It was still dark when he left the archive but he didn’t care. He let himself take a minute to watch Thera sleep after the perceived weeks he’d been away before rushing to the living room where he wouldn’t disturb her. A small part of him wanted to wake her up and drag her to join him but he crushed that selfish impulse. He was the one who decided to spend so much time in the archive like that, there was no reason to make her suffer for it. Especially when he knew how much she enjoyed her rest.

Sitting on a chair, he turned on a light, dimming it just a bit given the time before materializing a simple knife with his power, just to give himself something to enchant on as he immediately began with his attempts, the first of which would only be done on the unaltered ring system.

Since there was no telling if it would be compatible with his system of enchanting, it was important to practice it on one he knew could work first, even if he wanted to skip that and rush to the deep end, but he suppressed the desire. Better to take a bit of extra time and do it right and with goal firmly in mind, he began with an enchantment that would compliment the knife.

He ended up going for a simple death one that would sap the vitality of the target. It was one that ended up on plenty of his weapons, including the thousands he’d sent off for the war efforts, meaning it was the perfect choice for his current attempt as he placed down rings, trying to copy the subtle manipulation of mana and felt himself fail.

It wasn’t shocking, there was a reason the enchanter who found it discovered it by accident. There was literally no reason to move one's mana like that when enchanting. If anything, it would just yield a worse result unless perfectly pulled off, meaning it was a technique that needed to be mastered in order to be properly used.

But if that guy could get it in less than an hour of attempts then so can I.

He broke the ring enchantment that had gone down and tried to replace it again, feeling another failure as his various minds examined both himself as well as the flow of his mana while he used it. Mana control was one of his strongest points when it came to magic, it was an advantage he was going to exploit for all it was worth as he watched enchantments form and break in quick succession until his first success.

It was thrilling. An advancement to the way he'd enchant if all went well, but he didn't stop to study the effects of the minor modification. That could come later. This was a method that needed to be practiced, so with the one success under his belt he immediately began shooting for another, changing the initial enchantment to a different affinity as he tried again, shifting affinities with each success and going through all ten options before using it with non-affinitied spells.

It was only after thirty tests that he was confident in saying he had it. He could perfectly recreate that small change to the ring system and as much as he now wanted to dive in to see if the application would extend to his own means of enchanting and beyond, it was now time for him to actually confirm its effects.

To do that he reshaped the knife in his hand, turning the entire thing into a thin metal sheet, leaving a foil so delicate it wanted to crumble under his touch the moment he stopped holding it together it and applied the earth enchantment sturdy to strengthen it using the modified ring system to see what effects would come.

It wasn’t that he didn’t know. He’d formed his theories in the trial and had seen the tests of the enchanter who’d first figured it out, it was more a matter of needing to see it for himself before he was willing to move on to the next phase of things and with his motivation firmly in place he began his study.

By that point, he was well aware of the effect he would have gotten if he’d used the normal version of the ring system. Given the lightness of the foil he’d made, while the enchantment let it hold itself together under its own weight he’d have been able to destroy it with his hands rather easily. Not so with the modified version on it.

While it hadn’t become some impenetrable barrier, it took work to tear into it, needing a bit of strength behind the act that wouldn’t normally have been there, leading to the same answer as the one who’d discovered the technique. When putting the same amount of mana into an enchantment, its power exploded multiple times over.

Or alternatively, it means that an enchantment can be made significantly less mana intense while resulting in a comparable effect. God damn, this is huge. This is beyond huge.

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Even though he’d pulled it off after a few attempts, it was by no means easy. It required the technical skill of an awakened enchanter, but this was the sort of thing every one of them needed to be aware of, at least as soon as he was done a bit more testing.

If it can’t be done with the weave system then every enchanter in the world is going to have to convert to the ring system after this, just gotta see… And it works with the weave! Thank god, that would have been crazy.

He ran the same tests he’d done before, seeing small changes in the results due to the characteristics of the two systems but still a growth in power that made it a must-learn for anyone who could.

All that left was to test the system that mattered most to him. His system, the one he’d built up with the knowledge he’d gained in the world, one that would be impossible for anyone else to use at the maximum potential unless they worked to grow just a few more minds to let their work truly shine. A system made of interlocking rings, where each one was made up of a weave of others and the strands that made them up would each be composed of blended mana. A monstrously complete system that trumped all others so long as one had the resources to use it and he was about to try and make it even stronger.

For the sake of it, he at first tried to cause the change on the larger rings, even as he expected failure. He didn’t want to discount it as a possibility, it was just the overall structure left it unlikely in his eyes and repeated failures gave him the impression he was right.

No, what he needed to try wasn’t provoking the change on the small rings, but the even smaller strands that made each one up, enriching the whole of the tapestry that was his magic.

If it’s even possible.

Adding it to that aspect of his system would be a massive change, needing him to repeat the same strange mana movement dozens of times at once for even his simplest of enchantments given the way he structured things, but with the skills he currently had, it was more than possible. His minds would be able to carry the weight of construction without even using up half of the ones in his head and his enchanting was at a high enough level that even if the difficulty was going to spike, it wouldn’t be insurmountably so.

After taking a second to psych himself up for the challenge he put everything he had towards it, making the sturdy enchantment once as he poured his all into the task, only to end with a surprise. The weight of the enchantment was too high and the foil crumbled to dust beneath his touch.

“Heh, been a while since I’ve made a mistake like that. I should have guessed though. Hundreds of rings composed of dozens of weaves, each of them having a bit more mana added to it in the form of those non-affinitied lines, it’s all added up. That’s fine though, taking that into account I can still do it, just gotta reduce the scope a bit. If I pull back about five percent of the rings I think that should work fine and then I should see both a bit of a reduction in the mana cost as well as a strengthening effect. Let’s take it again from the top.”

Using his material manipulation, he gathered and reformed the metal powder back into a foil before trying again, keeping aware of his prior mistakes as he let himself shrink the scale of what he was laying down just a little bit as before his eyes he saw it work. His system had changed once again, growing all the more powerful for it.

“Damn me if I’m not the best enchanter on this freaking planet!” He laughed, the feeling of his success coursing through him. He’d pulled it off and with a level on top of it, that just meant he’d be able to instantly work better than he had before when he got around to remaking it, but that would wait. First he needed to see how what he’d just done would compare against his previous tests so once again he tried to tear into the foil.

While unenchanted it would crumble in his hands, with the basic ring or weave enchantments it would hold itself but rip like paper, and once modified with the change would need a bit of force to achieve the same result, this time it was a different realm of effort.

The strength of his enchanting system combined with it and left the foil in a state that he had to put his back in it to get it to tear. Still possible to destroy, but with heavy implications.

Ben was by no means weak. When the top end of the average strength for hominid types in the world was a value of one hundred and fifty, at least so long as they weren’t actively doing things to train it, he was over six times higher than that. Something that took effort for him to destroy might be impossible for others who hadn’t reached the same heights.

Which means this is going to be huge for my work. Okay, first things first, I need to do a lot more tests. Like an entire buttload of tests and then I need to make a report to submit to… The head branch of the craftsman’s guild doesn’t exist anymore and I don’t know if it’s been replaced by another one. Okay, submitting it to Killi since it’s magic and hope that she’ll help me figure out how to get it distributed to the rest of the world. All that’s left is to get started.

He could see a million different aspects to test out but only had so much time to do it amongst his other work. He was going to be keeping busy with it but could already tell how worth it it would be, even if it meant he wasn’t going to be getting any sleep that night.