A small cloud formed in front of me as I let out a deep breath, thankful for the magic in my clothes for keeping me warm.

  I walked the snow-covered forest without leaving any marks in the snow. It’s been a couple of hours since I started looking for the genius loci, and I’ve covered less than a percent.

  “Haaah,” I sighed. This was stupid in the first place. Assuming my sensing range, converted to normal space dimensions, is roughly 20 meters, with my walking speed, it would take me upwards of 12 years to scan the entire island. The simple reason is I have no way to know whether a magically significant place exists here, since the center was empty, and more than that, I can’t be sure that a genius loci wouldn’t form in a place I’ve already looked, after the fact.

  “Ok, new pla...” I went quiet as something entered my senses, immediately after which I cranked my perception filter to the max and hid in the branches of a nearby tree.

  “And... Hey, you heard something?” A gruff voice asked, cutting off mid-conversation.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake, SHUT UP!” A smoother, feminine voice shouted over the other. “Do you see anyone else yapping a tenth of you? Even if there was anything, no one could hear it over all of your nonsense.” The woman, now in my line of sight, huffed, letting out a huge plume of steam as she walked ahead.

  The gruff-sounding guy stood frozen before looking back at the others. “Geez, if she didn’t want me to talk, she should’ve said something, right?” The other three, two men and one woman, just looked at him briefly and walked by without saying anything.

  The five, that I’d come to realize, were werewolves, made their way to a clearing devoid of trees, about a twenty-meter-wide circle. I followed them, wondering what they were doing as I did. I also noticed something else: even though all five were werewolves, only three of them were also wizards, making me realize that I’d never seen a mundane human turned werewolf.

  The two silent men started pouring a red liquid in a ten-meter-wide circle in the middle of the clearing that I just realized had only a thin layer of snow on it, as opposed to the meter-deep snow of the other places. Looks like if not for the snow, this would have been a very low hill. I guess someone had cleared the snow beforehand.

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  “Hey, are we sure this is pig’s blood? It smelled human,” the other, younger woman in the group asked, looking squeamish.

  “Yes,” the angry woman from before answered while looking over the two men now drawing symbols with the blood. “Don’t worry about the smell. The blood was magically treated, which is why it smells that way, but it’s definitely pig’s blood.”

  It was, in fact, not pig’s blood. I gotta say, it’s fascinating how acute something like the sense of smell or hearing can be for some creatures. I could never imagine myself detecting smells so acutely, as to dictate something's species through the smell of it's blood.

  But I could do so through their magical signature. Though I’m not sure why, all blood has a magical signature—or rather, all blood outside the body it originated from does.

  Wizard blood is different from mundane human blood, and that in turn is different from animal blood.

  I’ve come to understand all non-sapient animals have the same magical signature in their blood, but I don’t know if the same is true for non-sapient magical creatures, though logic dictates that they aren’t. I'm also not entirely sure about non animals, like insects, arachnids or the plethora of sea creatures, that do not fit nearly into the vertebrates subphylum.

  The blood they have is definitely human, specifically wizard blood, with some weird ancestry I’ve never come across before.

  As I was thinking, they completed the circle and started putting other miscellaneous objects like a tree branch and several herbs.

  After they were done, each of them stood around the circle at one point of the pentagram drawn in the blood circle, each holding a copy of the item that they had put in their respective points.

  After standing still for a while, they spoke a weird chant in a Native American tongue I’d never heard before, and the mana field started vibrating.

  “What’re these guys doing?” Huge waves started pulsing from the circle, giving me a slight seasick-like feeling. From their point of view, however, it must look like a sudden breeze.

  The feeling I got from this circle is like a heavy mix of Divination and spatial magic, and something else I’m not sure about, but it somehow resembled what I would assume Occlumency would feel like if it was an actual charm.

  “Ah.” As I looked at the fools standing in the middle of an intensifying wind, It all clicked. These idiots are summoning a fae.

  A strong whirlpool of wind picked up the surrounding snow, making a small freezing tornado with the ritual as its center.

  Just as I was thinking about blowing my cover to cast a fire charm, the winds disappeared as if they’d never existed in the first place. Even the snow that was picked up had returned to its previous undisturbed state.

  It was as if the ritual itself was a dream that never happened. That is, if we were to ignore the humanoid thing standing in the center of the circle... smiling.