CHAPTER 24: WOW ENCHANTING PRACTICE
Jenna studied the whorling lines around the crystal. It was relatively easy for her to find the differences between Enchanting Hardened Glass and Hardened Crystal, at least in the base form. Or, at least, it was relatively easy to find the places where Magic was not flowing well.
Some instinct or half-stolen memory suggested that the goal of the puzzle was not just fixing the Spell. That would be enough to pass it, sure, but it would be far better if she could also understand what was wrong with it. So, rather than just start messing with the lines of the Spell until she fixed the flow, Jenna tried to figure out what changes were made because of the shape, what changes were made because of the material, what changes came from the combination of them, and how to make the imperfect parts of the Spell perfect.
She looked around the room, noticing that there were squares of what looked to be an identical material to the crystal and pieces of glass shaped like the crystal. It was clearly a hint from the Pyramid that she should test what changing the shape or the material did. Jenna couldn’t find any other crystals shaped identically to the one that was giving off heat, which could mean one of two things.
If she was lucky, then the changes that material caused to Hardened Glass wouldn’t interact with the changes that the shape made and vice versa. If, as Jenna knew was more likely, the two changes had a number of interactions, then it was the Pyramid trying to push her to think and use mental models, rather than just brute force solving every problem. Still, it gave her the chance to do some brute forcing.
Jenna walked over to the sheets of red crystal. Picking the first one up, she pushed out a thin cloud of Magic to help her with Enchanting it, like she did with glass. The crystal started to tug at the Magic, trying to draw it in.
As it did, she realized the third part of the trial. The Pyramid also wanted her to break away from the habit of making a cloud of Magic on top of everything before Enchanting it. That made sense, and a large part of Jenna knew that she should have already been pushing to break the habit. It took far more magic to make the cloud than it took her to actually Enchant the Hardened Glass, and that would probably remain true for as long as she was Enchanting.
She looked around the room and was more than a little surprised to see a few panes of glass lying there. They certainly hadn’t been in the room the last time she had looked around. Jenna became more confused. Was the Pyramid trying to help her or hinder her?
In either case, she wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. She picked up one piece of glass and quickly and carefully carved the Enchantment for Hardened Glass into it.
First Tier Hardened Glass Rank: E Primary Flaw: Inconsistent Magic density within piece. Other Flaws will not improve quality of product without fixing Primary and Secondary Flaws. Would you still like to see the other flaws?
That was more than a little frustrating. Still, looking at the piece, Jenna couldn’t argue with the Pyramid’s score. There were absolutely points where she had more or less Magical density. As she tried to figure out why that was, she realized what was causing the issue.
There were a number of places in the Spell where lines intersected each other. By carving it how she did, point by point, Jenna was basically doubling or tripling the Magic density at the intersection points. Suddenly the Pyramid’s advice of making the entire Spell at once made more sense.
Jenna once more considered how she could do that. As she did, she realized that she was already part of the way there. To save time, she no longer traced out the spiral loop by loop. Instead, she just made the entire spiral at once.
It was a similar story with most of the other pieces of the Spell. Jenna created the entire stroke at once, rather than point by point, like she needed to do with the etching tool. With that in mind, she tried to visualize the entire Spell at once.
It was difficult, but she felt like she had it. Carefully overlaying the vision she had made on top of the other piece of glass, she flexed her Magic and forced the Spell into the glass. “How did I do?” she asked the Pyramid.
First Tier Hardened Glass Rank: A
It was strange. Before entering the rift, Jenna would have been over the moon about getting her Hardened Glass up another grade. Now, though, it was barely even the first step in what she needed to do.
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Now that she could make the Hardened Glass at once and without needing the cloud, Jenna picked the piece of red crystal up again. Putting the Enchantment on the crystal couldn’t be identical, but she didn’t have any better ideas than just trying the Enchantment and modifying it after she saw what went wrong. Instinctively holding her breath unless something went wrong, Jenna Enchanted the piece of crystal.
She was grateful for the Pyramid’s guidance here, even though she still knew better than to trust it.
First Tier Hardened Glass (Crystal) Rank: A
Well, that was nice. There apparently was no difference between Enchanting a piece of crystal and a piece of glass with Hardened Glass. As she thought about it, that made some amount of sense to Jenna. After all, what really was the difference between glass and crystals?
Moving on from the question before she wasted any more time, Jenna picked up the first piece of shaped glass. The Enchantment wouldn’t even take to the chunk of glass, which she had expected. After all, the Spell she knew was designed to work entirely on a two dimensional surface.
As she manipulated the image in her mind, she could not find a way to make the image follow the specific contours of the crystal. Deep inside of her, Jenna knew that there had to be an easier answer. If each Enchanting Spell needed to be completely reworked to fit each different shape that it went on, there was no way that people would be able to Enchant anything flexible.
Thinking about how an Enchantment would work on something flexible ended up being exactly the inspiration that Jenna needed. She started considering how an Enchantment would work on a piece of paper. The surface was technically the same, it just looked different.
She was growing more and more grateful for the mathematics class that the Pyramid had put her in. While she still struggled with some of the more arcane concepts, she was better able to understand how transforming a shape still left the original shape. Of course, being able to imagine the way that the Spell for Hardened Glass would change on a flat surface that then bent was still just the first step in being able to make it fit onto the sharp surface of the crystal.
Jenna carefully went through the math in her head. Looking around again, she was grateful to see a stack of papers and some pens. As she started working through the derivations, she was able to understand the transformations that could occur if she had a curved change, like a weight on a sheet. That math didn’t carry over to a sharp corner, like every edge of the crystals had.
Jenna kept working through the math, slowly re-deriving the answer for sharp changes on the surface. She wasn’t totally happy with the results, because they relied too much on solving for specific cases, rather than being totally generalized, but it was as good as she felt capable of doing.
After having run through all of the derivations, Jenna decided to test her theory. She called the image of the Spell to mind and picked up the crystal again. Once more, she imagined the Spell on top of the crystal in her hand.
This time, instead of just putting the Spell directly on top of the shape, she imagined the way that the surface would need to distort to fit on top of the surface of the shape. With a pulse of her Magic, she forced the entire Enchantment onto the crystal.
First Tier Hardened Glass (Sculpted) Rank: B Primary Flaw: Inconsistent Magic Flow throughout piece.
The Pyramid helpfully lit up the regions of the Spell that hadn’t taken perfectly. To her complete lack of surprise, it was over the points on the shape where a curve met a sharp edge. Jenna once more sat down to solve her derivations, this time focusing only on the edge case where there were both curves and sharp edges intersecting.
After she had worked through it, her mind felt nearly as wrung out as her body. The heat hadn’t grown explicitly worse, but continuing to stay somewhere too warm for comfort made her body more and more exhausted. Thankfully, her Magic was not as tired as the rest of her. She looked over the shaped glass one more time and then forced her Magic onto it.
First Tier Hardened Glass (Sculpted) Rank: A
She looked through the lines of the Enchantment on the piece of glass in her hand. They mostly mirrored the lines on the glowing crystal, but she saw a few discrepancies immediately. Thankfully, each of the differences was a place where the glowing crystal was emitting heat.
Jenna grit her teeth, bent down towards the sweltering heat, and got to work
Jenna’s Status:
Jenna Fredrickson First Year Spells Known: First Tier: Hardened Glass Expected Years Completed: 7 Prediction Confidence: 50% Points: 5 Qualified to Ascend to Next Year? Yes