So he settled on a spell that would, as per the description in the books, allow him to be protected from harm, and considering his current situation, it seems like the perfect test run.
It involved drawing Athena's sacred symbols on a piece of parchment, or in a modern sense, paper, those being the owl, helmet, and shield.
Afterwards, the book directed him to get some olive oil and a small figurine of Athena, and while directed him to chant a prayer to asking for protectection from harm.
You would anoint the small statue with olive oil and cover the statue with a piece of cloth.
Then every day, you would offer Athena an offering of honey by dripping it into a fireplace, which their mansion conveniently had.
Acquiring the materials needed was a breeze; in fact, his father already had a figurine of Athena in his possession, so doing the ritual was barely an issue.
Once the ritual was finished, he immediately felt a difference; he felt the world shifting, and a gray smoke visible only to Nick started covering the entire mansion.
To his prescience, he saw an invisible veil drawn over his entire mansion.
When he used prescience to investigate, to his surprise, the answer was crystal clear; instead of muted, it simply said "Protection from harm to all who live in this place".
When he tried finding out the limits using his prescience ability, all he got was muted static; however, through repeated trial and error by asking questions like can it protect against mortal harms and escalating it step by step until his ability started to get muted.
Through this process, he managed to get a rough estimate of this protection. It could roughly protect against danger up to the point of a monster such as the minotaur.
This outcome greatly surprised Nick, as he was barely hoping for protection against mortals, as the only offering he gave was of olive oil and honey, but he guessed that praying to your own mother does have some perks.
When he tested how this ritual actually provided the protection, it was quite the sight to see. He tested how it worked by trying to injure his owl's wing with a knife.
However, whenever he actually wanted to do it, he would get blocked by a gray, smoke-like barrier.
Once this ritual was done and its effectiveness verified, Nicholas tried many other similar rituals.
Such as the divination ritual, also geared towards Athena, which allowed him to predict anything he wanted, and he tested it by asking where the nearest person with a mole right below their right eye was without using his powers.
After doing the ritual, he immediately received a vision of a street and the street number of the house. He then immediately verified it by using his prescience, and sure enough, it seemed to be correct.
In there, he found a blond woman with a mole right beneath the eye he specified.
Once he verified that praying to Athena was extremely effective, he immediately wanted to check the effectiveness of rituals calling upon the powers of other gods.
His next ritual to test on his list was a ritual to Apollo; he figured he should be first on his list as one of the gods that could be described as "friendly" to Athena, or as friendly as the Gods could be.
So Nick figured that if he tried to invoke Apollos' name in a ritual, he would get some sort of effect, if only to satisfy his vanity at being worshipped.
His next ritual was decided then, a minor ritual of healing dedicated to Apollo.
It was about three days later, after discreetly acquiring the items he needed, that he acted. Nick woke up right before the sun rose at dawn and went to the back garden of their mansion with a knife. He made a small cut on his hand before starting the ritual to demonstrate the effectiveness.
He wore a laurel crown (Which he had to convince his nanny to buy and then weave together himself) while also burning laurel as an offering.
Nicholas chanted the spell as the sun was rising and used a small mirror to redirect the new rays of the sun to the wound.
"Hail, Apollo the Golden, who drives out the pain of mortals; let your light descend as balm upon the stricken." He said in Ancient Greek, grimacing at the theatrics.
And as he finished speaking, a flash of light descended upon his wound, and in 10 seconds flat, it was healed as new.
"What the hell?!" Nicholas said, surprised at the effectiveness.
He hadn't expected the ritual to be so effective, after all, his mother didn't have any special connection to Apollo, and his offering for healing truly wasn't anything too special.
He was truly confused, as if such a minor ritual truly was this effective for everyone. Why would we even need hospitals?
Why would the mortals in this world ever stop worshipping the Olympian Gods?
He knew the Mist would conceal or disguise magical phenomena from the mortal eyes, but even still, if it was truly this effective, they would still notice the effects, if not the reasons.
Unless it was something special about him? Did being a Demigod grant a boost to all Magic? Or was Apollo being especially generous for no real reason?
To test this hypothesis, he wanted to try other minor rituals, this time completely unconnected to any God.
Specifically, magic using Norse runes, Runes were used in this type of magic to symbolize natural phenomena and were used to influence them.
It required an offering of the same symbolic nature as the natural phenomena in order to power the influence.
Thus, this should be able to tell him if it was the influence of Apollo that boosted the ritual significantly or if it was just his divine nature as a son of Athena that did it.
While he was doing all of this testing, his father started growing suspicious of his growing collection of strange items.
Nick was seriously starting to consider letting him into his ritual practices, since he needed more advanced offerings and materials for his magic.
However, he was wary of revealing his abilities to his father, as he knew that his prescience ability was an incredibly rare ability that none of the characters found in the original book had, and he was afraid that if any Gods found out, it would lead him straight into his "destiny".
So before he revealed anything about his abilities to his father, he first did a ritual at midnight dedicated to the Goddess of Magic Hecate. In this specific ritual, he was utilizing her domain over secrecy.
He was using a ritual that the Greek armies used when they didn't want to be spotted. It was performed with 3 candles representing the 3-faced Goddess with an offering of salt, requesting secrecy.
A similar phenomenon occurred with the mist gathering over his home once again, and once he saw that his home was warded against any spying and that his secrets were safe, he finally breathed a sigh of relief.
Now his home was practically a fortress warded against anything that would harm him.
Only now did he feel safe enough to finally have a talk with his father.