Evan stood beside Master Isaac, inspecting the building before him. It was brand new, and it showed. While the alchemist might have skimped on the formations, he seemed to have spared no expense for the actual building – likely because mundane construction was far cheaper than the time and expertise of a formations master.

The building wasn’t as large as their own workshop, but it was bigger than their communal home. It was two stories tall and constructed out of stone bricks laid atop each other with mortar – evidence that no magic was involved. The stone was granite, likely excavated from a nearby outpost – it couldn’t have been cheap to get it moved here, but it made the house stand out in its luxurious construction.

Mountain Acropolis seemed to be better planned than Fool’s Hope, and the building was situated on a quickly developing street full of other workshops that directly sold goods. The storefront had thick glass windows, behind which sat a display shelf that was empty.

It was a good idea – even now, in the early morning, there were crowds of people moving into and out of the buildings, fat satchels of coin tied to their waist or kept in purses.

Some of the other nearby buildings were just as luxurious, but they were a minority amongst the mostly wood – although nicely built – buildings that catered to soldiers rather than hunters. He supposed that the alchemist who owned the building was trying to garner himself a reputation as high quality.

This could be inferred from the sign above the door, which itself looked high quality, that read “Lazy Hunt Potions”. He could already imagine the subtitle – “Makes hunting easy!” or some such. The words were written in nice calligraphy, the letters flowing and almost oozing class.

Overall, it just barely managed to keep away from overdoing it. He wondered if that would change once he was done with it – the more detailed request he had gotten to read mentioned that any embellishments would be appreciated, and Evan was eager to make a good impression and try his hand at it.

Having gotten a good look at the front of the building, he made a casual circle around the building, speaking his thoughts aloud – his master was with him, and had said that the best way to teach would be to let him do his own thing, and that he would only but in when he made a mistake or lost direction, with only occasional bits of guidance.

“There are more windows than expected.”

“Its construction is sublime – I know we’re not doing reinforcement, but it wouldn’t need much anyway.”

“This is a perfect place for some lights.”

Evan made many comments, but most of them lacked substance. He didn’t really know what he was looking for, and all of his work would be done inside for the most part. Even for the lighting, the outside would make do with lanterns – it would easier and cheaper to replace them from time to time than to install a formation that required maintenance.

His master said nothing, and strangely that was more anxiety inducing than if he had been full of complaints.

In truth, the building was very nicely built. There was even an awning in front of the door, to shelter customers from rain as they entered or left.

Once he retrieved the key was given and unlocked the front door, he did a tour of the rooms.

The first floor was all business – most of the floor was taken up by a large shopping space with various racks placed all around, with a counter in the back that presumably an employee would stand behind to complete sales.

Behind the counter there were two doors, each one on opposite sides of the counter that ran the entire length of the room. The one furthest from the front door revealed what appeared to be a storage room, with more shelves that were more thickly bunched together than the shopping area.

There were also a few crates, along with some separators that could be used to divvy up the space inside the crates.

Along the back wall of this room was a staircase that led to the second floor. Up there were an assortment of rooms that made up the living space for the alchemist, and nothing more. There was a bedroom, a kitchen, a bathroom, etc. – all of them quite large and spacious. He was a little jealous – their own communal home was far more cramped.

Back downstairs in the other room was another storage area, though this one wasn’t furnished. Given that the other one seemed to be meant for completed potions, he figured this room was meant for the ingredients of the potions. It must have been unfurnished as he himself would be designing most of this room.

There was another room connected to where the ingredients were stored, though it was entirely unfurnished and empty.

Evan realized that he should have requested the floor plan for the building, so he could know for sure what each room was intended for rather than making assumptions. His master hadn’t said anything, but once he brought it up, he got an earful for wasting their time, though there was no real annoyance in his master’s tone.

Like always, the man was incredibly patient.

Back to the empty room, though, he guessed that it was where the alchemy would happen, given it was connected to the room where ingredients – and now that he thought of it, Substance – would be stored.

It was enough for him now to know the layout and see the rooms for himself. They left, locked the door behind them, and while Master Isaac headed back to the workshop, he went back to the office and got a hold of the floor plans for the building.

Now, he would meet his master at the workshop and start figuring out the design of the formations.

***

“How will I add inscriptions?” Evan asked, sitting beside his master in the workshop. They were hunched over scribbles of paper, laying the foundations for the primary formation. It was the most important, and he couldn’t afford to mess it up.

“You’ll use the carving spell for metal – it’ll work just as well on stone as it does on metal.” At the expected response he frowned; the spell took a lot of mana, and having to do it all himself would make it incredibly difficult to get things done in a timely manner.

“Don’t look at me like that. You know better than to invite strangers into doing the work for you, and it will be good for you to start using the spell in your work.”

He did of course know better, but it would still be a tiring, maddening affair given his lacking magical abilities. Was this another reason the work was paid so well?

“Can I inscribe onto the surface, or does everything need to be submerged?”

“It’s up to the discretion of the owner, but generally it should always be done out of sight. I’ve already looked at the full details; the alchemist wants everything submerged.”

Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

Hmm…

The difficulty of the task was beginning to show itself to him. Everything would need to be planned in advance, for if he made any mistakes while inscribing the building, there would be nothing he could do – he simply had no way of restoring any of changes he made, and the primary formation was no less complex than his Weight Redistributor, not to mention it worked at a much larger scale.

Had he bitten off more than he could chew?

***

Evan made his way back to the workshop and got down to business, learning from Master Isaac as he sketched his design down onto paper.

“The most important aspect of the primary formation is adaptability. From the full details of the request, it is apparent that the work being done now is only the start. This could also be seen from the building itself – trying to market itself as a high-end store for hunters will require more than a fancy sign, stone walls and two basic formations.

“In the future, the store will need reinforcement for the entire building, air conditioning, and more. You might not be the one to install those, but it is important that regardless of who installs them, the primary formation is capable of accepting them into the grid and allowing others to work with it, within reason.”

“Master, how do I imbue this into the formation? I understand that some sort of key will need to be made in the security, to allow others to work on it, but how does the primary formation become ‘adaptable’? What does that even mean?”

Evan was deeply confused – he felt like it was his first time imbuing again. All of his work up to this point had been built with the finished product in mind, and he had no idea how to go about hooking up other formations without manipulating the primary formation each time.

“I’m getting to that. Listen. With this core trait in mind, everything else is secondary, but it must work with every additional formation. Most likely, there will be a vague limit that is apparent in the design that you can offer to the client.

“How you go about making the formation adaptable is relatively simple but difficult. You will create a dynamic imbuement that can be keyed into ‘latching’ onto other formations, built with the purpose of facilitating the other functions of a primary formation. This imbuement is considered dynamic as it is programmed to cycle through all keyed in formations.”

“Does it cycle in order to get through all attached formations? Why is there a limit to how many can be connected if it just cycles through all of them?”

“The rate at which the primary formation cycles through the formations is quite slow – creating such a dynamic imbuement is difficult to begin with, but improving it is even more difficult. You must remember that the scale we are working at is much larger than most devices, and the attached formations could be anywhere in the building, and of various sizes.

“Getting the imbuement to go through all of them requires a pre-laid track as it moves through the building, which means this track needs to reach most reasonable spaces inside and outside the building. That’s a long path, and the imbuement has to do more than simply recognize all attached formations – each additional feature of the primary formation will complicate matters.

“At some point, this cycle simply begins to take far too long, or ends up carrying far too much information. Each ‘stop’ along the track takes varying amounts of time and adds data to the imbuement that it must carry until it can discard or transfer it somewhere.

“This is how you will know the limit of the imbuement – its parameters will be determined at the outset, and you can intuit how much the imbuement can handle before it becomes too much.”

It took some time for Evan to process that, but eventually he understood – it worked somewhat similarly to the sensors he had seen and even used.

When he originally learned how imbuements work, his understanding was that each imbuement of the formation was spread out over the entirety of the formation – this was what allowed the imbued devices to break down in parts rather than suddenly outright breaking.

This was only true for the simplest imbuement, though – class zero. More complex imbuements – the pieces of each formation – needed to be centralized.

Doing this meant quicker, more complicated breakdowns, but it was necessary for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, though, was that the ability of any crafter was ultimately limited. While their ‘bandwidth’ increased with their cultivation, so did the needs of their work.

It was yet another reason that talent was so important, even in the higher Collapses.

Because of this, a crafter couldn’t evenly elevate each imbuement. Complex imbuements like sensors needed the power to retrieve information, and large amounts of data would be needed to moved from sensors to wherever that data was used. If the sensor was evenly distributed throughout the formation, the data transfer of the entire formation would need to be elevated – something that took a lot of strength.

To get around this, as imbuements increased – one for reinforcement, one for sharpness, another to act as a switch – they would be increasingly centralized, with careful lanes connecting them to allow for transfer of information or whatever else.

In small devices, this worked just fine. Everyone understood that more complicated formations broke more easily – that was true even for mechanical devices. The problem with larger formations was that in most cases, such as his own, the formations laid down in the beginning weren’t the finished product.

No client wanted to be told they couldn’t have this or that formation installed because the primary formation didn’t have the proper pathways at that location.

To remedy this, the primary formation would instead use a dynamic ‘carrier’ of information that moved along a track spanning most of the building, exchanging a constant line of traversal for a much ‘cheaper’ method that still worked, but didn’t provide live communication or travel through the formation.

It was a tradeoff, much like anything else.

With his newfound comprehension, Evan started asking more questions.

“Why only have one dynamic ‘carrier’? Couldn’t the load be split with more?”

“Yes – that is definitely possible, and commonly done, but you’re underestimating the cost of each one to your bandwidth. It will seem like you have more than enough given the amount of Substance involved, but by the time you’re finishing up you won’t feel like you have enough.

“This is the cost of a dynamic imbuement like this – it changes too much, so inscriptions can’t be used. It must be baked into the imbuement using only your will, making them massive hogs of bandwidth and is one of the reasons why they’re so difficult to create.”

“Still cheaper than individual pathways?”

“For the entire building, yes. It also makes things a little easier to design – you’ll need colored pens for keeping track of all the pathways otherwise. Some mix and match, leaving extra pathways to places they expect there to be lots of transfers.”

Evan found he liked that idea quite a lot. It felt incredibly satisfying when he looked over his complete design of the ‘Weight Redistributor’ for the first time – he had a feeling this would feel even better when he was finished with it.

If the dynamic imbuement was so expensive that having several was prohibitive, and they were used to increase the ‘adaptability’ of the formation, then by carefully mixing just one with static pathways at key locations he could somewhat stretch the limit of his primary formation even further.

Wait…

“What about everything else a primary formation is supposed to do?” He asked. So much had been explained to him at a rapid pace he was losing sight of the bigger picture.

His master laughed for a short moment before answering. “Yes, this is the problem; you will never have enough bandwidth to go around and do everything, especially for this request.”

Evan frowned. He didn’t like hearing that, but it was true. “Because the alchemist is at his third Collapse?”

“Exactly. Already, you will struggle to bring the formation to a suitable level. Trying to give it additional features is a thankless endeavor. The request allowed for and only paid enough for someone at the first Collapse to bother taking it on, so their expectations cannot be that high.”

“If I was able to, what sorts of things could I add to the primary formation?” Even if he didn’t get to add anything fancy for his first try, he was still curious about what sorts of things others added.

Could he read through requests and come up with ideas that way? Something worth noting – even if he had to figure things out himself, just knowing what could be done would serve as great inspiration.

“Well, there are all sorts of things. The pillars of a primary formation, the must-haves, are adaptability and security. The former enables the latter, as well as opening up all sorts of options.”

Master Isaac took a deep breath. “Acting as the infrastructure, it is important not to let the original purpose get away from you. Basic extensions are security alerts, to catch any malignant actors trying to add unauthorized formations, and maintenance reminders.

“Intent cannot create more intent when it comes to Substance, so while automatic replenishment isn’t possible, conveniences can be made – such as using the primary formation as a transportation network of Substance, allowing it to be moved around the building as needed for anyone doing maintenance, or in the case of crafters, for easy access in their work.

“If possible, these are essential additions. There are others, but those are usually better served as their own formations that connect to the primary.” He stopped and seemed to notice Evan’s starstruck gaze.

Evan shook his head as his master stopped his rambling and got down to business – how these things could be constructed in the first place.

“Let me show you. You’ll need practice to manage the dynamic imbuement, though…”