Of course, Scorching Fireball had its drawbacks, its mana cost shot up to 40 points. Though for Li De, this wasn’t a problem at all. After all, his mana was about to surpass 900 points.
However, for low-level vampires, each person could at most cast it five or six times before running dry.
It was far from being able to match the long-duration casting capability of Small Fireball.
But if Scorching Fireball were used for dive-bombing attacks, the effect would be entirely different. The damage it inflicted would be more than ten times that of Large Fireball, and potentially even more terrifying than an all-out barrage of Explosive Fireballs, a Tier 3 Spell.
Its extremely high temperature was enough to suffocate any opponent except those born of fire elements.
All in all, Scorching Fireball lived up to the system's exceedingly high evaluation.
This spell could greatly enhance the vampires’ current offensive capabilities.
It avoided the dilemma during large-scale battles where other spells took too long to cast, while Small Fireball was simply too weak.
As for the second spell, Li De was also extremely satisfied.
Dragonscale Shield, this was a super-enhanced version of the Tier 2 spell Mage Shield.
After undergoing a revolutionary overhaul, it bore no resemblance to the original Mage Shield. It was a completely new spell.
Mage Shield, with 220 magic nodes, was a must-learn spell for all mages. Its popularity was on par with Mage Hand, because it was a vital life-saving spell for Intermediate Mages.
Once a caster reached Level 5, they would choose one from dozens of Tier 2 spells to learn.
And Mage Shield always took precedence over every other spell. Why? Because survival came first. How could the noble life of a mage not prioritize self-preservation before combat? That would be foolish.
Staying alive was the foundation of everything.
Under such a context, Mage Shield was highly favored. Many veterans who had grown from novices remained deeply attached to this spell. After countless Transcendent and even Legendary Mages studied it, it eventually developed into the stable model used today.
Just like Large Fireball, it had few magic nodes, was easy to learn, and performed reliably.
However, because of this, Li De always felt it lacked distinctive features, it was too generic.
Moreover, the defensive strength of Mage Shield was also worrisome. It fell far below the standard he required.
So Li De carried out a total transformation of the spell.
Except for several dozen immovable magic nodes, he rearranged the entire sequence of the remaining nodes, adding several hundred new ones, bringing the total to 550 nodes, the threshold of a Tier 2 Spell, just 50 nodes short of stepping into Tier 3 territory.
Drawing from his successes and failures with Large Fireball, he ultimately transformed the classic Mage Shield into a completely new spell, Dragonscale Shield.
The name was reminiscent of the dragonscale armor from ancient China, and the idea came from Crimson Moon’s analysis department combining the concept with fish scale armor. But if they had called it Fishscale Shield, it would've sounded way too cheap.
The Dragonscale Shield’s mana structure was no longer a simple flat-plane shield, but a series of small individual shields like scales. These small shields overlapped in sequence to form the curved surface of a dragon’s scales.
Li De tested it personally. The actual defense of Dragonscale Shield was several times greater than the original Mage Shield, even exceeding the system’s stated fivefold increase.
The most crucial part was, after casting, the shield’s defense could be continuously enhanced by pouring in additional mana.
This was the key difference between Dragonscale Shield and Mage Shield, and the part Li De was most proud of.
Mage Shield required 15 mana per cast. After casting, it would provide a shield lasting around two sun-hours, with a strength capable of withstanding a full-strength blow from a warrior of the same level. To maintain it for longer, each sun-hour required an additional 5 mana.
But Mage Shield's defense was fixed. No matter how much extra mana was input, it could only extend the duration, not increase defense.
Dragonscale Shield, however, was different. After forming, mana could still be poured in to continuously enhance its defense.
At maximum potential, it could reach twenty times the original Mage Shield’s defense.
Of course, fully powering the Dragonscale Shield to its limit had an absurd cost, consuming 50 mana per second. Even Li De, with nearly 900 mana, couldn’t maintain it for more than a few seconds.
But the pros far outweighed the cons. The ability to reinforce its defense through mana input made it an unparalleled defensive tool. As long as he had mana, even top-tier Level 15 combatants couldn’t break the shield with ease, despite its enhanced twentyfold strength.
Dragonscale Shield had undergone a fundamental transformation, drastically boosting Li De’s survivability.
If he paired it with Shadow Step, which he had learned from Emi, the chance of being one-shot would approach zero.
It was practically the ultimate life-saving technique.
When combined with the offensive power of Scorching Fireball, both his offense and defense had received unimaginable enhancements.
Li De was very satisfied with this. The month of triple-shift overtime by Crimson Moon’s analysis department, tirelessly processing data for him, had not been in vain.
Of course, the most critical part was still his own death-defying efforts.
Anyone else subjected to five or six thousand cases of mana backlash within a month without dying would be called a walking miracle.
That backlash occurred in the Mental Sea, the most fragile part of the mind.
And this wasn’t backlash from Tier 1 Spells, but from Tier 2 Spells with 200 or more magic nodes, easily ten times more severe than Tier 1 backlash.
It could be said these two modified spells were the result of Li De repeatedly courting death.
His reverence for magic was far less than that of the native residents of Glory. If it had been a native with the same conditions, they would never have dared to act as recklessly as he had. After all, each failed experiment risked turning into a vegetable, who could bear that?
Of course, the rewards he gained were just as satisfying.
Not only did he obtain two extremely powerful modified spells, but even just the 8000 points of precious experience left him thoroughly pleased.
Level: Mage Lv14 (14308 / 50000)