The boar monster shuffles its feet, stepping through the pungent mushrooms springing up from the dirt, moving towards the decaying body of some fungal construction. The boar was the largest of its group, a good three feet taller than the next largest, with a wicked looking horn sprouting from its forehead. Making it through the field of mushrooms, it pokes the corpse in front of it, a body that was surely humanoid once but was now bloated with decay and sprouting purple mushrooms all over it. After a few seconds of prodding, finding that the body truly was dead, the boar monster pushed its head forward and tore the head off the body with a crunch.
Others of its herd, six smaller monsters that remained outside the circle of mushrooms growing around the body, take their leader’s actions as a sign that the mushrooms were safe, and set to plucking the fungal caps off the ground. When a snout bends down and snatches up a mushroom, a cloud of purple spores erupt in the vicinity, but the monsters take little notice, completely unaffected by the fungal spores.
The largest of the monsters continues to snort as it turns partially decayed bones and sinew into easily swallowed bits with its powerful jaws. The horn jutting from its forehead glows with a pink contentment as it eats. Bristles down the spine of the boar stand up, its chewing ceasing, but the bulky monster is too slow to stop what is coming. A ball of orange fire screeches out of the trees above the monster, colliding with the center of its back before erupting in an explosion that shakes the air. The other monsters leap away from the sudden fire, tongues of flame licking the two closest which are almost ten feet away. The big boar is allowed a single screech of agony, expelling all the air in its lungs, before it is choked by the conflagration.
Another bolt of fire, not nearly as powerful as the first, screams down from the tree canopy far overhead, blowing a hole straight through one of the lesser monsters before sparking another explosion of the vicious orange flames. The fire engulfing the leader of the herd gives way, showing the slumped body of the great boar that continues to burn and sizzle. Panic sinks into the hearts of the monsters, the lesser boars running in different directions, one narrowly escaping a bolt of fire that explodes against the detritus at its feet.
Running in different directions, the lesser boars become more difficult to hit. They are fast and strong, and if their ability to resist magical attacks wasn’t so completely abysmal, I doubt I would have killed any of them. As it is, I down three of the lesser boars and the big one before all of the monsters have scattered.
More than a hundred feet overhead, I allow myself a bit of rest, taking a moment to calm my heart as I look through the canopy floor for any sign of an oncoming monster. The day before I realized that the canopy that the huge trees create like a lattice is far more complex than I initially understood. It is almost as if the trees intentionally created a floor with their sprawling branches a hundred feet up, another gap in the foliage stretched far over my head, leading up to a similar level another seventy feet up or so. I stand, the huge leaf beneath my foot as stable as the ground. Vertigo tries to invade me as I stare down at my kill, the charred bodies of monsters a hundred feet below.
The sound of oncoming monsters doesn’t reach me. Throughout the first level of the canopy, Climbing Pythons and Rock Tellemurs are numerous. The snake monsters are the easiest things to kill in the forest, if you knock them out of the tree they won’t survive the fall. Unfortunately for me, they are not useful for what I am currently trying to do. The Tellemurs are more useful, but the evasive bastards have a tendency to run away if they know they will lose the fight. The big, dumb, and landbound boars on the other hand, are perfect.
Reaching the trunk of the tree on who’s branches I stand, I scale down, using the poison dagger found in the mud forest to keep me stuck to the trunk. I don’t dismiss the charge I am holding on my Dragonfire Bolt until I step up to the first body of one of the smaller boar monsters. A light dusting of lavender colored spores cover the body. Mushrooms, hundreds of different kinds, grow throughout this section of the forest. My eye has informed me that almost all of them are toxic in some manner, but the monsters around here seem to have some level of immunity to some of them.
Fire burns away from my hand, scorching the spores from the carcass of the monster before I bend over to tap it, turning it into sparkling pink smoke. I do the same with the rest of the bodies, slowly working my way through the forest floor, incinerating any mushrooms long before I get near them. Most of the mushrooms are rank zero or rank one things, and my Recovery is likely high enough to prevent them from effecting me, but after Kendon, I don’t take any chances.
A smile spreads across my face when I finish disenchanting the largest boar, the pink smoke that its body becomes funneling into my storage ring directly.
42.3lbs. of Wayfinder Boar meat has been added to inventory
16lbs. of Wayfinder Boar meat has been added to inventory
3 gold has been added to inventory
13 silver has been added to inventory
Wayfinder Boar Tusk has been added to inventory(Multiplicity)x2
“Must be my lucky day,” I say.
After deciding my path forward, I had agonized for a good four hours about how to use the Rune of Attunement that I gained from the dungeon. Upon holding the rune, the knowledge that it would only work with two of my abilities somehow became imprinted in my mind. The decision on whether to use the rune on my Disenchantment ability or my Dragonfire Bolt had been almost as difficult to make as choosing which essentia I wanted.
My decision had ultimately been decided by the nature of my Dragonfire Bolt. The attack was the only real power that I have, and it has become a truly powerful ability over the last twenty five levels, capable of killing a rank two monster in a single blow if they were caught off guard. It might have followed then that adding the Multiplicity affix to my dragonfire would be a no brainer, but something had held me back, whispering to me that it might not work the way I wanted it to.
If the rune had allowed me to create three Dragonfire Bolts at a time instead of one, my offensive ability would have become a true terror. On the other hand, if it then forced me to have to conjure three every time instead of one, it might have tripled the time that it took for me to launch an attack. The speed at which I am able to hurl my dragonfire is one of the biggest strengths of the ability, even having multiple of them at once would not have made up for a slowdown. In the end, I chose to apply the affix to my Disenchant ability, and I have not regretted it since.
Gold Essentia: Disenchantment(Rank 1)
By touching a dead monster, you are able to break down their residual essence into component parts and solidify their magical residue into physical objects.
Gold: this ability also produces an amount of coin commensurate with the power of the monster.
Multiplicity: using this ability has a low chance of producing an additional, duplicate item and will always produce two to five times as much coin as it would without this affix.
After thoroughly clearing the area and checking for hidden monsters, I make my way back to my island. This has been my routine for the last three days, swimming off my island each morning to look for monsters out in the forest. Today was the first time that I have managed to find a rank two monster, the big boar, and after hunting almost twenty of the creatures, I think that I might finally be ready.
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Nothing has approached my island in the last few days, and it has been rare for me to spot any monster along the shoreline of the river. The monsters seem to avoid the river water for some reason, relying on small ponds scattered throughout the forest for their water. I’ve taken the natives’ distaste for the water to heart, relying on my own stores. The slightly sour water doesn’t seem dangerous, but it isn’t worth taking a chance on.
The nest I have built my small camp inside of is mostly a pad of broken twigs and branches at this point, my heavy boots having done wonders to slowly break it over the last few days. The bookshelf stands alone in the center of the island, surrounded by furs and my previous attempts at sewing clothing from the pelts and skins my ability produces. I am halfway through sewing a bearskin shirt that doesn’t look completely awful; I’ll have time to get back to that later.
I ignite a roaring fire in the pit I have dug, stabbing heavy skewers of boar meat to roast over the fire before returning to the sewing. I skim through an enchantment guide as my fingers work, slowly stitching together something that I can use to cover up better than the cut up rags that hang off of me. It is still winter here, and despite there being no snow around, a chill pervades the forest at all times.
Almost an hour later, the meat has cooked sufficiently, and the real work begins. Extracting the mana affixes from the boar meat is much easier than I had initially expected it to be. I had expected there to be some kind of technique to it, some skill, but after roasting and eating the catfish meat a few days ago, I discovered that just having a soul tool facilitated the process greatly.
The instant that I took my first bite of the catfish meat, I felt a strange power dance across my tongue, a vibration that tickled my pallet, almost fizzy. Strange as it may sound, the cut of catfish, completely unseasoned and burnt on one side, was the tastiest thing that I have ever eaten in my life. I tore into the meat like a beast, ravenous to push the meat down my gullet.
A split in my attention made me aware of strange effects. As if I stood in that void and in the real world, I could see the twelve-sided object that was my Enchanter’s Affix Index while my body moved to wipe my face clean, even heading down to the river to wash my hands off. For a few minutes, it was as if two of me existed simultaneously, one in the world of the mundane, and another in a place far more special. Two streams of energy, one a muddy brown and the other a pure cerulean, snaked around the index in two streams. With my hands I found that I could channel the streams, directing them into the index with my attention alone.
The streams resisted me, barely wanting to shift, but it was as if my will was their bane. I could feel the inexorable movement deep inside of the streams of mana, their inertia something that should be impossible for a weak magician like me to manipulate. My will was like a bucket of water compared to their lake’s worth of momentum and unyielding direction. Somehow, that bucket of water was enough. Despite our difference in raw power, they bent to my will, and poured into the index. After the streams disappeared fully into the index, my split consciousness collided back together, stunning me for a moment.
I thought that I might have messed up somehow, broken whatever I was trying to do, but Galea creating a window in front of me banished my fears. In front of me, a transparent window with twelve different boxes appeared, two taken up by symbols so faint they were almost unreadable, the other ten blank. I tried to guess at the symbols for a while before referring back to the enchanting glossary, only to find that it didn’t describe the symbols either. The answer was found inside of the book on spellcraft. In the back of the book, a rudimentary outline for basic runes is written, two of the runes matching the ones in my Index window: Earth and Water.
Considering that the catfish had been a monster that lived in mud, this made a good amount of sense to me. Still, looking at the window, the two runes were barely even visible. I sampled all of the different monster meats that I have been accumulating throughout this Passage, finding that most of the time, meat from rank one monsters do not contain any affixed mana, while all of the rank two monsters did. Hunting in the forest for a day let me come upon the boars, and to my delight, the meat from the rank one boars contained Earth affixed mana.
I take a steadying breath before digging into the nearly hundred pounds of meat that I have roasted over the fire. Another surprise that I found in the last few days was that I can seemingly eat an endless amount of food so long as it contains some kind of mana affix. How that works or how my stomach doesn’t burst from all the meat I shovel down my throat, I don’t know.
An hour later I finished gorging myself on the boar meat and recline against a tree for a few minutes to recuperate. My Index window opens in front of me, a few symbols stand out, dark and almost impossible to see, while one reflects a powerful brown light, Earth. I devote another hour to going through my plan, reading back through the books to make certain that I have everything in order before I begin. Assured that I should be able to manage at least something, I stand and walk to a cleared area I have prepared for my work.
With a wave of my hand, ten silver coins fall into a divot in the sand that I dug out. Calling dragonfire to my hands and pouring heat into the metal is the simplest part of the process, the silver melting after a few minutes into shiny goo while I continue to pour on the heat.
The text indicates that natural metals are the most basic sources in which to house affixed mana, though, depending on the item an enchanter is working on, other substances may be used. For example, incorporating affixed metal into leather pieces seems to work, but not as well as affixing monster blood and applying it to the piece like paint. Base, non-magical metals also have issues with containing the affixed mana for extended periods of time, slowly losing their magical potency.
What I am trying to do now is the most basic of enchanting, which is the only reason that I am even somewhat confident in completing the job. Aside from being only a master of enchanting, most enchanters also master a craft. An armorer will create magical pieces of armor, running affixed mana beneath the surface of their metalcraft so that it cannot be damaged and so that it will be perfectly integrated into the piece. Devicers, enchanters that focus on creating astounding devices, will likewise create the magical mechanisms inside of the items they produce, both hiding their workings and protecting the arrays that the affixed materials create from the elements. Without a craft to do in hand enchantment, I am at a severe deficiency, only able to even attempt the most basic of craftwork. Still, watching the silver coins melt before my eyes and feeling the mana storied inside of my index, I am excited to see what I can do.
Transferring the silver to a second hole I have dug in the sand is difficult. I spent more than two hours this morning making certain that I drew the rune at the bottom of the second hole perfectly, and as I watch the silver pour into the lines, energy brims inside of me. Time flies by as I wait for the metal to cool, unable to work with it until it has become solid.
I pull a misshapen hunk of metal out of the hole the next morning, turning it over in my hand. The silver didn’t set smoothly, something I had been worried about but expected. My Bane Crystal comes in handy, my green dragonfire carefully applied across the surface of the metal to wash it with acidic pour, making it smooth out. I even chip away at small imperfections that stick off the silver rune with the utmost care. By the time I eat lunch, the silver rune in my hand shines brilliantly in the light, its surface capturing the sun.
The final part of the craft, the actual infusion of the metal with the affixed earth mana I have been accumulating, is far easier than I ever expected. As soon as I begin to press my will into the index, the earth mana jumps at the opportunity of release. An odd, muddy-brown fire spreads over my fingers, pouring into the silver rune in my hand like water down a hole. I deplete all of the mana in my index in seconds, the rune I hold taking it all in, as if the silver rune is an infinite repository for magic. The book mentions the maximum magical density of various materials; the reason I chose to make this rune from silver was due to silver having the highest possible density of mundane metals. As I sever the connection between the rune and my index, completing the craft, I feel a bit of regret at not having gathered more mana before beginning.
I push that regret aside, feeling the thrum of magic in my hand, the silver rune almost vibrating as I hold it. Galea swims in the air around my hand, staring down at the rune with interest.
“This is your first craft, Mistress Charlene,” she says.
“It is,” I say, putting a string through the top of the rune, turning it into a necklace. “Show me.”
The dragon nods, and a window appears in the air between me and the rune.
Lesser Talisman of Earthen Protection(Uncommon):
The first craft of the Enchanter Charlene Devardem, this talisman was created in the wilderness during the Passage of Rising Tide. Its simple form and nature belies a budding understanding of the Enchanting arts.
Enhancement: +5 Defense
I’ve done it. I have actually made something.