“Bastard rings? Really, isn’t that a little tasteless?” His teacher asked him after flipping through the couple hundred pages of notes Ben had written, getting a shaky thumbs up in return.
“It’s the ring system of a bastard, it works,” Ben said weakly, still feeling the effects of buying what he needed to with Thera the night prior. “The other option was assface rings and honestly that just doesn’t have the same ring to it, you know?”
“Huuh, you’re not wrong but it doesn’t mean your first choice is good. Still, I get you went through a lot figuring it out and I honestly think Iberu will get enough of a kick out of it that he won’t have an issue pushing it through.”
“If anyone complains just tell them I say that’s the actual name and I’m just trying to honour the last will of the god who made it by passing it on faithfully.”
“Not one part of that was true.”
“And only you and I know it.”
Shaking his head, Falk gave up, instead focusing on the god bones in his shop, dry and ready to be worked. Much to Ben’s displeasure, he wouldn’t be able to make many items with them himself, Falk was the better of the two of them by a large margin still, but it wasn’t all bad news for him. He’d be doing some of the simpler work on them as well as the majority of the enchantments, and from what he’d been able to learn from his one sample piece he was allowed to practice on, he’d be gaining a positively insane level of experience from it. His current method already let him place significantly more enchantments than the standard weave method, and he could triple the quantity on something that was enhanced with a god's bones.
So that was how the day went. Myriad in his head, letting him know who would be getting what so Falk could make it, while he took the items once they were cool enough to handle comfortably, applying enchantments in a way that would compliment the wielder’s skills best.
It was long, difficult work, draining him of mana more than normal as he tried to get everything done as fast as possible without sacrificing quality, but as he looked at each one he couldn’t deny it was worth it to take part in their creation, at least a little.
Falk had told him in the past that it was ridiculously hard to get an item out of the rare ranking without applying enchantments to it, but anything made from the bones of a god would do. Each item that he was handed was listed as high ultra-rare in his eyes, with the only sad bit being that after his enchantments went down they were still in that same tier.
He didn’t have any illusions about it. He understood that the gap between high ultra-rare and low-legendary was a massive one, a barrier an enchanter typically needed either multiple awakened skills or an extremely high level of one to break.
And I can’t exactly just throw my sacrilege on there willy-nilly to try and up its value.
Even if it hadn’t made it any higher yet though, that was likely to change when it got back into his teacher's hands as Falk added a few finishing enchantments to it to complement the ones Ben added himself.
He could only imagine what the ones his teacher was going to enchant would achieve, assuming they would easily make it to mid-legendary, even if getting to high legendary wouldn’t be a guarantee, let alone anything mythic. Now that he spent a bit of each day playing with the archive he understood just how high of a hurdle that was.
The fact that god bones enhance the power of enchantments on top of everything else is going to be doing a lot of the heavy lifting too. Oh man, I just want to make it to legendary on my own so freaking badly!
Both of them were completely absorbed by the task that they knew would take them weeks, knowing they’d likely never get the chance to use a material like that again in the future, but despite how much they both enjoyed it, his teacher put a strict end to the day.
“Awe man, but I can definitely go on longer Falk!”
“Nope. Something like this, we’re doing it as right as we can so we’re ending early today.”
“Oh fine,” He said, giving in easier than he wanted to for the simple fact that he had other things to do. Things he could potentially drag his favourite yeti into as well. “In that case, think you’d be free to give me a hand with something then?”
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“Depends I guess, what did you have in mind?”
“I need to buy a house. After I just want a hand building a greenhouse if you’d be up for it.”
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Buying the house had been easy enough. With enough people having left Stonewall with the invasion, he had even been able to get one in the same area as Sonya’s, convenient considering what he needed it for.
The only reason he’d bought it at all was because he needed space for the greenhouse he wanted to build, not wanting to take up the entire backyard that Sonya had been training in with a project that might not even work, so after spending far too much for an experiment, he got Falk to help him set the whole thing up.
Originally, he’d gone to Anailia to pick up glass in the exact dimensions he needed, but since the material he used would all cost the same for the great earth spirit to create if it wasn’t inherently magical, he decided to go to the greatest extreme he could think of, having sheets of diamond produced since they were nothing more than rocks in Abrus’s eyes. Everything was shaped to the dimensions he needed, along with the fittings to put it together, so from there it all came down to assembly, as well as making the plant beds with plant magic enchantments built into them for the exotic ones he specifically went out of his way to buy, going through a few different gates to collect five different kinds of miniature, fruit-bearing trees.
“I’ll admit boy, I was hesitant at first but I see the appeal,” Falk said approvingly. “Gardening’s a nice hobby, are you going to bring that one you got at Sonya’s over too?”
“Nope, keeping Fredrick where it’s safe, and this isn’t exactly a hobby. Consider it both a long-term attempt at making more strengthening potions, as well as getting sacrilege to the third tier. If this works, that is.”
“...Alright, I’ll bite. How?”
“Glad you asked, give this a look.”
With all of the trees planted, he went to each of them, placing a thick metal ring around the base of each trunk, with two empty slots in each. One for a white mana battery, and one for a soul crystal. Specifically, the ones trapping the souls of each forbidden god.
He hadn’t been immediately sure if it would work, he’d made each of the rings to carry both the beast form skill, as well as a mental compulsion to be as relaxed as possible and a sleep spell, but he didn’t know if the first would let the skill be carried out on a plant and if the second two would work on a soul that was sealed in a crystal, but at least for the first he got to see immediate results.
The bark of each tree took on a slightly scaled look, yet not in the same way for each one, which he hoped was the skill taking advantage of not only the demon souls they contained, but the god’s souls as well.
It was a brilliant idea, at least as far as he was concerned. If potions could be made from bodies inhabited by gods, then he just needed to make a body he could keep taking from, with his mind going straight to plants. If it worked, then he’d have a permanent source of magical steroids, fresh for the taking
Falk for his part was less impressed with the ingenuity on display than he was with the theological implications. “You’re… you’re trying to farm gods?”
“Forbidden gods! Who happened to have put the world in an incredibly bad place! It’s fine, right Myriad?”
“He says it’s a fitting punishment.”
“Well, I guess if your god is alright with it,” Falk said, only a touch of hesitation in his voice. “And we are using their bodies anyway, so I guess this is fine?”
“Exactly. With that done, I think I’m going to set up some defensive enchantments throughout the place. It would probably be bad if anyone broke in. Worse if a crystal was taken.”
“Don’t even want to think about it, just make sure you put something down in case they start moving or something on the inside too. Don’t want any evil walking plants going through town.”
“Hmm, fair.”
Even if the ones he bought had no way of doing that sort of thing, he didn’t want to find out how much the souls of gods and demons could do to change the structure of a plant if the mental compulsion he was trying to force on them didn’t work.
His teacher, seeming happy that Ben would at least take some sort of precaution despite the insanity of what he was doing, stayed to watch him work, chatting as he did.
“So, are you going to actually be using that house you just spent so much money on? I feel like Thera and Sonya might end up missing you if you just move out on a whim.”
“That? I hadn’t actually thought about it, I just bought it to have the yard. Hmm, I guess I could use it to see about setting up some defensive enchantments throughout the house as practice to see how strong I could make it without destroying the place or needing too much rainbow mana crystal. Then I could set up the same for Sonya. If it works out I’m sure there’s plenty of rich and powerful folks out there who would pay a pretty penny for my services so it might be a decent business opportunity too. Plus fun, every time I’ve worked on a large-scale enchantment for a building the purpose has been charm suppression, it might be some pretty good experience if I just cut loose with it.”
As Falk watched his apprentice ramble about whatever ideas he was having, he only grew concerned. The greenhouse was enough of a sign of just what sort of ideas his apprentice had when he cut loose, he didn’t want to know just where his head was at enchanting an entire house, he just hoped he wouldn’t do something as dumb as setting one off by mistake and getting himself killed.