For now though there was no telling what the wily old bastard would attempt. Rather than strain myself over it I chose to just relax and live life one day at a time. I saw some changes from canon that my interference had caused during this time. The first was that when the dragon egg hatched Malfoy had no leverage after witnessing it. The dragon was technically Dumbledore's after all so there was no laws broken with it being there. This as a result led to the sending off of the dragon Welp simply not happening.-
Ron's brother Charlie never got a letter about it because there was no need for one to be sent. This further led to the Golden trio not getting detention and Harry never meeting Quirelmort in the forbidden forest or Firenze the centaur. Oddly however the trio did learn about the attack on the unicorn and what it signified and why one might do it. Hagrid spilled that particular set of beans which was quite suspicious in my opinion. It felt weird that he'd mention something like that to a bunch of first years.-
Not out of character exactly as Hagrid was terrible at keeping his thoughts to himself when he trusted you even a little, or was drunk. Still there was a weirdness to it that I couldn't quite put my finger on and made me suspicious that Dumbledore had manipulated things a little. The fact a puzzle piece that the trio would have not have gotten because of my interference had still slotted into place made me wonder if the theory that Dumbledore was manipulating things from the shadows was actually true. I chose to turn a blind eye to it for now since I clearly wasn't the one he was puppeting on his strings, Harry was.-
Time passed by normally after that and my next potential customer time was rapidly approaching. During this time a few things had happened. The first was that Auron had gotten me the first batch of trade goods. One peak black mage, one peak white mage and one peak summoner. He traded me a copy of their magical abilities and skills that I wasted no time at all adding to myself. Interestingly both the white magic and black magic abilities jumped up in level to four each the moment I got them. -
The reason for this was fairly simple, magical energy manipulation. Both magics worked through intense will and control over the casters magical energies. Both of these were coincidentally also key parts in the magic casting of my worlds magic system. Thanks to this I had the ability to cast the first and second rank spells of both types of magic. For example from black magic I could cast both the "fire" and "fira" spells. For white magic the "cure" and "cura" spells were available to me. Summoning magic on the otherhand was DRASTICALLY different in how it worked.-
Frankly the differences were so great it was hard reconciling the fact that the same civilization created both. While white and black magics were actually VERY structured and had a solid easy to follow progression path summoning was almost entirely freeform. The only limits were exactly four in number. The first was that all summoning required a medium to do, typically in the form of a Fayth. The second was that the strength of the summoning was directly proportional to the skill and strength of the one doing the summoning. The third was that all summons had clear limits. -
This was usually the form of the summon but could also be in the shape of unique abilities being locked behind certain mechanics or even the size and complexity being limited. The best example of this was probably the summoning of the city state of Zanarkand that remained static. No progress was made there, no new inventions, no population boom, absolute stagnation. The final limitation was that all summonings required energy to work. Typically it came from the summoner but as Yu Yevon proved you could take it from other sources as well, in that particular case souls.-
That was it, those were the only limits the magic system had. To put it bluntly it was effectively infinite in what it could accomplish so long as you followed those rules. Once I fully absorbed the skill stones for these magics I immediately began to consider how best to use them. For white and black magic it was a matter of practice but for summoning more thought was needed. Beyond Auron coming through on his first payment Guts had dropped off another offering on his side that was a doozy. Dozens of behelits, apostle souls and hundreds of thousands of astral creature souls. The sheer amount of parts he sent over forced me to burn through a chunk of my system coins to expand my inventory to accommodate it all. -
It was a ridiculous amount of stuff but I wasn't terribly surprised. The combination of things I had given Guts was more than capable of turning him into a monster capable of slaughtering all but the most powerful of beings in his world. Whatever I spent on expanding my inventory I got back two fold over from the sheer amount he sent me. I did tell him to stop with the parts though and focus on the souls and behelits from now on. I now had a use for them after all, fuel for the summoning.-
The question became WHAT to summon? I considered creating a Sin all my own given it's extreme power capable of scarring a planet so greatly it was clearly visible from space. That idea was quickly dropped though as I saw no point in that. My own power would reach that limit and exceed it eventually anyways. Finally I settled on an idea, not a creature but a place.