Now that I've caught up. We have Aethyric Vitae which represents a unique opportunity to develop a better means of controlled magical evolution. Humans mutate in the presence of magic. When that magic is Dhar the mutations are largely negative and self-destructive in nature. Yet humans will mutate in the presence of Ulgu too. When they do the mutations are related to Ulgu.
It is not a large jump to suspect that humans can mutate in the presence of Vitae. What we know of Vitae is that it changes in the presence of a strong enough magical influence. Thus the Vitae could act as a magnifier to the human trait to mutate. Unguided this could be quite dangerous and certainly something to be wary of.
The gilding of Gold magic is an example of a magical ritual to enact guided mutation of a human. It is entirely possible that Aethyric Vitae in some form would lower the danger involved in that ritual. Perhaps you soak it into the gold before performing the ritual for example.
Ulgu being the wind of confusion has a bunch of undesirable mutations, yet it is likely that with the aid of the right magical ritual a grey wizard could guide their own evolution in a beneficial manner. Likewise as this guided mutation process is a property of humans rather than wizards, it is reasonable to believe that a non-wizard could undergo such a process as well.
For example if we achieved the least interesting option in the possibility space: to create a ritual that reliably gave a human a known existing mutation of Ulgu such as the Mark of Ulgu, we might well have found a way to create artificial grey wizards. Turning a non-wizard into a wizard. We'd probably need to carefully vet and train the volunteers for such a process and it might necessitate the formation of a college branch devoted to it. It might even be wise to maintain a certain amount of distance and exclusivity to limit the intake to the truly committed but the benefits to the empire of an increase in the number of wizards would certainly be a boon.
That remains a less interesting option though than focusing on the shadow aspect of Ulgu to develop a guided mutation ritual that turns a human into a shadow being that can shrug off non-magical weapons and disappear into the shadows to invisibly stab enemies to death.
