***

The Reliquarian’s Duty.

Now began Henry’s first probe into Arcaneworking, a Civilian discipline dedicated to crafting magical items.

If a power-thirsty type were using The Cap of A Thousand Dreams to accumulate strength, then this would be their subject to focus on. Arcaneworking was the key art when creating Legendaries. After honing this one craft, the hat owner could exploit the time-expansion item to spam forge hundreds and thousands more, equipping themselves and their armies with an unstoppable tide of heaven-sent artefacts. This function made The Cap basically one of Saana’s hidden victory conditions. If you found it alongside The Ring and one or two other pieces from The Syncretist’s Armament, you won the instalment. Good game, everybody. Catch you in a couple years when the world reset!

However, Henry'd already won this instalment through the harder path of outplaying millions of uber-noobs and was just using this immaculate tool of empire to min-max side-hobbies. Thus, what could've been a massive topic would instead slot in between the rest of a retiree's duelling vignettes.

On the surface, the goal here was straightforward. He wanted to formulate some item enchantments that would simplify A Thousand Tool’s core weapon-swapping and make the art accessible to plebs. In practice, this would require him to solve some of Saana’s most obscure and toilsome scholastic challenges yet, to plunge into the dark unknowns of soul magic and time magic.

First, to introduce Arcaneworking, the field could be split into two sub-disciplines. The first, a kind of pseudo-engineering, constructed elaborate mechanical devices like smokebombs and Henry’s rapid-makeover transmogrifier. The second, more magical in orientation—and the priority in this study—revolved around enchanting wearable equipment, conferring augmentations to certain spells or resistances against elemental types.

To enchant, an Arcaneworker would siphon energy into an item using an interface similar to that of combat spell-casting, the player gesticulating through a sequence of star-like constellations. The Arcaneworking method, however, differed from combat in several respects. On the one hand, simplifying the procedure, the constellations didn’t fluctuate so dramatically across casting instances. While the combat gesture-sequence had to be improvised every time, the Arcaneworker’s stayed—roughly—the same, every enchantment having a unique and consistent order. On the other hand, complicating it, the Arcaneworker’s spell-casting was slower. Each gesture could take minutes or hours as the player zoomed in on the casting interface to edit the star configurations for microscopic improvements.

See, on the expansion of the casting interface through astral projection, what appeared to be stars were in fact tiny galactic superclusters composed of densely packed galaxies. Magnifying further, as became possible with higher Arcaneworker levels, one would discover stars proper and planets. There was a bunch of lore behind this, relating to cosmic planes etc. However, practically, this resulted in a crafting mini-game of exploring and charting the miniature galaxy. After memorising an enchantment’s base constellatory map, the Arcaneworker would add or remove galactic nodes, altering the spell’s potency, adding secondary effects, etc. The full mechanisms were bewilderingly convoluted. Astral nodes fluctuated in their efficacy according to variables like enchantment category, item material, physical location, and the body-constitution of the craftsman.

In terms of the equipment enchanted, Arcaneworkers could technically bless any weapon or armour. Nevertheless, the trade focused almost exclusively on Saana’s four jewellery slots: a ring for each hand, a necklace, and a relic that could be worn anywhere on the body. For laborious reasons, jewellery pieces were much easier to enchant, and they were thus considered the chief and sole avenue for a player seeking to customise their gear set-up with unique magical effects.

Bringing that crafting business back to duelling, every martial art in Saana paired with ideal Arcaneworker effects. Certain enchants could radically boost the efficacy of key moves or shore up Class shortcomings. One Touch One, for example, the style focused on a single thrust, would’ve benefited from an ultra-rare effect, , that let a combatant expend their full Stamina pool in one super-strength attack. The current practitioners of One Touch One could only dream about owning an item with this. Nevertheless, there were other sects that centred around rare artefacts held by principal members and inherited down to successors. Henry himself had stashed from the extinct Starhunters a Tier-4 Legendary that passively gathered Celestial Charges. Without that item, the art was suicide, the Starhunter getting stomped by their giant monster solo-foe whenever they paused to collect spells. With it, Starhunting became slightly less suicidal.

For A Thousand Tools, any enchantment could be utilised. The art combined every mode of combat, and thus it benefited from any resources. Henry, limited by time however, had chosen to focus his research on augmenting the technique at his art’s syncretic heart, the multi-weapon trick swaps.

But, to reverse time for a bit and dive into ancient history, Henry's martial predecessor, Heavy Fingers, had mused much on this same topic for Twenty Tools. The monk had seen in Arcaneworking an answer to his style’s main obstacle.

The weapon-swapping was plagued by two fundamental roadblocks. Problem one was the actual physical act of swapping to another weapon at the necessary speed when one’s hands were already occupied by another. Problem two was the universe of Saana’s restrictions against multiple attacks, abilities having cooldowns that meant—outside of zero-damage feints—you could not smoothly strike with weapons switched in near-instant succession. Both of these limits had to be overcome to perform the swap in the middle of a real fight.

Heavy-Finger’s solution had been to treat the second roadblock, of attack cooldown limitations, with the Forsaken Qi Master build. This specialisation—as described in Henry’s study of The Insights of The Third Eye—traded the Class’s main flying weapon for a flexible, muscle-stored attack enhancement, . With that ability, a person effectively ceased to have cooldowns, fighting in the much more fluid manner of real-life combat. As for the first roadblock of physical weapon-swapping, the monk devised the flashy Spatial Bracelet juggling, circumventing the issue of wielding multiple-weapons by making extras float around him.

That might sound dandy, however, it should be understood that his solution had been an unhappy one. Although the weapon juggling made for the most attention-grabbing and distinctive part of the monk’s style, it was merely a means to an end, a flawed and burdensome one. The core of Twenty Tools lay in the simpler weapon swap that the technique facilitated. As the enemy was baited into countering one tool, you switched to a counter-counter tool. That's it, in theory, the rest being how to execute this trick within the millisecond margins of a real fight. While the juggling did enable this, it placed a monstrous tax on the brain, requiring weapons to be positioned seconds ahead of the battle due to the delay between initiating an item’s summoning and its wieldable materialisation.

Preferable would have been substituting out the juggling entirely for a much simpler swapping method – like the Arcaneworking enchantment, , which instantly switched weapons from your Spatial Bracelet.

Unfortunately, , forged from time magic, was not a commonly available enchantment. No player Arcaneworkers could cast it, and it only turned up on the occasional Legendaries. Therefore, for Heavy-Fingers, the idea went unfulfilled, staying as insubstantial and blueballing as a dream about being loved back by a crush.

By the by, it’d been on the specific point of solving these roadblocks that Henry'd eventually split from the monk to establish his own art, The Strategy of The Resourceful Komodo. His teenage self had been too impatient to pick up weapon juggling. Thus, he chose a solution in a different Class that could perform that half of the problem – Cutthroats, at Tier-2, acquired , a mirror ability to . As for the cooldowns constraining multiple attacks, he instead ‘just’ decided to find a Legendary with the even rarer time-magic enchant . From there, since he’d set himself on hunting down one broken artefact, he thought he might as well gather a couple more.

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And the rest became his own hilarious history.

Returning to today, for A Thousand Tools, these two issues remained unfixed. While Henry's new system offered advancements for everyone, the core weapon-swap that connected every tool was exclusive to one-in-a-million savants. No one could pick up the whole thing except mutants like Mrtyu’s apprentice Whitefrog, to whom Henry’d been giving some one-on-one training as his final successor. In total, he estimated that fewer than a hundred players would master the main swap. The vast majority practising it now would give up soon, switching to A Thousand Tool’s less gruelling sub-builds, like his current one, an Earthfriend Scholar. (In fact, this build didn’t use weapons at higher levels. Old Heavy Finger’s trick-swaps had been replaced by an Earthfriend routine to be completed later.)

Henry’s own fix, ‘get a Legendary’, failed on scale. However, the situation could be salvaged if some diligent Arcaneworkers could figure out the enchantment formulas for or . Either would suffice, the other taken care of by Class selection. With those obstacles removed, the number of people capable of performing Heavy-Finger’s technique should rocket up into the tens of thousands. The swap would become possible for even mediocre MIT-level geniuses.

Better yet, if both enchants could be achieved, then any Class could practise the swap – although the player would still have to be a freak, the skill never losing its milder difficulties.

The abbreviated, public version of Henry’s investigations into this would go nowhere beyond conjecture. He possessed plenty of experience that might’ve helped his search – both Alchemy and his Scholar skills overlapped with the same Arcane mechanics, his trove of Legendaries had familiarised him with a huge range of secret effects, and—obviously unmentioned—the Project Aevitas time-dilation quests had tapped into related magic. Nevertheless, the scope of the task eclipsed him. It would’ve required him to carry out many years of collaborative research, and he was unwilling to spare this much effort for a side hobby. He especially had no incentive when he himself could circumvent the issue again by getting more Legendaries. Thus, he gave up. In his manuals for A Thousand Tools, he left a vague chapter of theorycrafting, pointing the way for the Arcaneworking weirdos of the future.

The end...

Fin...

Exeunt...

Close book.

But, here in his immortal realm beyond dreams, Henry did have the time.

So, to begin his private arcane escapades, he learned The Reliquarian’s Duty.

The Reliquarians had been a caste of Arcaneworkers in the Old Rangbitan military, whose strength had centred on armies of skeletons and infernal minions. To bolster the force, The Reliquarians produced enchantments for the sub-schools of blood magic, demonism, and necromancy. Such magic was outlawed in most regions, the methods relying on materials made from human parts and soul sacrifice, and the craftsmen themselves were not exempted from the risks, some of the most powerful enchantments requiring suicide. The Old Rangbitans weren’t bothered by these costs.

That was the grand sum of all to be shared on the dark and evil stuff, the rest merely repeating the usual madness of one of Saana’s cultures and Henry’s crafting interests tangential to them anyway.

See—and the complexities of this were not essential to 100% follow—within Arcaneworking, blood magic and these other spooky enchantments were classified as hidden or ‘second-order’ schools, their magic arising from invisible cosmological planes separate to but touching the Arcane Plane and whose galactic nodes were activated indirectly via ‘neighbouring’ Arcane nodes. An Arcaneworker designing constellations for these hidden schools had to chart them through complex mathematical transpositions that generated four-dimensional maps overlapping the Arcaneworking default three-dimensional interface. Beyond second-order schools were third-order schools, accessed by mapping across second-order schools in a perplexing five-dimensional cartography. One example of a third-order school was soul magic, which happened to be the magic The Reliquarians had been secretly experimenting on within their secret tradition. Why? Who knows. But how that related to Henry was that—although he didn’t care about soul magic—for the weapon-swapping enchants, he needed to master his own third-order Arcaneworking school of time magic, built out of the already hidden magics of space, speed, light, and several others. Unfortunately, he lacked any accessible model for learning time magic. The field was usually confined to Cosmic Gods, who could think with the combined intellect of galaxies. Thus, he had to steal The Reliquarian’s soul magic research and transfer its methods over, conducting a type of sixth-dimensional mapping.

In short, finding the right enchantment for the weapon swaps would be difficult, and The Reliquarians’ quest for an equally difficult one could help him.

Before beginning, Henry’d had to finish up years of preparations. Over the previous Overdream sessions, he’d spammed throw-away Arcaneworker Legendaries to max out the class at Tier 7. He’d also—as one might pick up from Bow-Shooting or his potion, The Soma of Brief Transcendence—studied a tiny bit of time magic in other disciplines, all of which would help.

So, he took everything preceding, and he combined it with The Reliquarian’s Duty. He charted the Arcane stars and examined through the skeletons in their closet the obscure dimensions of the soul and then—beyond the soul—time.

Time, in its strange nature to expand and contract, passed, thousands of hours’ worth flying by in a breath.

And he failed, time once more slipping through his fumbling grasp.

That lofty dream of Heavy-Fingers, a cheap crutch for the lesser geniuses of the world, Henry couldn’t accomplish it. (At least not using the Tier-5 metals available to him – he did find the formulas, but they required greater material power.) Alas, for the cash-strapped trash of the world, there would be no cheating the limit. To swap weapons right, they would simply have to do as Henry had and master dozens of weapons after being born one of the planet’s smartest and most compassionate humans.

Forced to forget the weeping mass, he could only manage by surpassing the material constraints of common quality items and enchanting Legendary quality ones instead, Henry perfecting jewellery-making somewhere back there. Sighing, he forged for himself alone this time-bending garbage for Saana’s Relic slot.

Bracelet Three Hundred and Seventy Two (Legendary)

Effect: Attack Reset. Activation resets all cooldowns. Instant cast. No cooldown. Usages are limited and item will break upon depletion. 52/52 charges remaining.

Level Restriction: 20 (0-4) or lower

Condition: 100%

Material: Unknown

Weight: 9 g

Restrictions: None

‘Another failure…’

52 finite uses - that pathetic number wasn’t enough to last one measly second during the hundreds of attacks of his Soma potion’s god-hyperspeed. For a full cycle, he’d be forced to blast through multiple copies of the thing like a drunk machinegunner squandering rounds. How horrifically wasteful. Each piece took him hours to make. Listening to the sound of their shattering filled him with grief and sympathy for The Reliquarians, who’d likewise exhausted their souls making trinkets. (He did create a Legendary ear-piercing with infinite , but its own activation had a three-second cooldown, which wasn't really what he was aiming for.)

On the bright side, the time magic was much simpler for the second roadblock, Heavy-Finger's coveted . Henry did figure out a limitless zero-cooldown Tier-0 Legendary enchantment for it. That one, he'd save for later to put on some gloves when he hammered out a complete item set.

For a side project, he’d also gone deep into stat bonuses, the most basic enchantment studied by Arcaneworkers. This less interesting research wrought this ring:

Ten-Hand’s Copper Chaperone (Legendary)

STR: 1382 | VIT: 1382 | TECH: 1382 | mCOM: 1382 | mAFF: 1382

Level Restriction: 0

Condition: 100%

Material: Copper

Weight: 4 g

Restrictions: None

'Produced by the world's greatest craftsman, Ten-Hands. An inscription reads, "For my infant boy. With enough love, even the most neglected metals can be shaped into something prideworthy."'

This baby jacked his stats up higher than a certain God’s blessing, up to those of a Tier-6 character. Should he ever again fall victim to an over-buffed thug cannibal, no longer would he have to combo hundreds of thrusts and spells in a row without getting clipped once like some loser trying to slap an elephant to death with a pool noodle. Now, Henry was Saana’s strongest player by skill and equipment. Any punk who tested him - smoked in one shot. Get trashed. Easy.