Amun.
16th of Ianua, 1491.
Eldereach County, Bakewia. Shavew, Heather Brook District.
11:42 PM.
[Grandmaster Artificer: Step 12, Master Enchanter - Task Complete.]
[Reward - Active Skill: [Enchantment Duplication.] By imbuing mana into an enchantment of your creation, you can duplicate multiple enchantments per instance; with the duplicated number being dependent on mana density.]
[Reward - Active Skill: [Sigil Stamp.] The Sigils in your [Sigil Scroll] can now be stamped onto enchantments using this new tool, greatly facilitating the act of mass producing your craft.]
[Reward - Active Skill: [Duplication.] Using mana, you can duplicate raw materials at the same rate as the [Refined Material Purification] Skill.]
[Grandmaster Artificer: Step 13, Grandmaster Enchanter. To continue down the path of the Grandmaster Artificer, you must put your knowledge of craftsmanship to the ultimate test by creating a weapon of legendary proportions.]
***
Five days. Even as the God of Engineering, it took five days.
The party of nobles and guards turned out to be from a singular family; the man who witnessed my ambush being the chief among them. House Garchid stood closest to the wall from our location; a veritable village of relatively small buildings surrounded by a wall and lush fields. Though they weren’t the first to see it, they were the first to arrive and receive a formal explanation of how the Shards worked.
To little surprise, they seemed impressed to learn their prices varied according to the total area of the land lifted, with the smaller shards being limited in terms of altitude. In effect, nearly anyone could afford a shard or, at the very least could save up for one. However, they had questions, namely about someone attempting to ambush their entrance whenever they arrived or left.
Of course, for that, I pointed them over to my dear acquaintance, Ed, who allowed their eyes to feast on the many mind-blowing vehicles their family, friends, and guards could use to travel anywhere in the peninsula with guaranteed safety and reliability.
After, of course, I explained the Lunar Roads that naturally linked all Gates together. Roads of moonlight, capable of linking to other shards via a simple connection. In turn, those same roads could be used to bring shards closer or even have them orbit around each other. Almost like Leylines.
Naturally, those words nearly flew over the heads of the nobles and their cohort, but they purchased one for each of them, electing to subdivide their lands amongst themselves and have them float in a cluster together. Strangely, however, there was no mention of what Lord Garchid witnessed.
Regardless, in the passing hours after, every noble estate lifted into the sky one after the other, increasing the murmur and chatter in town to almost palpable levels; even from the Brook. It was nearly deafening went we went into town for breakfast. By then, the rumors had spread. But with the workday unfinished, all the citizens could do was gossip or approach for a quick word. At least until we began wandering around after our meal. Then, it was deal after business deal until the city began to sleep, wherein the real work began.
While we were essentially famous due to our mid-year event several months ago, recognition as renowned artificers wouldn’t come for a few more days yet- for five more days. And every waking moment of those days was spent working.
Ed placed his Doppelganger in charge of sales after the first day. Soon after, I promoted a skeleton, dressed him up, and named him Sid, then put him in charge of sales in my stead. Every moment further was spent in our Creation Stations, toiling in the workshops like coked-out addicts feening to create whatever toys would turn us into Grandmaster Weaponsmiths. But that came only after we fulfilled our duties to the home front by sending mountains of undead and infrastructure and enchantments and construction orders to Silas and the others in Maru.
With the relatively few skeletons and shadows they’d received until now and the mountains they’d receive later, they were given blueprints that showed a vast complex of tunnels, caverns, pipelines, and peaks that blew even Ed’s mind. And indeed it still blew mine, as such a thing could never exist in the outside universe. The same was true for Silas, to an extent. Despite him already knowing about the grand design and fully expecting such a task, he was hesitant to believe it could even be accomplished. And he used the perfect word to describe the primary objective.
Excavation.
Hesitant or not, Silas and the Council agree and go to work immediately. As such, so did we. Through the simple act of creating, divine energy poured from my spiritual body, accelerating my actions to the point that I could perform several tasks simultaneously, and at times, instantaneously from an outsider's perspective.
It wasn't as if I was moving from place to place at speeds that made me seem as if I was standing in many places at once. Enough energy poured off of me to form a not quite avatar, but something to befit the task. The energy would create faux eyes suited to analyze something or manipulators suited to grasp the infinitesimally small. All things that revolved around craftsmanship and Artificing, using pure energy.
Such things were natural reactions to my actions. But so too was the effect seen with Ed. Although not to as high a degree as seen in me, the speed of his actions was greatly increased. More importantly, his mental horizons were expanded greatly. He could know more. Learn more. See more. Become inspired more.
With those effects combined with the sheer abundance of material wealth pulled from the Deep Darkworld and the industries of Ilium, Hill Base, and these Stations here, we finally built up the infrastructure to realize the end of our technological road map and eventually, push past it entirely.
Miniaturization continued at an almost exponential rate until we successfully created machines and computers on the nano-scale. In turn, that created a positive feedback loop that made every other industry exponentially better. Nanotech improved automation, in turn improving nanotech, robotics, and other fields, which in turn improved upon each other. Leading to, in the end, far better infrastructure, industries, tools, and technologies than anywhere in any plane of this universe.
That sparked a creative frenzy in the two of us that was split down the middle. While Ed created infrastructure, tools, and massive fucking vehicles for Eotrom and her Legions, I worked on sorting through Archie’s data and using the findings to create armor and weapons and more, augmentations and implants that were guaranteed to work on the many creatures found in these realms.
That said, there was still much research to be done concerning their compatibility with different species, classes, and magical abilities. But I digress. The work was done; and I had the perfect candidate to be the first transhuman in this universe.
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The best part was, she was only a city away. The problem, however, was that the implants weren’t designed for prepubescents; or if they were, multiple surgeries and follow-ups were necessary to have the implants refitted as they grew. Or rather, that would have been a problem. A simple blessing from the ArcaTech would solve that. But I wanted her to become more. And as my protege, she would be far, far more than a mere transhuman.
So, in effect, she only needed to be educated enough to understand what would be implanted into her and, of course, to agree to my terms. Most importantly, though, she needed to learn more about herself and the realms around us and figure out who she was and what she wanted to be in this life.
Because I sure as shit wouldn’t do it for her.
What I did do, however, was spend what felt like days designing the pact that would grant her the perfect augmented body. And when that was done, I started on the stuff of myths.
I dove into the workshops to craft tools of war for first me and then my Legions, starting with an arm-length, hexagonal adamantine pole. After lacing the rod with mithral and infusing it with the electrical half of my EM Affinity, I capped it with gold and inlaid the head with a pair of enchantments infused with my Darkness and Ed's Smoke. From them came an incorporeal chain that connected themselves to their twin enchantments fastened on the base of the gold-lined adamantine cups sitting nearby, drawing them to dangle in the air and allow the Tungsten-infused enchantment within to grow the missing poles of my new 3-section staff.
It was crucial for me to enchant the main rod with Toril's Weight and my Gravitational Magic, as the three rods were 65 centimeters long with a diameter of 30 millimeters each. When applied to the high density of the tungsten within the outer two, that equated to a weight of a little over 3.5 metric tons each.
I took my time detailing the weapon of mass destruction I created with no detail; instead infusing it with a little pizazz that would etch the battles it warred in on the weapon itself. The Pillars of Eotrom.
Poe.
I couldn’t wait to give her a try. But, I wasn’t done.
My evil twin needed a weapon as well. So I took a standard repeating hand crossbow and Dismantled it beneath a cloud of mana, then took the time to Fabricate a scaled-down version of the Jaeger Bow and fit it inside the skeletonized crossbow frame, laid in an array around the 3-D blueprint spread about my workspace.
From there, the drum was replaced with a spring-loaded magazine, enchanted to have infinite storage and engineered to click into place along the ventral side, inside the pistol grip like... well, a pistol. And so too were the bolts enchanted to Bamf back into the cartridge after several seconds had expired post-impact. Normally, that would have completed the design, and indeed it became the upgraded or modernized version of the repeating hand crossbow for the Legions. The Owl’s version, however, would be far more capable.
To that end, I created a thin disk of mithral with a pie of twenty enchanted slices etched into its face before imbuing each slice with a different flavor of energy, and to the radial side, the disk went. Finally, a small, dome-like capsule fastened to the top completed the base design of the weapon.
It was the central point, that small dome. A tiny fixture that had a dual function as a rear peep sight. Primarily, it was built to contain a small, twenty-sided die held aloft by a gravitational enchantment. Naturally, those twelve sides coincided with the pies of the disk just below it.
The result was a rolled die every time the weapon was fired. A rolled die resulted in the disk spinning to align the corresponding pie with the bolt, imbuing it with the energy of whatever was rolled.
From a natural 1 to a nat 20, there was no such thing as a bad roll. Not for the Zodiac Crossbow.
A bit misleading, but that was how it was sometimes.
The arcane words flashed to life the moment I sent it to the Owl. But I was in the zone. I kept working, this time taking staffs and sticks made from divine wood and imbuing them with enchantments or materials infused with Ash’s fire, then imbuing half with my darkness to create staffs and wands that burned with the Flames of Moil; and fire.
I then took a boomerang and infused it with gravity and Toril’s Combustion Magic to make a Bomberang that would always come back.
I took the standard issue daggers, infused them with Darkspace to enable them to teleport back to the user after being thrown, called them the Night Crawler Talons, and sent them off to the rogues.
Just for the hell of it, I took kegs and infused them with spatial magic to allow them to be filled with an unlimited quantity of acids, poison, booze, or whatever else anyone fancied. Of course, those were being sold to the civilians outside, but these could also flow with the force of Ed’s magic, creating recoilless geysers that could spew any fluid known to sentients across the realms.
I made lunar swords and whips that could split into multiple octopus-like arms, then did the same with serpentine armaments fueled by twilight.
I made another toy for myself when I came back from a smoke break. A popular item for Saturnian Knights fighting on Saturn's low-gravity moons. The Lagrange Spear; or a spear with mini thrusters installed within, controlled by a neural mesh. In that way, it was like the Shadowsteel Reaper. But Lagrange Spears had slings attached to the pommel, allowing them to do a lot of damage in airless environments. This one, however, was imbued with gravity magic so that it could pick up, catch, launch, and accelerate projectiles at insanely lethal velocities.
When that was done, though, I turned back the dial and made enchanted versions of all the basic issue or industrial equipment.
Mithral and adamantine chains were given umbral and gravitational properties, making them weightless and able to stretch indefinitely. So too were ropes enchanted. And, really, anything imaginable. Everything was enchanted in some way until, using the last bit of weapon-based inspiration I cared to give myself, I chose the simplest thing of all to try and make legendary.
A butterfly net.
Made of mithral, the ring was imbued with Darkspace, turning into a planar wormhole tucked inside a net of carbon nanotube fabrics. To make things better, the ring was then enchanted in many ways, with one of them giving it the ability to expand far beyond its means like the maw of a great cosmic serpent. Inside the interdimensional maw, however, was an ordinary region of cosmic space, filled with just one celestial body.
A Supermassive Black Hole. A gravitational singularity with a pull strong enough to put the galactic core of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A *, to shame.
At least, it was for now.
Through the wormhole on the edge of the system, light years away from the event horizon, matter would enter and fall under the relentless pull of gravity. Faster and faster with each passing second, the matter will accelerate and fall into an orbit around the black hole, forming an accretion disk of material that would begin to heat and glow and change phase as its decaying orbit pulled it to relativistic speeds and eventually beyond the event horizon.
Not all of that matter would meet such a fate, however. Kilotons upon kilotons of superheated matter, a mere fraction of the disk's mass, would be ionized and ejected along the axis of rotation as jets of radiation traveling just under the speed of light.
Using absurdly strong magnetic fields, those radioactive jets would converge and flow right into a second wormhole just like they flowed into me during my exercise with Lance last year. By flipping the net inside out, the ring would shrink down to the size of a barrel and that wormhole would be opened, releasing that concentrated jet of relativistic particles on the realms to devastating effect.
It, the Star Mitt was completely overkill and yet entirely necessary. For, if the history of humanity and warfare told me anything, I knew I was guaranteed to use it eventually. And thus, after five days, my steam finally condensed to form tepid water and I eagerly looked at the perks of becoming a Grandmaster Weaponsmith.
[Grandmaster Enchanter: Step 13, Grandmaster Enchanter - Task Complete.]
[Rewards - Active Skill: [Upgrade/Downgrade.] Using Mana, you can upgrade or downgrade the quality of any crafted object by one tier.]
[Reward - Passive Skill: [Forgers Eye.] Your time in the forge has yielded great knowledge of your craft, enabling you to spot weak points and discrepancies in armaments with little effort and granting you the means to know the most obscure details of any weapon you focus on.]
[Reward: Passive Skill - [Blessing of the Forge.] Through your tenure in the forge, your proficiency has grown such that tools and materials become a part of you, enabling you to work metals and materials with much greater efficiency. Even with limited tools.]
They were all things that would come in hand, I was sure. Even the latter two, as they so nicely synergized with my Engineering Domain, working to amplify the perks beyond comparison. And, as Zoop's father did in my first year at the Bodhi, I could properly identify the name and specs of any weapon I laid my eyes on. Not to mention, upgrading things made it all the more easier to promote the Legionaries.
That said, the next perks were even better. So, after another self-blessing to inspire me to create, I was out of the forge and into the workshops.
It was time to create the stuff of legends.