they were facing a monster of equivalent rank. Using the dragon from above, they absolutely project an absolutely massive aura. When that aura is focused down on a single target, well that's how venerated heroes freeze in their tracks, or entire battalions are paralyzed long enough to be blasted with wyrmfire.

Permeation - auras have distinct patterns and affinities, and an essence user can use their aura to permeate an object. This has as many possible functions as the imagination can concoct, but common examples are creating bonds of ownership, such as soul-bonding an item (it's really aura-bound, a soul-bound item would move from life to life as the owner died and was reborn). This can create bonds between people, apply aura affinities into or against an object (waterproofing something with water affinity, catching things on fire with fire affinity). An uncontrolled aura, and aura permeation are how essence users end up with witch walks or tells, so that even the non-magically aligned can identify them. This is a common way to track essence using monsters.

Suppression - This is the manipulation ability to control other people's auras. This is ... rude. Suppressing, manipulating, or controlling someone else's aura varies in level of offense from being a social faux pas to the R word. A person who has their aura suppressed or manipulated has been profoundly affected. The main use of this function is to interrupt a person from using their own essence and aura abilities, and is the magical equivalent of brute force. This is also the power an essence user uses to control monsters.

4. Spellcraft/Rituals

There are three kinds of basic magic: adept, sorcery, and ritual. Adept magic is the magic used by physical or social essence users, and it makes them faster, stronger, and more alluring. These are the magic warriors, bards, and mystic knights. The do not use spells. Sorcery is the flash and dazzle thunderbolts, fireballs, and summoned flying monkey warriors, simple enough. Rituals and spellcraft are the more traditional hermetic/wiccan magic use. This magic is most commonly seen on the very low end and the highest end of essence users. It is slow, deliberate, requires patience, material components, and lots of focus. For weak essence users, this is the only way they can cast spells, as they cannot hold and manipulate enough essence to shoot it from the hip. For powerful essence users, this is how they cast domes of protection over entire cities, rain fire and stone on entire castles, summon hosts of magical creatures, or banish divine level monsters into the void.

Spellcraft is the librarian/forensic knowledge of magic, and rituals is how to build those powers. For a cook, this is their ability to read and write cook books.

5. Calligraphy, Runes, and Sigils

This skill ties into the above spellcraft and rituals, because without writing things down, everyone is just screwing around. This is a different skill, though, because reading and writing magic is not the same thing as knowing the spells and rituals and all that vibe. This skill is required for writing magic scrolls, keeping grimoires (living books of magic), and creating the written components for the preservation of magical knowledge. 

This isn't penmanship, its functionally learning multiple languages, alphabets, and entire systems of non-spoken non-literary symbols, glyphs, runes, hieroglyphs, and the rest of that mess. Magic doesn't work because the words contain magic, magic works because the words themselves are how the spells and essence are shaped and for that to work, the caster must be literate in the language the spells are written in, and in the language they might want to write them down in. Magic is NOT the common trade language.

This skill is required for essence users with the reliquary skill to craft magic scrolls and magic books from slain monsters. This is a powerful ability because this is a method for essence users to acquire the innate spell-like abilities of monsters as spells them can use themselves, or for their power to convert a normal monster attribute or ability into a magic spell or skill.

6. Magic Crafting

This is a weird one, and it's a very common secondary skill.

To make a monster drop magic armor, the essence user has to have the reliquary skill. Then, they have to have the foundational knowledge of how leather armor is made. THEN, they have to know how to use essence to make leather armor. It's time and focus consuming to learn how to turn slaughtered chimera into boots, belts, and purses.

This isn't really complicated, its an XP sink to force heroes into becoming specialists.

An essence user can get astounding loot drops from monsters, but not before investing time and energy into the appropriate skills to get what they want. Then, from there, they can profitize their looting ability.

7. Cultivation

Traditional Dungeons and Dragons has magic users memorize spells and rest. In the realm of LitRPGs and cultivation lit, this is the most basic and slowest way to recover essence. Over the course of a cultivator's lifetime they learn how to turn their own body into an essence sink and refinery, breathing in the natural essence of the world around them and condensing it down into increasingly dense and pure essence. This allows advanced cultivators to hold vast amounts of essence, rapidly recover from injury, attain immortality, and given enough time and space, godlike power. 

That's the practice, but the skill of cultivation is learning how labyrinths are designed, the function of mandalas, and other pattern techniques that allow the cultivator to recreate those patterns within their body and soul. Magic users who don't pursue this field of study are forced to use essence storage devices, learn high efficiency low essence use spells, and deal with the fact that over time their ability to handle essence degrades as they become polluted with the material dross/residue of the essence they've used over their lifetime.