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1126 Words
“Find anything?”
Liz shook her head at the question but pointed to the rune circle on the floor.
“I don’t know runes as well as you but check that out. It looks like someone changed the structure of this one.”
Matt bent down and inspected the circle on the floor, and after studying it for a few minutes, disagreed.
“No. They didn’t change it. Or at least not really. They added the golem to the charging function.”
He could hear her eyes roll when Liz said, “That’s a change, though.”
Not wanting to argue the semantics of what constituted a change regarding a profession he already loathed, he continued with his analysis. “This formation looks like it’s more for adding mana into the potions that someone was making. A way to boost efficiency or whatnot.”
Liz dropped down next to him and bumped him with her leg. “Then write this down for me! I want it. These kinds of things are usually hidden, and are proprietary knowledge… Wait a minute, how do you know that that’s what this does?”
Pointing at the runes, Matt explained as he pointed. “That’s a gathering rune for ambient mana, and those are conduits that lead to a storage rune. They can only hold a small amount of mana, but they’re good for making sure that it doesn’t come in intermittent pulses. That one there is what injects the mana into the bottom of whatever the rune is paired to.”
Liz c****d her head and said, “It’s that simple? I thought it would do more.”
Matt shrugged and stood up. “No clue. That’s what this one does. Maybe I’m wrong with the particulars, but I’ve been studying runes along with my AI for a while now. Maybe the ones in the Empire do more, and this is just some rudimentary formation only a poor person would use. I don’t know too much about alchemy runes, so don’t take my word here as law. Maybe they’re adding a bit of something else that I haven’t thought of. That would make it a lot harder to figure out, and an even better reason to keep it secret. I just can’t be sure.”
Camilla and Malcolm were both searching the rest of the room during their conjecture, while Aster was preoccupied with sniffing at the bottles on a table.
Scanning the rest of the back room, the only thing that caught Matt’s attention was what looked like a conveyor belt in the corner of the room. Using his light, he found that the belt had friction runes spaced apart every few feet, but they climbed all the way from the floor.
Maybe they get fed half complete items from the floors below?
Unable to find anything else out, the group exited the alchemy shop, and returned to following Malcolm’s Talent, while making a quick detour at a weapons shop.
Matt needed a new shield, and Camilla could use one as well.
The weapons shop was much larger than the alchemy shop, and they found that a variety of weaponry had been crafted, hung on the walls, and laid out on tables.
Malcolm wandered around, and asked in wonder, “What is this place?”
Camilla slipped past him and hefted a small shield, while summoning her mace.
“I don’t know. But it’s good that we found this place. Matt…” she turned to him. “Can you show me how to use this thing at least somewhat decently in the next few hours? We could use some time to rest and regen mana anyway.”
Matt shrugged and posed his response as a sarcastic question. “Maybe put the shield in between you and the incoming weapon?”
At Camilla’s slight grin, he picked up a larger kite shield. The shield was clearly made for someone shorter than himself, but it was better than nothing.
“We can take a rest here. The door shuts, and I can throw some enchantments on anything we plan to use here.”
Camilla put her shield down and said, “Well, let’s go clear this place out. I don’t want to injure the shield early.”
“Injure? It’s not alive.”
Camilla ignored him, and moved to the weapons shop’s storeroom, hidden behind a long counter.
Matt considered the shield he had just picked up and decided to put it back.
I might as well use the old one for one final fight.
The two of them opened the back room but found nothing to attack.
Feeling slightly silly, they returned after checking the rest of the building and the smithy area.
They found Malcolm trying on a light armor set, while Liz was getting in a few practice swings with a hammer she had grabbed. It had a point on the reverse side that would come in handy for the golems that patrolled the pseudo city and its buildings.
Pulling out their tents, they set up camp for the night. While Liz tried her hand at cooking, Matt fiddled with a spare shield. He was only enchanting it with simple runes, but he hadn’t had much practice. Other than the training classes while staying with Travis and Keith, he could only rely on the few ideas that his AI had come up with while researching.
It wasn’t a thing that he enjoyed, but now the lack of experience was making him hesitate, on top of his displeasure with the craft as a whole. The best enchantments were built into the item’s structure while it was being created. Experienced crafters took up enchanting as a side job, just to ensure that they made the best weapons possible.
But it wasn’t the only way. Runes could be carved into the item’s spiritual structure after the crafting was done, but it meant that the runes would be weaker than the ones carved in the surface during the crafting process.
With that in mind, Matt had two choices. He could lightly trace out the runes and carve them into the gear that they chose, or he could instead use his mana to carve them directly into the item’s spirit.
The problem was, if he made small carvings into the items and they were damaged in combat, it would ruin the rune, and therefore the enchantment. But if he just went with the mana and spirit method, the runes would be weaker, and he would only be able to fit one rune reliably.
A proper crafter would incorporate the runic lines into the entire item and its spirit, and a good enchanter would be able to do nearly the same thing.
- Writer
