Magically enchanting the Ratling with just weaves alone wasn’t going to cut it, not only was that too expensive it was also limiting, at least for now. The sole limiting factor was my lack of soul essence, which would be resolved in time.

There were other things I could do to make them better though, although it would probably aise their spawning cost by a noticeable degree.

It didn’t matter though, as this was something I wanted to test out anyway. The recent patterns had inspired me, particularly one called Rokacrystal. It was an interesting substance that could absorb shock and had the ability to grow more durable over time as it slowly converted that force into more of itself.

There was one downside though: it was extremely heavy due to its density. That was only a downside if you were weak though, as shown by the barbarian-man-cat thing, I still wasn’t sure what he was if I’m being honest.

I didn’t even want to think about his transformation, my mind would have more questions than answers. I had initially wanted to give my Ratlings a skeleton made of Rokacrystal but dismissed the idea, that would counter their build as stealthy swarm-like fighters.

I wanted them to be tough though, their first fight was embarrassing and I couldn’t bear to see a second one play out in such a manner. The first thing I needed to upgrade is their resistance to the various elements, particularly fire.

I was surprised at how easily they burnt and caught fire, that would end here.

I plucked a strand of soul essence from my slowly filling pool and pushed it into a newly made Ratling. I then switched to my magical sight and watched as it settled into the core of the Ratling’s metaphysical body.

Normally I would’ve just imprinted what I wanted onto the soul essence and left it there but after my trance I realized many things about weaving soul essence, aka enchanting. The first thing was that it required understanding, or at least knowledge of the concept you wanted, the second was that understanding and complexity reduced the cost, sometimes significantly.

I discovered this fact shortly after made the game table and checked my soul essence pool. A significant chunk had been used up but it was a lot less than I expected.

With the discovery I quickly realized that the way I was enchanting up until that point was very inefficient, hence why they cost so much. I also realized that I needed to update all of the weaves within my dungeon, which was going to be a tedious task, to say the least.

Anyway, back to the task at hand.

I extended my metaphysical fingers and pulled at the thread, manifesting smaller threads of soul essence that I wove over the parts I wanted the weave to affect, which was the Ratling’s entire body.

To make things easier for myself I modeled it after the Ratling’s circularity system , I basically copied it, modified it, then pasted it onto its vessel. This one was made of only soul essence though, not matter.

The modifications were simple; instead of a heart there would be a ball, and it would be located in the center of its being, right below the diaphragm. The Ratling vessel now looked like a massive and intricate network of faint threads that pulsed with luminosity, all tied to a tiny rotating ball of white light.

It was beautiful and new, I’ve never made a weave like this before and I couldn’t wait to see the results.

Would it work? Or would it explode violently?

Only time would tell!

Anyway, time for the most interesting part; weaving in my understanding, concept and instructions.

I plucked another thread of soul essence from my pool and pushed it into the tiny ball, watching as it swelled in size slightly. Then I began the process of weaving my understanding.

What did I know of fire?

Well, I knew that it burnt, and that it was hot and could get extremely hot if it had enough fuel and the necessary conditions for it to do so were met.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

Hmm, what else?

Not much else, surprisingly. I didn’t even know what exactly was fire, only a basic understanding that it burnt, grew and needed fuel to have a continuous existence. I was a bit disappointed by my lack of deeper knowledge but what could I do about that now? Only time, experiment and a willingness to learn would fix that.

Now that I knew how parts of weaving worked, I realized I had to familiarize myself with what I wanted more deeply if I wanted anything spectacular. Despite the lackluster understanding I still wove it in, it was better than nothing, right?

Next I moved on to the concept of resistance, which I was a lot more familiar with. The concept itself was a lot more ambiguous than fire, which was why it had so many definitions within my mind.

I went with the ability not to be affected by something, especially adversely. This definition aligned with what I had in mind, which was the ability to resist harmful fire. I wove in my understanding of the concept and wove the threads defining fire and resistance together tightly, expanding a bit of soul essence to fuse them into a new concept: fire resistance.

I felt a surge of happiness, this was a lot more challenging than I anticipated but a lot more rewarding. The newly formed thread of fire resistance floated at the center of the ball, awaiting instructions.

I left it there for the moment, I wasn’t done yet. I wanted more than fire resistance, I wanted resistance to shock, water, light, lightning and some other elements too. I repeated the process struggling to define the concept of shock, what it was and how it worked.

It was really embarrassing and I wondered what my past self spent most of his time doing, was leaning really that hard for him? Or was it my artificially blocked and fragmented memories? I only had a vague understanding of these basic concepts.

Water was a lot better, I had a lot more experience with it and I also had a pattern for it. I wove in my understanding of the concept, then water itself and moved on to lightning and anything else that came to mind.

When I was satisfied I had about four threads of resistance threads, fire, shock, water and lightning. The water resistance thread was the most pronounced, composed of multiple tiny threads woven into each other to form a shape reminiscent of a water drop.

The fire thread was similar, but its shape was fuzzy and all over the place. The other threads were just that, threads. They had nothing distinct about them and resembled the other threads that made up the core of the weave, just a bit brighter and excluded more meaning than the rest.

Now for the fun part: weaving instructions. It was a lot easier than defining the concepts, I started with water, since it was the most defined of the three. I plucked three threads of soul essence from my pool, then wove one into the water resistance thread while expressing my intent.

I wanted it to resist harmful water to the best of its abilities, anything that didn’t come from me that had water in it should be resisted. I wanted to give the Ratling the ability to determine what it thought was harmful when it came to water but held off, the sheer amount of knowledge and soul essence threads that would take was more than I had right now, it was something I wanted to do though.

This would have to do for now though, I did the same for the other threads before plucking another large thread from my soul essence pool and tied them all together in an intricate mix of concepts.

I zoomed out and admired my work, a massive interwoven network of thinly glowing threads of soul essence all connected to a thick but slowly rotating ball of concepts and meaning. All of this was a single, interconnected enchantment, the first of its kind.

It was beautiful and I felt extremely proud of myself, not only had I figured out a new method of enchanting I also made it cheaper too, since these thin threads barely cost me anything. The only thing that went up was the amount of time spent, which wasn’t that big of a deal since I’m sure that would go back down as my proficiency in the art grew.

I plucked a piece of soul from my growing river of soul shards and gently placed it within the ratling’s brain, watching in fascination as a spark of life and intellect ignited within his formerly dull eyes.

How that worked had always been on my mind, what were souls exactly? I got soul essence from them over time but that was just a byproduct, produced by…well, experience? That wasn’t quite right, I still got soul essence, even when nothing new is experienced, it was just slower.

The constitution of the soul was an even bigger mystery, they were like shining stars of concepts, meaning, soul essence and knowledge but zero of these things were involved in their makeup, according to my senses anyway.

Anyway, now for the moment of truth.

Soul essence began to trickle into existence shortly after the soul settled in, leaking into the thin threads of the enchantment that greedily sucked it up and transferred it to the core. It activated with a pulse of white light, then red, then blue and finally a gray pulse.

The network became awash with these colors as the threads of soul essence drank them, swelling and growing in size.

Hmm? Did It work?

W-

I blinked, then blinked again.

What the heck?

My fully formed and alive Ratling was gone, reduced to burnt and cracked bones, splattered blood and burnt fur in a smoking crater in the ground.

What the flip?

How the heck did it explode? Why did it explode? What did I do wrong? Where had I gone wrong?

I felt a pang of frustration, all that work and dedication, gone, reduced to useless slop. I calmed down though, that wouldn’t help me at the moment, figuring out the problem would. I cleaned up the mess and remade the ratling, fitted it with the same soul and remade the network of threads and formed back the core, managing to do it even better this time now that I had some experience.

Then I activated the soul, paying close attention this time to the entire process. The core drank the soul essence, activated and fed the colored soul essence into the entire network, then the threads warped, twisted then exploded, killing the Ratling once more and releasing its soul.

Huh?

Why did they explode and twist like that?

Was the soul essence too much? Did it have to do with the fact that the soul essence had changed? What exactly was causing them to overload here?

Hmm, lets try reducing the amount of soul essence produced. But how would I go about that? Weave an enchantment on the soul itself? That wouldn’t work, as the soul itself didn’t exist, technically speaking. I was only interacting with a proxy of sorts, not the actual soul itself.

That’s what it felt like anyway, trying to peer deeper into it only resulted in a confusing mess of nonsense at best and a killer headache at worst.

With that off the table what else could it be?

Could it be the threads themselves? Do they have to be thicker? Was the metaphysical load of three four combined concepts too much?

I felt a sense of excitement wash over me, drowning out my annoyance and frustration. Figuring out this would be fun, and potentially very rewarding and I’m here for it.