Robert sat in the liminal void, cycling through his tempering techniques for two months. In the meantime, iRobert lived another man's life for a year. He experimented the joy of getting his Prime Vestige.

"Gaze into the Netherecho and witness the magic of the world," the orb with a face said.

It was different from Robert's fairy eyes. He couldn't see the Netherecho all the time without projecting himself there and risking soul damage if an hostile construct attacked him. But the crafter couldn't see through deceptions.

A company recruited the man. They taught him the basics and he lived for his job. But his job loved him more. And he felt marveled at all the wisps, vestiges, and remnants. It was a world of wonder and fantasy.

Over time, he became a slave in all but title. His usefulness to the company was so great they trapped him with around the clock surveillance. His family couldn't handle the scrutiny and pressure. They left him. The magical creatures no longer filled him with amazement.

Now, the man hated his job. He worked, worked, then slept. Reaching his second star after six years of crafting wasn't a reason to celebrate. It just meant more work.

He created wonders. At his deft hands and meticulous eyes, miracles happened.

But his movements were mechanical. The pieces he crafted were soulless. The creatures from beyond sneered at him they mocked and jeered and distracted him.

He committed mistakes. His bosses placed the burden of the lost materials on him. He owed six lifetimes of wages to the company.

They moved him to a lavish house where they could watch his every move. He couldn't sleep. The creatures of the NETHERECHO, THEY HATED HIM.

iRobert stopped reliving the memories. In the liminal void, Robert tempered the Jade mind.

*

*

At the Academy, Robert made use of the gym’s crafting stations. He bought a crate of base crystals and was engraving small storage accessories for the Taulusian Resistance. They could wear rings on their tails but needed a clasp to keep the ring from sliding off, like the one Freddy wore.

The best type of accessory for their canine bodies was a collar. It wasn't as hard to put on, didn't need body piercings, and had plenty of space for the runes.

Over five days, Robert made a hundred storage devices. Instead of shaping them like dog collars, he made torques. It was easier to put on and take out than a collar clasp with a pin. They just needed to twist the flexible metal and push.

He wanted to make them another item but needed Noah's help. He scheduled a meeting for the next day.

"The process to make a spellcasting wand is very similar to writing Ether scrolls. Both hold the runic pattern of the spell but one writes the stage zero shell on the user's soul, while the other casts the spell using the caster's essence. Now, the issue with wands is that the user doesn't have the correct affinity."

"Yes, an affinity converter. I'm having trouble linking the converter output to the spellcasting sequence."

The mask's floating, cursed eye winked. "Let me guess. The wands cast the spell the first time, but then they jam on the second casting, or perform poorly."

"Yes, exactly."

"And why do you think that happens?"

Again, with the cryptic questions.

"Let me give you a hint. If the wand were an Arch casting the spell over and over, what would force their performance to degrade?"

Robert thought about it but the answer came from the imprint. Dross essence. The unusable residue that accumulates in the body. The soul eventually eliminated this dross essence but the wand had no soul.

The knowledge he stole from the crafters at the Shayver Group didn't contain that tidbit as wands weren't too popular. Their essence-to-effect ratio was awful. Normal Archs had to pace their essence usage because it had to last for a full day of work.

He explained his finding to the teacher. Now that he knew what to search for, his imprint located a book with the instructions to clear dross essence from devices. He missed it because he had searched for books on crafting wands. The knowledge was criminally missing. In this cutthroat world, people hoarded such knowledge like a dragon's gold hoard.

"What you need to do is to connect the converter to both sides of the runic script. Then, you add an exhaust and switch near the main input. When the user casts, the wand sends essence normally causing the effect. The converter holds a fraction of it back and sends it down the reverse path once the spell ends. This raw essence pushes the dross out the exhaust, clearing the wand for the next spell."

They then built a mock prototype with enlarged essence circuits as a proof of concept.

"Thanks, I think I can handle the production model now, Noah."

Robert used the remaining days until their return to Taulusia making Mage Hand wands shaped like leather bones. The idea was that the Taulusian would hold it comfortably in their mouths and cast the telekinetic Force cantrip to perform fine manipulation on objects.

Was he worried the Taulusians would chew the enchanted artifacts? No. He was as worried of that happening as he was worried Amanda would suddenly pick fleas on his head and eat them.

*

*

Robert stood in the gym workshop. Before him, the materials for two teleportation platforms. Anda didn't specify but he knew what kind of platform he wanted to make.

The platforms could be paired, and they would send people between them. There were easy to make and portable. So long they were within range and on the same realm.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

Then, the targeted location platform. The target could be a fixed set of coordinates, always sending people to the set location. The programmable version was more complex but was, well, programmable.

Finally, the master-slave platforms. The master platform was bulky and complex. The slaves needed to link to a master. The slave only linked to the master but a master could have several slaves. But the master used at least double the materials than a normal platform, as it had both outgoing and incoming sides.

Then they had the incoming collision problem. If the incoming pad were occupied when someone used one of the slaves to send more, the results were… to put it lightly, one would wish they only had their DNA scrambled with a fly.

Solutions to this problem involved making one incoming pad for each slave. Current understanding considered that approach a waste of materials. Others had the master shutdown if the incoming pad was occupied. Then the slave had to lock on the master signal to greenlight the teleportation.

Robert knew this first pair was to grant access to the Minotaur Dungeon.

He asked iRobert to open their copy of the schematics manual on the proper page. Not needing to steal the original or taking away their prized crafter would delay their reaction. They didn't get the contract for the platforms and Robert had sourced the materials from the ATA.

They could claim the thieves auctioned the materials but good luck getting the ATA to reveal who did what.

He looked at the huge slab of base crystal. A disk seven inches thick and six feet wide. Teleportation used a massive amount of Ether. The number of runes was also staggering. As many runes as twenty spatial rings. Which was a good analogy since both relied on the Space affinity.

He shifted into his fairy form and hovered over the crystal. He saw the Ether flowing inside of it, felt for the imperfections that would make the inscription difficult. He had a copy of the crystal made in his mind palace, then used his primary talent to give iRobert all the time he needed to simulate the inscription. He cycled his Life tempering techniques in the meanwhile.

When he had the perfect template, he started. Laying on the crystal, with his tiny engraving tool, Fairy-Robert followed the blueprint his imprint had printed and started carving.

Base crystal came in a range of purity and quality. Without the ability to see Ether, it was almost impossible to tell a good crystal from a crap one.

Several attempts at creating a mass-engraving device were made but they needed uniform and flawless crystals.

Even two hundred years after the Rift Cataclysm, enchanting was still an artisan's job. The Ethertech industrial revolution was still in the future.

But Robert had this crystal figured out. Working in his fairy form gave him a huge advantage. His tiny range of movement made inscribing five times more precise at the expense of time. But that was a tradeoff any enchanter would make any day of the year.

And yet, when he was halfway through the inscriptions, the crystal cracked with a might snap and split in half.

Noah and Camille rushed into the room. The young woman shrieked and Noah just shook his head.

That slab of crystal cost Robert eight hundred thousand dollars. In truth, he only paid the ATA auction fees because he got his money back as the seller. But he invoiced his junior enterprise the full price.

"What a waste," Noah lamented. Robert saw a droopy phantasmal eye, surrounded by the wicked cursed energy.

If only he could… Robert had an idea, a crazy one. He surrounded the crystal with Time essence, then pushed it backwards. The crack sounded in reverse, like someone had smashed the crystal pieces against each other. The crack had vanished. Robert then released the time essence.

The crystal shattered, more violently than before. It was as if several probable futures where it had cracked in diverse ways happened all at once.

It wasn't what he wanted but still an interesting effect. He named the new spell "Temporal Catastrophe".

Robert noticed the mask's eye glaring at him with intense attention. Noah was grinning behind the mask.

"Thanks for the new spell," Noah said.

Shocked, Robert stared for a while, then laughed. He finally figured out how Noah could cast spells of a dozen different elements, but all of them were disasters. He had to witness the disaster, study it, then copy it with his magic. It remained to be seen if it was his talent or the mask's power. But the difference was moot. Both were part of his soul.

Robert stared at the shattered crystal and tried the stunt again. This time, it required four times the essence. He wrapped the shards in a temporal bubble, then reversed time to a moment the disk was whole. A massive temporal twist put pressure on his essence and demanded more from his void heart. The crystal became blurred to outside observers because of the many superimposed parallel timelines and the difference in time frames.

Then, instead of releasing it like before, Robert carefully brought it back forward, easing the temporal distortion and guiding the crystal down a probable future in which it didn't suffer any damage. This one was also hard and taxing because the things that happened wanted to happen again. But iRobert joined in the effort, using Foresight to guide his essence. Finally, the temporal dilation of the crystal matched that of the present. Robert let his essence dissipate slowly, revealing a perfect crystal disk.

He used over three hundred points of essence for this attempt alone, putting this feat square in the four-star exclusive club. Anyone with a smaller essence pool than that wouldn't manage to hold onto the essence and would fail catastrophically.

He named the new spell, "Temporal Restoration."

His mind was dizzy and his perception of the outside world swam back and forth, speeding up and slowing down. Robert's punch above his weight class caused severe essence poisoning. Anyone with essence channels weaker than him would be dead on the spot.

He used his main talent. In the liminal void, body functions stopped. He couldn't die of shock there. Robert started to meditate, or at least tried.

iRobert cast purge essence from the mind palace, spreading Void essence through his channels, obliterating the dross Time essence, and pushing the remainder down his Void Veins and out of his system. A few minutes later, he felt better but still had to use lavi flows and reconstruction to recover from the damage. It still took a couple of days.

But when he returned, he was in perfect shape.

"I can't fuckin' believe it!" Caroline cursed, for the first time Robert remembered.

"That was…" Noah drew a deep muffled breath and exhaled. "Impressive. Most impressive."

Then the professor snapped his fingers. "Robert, could you fetch us a small monster? Put it in a coma."

"Okay."

Robert went to the Mollusk realm and kidnapped a slug. It was not really a monster but his degrading morals and the fact it was about to strike a human pushed those considerations to the back burner. He dragged it through the void and, two minutes after departing, returned.

"What do you want it for?" Robert asked Noah.

"Make a small cut and try that new spell of yours on it."

Robert followed the instructions. He knew that a living being would resist foreign essence but didn't expect such a weak mortal to resist this much. He kept pushing and manipulating the essence with the aid of the new stage zero spell but ended up using more than four hundred points of essence.

The end result was a healthy monster. Mortal. Robert couldn't see a star inside the creature. For the Mollusks, humanity was their Endless Hive. Too bad nobody thought they were cute enough to rescue them. Such was the cruelty of aesthetics.

"Congratulations," Noah said. "You just found a way to reverse damage. That's Shiba Tatsuya levels of badass, but still not instantaneous. Regardless. Well done. When can you cast this spell again?"

"In a few minutes. I need to recharge the tank," Robert answered.

Camille choked on a grunt and coughed.

Robert meditated next to the comatose slug, and then entered the liminal void for eight hours. He slept and woke up fully recovered. At least the Void Heart reservoir, because his stars didn't recover shit. They never did, when in the liminal void.

"Okay, I'm good to go."

"Hold the slug's head in place," Noah said. "I'm going to attack it, then Caroline will count ten seconds and use your spell."

Robert knelt next to the slug's head. Noah conjured his rapier from his ring and slashed the slug's head off in a single motion. "Count!"

Caroline shrieked, then started counting. On the ten, Robert used his spell again. The slug was dead. He felt no resistance. Robert reversed time, bonding the head back and seeing the slug's lifeforce returning. Then, he brought it back to the present the same way, down a timeline where Noah hadn't slashed its head off.

Even though he was the one who did it, Robert couldn't help but be shocked. In his excitement, he shouted.

"It's alive! It's alive! It's alive!"