If I merely take the parts of the enchantments I will need from other plans and designs, I won’t need to understand how the runes function in general. Of course, it probably won’t be as simple as to complete copy over runes but I doubt I am the first to think of such a method to create items.

Well, it’s not like I can’t ask the artificing instructor, he probably won’t jump to the conclusion that I am the mysterious man with the dark mask, who is killing off pure innocent nobles and that I will use the information I would get from his answer to make myself completely uncatchable by the idiotic academy staff.

So the next day I did such a thing, and when the lesson came to an end, I walked over to him and asked about using pre-written mana formula scripts.

“You shouldn’t call them ‘pre-written mana formula scripts’ as you call it, they have a name, they're named arrays. There are many books written about using them the way you asked. I personally recommend ‘Marple's Guide to Array Usage’. Although I don’t recommend you read it now, it requires a fundamental knowledge of artificing, which you don’t currently possess. I would advise you to start reading mid-semester," he answered with one of the most dry and disinterested tones I have ever heard in my life.

Unfortunately, I don’t have time to actually learn artificing before the idiots of the academy find out that there is no one among the staff that has betrayed them. I expect it to take them two to three months before they give up searching the normal way and resort to using mind magic, because while the noble students may mind getting their minds dug through, I doubt any of the workers of the academy, who are likely not nobles or really any other important figures, probably some middle-upper to lower-class citizens, who have no right to complain about their privacy.

And so the very same day I start reading through “Marple's Guide to Array Usage”, as the half-dead teacher had told me, most parts were incomprehensible magic jargon, but I still manage to figure out the very basics, if I try to take an array from other designs, they will likely be tuned to a certain amount of mana flow, like the mana version of volts, one will need to switch some runes around in the core design of the array to change the density of the flow of mana. Unfortunately, the inner workings of most arrays are a mystery to me. Although, the book probably has useful examples to assist in changing around stuff in an array I just can’t understand any of it.

If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

Even so, there is still hope, for fate always will favor me, magic items are divided into ranks from 1 to 10, depending on how much mana is running through their runes, if I understand it right there is a way to calculate which rank your device should be, it is through a list a very big list, for example, it says here if your item will have to absorb the surrounding fire element, it will automatically move up to a tier 2 magic item, figuring this out was probably done by a lot of formulas and experiments.

I scan through the 3 pages of the list Mr. Marple deigned to show in his book, but find only a few functions the signature fooler is going to use. so I have to look for a different book sole filled with the contents of the full list.

After a little searching in the artificing section, I actually find it quite fast, and it’s very thick.

After two whole hours of looking at a stupid list that for some reason was not organized in any way, I conclude that my magic device is a rank 4. That means I can only take arrays from other rank 4 items. Now all that is left is to combine the arrays into one item.

So over the next month or so, I start creating the blueprint for the device. I have to sift through a lot of designs to find the arrays I need, and whilst I’m doing all that, Keswick wants to hang out more and more and waste valuable time, she is getting more pushy about me not spending enough time interacting with people, as if interacting with this world's denizens would have any positive impact on my mental health, they're all a bunch of two-dimensional idiots.

Whilst looking through one book, I saw the soul carver I had to use to cut a mana breach open on my soul’s spinal cord, which reminded me that I would need to remove a part of Ustosis's soul, the soul carver would be a perfect tool for this.