Falk arrived at his shop, silently hoping the boy would sleep in or not show up so he would have an excuse to dismiss him, but no such luck. The brat managed to show up before even he did and was sitting outside the shop, laying against the door.
All he could do was groan a bit, forced to accept what he agreed to. "Alright get up, first things first give the shop a sweep and we'll figure out where to go from there."
Ben immediately got to it, cleaning up the shop with enthusiasm while Falk had no choice but to use the few minutes he had to focus on something he had been wracking his brain about all night, just how to train the brat.
Unfortunately for him, Ben was thorough but quick, too quick. The shop looked fine to open and he was standing in front of Falk, looking up at him expectantly.
"Huuuh, alright kid, first I guess you should make me something. We'll see where we should go from there." He brought him to a room in the back that looked like a combination of supply closet and work area. Buckets and drawers of materials were piled around, with a desk and tools hung around it, and a small shelf of books nearby.
Ben's first thought seeing all of it was basically that it looked like fun. It was definitely somewhere he could sink a lot of hours if he was given the chance. He just had one minor problem.
"What am I supposed to make?"
"Whatever you can for now, I just want to watch your process and see where you could improve at first. Help me pull the desk out front unless you're going to want to use the forge, then grab the supplies you'll need. To be clear, I'm only letting you grab from my stock today, in the future you'll have to supply yourself."
Ben did his best to help move the desk the Yeti worked at into the front of the shop, before going back and looking around.
There were metals and materials of all sorts. He saw the bones and teeth and skins of a variety of creatures, the woods from all kinds of trees and materials that were clearly organic in nature but that he had no clue as to what they could be. There was also an unusual amount of stone, of various types, all organised in a back corner.
He wondered about the room for a minute, taking it all in, making a mental list of what to explore in the future, while he tried to figure out what he was going to make. The options before him seemed limited. He originally considered himself something of an artist, dabbling in a variety of arts, but he didn't think that would work. He could stitch together furs to make a cloak or jacket but that didn't feel right either.
It wasn't until he came across some metal wire that he remembered an unfinished project he would never get the chance to complete, giving him a good idea of what to do.
Taking the supplies and tools he would need to the front workshop he sat down at the desk and got to work as his teacher stood above him, watching as he went.
It only took two minutes for him to stop Ben from his work. "What are you doing?"
"I was going to make chainmail, I thought I would add stealth to it while I went to at least give it a bit more benefit."
"Yes I can see that, I more meant why are you doing it so wrong?"
Falk seemed genuinely confused which kept Ben from being too annoyed. He came here to learn and that's what he would do. "What exactly am I doing wrong here?"
"God's where do I even begin, you're going to make all that wire unusable if you keep this up, and it doesn't even seem like you're crafting."
"Falk I'm going to need you to give me a bit more than that."
Realising he hadn't properly explained himself, Falk took a second to put his thoughts together and started again. "You look like you're trying to enchant every single individual wire. That can be possible at a higher level but right now you can't do that for something so small, the enchantment won't take and you'll render the material unusable." He picked up the wire Ben had been using and ground it between his fingers. It seemed to have lost all of its malleability, causing it to break into shards and dust. "What you have to do is slowly add the enchantment to the entire thing as you go, spreading the enchantment across the entire item. Aside from that, do you not know how to use your crafting?"
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He clearly did not with what was being asked, but he had to confirm anyway. "Is it not just a way to have a better idea of how to put stuff together while also making you better at the process?"
"Well you're not wrong, but it's also like most other skills, you have to burn up a little Mana to get its full effects. Since you can enchant you should know how to do that, yeah?"
He did, it had taken a fair amount of trial and error at the church, as well as a lot of questions to the priests to figure it out, but when he got it was incredible. "Alright so just use Mana with the skill and try again."
He got back to work, doing as he was told and immediately felt a difference. He could feel it flowing out of him into the wires, making them slightly more easy to work with, bending as he wanted them to and holding their shape a bit better. This wasn't even considering the improvements to his body. He could feel his movements improving, making less mistakes that needed to be corrected. He couldn't help but think of how long carving all of the spikes had taken before and how much time he could have saved, but no point worrying about that now.
With his teacher's advice he immediately lost himself in the task, devoting all of his attention to the project before him.
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He wasn't sure how much time passed, but before he knew it he was holding onto a full set of mail, enchanted with stealth as well. He couldn't help but think how incredible skills were. While he had been chipping away at the piece he had been making at home, getting a few hours a day done here or there, he now has a finished product in one go.
Sighing in contentment he stretched and looked to see Falk snoozing at his chair. He figured it probably wasn't good for the man to be sleeping on the job, so decided to have some fun.
"Hey Falk, what do you think!" He yelled, waking the man up.
He shot up from his seat with a start. "Damn it boy! Do you have any idea what time it is?"
"No?"
"I decided to sleep at midnight!" He threw open the door dramatically, making it clear that the sun had fallen and moonlight streamed in through the door. "You must have been working at that for almost twenty hours!"
"Ah, haha…" maybe yelling to wake him up hadn't been the best idea. Ben knew he was prone to getting lost in a task, his family used to have to tell him lights out whenever he got into a project, but he didn't think he'd ever gone this long before. "Sorry about that, using crafting ended up being more entertaining than I thought."
"I'd say you got more use out of your focus skill than anything." He grumbled, waving his hand for Ben to hand over his item. "Come on now, let's see how it went so I can go back to sleep."
Falk stared at it for a few minutes, slowly losing the tired expression in his eyes. “Looks like you managed to make a lower common item, not bad for your first attempt considering you didn't even know how to properly craft when you started.”
Items could be divided into six levels of rarity. There was common, uncommon, rare, ultra-rare, legendary, and mythic. On top of this, each level was further subdivided into lower, middle, and upper to show just how well it would compare to items in its own category.
“How can you be sure, shouldn’t an enchanted item be a bit better than that?” The disappointment was clear in his voice. Even if the time flew by for him, all of that to make something of only lower common quality was pretty disappointing.
“When you reach the ninth level of your skill you’ll be able to see the quality of the item without issue. Since I have blacksmithing I can see this no problem, but since you have crafting you’ll be able to see the quality of basically any manufactured item. That's basically the biggest benefit of your particular skill. As for its quality I would say don’t worry about it. I was fully expecting you to make a failed product, the fact that it turned out this good at all is promising.”
While he may have been playing it down a bit Falk was actually fairly impressed. One of the biggest issues in any crafting skill was how often items failed at the beginning few levels of a skill. Often students would misjudge how much magic to use in their enchantments or rush too much to get an item complete, not to mention the basic difficulty associated with getting acquainted with a skills use. If the boy could continue making items of this quality he should be able to make enough to live on while he worked here.
“Anyway.” He continued. “Don’t worry about it too much. Almost all items are of common quality because that's going to be reasonably priced enough for an average person to buy. While any good craftsman should be able to make uncommon and the occasional rare item, there aren't many who can consistently make rare ones, and someone who can make ultra-rare ones regularly only shows up once or twice every few hundred years.”
This raised Ben's confidence a little but left him with another question. “What about craftsmen who make Legendary or mythic items?”
“Ha boy, you’re a few centuries away from that if it's your goal. While anyone who can consistently make ultra-rare items may manage to spit out one or two legendary items in their lifetime, someone who can make them consistently only shows up once or twice a millennium. As for mythic, well I’ve never heard of any mortal making them. From what I know the few that exist were gifted from the gods.”
“Well if I’m going to have any goals they may as well be big goals.”
Falk gave him a large, toothy, scarier than intended grin. “You say some good stuff brat. With how late it is there’s no point in you going home, there's a blanket and pillow in the storage room. Sleep there and I’ll wake you for work in the morning.”