As he watched the combatant battle the agony inflicted by curing the curse Ajax found himself praising his past self for the foresight to not test out the interaction between the two conflicting mana types on his own body without doing any research first.

“Is he going to be alright?” Ajax asked Nina as the fight was over.

“He will be fine, the hell hounds bite only inflicts a lesser localized curse caused by infusing a large amount of curse mana into the bite site.” She explained as she watched over the crafters who started to set up their work stations.

“Lesser curse?” Ajax wasn’t surprised that the curse was different than his own but he wanted to see just how much information he could pull out of Nina, after all the more he got out of her the more he would be able to question Balthazar without it looking suspicious.

“Curses are set up in different tiers, the known ones are minor, lesser, weak and the basic curse. At least those are all the tiers where the subject has survived getting cursed, there have been curse users who have claimed to achieve strong curse variations but no victim has ever survived to confirm it before the culprit was executed for one crime or another.” she answered.

“So curse magic is outlawed?” Ajax asked curiously.

“No, it just so happens that anyone that managed to find a way to curse people has also been dabbling in many outlawed practices, most prominent of which torture by exsanguinate.” she explained as a small frown took over her face before disappearing. “ At least those who can cast a stronger variant than weak curses anyway.”

With the questioning out of the way Ajax started to reflect on the battle he had just witnessed. Unlike the imps that were clearly a caster type the hellhounds seemed to be an obvious physical type combatant, their speed and strength alone marked them as such for level fifties monsters. So then the question remained, how did they work in curse magic on top of that?

Despite spending almost an hour thinking over the topic Ajax was no closer to finding the answer than when he started. It wasn’t that he didn’t have any theories of what could be going on, instead it was because of his gaming background from Earth that he had way too many plausible theories. After all, the LitRPG genre as well as DND and online video games had many takes on curses or the warlock archetype and he didn’t know which one applied or if they were all wrong.

He was broken out of his thoughts when all of the hellhounds were skinned and the tanners started their work on them. With their camp having limited space some of the imp skins were taken down and considered done since the hellhounds were so much more valuable, after all their skin was that of a physically focused creature and as such would be of higher quality than that of caster type of the same level.

After getting his imp skin back Ajax wasn’t focused on turning it into any proper leather armor, he knew that both his skill and the material wasn’t good enough for him to make anything that would be better than his current equipment. At best he might be able to make something comparable using the skin of the two hellhounds that he brought down.

That didn’t mean that the imp skin he had was useless or to be used just for trial and error. The system was known to grant increased experience for complete items, this wasn’t something that could help him, but there was no such thing as plate armor that didn’t use any leather, if only for warmth.

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With that idea in mind he had quickly approached one of the crafters who had been previously working on only making weapons, not only that but the weapons were of a slightly lower quality that any other smith that was working with the metal that was being pulled out of the mine.

“Hey.” Ajax greeted as he approached.

“Yes? Is there something I could help you with?” His slightly annoyed tone quickly turned respectful after he saw who he was talking to. After all he knew that the Silvertongues were invested in recruiting Ajax and he didn’t want to make a bad impression.

“I’ve noticed you are sticking to only making weapons.” Ajax approached the topic straight away as he didn’t want to put too much pressure on the young smith and was just looking to make a fair connection that didn;t come with strings attached.

“I am, but that’s not because I am focusing on weapon smithing, simply because they will grant me the most experience and experience.” the smith said.

“I was wondering if we could make an agreement.” Ajax said as he looked at the work the smith produced. “Despite it being worse than the others it wasn’t by much, at least if he didn’t take Nina into account, and it was a lot better craftsmanship than the few metal pieces that made up his set of armor . “I’ll make the leather inlay for your armor pieces, that way you can gain more experience from making complete works instead of just weapons. And in exchange you can help me with the smithing needs of my own armor once we are back outside.”

“You’re not going to be focusing on smithing?” the boy asked surprised, considering he had seen Ajax talking with Nina quite a bit and he had also seen him going down in the mines to mine out the ore.

Ajax wasn’t surprised by the question but he knew that he couldn’t overextend himself too much when it came to professions crafting if he didn’t want to fall behind on his combat skills. In the end he decided that Alchemy would be his main focus as it was by far the most expensive one and the one he could gain the most from by drinking stat potions in the dungeon. The second would be leatherworking as most of his gear and bags were made of leather, meaning that he would have to branch out for the other pieces.

“I plan to focus on Alchemy.” Ajax admitted. “Sadly there are basically no plants on the floor, since most of my armor is leather I will put any spare time I have into leatherworking. That’s not to say that I don;t need a good smith, simply that I can;t stretch myself too thin.”

The smith seemed to weigh his offer for a few seconds before he extended his hand towards Ajax. “You’ve got yourself a deal. You make me the leather pieces for a few sets of armor and I’ll be happy to make any smithing pieces you need on the outside.” His smile turned into a smirk as he added one last part to the agreement “as long as you provide the ore or metal, ofcourse.”

Ajax had hoped to get one over on the smith with the surprise offer but it seemed he caught on to the trick and asked Ajax to provide the materials. Still it was a good deal and one he gladly shook on as he headed back and started his work on the leather.

Working with such high leather was a lot harder than he had expected. Unlike the level thirty five snake he had worked on the level fifty imps were a lot harder to get to work nicely. The biggest reason for this was the fact that the imps were casters, as such despite the leather being of high quality their lower Endurance made it much harder to work with than the snake had been.

His work as he finished with the imps was by no means a work of art but it was good enough to be considered padding for whatever amor the smith crafted. Seeing as he had finished a bit of time before the smith had finished with the armor Ajax decided to go back to analyzing the curse mana he felt from both the imps and the hellhounds.

The more he thought about it the more it didn’t make sense. The hellhound had clearly had a more potent curse mana than the imps, this was clear when he thought back on the amount of curse mana that the hellhounds released with each bite and the amount that the imps were using to mix into their fireballs.

This didn’t make any sense, the imps were clearly the caster type. Not only that but the hellhound couldn’t even keep a hold of the curse mana after they bit down, regardless of whether or not that bite actually made contact.

That is when Ajax had an epiphany. What if neither the imps or the hellhounds actually had any control of the curse mana. What if they both simply released the curse mana and it naturally melded with its surroundings, for the hellhounds that would be the atmosphere when they missed and the flesh of their target when they made contact. For the imps it would always be their fireball they were preparing.

His theory made a lot of sense considering how when he tried to generate curse mana directly it had tried to infect his entire mana pool and ended up cursing him. What if they weren’t generating curse mana from their mana pool, what if they were generating it by sacrificing their stamina instead. Both the constant motion of the imps and the tired hellhound supported this theory.