It only took a couple days for Evan to relent and once more modify his stove. The two simple controls he’d given it just weren’t enough and were badly designed – he knew that now.

The biggest change he ended up making was including a sensor to evaluate the heat inside, and to stop powering the heat-emitting formation once it was reached, keeping the temperature at that level.

Without this, it got far hotter than the setting would suggest.

Next, he included some insulation formations, as the heat that had been leaking out was unpleasant, even if his thermostat protected him. It would also, when combined with the previous sensor, increase efficiency. Not to mention the danger of any kind of fire that might get started – down here, that could be truly dangerous. He hoped the cavern had a formation for dealing with that.

These two changes alone made a massive difference in how usable the stove was, and actually made him view cooking – or at least, heating up the meals from the restaurant back up – as something a little less frustrating.

His cold box, by comparison, worked perfectly. It kept things cold and went a long ways to helping him preserve his food so that he could avoid cooking.

Doing all of this made him wish for a home of his own, so that he could make up plans for building a personal composition, even if it was pricey enough that he probably wouldn’t go through it with it.

Since he didn’t have one, though, he instead channeled his efforts into completing the design for his inscribing device while avoiding the drama that Theo, Rory and Alison seemed to constantly create.

They all seemed to know each other well and had been friends since childhood. All of them came from families of miners who lived in the shaft but had each decided to pursue something other than mining.

It was in this manner that Theo and Rory ended up becoming crafters, and that Alison took up a job with Starspire running one of their offices.

He had been somewhat curious, but he never even had to ask – Alison loved to just talk and talk, to the point where he found himself avoiding the office whenever he could.

To that end, he started placing larger orders of Substance, and keeping a larger stock in his workshop.

Speaking to them had at least one positive, though; it allowed him to get a better idea of what it was like living in the shaft, and what sorts of things he could create to sell.

None of them seemed to mind his probing, and by the end of the week he had several other ideas. They weren’t original, of course, but every addition to his repertoire helped, even if he was just selling to the military.

At first, part of him was excited at the idea of renting out a store to sell his products from – over his childhood, he had spent many hours just watching through the windows of such stores, yearning for any of the products inside.

Of course, that wasn’t really realistic here in the shaft – each community was too small, and traveling through the lifts just for shopping was frowned upon and inconvenient at best.

For now, he’d just have to settle for his growing balance with the bank, while increasing the different types of objects he sold.

According to Theo, Rory and Alison, any kind of equipment that could make the miner’s life easier, more profitable, or safer was a good bet. His beams accomplished all three, in a way, so it made sense they were so popular.

Well, there was also the fact that his beams were foundational to mining, and somewhat consumable. Every miner needed beams to hold up the rock above them – there was just no other way around it.

They could be used sparingly, but doing it that way was a huge inconvenience when they weren’t that expensive – not for miners with much cultivation, anyway.

Circling back to his future products, he settled on commercializing his thermostat, as well as making some mining helmets, and maybe even pickaxes.

Typically, he preferred sticking to bigger products – it was one of the reasons he had made the beams in the first place, but he had been making them for so long he needed something new.

He was also curious about what he could manage with some smaller projects, and he hadn’t forgotten about his ultimate goal here at Goldspire – figuring out what his Myth did, and how to increase it.

Before he could get around to doing that, though, he would need a lot of money – money he could get by selling more products and increasing his repertoire.

Doing this would also help him become a better crafter in general – he had decided on taking the generalist approach, as he thought overspecializing in anything was a bad idea. He should be able to craft anything himself – even if a specialist could do a little better.

Jack of all trades, and all that.

With his decisions made, he first did something he’d been meaning to do for a while – inspect the work of Theo and Rory. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust them, it was more that…

Well… no, I just don’t trust them to do a good job.

He also wanted to check out how the formations worked, as Isaac had said that there was a learning opportunity there.

To do that, he met up with Theo the next morning after getting up early to do his own rounds. Honestly, he’d have preferred Rory, but Theo had been much more receptive to the idea, and generally more welcoming.

"Hey Theo, I’ve been meaning to check out the formations you guys do maintenance on for a while now – I’m curious about how they work and figured you might be willing to show me around?”

He didn’t know where they were, exactly, and he figured there wasn’t any issue having Theo tag along – he wasn’t doing anything strange. Evan would also need his access badge to actually inspect anything without getting attacked.

“Sure man, I guess. You good to go now? Might as well get it over with.”

“Yeah. So, what are all the formations that keep us safe down here?” Even after a couple of weeks he wasn’t entirely sure what the entire list was, or how they worked.

“Well, there’s a lot. You have the obvious stuff – the one that keeps the air good and clean, the one that keeps the temperature reasonable, the one that ensures the roof stays held up, and the one that manages the lights. Honestly, that’s all you really need to stay safe down here. What makes everything so frustrating is how big they are; makes doing anything at all to them take ages and way harder than it should be.”

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That was interesting – he knew that when his will was connected to something, he could explore and manipulate it even past where his soul sense would have reached, but he had never had to work on anything that truly required it – even the compositions of buildings that he had worked on before easily allowed him to reach wherever it was he was imbuing, and so he had never done so from any real distance.

He didn’t interrupt, though, as he would soon get to experience this for himself, and he didn’t want to reveal he hadn’t ever worked on something so large before. Theo continued, and even started to get a little heated – he seemed truly frustrated by how hard his maintenance work was.

“All of that is pretty reasonable, though! The formations are massive, and I get why. I’m not so childish that I get upset over the way the world works. What really grinds my gears are the processing formations. They’re so stupidly complex and massive, but they expect me – and Rory, I guess – to keep them in good shape! Starspire-”

“Wait, processing formations? What are those?”

“You don’t know?” Evan gave him a dangerous look. “Ah, well I suppose you’re not from the shaft, so you probably don’t run into them very often. They’re the formations that process raw Substance into the stuff we use to cultivate, or imbue, or whatever – and they’re ridiculously complex. As I getting to before, their so complicated they need specialists to build them. How are we…”

Evan ignored his grumbling as he considered that. He knew that the Substance he used every day – for pretty much any purpose – was not the same kind you could get straight from a beast, or from stone and ore. It was processed first, but he had never run into one of the formations that did that.

For good reason, it sounded like – by ‘specialists’, Theo probably meant those formation masters had a special certification for it from the guild, or maybe just the military.

The only thing he knew about how processed Substance differed from the raw kind was that it was specialized. Raw Substance was an eclectic mix of everything that it was for needed, but most of those aspects weren’t needed or wanted for use in cultivation or formations – one of his earliest lessons in imbuing was to never use raw Substance, as it would gum up the formation after it finished using the aspects it actually needed, and wouldn’t work nearly as well in the first place, if it worked at all.

At the time, the lesson had seemed so out of place he had nearly forgotten it, but with this conversation it came back to him.

He mused over how hard this certification would be to get as they traveled across the cavern to their first destination. Their trip took them near the entrance of the cavern, where they saw a massive formation that stretched around the entrance.

It wasn’t something he had noticed on his way in, but he was tired at the time and dreadfully bored – that first trip through the lifts had almost put him to sleep near the end.

The formation didn’t look like anything special, so long as you discounted its size. It stretched around the cavern, a dull looking belt of metal that seemed to sit partially inside the rock, only showing its surface.

Like most of the more advanced formations he had seen, there were no inscriptions on the surface – everything would instead be set inside the metal itself, to protect the rather fragile inscriptions from any damage. To his mundane eyes, it looked rather ordinary and plain.

As he got closer, though, he could begin to make out a dull hum that resounded from it. That wasn’t a good sign – it showed that the formation was beginning to show its age, or that it wasn’t properly maintained.

Either could be the case – Theo and Rory didn’t seem very passionate about crafting, at least not like he was – to them, it was just a job like any other, and he was sure part of that to do with not being very good at it.

“Well, here we are. Man, I hate this thing. There is no way it possibly needs to be this big. Sorry about the humming, Rory probably didn’t finish up…” He seemed almost embarrassed.

Evan would be too, if another crafter saw such a shoddy work of his, but he just nodded and gestured for Theo to explain which of the formations this was.

“This is actually two of them – it keeps the air fixed up and the temperature tolerable. It’s easy to miss, but you can feel a very slight breeze if you’re standing close enough. You probably didn’t even feel it coming in, but I think that’s by design. Go ahead and take a look at it. Just… don’t be too harsh, okay?”

“Relax. I wanted to look at it, but I’m not going to insult you while I do so. I’m sure the hum is just from the age of the formation. I don’t know how old they are, but some wear and tear on the inscriptions is inevitable.” Theo and Rory were always so wound up around him as though he was going to berate them for being terrible crafters or some such.

He knew he could be a little… uptight when it came to crafting – Arnav had complained about it before, and Illiana had mentioned it before he left – that he was very meticulous about how he went about his work.

But he had been quite close with them – they shared a workshop, so it was inevitable their attitudes while crafting would come out. With Theo and Rory, he had mostly kept his distance – he didn’t want to grow close to someone new so soon after Arnav’s death, and he didn’t like how easy going they were about their lives.

It just rubbed him the wrong way.

He made a gesture to Theo, and he took out a small badge from his pocket before handing it over to Evan. This was how Goldspire managed security for the formations, and it was a rather novel way of doing it after what he’d experienced elsewhere.

The badge would function as a ‘key’ to the security of the formation, so that it wouldn’t do anything nasty to him when he connected to it with his will. It would have a short grace period, so long as he didn’t take any actions, so that he could establish the connections necessary.

Stepping forward, he placed his hands on the formation. The metal was, surprisingly, warm to the touch. Another sign of the abuse the formation had taken with the passing of time. As he had done countless times before, he forged the connections needed between himself, the badge, and the formation – though this time, things were a little different.

Usually, whenever he connected to something with his will, he could sense the entire object – along with its formations, inscriptions, and Substance – entirely. It would appear in his mind so intimately and deeply he could conjure the entire object, in perfect detail, without needing to see or feel it.

Every imperfection, every worn edge, everything would be almost branded into his mind.

It hadn’t always been this way – it had gotten stronger as his cultivation increased and his capacity for crafting increased, but by now he was used to knowing almost everything about whatever he connected with.

Now, though, he didn’t have that. Instead, he could only vaguely sense a portion of the metal band, and his understanding of what he could sense was hazy, like the resolution he had grown used to had been completely reversed.

He was thrown for a loop – even though the feedback he received was largely useless, the suddenness of it combined with the overwhelming amount had his head pounding intensely after only a moment and he hastily broke the connection, his vision swimming as he almost lost his balance and fell.

Anger began to flare up in his mind before it was doused with the knowledge that this was his own fault – he should have known better.

He wasn’t an apprentice anymore; he shouldn’t be making mistakes like this – of course Theo hadn’t said anything.

The sense his will gave him was not omnipotent at revealing the details of an item. It worked like soul sense in that it was a formless perception that worked off esoteric principles he didn’t understand – but was different in that the size of this perception was related to his crafting cultivation and was able to grasp more information than his present soul sense.

Additionally, this sense was limited to items he was connected to through his will – in other words, it wouldn’t help with analyzing another’s work, as connecting to something, as he had previously learned, was two-way and could open himself to harm.

Finally, the crux of how he was just harmed was that his perception was limited to the item he was connected too – in the case of something relatively small, like a sword, this meant that his perception was ‘thicker’ – it deepened, allowing him to have more clarity or ‘resolution’.

Since the metal band was so large, his perception had instantly spread out as much as it could, overwhelming him and giving him only a few sparse details about the band – the only thing he truly knew was its size, so lacking in depth had his perception been.

“Are you alright?”

Evan glanced over at Theo, who looked like he was fighting back a laugh. His anger began building again.

“I’m fine. I just… I was distracted.”

The words came out sloppily, missing his usual measured cadence, but he was too focused on retaining his balance to care.

“Right. Well, why don’t you rest for a minute? I’ve done that a couple times, and I know how terrible that can make you feel.

Agh. He didn’t want to admit to his mistake, but at the same time, he did need a minute to rub his head and try to work away some of the pain. Maybe he should sit down.