More days passed as Ben continued his work in the shop making a variety of items, some to be sold in there, and others handed off to traveling merchants Falk knew as a way to empty out the storage room without cluttering the sales floor or workshop in the back. All the while he was trying to learn as much about the various skills he had access to enchant with as he could, from reading up as much as he was able in the few books on skills present in the adventurers guild archives to having Myriad gather information for him that he could record later. He had a goal in mind after all, and he needed every bit of information he could get to achieve it.

When he got home for the day it was slightly later than usual, with both Thera and Sonya already there, dinner ready and waiting. They ate their meals as they always did before going to the living room and getting to work.

He had prepared a variety of braces ahead of time and he got Sonya to wear the first one as he carefully applied the resistance enchantment to it to cover up her charm, but at only up to a resistance of twelve so that there would still be plenty leaking off of her when they measured it. That brace would serve as the baseline while he experimented with the others.

To each one after he attached a variety of skills and partial skill effects to try and enhance the charm suppression of the initial magic. He was doing this with Sonya instead of Thera for a few reasons, the biggest being time. While he would still take almost a full night to apply the enchantment Thera needed, with the amount his enchanting had improved, Sonya’s could be completed in around fifteen minutes, meaning he could easily complete them one after the other to measure and compare its effects.

He spent hours making them all, Thera and Sonya playing board games in the background as he worked, but by the end he had a dozen different braces made, each with a different enchantment added to the original one to try and enhance it.

“Alright, time to test it out,” He muttered, getting Thera to throw on her cloak so her magic wouldn’t interfere with the tests and got Sonya to wear them all one at a time, with Ben setting up the passometer to measure any variance in the charm she released again and again, recording the results each time.

Kind of crazy that it took three hours of setup to make all the enchantments, but I finished testing them all in ten minutes.

Myriad wasn’t the only one to notice he’d had some success, the other two could see the smile stretched across his face that hadn’t been there the first few times he’d attempted to improve the resistance enchantment with them.

“Don’t leave us waiting, what are the results?” Thera asked, excited to see some potentially good news considering how any success had the chance to help her live a more normal life.

“Taking the magic resistance effects of armor and shield enhancement brought the enchantments suppression effects up by one, while defense enhancements magic resistance managed it by two, though since that skill was at the first level while the other two were at the zeroth it might just be an effect of the greater skill level. Either way, I’m going to need to grab enchantments of all three at the highest level I can get to see how that affects things. Other than that it looks like tying in a fourth-level purification spell from light magic had no effect on increasing the resistance. As disappointing as it is I guess that was a pretty obvious result, trying to purify mana of the affinity tied to it is probably one of the first things people test when trying to come up with a solution for all of this, but it’s still good to have gotten it out of the way. There’s still plenty of other skills I can try to experiment with after I learn a bit more about their properties, but at least this is some progress.”

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Even this much meant he’d need to go the guild master Ceselee to update the information in his patent so all the other enchanters that worshiped Myriad could get the chance to learn about it and hopefully make stronger resistance braces without having to level up their skills as much, but it still left him a ways off from his goal of completely managing Thera’s charm, even if he was on the correct path. Given the power of her mana, there was a good chance that she wouldn’t get more than a point or two of her charm suppressed, even if all three skills were put onto the enchantment, but that just meant she needed more and at a higher level.

“I wonder if Falk could find any enchanters with high levels in those three skills?” He muttered as he rolled ideas around in his mind. “It probably wouldn’t be too expensive, and even if it is, it would be worth it for the research.”

He didn’t want to just try and throw money around till a solution presented itself, but he needed to do something if he was going to get any results soon, especially since he was fast approaching a certain limitation that he couldn’t get around. Since he had enchanting as a blessed skill, he was able to use fifteen percent of his resistances per level instead of the normal ten, but that meant at his next level-up he’d finally be using the full potential of the resistances he had. Even if he leveled up more after that, he wouldn’t be able to increase the strength of Thera’s resistance band by changing it to have a greater level of resistance, if he couldn’t find enough other ways to supplement it, any increase he could squeeze out would all come down to technique. While he might be able to make it past that in some ways if he were to awaken his skill, that was still going to be far off if ever, and he needed as many potential options as he could get to make it work.

He continued to mutter about it, tossing different ideas around in his mind as Sonya placed a gentle hand on his arm.

“Ben, it’s okay,” She told him soothingly. “Don’t worry about spending your money on this, just tell me what you need and we’ll get it.”

“Hmm? Thanks Sonya, but I can’t ask you to buy anything when I don’t know if it will go anywhere.”

“Oh, it won’t be me,” She said with a small laugh. “My sister has more than enough reasons to be invested in the results of you researching this. Give me a list and I’ll send it to her, anything you discover could help my people as a whole, and Pelenia won’t spare any expense if it means helping her daughter.”

That… is an excellent point. Gotta take advantage of the absurdly wealthy in my life.

“You’re absolutely right. For now, I just need the highest level of those armor, shield, and defense enhancement that she could get on rings for me so if you could ask her for those that would be great. Let’s see, I really should get around to finding a few books on skills I could reference to see if any of them stand out as having potential, so if you could order some of those too I’d be grateful.”

“I’ll let her know, I’m sure she’ll have them here in no time.”

“Great, in that case, I think that’s all I need from you guys tonight. Thera, if you’re cool with it I’ll update your enchantment tonight with what I have to see if it improves the overall effect for you.”

“So another night of you hovering over me while I sleep then?” She joked. Even if she wasn’t crazy about it she’d also long grown used to it, and it especially helped that he’d gained hidden mind so his thoughts weren’t too distracting.

“I mean, if you’d prefer we could do it during the day when I’m off instead of going out to hunt.”

“As fun as the thought of doing nothing all day without being able to move is, tonight works fine. Give me a bit to change.”