Saul would begin with crafting the new unique Sigils that he was being offered, and then move to exploring the Glade magic. His head was spinning with the potential.

Zorea and Brand were as excited as he was, if not more so, as they read the System texts.

“Craft the Spell Combination Sigil!” Brand said, at the same time as Zorea said, “What will the Specialist Sigil do, I wonder?”

Saul smiled at them both. “This is the joy of Sarkur’s System. The deity did not design it with a user’s manual. I don’t even know if he himself fully understood how it would work.”

“What do you mean?” Zorea asked.

“Well, I am beginning to think that it’s kind of a self-perpetuating thing, rather than something pre-planned. There are things about it… the way it works is unpredictable, sometimes, and it responds to the environment and to my needs in a way that would be hard to design in. I think it’s much more likely that it’s a System that grows and develops with me, rather than something that only works in predefined ways.”

“But that means…” Brand said, then trailed off, his eyes widening. “That means that you might be able to actually design what would happen yourself?”

“The longer I work with it, the more I’m beginning to think that is a real possibility,” Saul said. “I think that we could get to the point where I can alter the System to make it develop in ways that I want it to develop, rather than being confined to its parameters in some way.”

Warning: options depleting:

Select: Craft Specialist Sigil (Squad) (x1 available) (Time Limited)

Select: Craft Spell Combination Sigil (Solo) (Time Limited)

The helpful little hourglass appeared again, and Saul and his friends immediately left off their speculation about the nature of magic and the System and returned their attention to the task in hand.

Saul selected the Specialist Sigil option first. This time, something new happened. A glowing hammer made of the same translucent, smooth crystal as the Anvil itself appeared.

Shrugging, Saul lifted the hammer. It was big and solid, heavy as a regular blacksmith’s hammer. He hefted it, and then something appeared on top of the Anvil. It was a piece of golden material, unformed, but to Saul’s mind glowing with potential.

“Look there,” Zorea said, sounding breathless as she pointed down to the ground by the Anvil.

“It’s a set of smith’s tongs!” Brand exclaimed.

Saul felt strangely unsurprised at this new development. He lifted the tongs and used them to grip the gold stuff that glowed on top of the Anvil. Then, with the hammer and the tongs together, he crafted.

Time flowed past him as he worked, and a strange mellowness blossomed in his mind and his chest as the world and all its cares flowed away from him. He turned the gold, moving it this way and that and tapping here and there with the hammer as he brought out a shape that he could conceive clearly in his mind’s eye.

As he worked, new tools appeared; smaller hammers, new sets of tongs, and finally a fine set of engraving tools, each made of the same glistening, transparent crystal. Tools manifested out of thin air the moment he needed them, but when he was finished with them, they did not vanish. Instead, Saul placed them on the wide base of the Anvil by his side, building up quite a collection as he worked.

With a sigh of satisfaction, he placed the last tool down by his workstation and held up the finished Sigil. Then he blinked, the realization of what he’d just done flooding him.

“You crafted a Sigil yourself!” Zorea exclaimed, before Saul could speak. “That was amazing!”

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

“How long was I working on it?” Saul asked.

“I don’t know, really,” Zorea answered. “I felt like time stopped being relevant when you started working on it.”

“Me too,” Brand agreed, “but there’s the hourglass. There’s still quite a lot of sand in it, more than I would have thought possible, actually.”

“Magic,” Saul marveled. “This is a new development indeed. Up to now, I’ve relied on the System to do the crafting for me, in a way. But now that I’ve reached Level 20, I see that there’s a new dimension to this that I didn’t see before.”

Feeling no urgency, he laid the newly crafted Specialist Sigil to one side, and then activated the next option, Craft Spell Combination Sigil (Solo).

Again, there was a glow of light and a piece of unformed gold appeared on the Anvil. Again, a clear conception of what he needed to do moved smoothly into his consciousness, and again he picked up the tools and got to work.

When he was finished, a small gold sigil lay on the surface of the Anvil.

He smiled- There was more to the crafting process than he’d initially thought, and it was an oddly satisfying process.

“What is it, Saul?” Brand asked. “You look like you’ve suddenly understood something.”

Saul nodded. “Yes. I’ve realized that in this new crafting process, I not only know how to create the Sigil, but I understand what they do. I don’t know where the understanding has come from, but I see the function of these Sigils clearly now.”

“What do they do?” Zorea asked.

Saul smiled enigmatically. “I’ll tell you soon. Let’s absorb them and return to the world first.”

There was one more surprise awaiting them, however. After Saul had absorbed the new Sigils, he was about to deactivate the Workshop and return, when his eye was caught by something moving over by the Rewards and Resource Table.

He stepped that way and found a little blue Sigil waiting there, turning slowly as it hovered above the black velvet surface of the table.

Bonus Reward Sigil: Weapon crafter

Saul, pleased with this new discovery, quickly absorbed the Sigil and then deactivated the Workshop, transporting himself and his friends back to the grassy hill a few miles from Jillin where they had been before.

“Let’s see the Glade spells,” Zorea and Brand asked as soon as they were back.

Saul brought up the options. There were a range of interesting spells, including, as with the other Schools of Magic, some passive spells that were useful out of combat, and some active ones that would be good for fighting.

School of Glade:

Spells Available: Tier 1

Promote growth (Crafter)

Scan for crafting ingredients (Crafter)

Detect poison (Ranger)

Spells Available: Tier 2

Leafblade (Combat: Ranged)

Gladesword (Combat: Melee)

Creeping Vine (Combat: Area of Effect)

“That Crafter class of spells is new, isn’t it?” Brand said.

“Yeah,” Saul replied. “Well spotted. And I think I’ll find another Crafter class spell if I look here…”

He scrolled through the spellcasting options, until he found the one that had just been absorbed, the Weapon Crafter spell. Here, he found a set of brand new options.

Weapon Crafter

Spells Available: Level 1

Improve Weapon (Melee)

Improve Weapon (Ranged)

Enchant Weapon (All)

“Wow! You can create enchanted weapons!” Brand exclaimed. The young man’s face beamed with enthusiasm, but Zorea looked thoughtful.

“I wonder if that could be used to break the curse on this town,” she said quietly.

They both turned to her.

“How do you mean?” Saul asked.

“Well, it seems clear to me that there’s a curse of some kind haunting the village. These things don’t work like warlock sigils. Curses are an older magic, a more active magic. They need someone to be focused on the place or the person for the curse to remain active.”

She waved her hand to stop Brand, who had taken a breath to intervene, from speaking. “I know this from Nala, my old mentor. Not all magic works with anchors and channelers, nor even from Sigils. There are other, older magics, not as dramatic or colorful in their effects, perhaps, but just as powerful in many ways. The old magics, including those of curses, blessings, love magics, and that kind of thing, are scarcely used in Keldor anymore, but they can still be effective.”

“Nala used these magics as well?” Saul asked.

“Not to my knowledge,” Zorea said, “and I think that if she’d known how to do them, or if she had practiced them herself, she would have told me. No, I don’t think she was into using them, but she knew a lot about them, probably more about them than she let on. She knew how to recognize them, and she knew how to counter them.”

“She knew how to counter curses,” Saul said, smiling.

Zorea nodded. “She did, and she taught me how to do it, but have kept quiet until now because I wasn’t certain this was the thing we needed to do. Well, I’m sure now that it is an old world curse, and the fact that you’ve been granted an Enchant Weapon spell just at this time seems too good to be mere coincidence. I was thinking about what you said a moment ago, Saul, when we were at the Workshop, about the System adapting itself to what you need, when you need it.”

“You’re saying that these old world curses need an enchanted weapon to defeat them?”

“Not just any enchanted weapon,” Zorea said. “They need an enchanted weapon that’s made of Soulstone.”

“Soulstone?” Brand said. “But that’s not been seen in the world for hundreds of years! Why, it’s basically a legend now. If such things ever existed, there’s no telling where one might be in the world now…”

A ring of metal cut Brand’s words short.