Robert massaged his temples. He couldn't believe people were this naive. Or was this a test?
The shard on Robert's hand was worth three hundred thousand dollars. A one-star artificial Core satellite usually sold for around none to ten million. A good crafter could make one satellite out of every twenty tries. Six million in materials, three to four million as gross profit. This crystal could also be combined and crushed together with a Prime Vestige to create the highly illegal drug Phillip Shayver used to cheat during the tournament. Robert wouldn't touch that stuff with a hundred-foot pole.
The client had included sixty shards with his request, eighteen million dollars worth of crystallized Ether. They expected three one-star Cores, the common crafting ratio. A scammer would pocket the shards and report they all failed. After all, Robert never crafted a single artificial satellite Core. But this was probably bait. They wanted him to report the failure and then sell the shards.
He knew how to make them. Both master enchanters whose memories he absorbed made satellites in the past. But even Pappardelle still failed to make them most of the time.
And Robert had one advantage they didn't.
With that in mind, he used his secondary talent to start the process. Fairy-Robert held the engraver in his tiny hand and started to meticulously carve the shard. The process was similar to a star ignition. He needed to overcharge the Tzekenite shard and force it to go supernova inside a containment crystal. The inscriptions had to keep the energy from escaping en masse, causing an explosion.
As he cut into the crystal, the shavings dissolved into pure Ether, creating an inebriating puff of raw Ether. Robert reeled and stopped, his mind spiking as he absorbed some of the raw Ether directly.
While the main body engraved the runes, iRobert stood ready to cast a spell. Then it happened. One slip of the hand and the pure Ether the shard was made of started a chain reaction. Time essence wrapped around the crystal and stopped the explosion as it happened. Then, time rewound and the shard went back to normal. iRobert slowly brought it down a timeline where Robert stopped right before making the mistake and stopped to study what went wrong.
He had two sets of memories crafting these Cores, and they used different techniques. He tried to follow one but then slipped onto the other without noticing. iRobert started to simulate the Core engraving phase in the Intellect Fortress workshop, making one with one method and another with the other.
Bam. Two hundred and fifteen points of essence later, he had his crystal back and stable.
Now that his Void Heart was developed to the end of stage 3, it could hold 975 points of essence. Robert had twice as much essence available as Titania did. He had to work on the Void Gates of Nirvana now. Halfway through stage 1, the ominous gates were generating only 420 points every eight hours. Almost a point per minute but it took more than sixteen hours to fill his Void Heart. He neglected its development big-time. But it was a calculated trade-off. It took Robert less than 10 minutes in the real world to gain sixteen hours in the liminal void. He expected to go back to the eight-hour refill by the time the gates reached the end of stage 3. And if it didn't, it wasn't too big of a deal.
He made sure everything was in its place and started to engrave the runes again. He went slowly, using the finished product in the Mind Palace as a reference.
Robert stared at the Tzekenite shard, at the end of step one. Now, the hardest one. The artificial Core needed a star-like shape. That required some sculpting. In the Mind Palace, iRobert painstakingly chiseled at the shard to create the points. It was at this stage he had to choose what grade of Core he wanted to make. He went for the easiest, the one-star version.
But the simulation in the Mind Palace had a flaw. It was all make-believe and things wouldn't go wrong unless Robert knew how and why it would go wrong. Fortunately, he had memories from thousands of times the two craftsmen had failed to make an artificial Core. It still didn't give Robert the reassurance it would work the same in the real world. At best, it was shadowboxing.
After he was sure he knew what to do without mixing up the techniques and avoiding the most egregious mistakes he could make, Robert's chisel started to chip the crystal shard. The pieces that came off evaporated into Ether immediately. Robert found sculpting calming if he wasn't working on an Ether bomb.
He came to a complicated part. Casting Haste and Thought Acceleration on himself, Robert kept working slowly, which was at the right pace due to his accelerated time frame. But one slip of his chisel in a hardened part of the crystal that didn't match the texture around it and everything came crashing down. The crack split the crystal in half. Serendipity advanced by a point. As it always did whenever Robert experienced bad luck.
Robert wrapped the cracked crystal in Time essence and froze it. He pushed it back five seconds and then, when he was about to bring it back to the present, he thought. If he could choose the path it would take moving forward from the past, why couldn't he pick the timeline where he successfully crafted the Core? He tried and it took more concentration and Time essence than he liked but he had plenty of both.
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His Void Heart almost emptied, though. The stunt cost him nearly eight hundred points of essence. Impossible if not for the synergy of his affinities.
He coughed blood as his vision swam. Now, Robert had to pay the price for abusing his magic. His body was burning, getting pushed in both directions through time. With the body almost unconscious, iRobert quickly used his main talent. There, he sat to meditate and purge the dross essence out of his being.
When his body stabilized, Robert finished meditating to recover his essence and tempered. He noticed that Chronal Shear had improved by quite a lot. The tempering involved doing exactly what the dross Time essence was doing to him but in a more controlled way. He suspected that the tempering technique consumed a good chunk of the rampaging and depleted essence, protecting him from the backlash.
Restored, he returned from the liminal void after working on Chronal Shear to reinforce the defense it provided.
But the end result spoke for itself. He moved the shimmering star to the containment box and locked it.
He had cheated. But the satellite Core was there, shining in its box.
*
*
While Robert played with his puffblooms to relax for a while, iRobert repeated the mistake that caused the shard to crack a hundred times in the Mind Palace. The imprint cross-referenced it with similar cases from Pappardelle and the jailed craftsman, trying to find the telltale signs of such an impending catastrophe. When iRobert finished processing the data, Robert dismissed Cotton and Coal to go and fetch some essence he threw around and returned to the workshop.
The next shard had no fault lines he could see. He used his engraver to write the runes, thinking of the other method to compare both. Pappardelle's memories taught him most of the runic language used on these inscriptions. He made no mistakes that required reversing time in the engraving stage. When it came to chiseling the shard in the shape of a star, however, he broke off one tip. Serendipity advanced.
Robert cast his spell and fixed his mistake, stopping at the point where he failed and continuing from there. He found a third complexity factor in the Temporal Restoration spell: The probability of the chosen path happening. When he cheated to bring about the finished Core, it cost such an enormous amount of essence because he did the equivalent of threading a cotton strand through a dozen needles in the middle of a busy market. Blindfolded during a rainstorm.
While he carved the crystal, iRobert worked to cleanse his system of the dross Time essence. Temporal Restoration was close to reaching the end of stage 1. The spell was so expensive it jumped by leaps and bounds every time he used it.
The last chip came off and the star was perfectly shaped. Another one-star Artificial Satellite Core and this one was almost a complete success. Robert put it in the containment box before it exploded in the wild. The Ether inside ignited and the star-shaped Core shone inside the box. The only time it would ever open again was when someone took it into their soul.
Robert crafted another two Cores, using his time-reversing spell every time. It couldn't be helped. These Tzekenite crystals were too finicky and delicate.
Looking at the remaining shards, he moved them to his spatial storage. He was worn out by the excessive essence use. Even if he made more Cores, he couldn't sell or use them. It's not this early.
He stowed everything he used and tidied up the workshop. Then he went back to Earth.
*
*
The Academy had a logistics division that helped the junior enterprises. Robert could place orders and send packages through them. At first, he was surprised but then it became obvious. This was the place for rich kids. Rich kids who could visit the ATA and shop for Prime Vestiges like they were in a garage sale. He doubted they would even wrap their deliveries themselves.
Robert placed an order for more storage ring parts and some Tzekenite crystals. He paid the high-security fee and insurance to make sure his deliveries reached their destinies. He had to wait until next week for new orders. The Academy wanted the students to have free time to study, of course.
He also did the paperwork, logging the items he made. He then spent several minutes watching as the spreadsheet updated itself. Two hundred years ago, it was instantaneous but this was the best people could do to replicate the electronic computers.
The next week, when he got the summary data of the previous one and the orders he had to fulfill, Robert checked the profits for the satellite cores, and he almost spat his drink. He had fifty-six shards of Tzekenite left over, and the client was extremely happy with his results. Making one core for every fifteen shards was amazing, apparently. He felt like an impostor. Forget selling overpriced teleportation platforms to bankrupt his girlfriend's company. The profits he could make selling satellite cores were almost an order of magnitude bigger.
Before he teleported to the Puffbloom Islands, he hit the gathering facility. He bought the concept of "Guidance" for his Temporal Restoration. Originally, he wanted another cost-reduction concept but this one was doing double-duty. Not only did this concept make it easier to get the result he wanted, but it also drastically reduced the added cost of selecting a hard-to-happen outcome. While it did nothing for the basic use case of the spell, it would do well to fight the ramping, heinous costs of fixing these Core explosions.
*
*
Robert visited his apartment at the male dorm just to show his face to his fellow students. When he opened the door, he noticed that the mailbox was full. He took the mail and sorted through it. Most of it was fan mail and a few invitations for interviews and conversations with factions now that he was no longer employed by Samson.
That was a bitter remark. Nobody, not even Amanda, explained to him why he was fired. He suspected it was so he could date the heiress without anyone raising an objection.
The latest piece of mail was also the last he checked. It was a telegram. Before the cataclysm, it was a relic of the past but with electronics gone, it went back to being the cheapest method of long-range communication.
It was from Italy. The sender was Angelo Pappardelle. The message, two words, one space, and row punctuation marks.
"Help me!!"