Evan had only been working with his inscribing device for a couple of days, but he was over the moon with it. It vastly sped up the rate at which he could complete his work, especially his beams, thanks to him no longer needing to spend his mana on casting the spell for inscribing.

His mana had always been the bottleneck to his crafting, as he could only trust himself with inscribing his work for fear of it being stolen. It was one of the reasons he had so much time on his hands – he just didn’t have the mana to spend all day working.

Not having to spend his mana also had other benefits – it let him save it for his own experimenting, for one, and took away the mental strain he was under while using the spell to keep it stable and control it.

Mana control wasn’t considered a part of one’s magical talent, as it was more a skill than an inherent quality, but as with everything, some were better than others. He wasn’t sure where he landed on the scale, but it couldn’t have been very high, for he struggled with most spells even after mastering them.

It was also like a muscle – it could be exercised and grown, so he had gotten better over time, but not enough to make controlling his spells easy.

Had he been a mage, working on his mana control would have been one of his utmost priorities, but he wasn’t, and so he rarely practiced for the sake of practicing – especially considering one needed mana to control to do so, something he rarely had enough of to go around.

All of this was to say that he wasn’t very good at magic, and so not having to use it anymore in his crafting was a great boon to his mental fatigue at the end of the day.

He really shouldn’t stop practicing though, as eventually magic would become necessary for his crafting once he started working with spirits, but… just this once, he was going to give himself a pass, and start it back up when he had less requirements on his time.

At the end of each day, he found himself less exhausted than before, and he actually had the mana to spend on his quality of life – things such as his cleaning spells, or the one for light. He didn’t cast them very often anymore, as he needed to save it for his work, but now that had changed, and it was glorious.

He had investigated making a device that could clean his clothes, but it would be complex and likely have to rely on mechanical processes. Theo had mentioned a ‘washer and dryer’ they used to clean their clothes, and that they were mostly mechanical in nature – a version that relied solely on Substance required a lot of different parts, and few formation masters could build them in the first place – nobody was sharing their designs, after all.

Since that was out of the picture for now, he instead turned his attention back towards figuring out his Myth. He tried to nail down what might do it – but the visions were vague, and only gave him a general direction.

He felt it had something to do with creating exceptional products, but that was all. In all the visions, they were used to do something exceptional – they saved the day, fixed something that couldn’t be fixed, or made legends of men.

In each, these feats were done by otherwise ordinary people – sometimes alone, sometimes in groups, and in others entire cities or towns were part of the vision.

Their allegiances were never made clear, nor why they did what they did. Some of them were obvious, though – he had seen great battles between two armies, though the focus was usually on a few heavy hitters.

With only these vague, discordant visions to guide him, he spent several days putting together a plan to try out some tests. The easiest would be to make something simple, like a sword, and use a technique he had long earmarked for use in testing his Myth. That of layering a series of connective Substance layers onto an object to artificially increase how much Substance, and therefore intent, it could handle.

This would drastically increase the power of the object, but at the same time, would cause it to fall apart exceptionally quickly as each interior layer caused a much larger outer portion to collapse with it.

Like a house of cards, as soon as some of the bottom scaffolding collapsed, much of the rest would follow.

Doing this was also expensive, but if it helped him figure out his Myth, it was worth it.

Before he could do that, however, he needed to already have someone waiting to receive it. Otherwise, it would decay so quickly that by the time he found a buyer, it would be nothing but scrap. This was another detriment to this technique – each of the supportive formations had to be always active, such that even while crafting the item, it was already on a timer before it collapsed.

There would be no turning off the weapon once it was made, so he had to be ready to sell it right away.

Finally, there was the matter of what would someone even do with the weapon down here? As far as he knew, there were essentially no hunters at the garrison, and he didn’t know what else the weapon would be useful were.

Thankfully, a quick chat with Alison the next morning when he visited her at the office gave him a direction to head in.

“Well, weapons are certainly still needed down here. Not all the caverns are man-made, you know? With how hard working the miners are, they run into natural caves and caverns pretty frequently. There’s a whole department here at Goldspire that manages those, keeping the miners safe by clearing them out.

“There’s not as much money in it as mining equipment, though, but I’m sure they’d be happy to receive some of your work, Evan! They have some lists of equipment they need that I can get for you, if you’d like?”

“No, no, that’s fine. I already have something in mind. Is there somewhere I could go to sell to them directly? I’d like to meet them, face to face, if I could. Get to know my valiant customers a little better.”

“Sure, but I’ll have to request the information, so it’ll take a couple days to get here.”

“That’s fine, just let me know?”

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“Sure thing, Evan!”

After taking care of his usual requests for Substance, he headed back to the workshop to think on how the sword would work.

It was only a few hours later that he realized a sword wasn’t a good fit at all. After all, there was only so much he could do with a sword before it was no longer a sword – most imbued swords were simply geared towards being better swords; sharper, more durable, lighter, that sort of thing, with perhaps some kind of elemental attack.

A sword also required a lot of skill – even if he made an exceptional sword, a beginner – or someone close to it – wouldn’t be able to truly demonstrate it’s prowess and might even hurt themselves with it.

No; what he needed was something that took as little skill as possible while still being quite grand and dangerous.

It didn’t take long before the answer came to him – a scepter! Many mages used one, and they were typically used as repositories of mana, crafted with formations to create a space where their mana could be stored in advance, able to be retrieved at a critical moment.

Others acted more directly to help their wielders, coming equipped with ‘spells’ of their own – formations that could mimic them, anyway. Most mages didn’t like these types of staves, viewing them as a waste of resources and demonstrative of the lack of confidence the wielder possessed in their own magic.

It was this kind that Evan decided to build. Featuring its own spells, all built by himself to be as grand and overbearing as he could make them, he figured he could turn anyone into a certified battle mage for at least as long as the weapon lasted.

This project wouldn’t be easy, as he needed to ensure that everything worked out perfectly – not only in truly making the wielder an incredible force to be reckoned with, but to also ensure that his own name was attached to the feats.

If this had the possibility of working to increase his Myth, then he had to ensure there were no potential issues with himself not getting the ‘credit’ for the achievements of his testing subject by simply not putting enough of the spotlight on himself.

Thus, with a direction to head in and a design to complete, he set to it.

At first, a month slowly passed as he wasted tear-inducing amounts of money on gaining familiarity with the layering technique. Because of how it worked, much more of the Substance invested was lost, and with the already massively inflated amounts of Substance involved, the loss between each test brought actual tears to his eyes.

Not much design work was done, as he spent much of his days busy either in his usual labor or figuring out how he could sell his finalized weapon. Every way he thought of looked strange, and as he felt the need to publicize himself to cover all his bases, if he did things wrong or he chose the wrong person he could ruin his budding reputation and become a laughingstock.

Already, his use of the layering technique wouldn’t do him any favors – at best, considering he would be ‘selling’ the weapon for virtually nothing, he would be considered a particularly eccentric formations master with delusions of grandeur.

Taken in the most negative night, it might be seen that he was misleading others on what he could actually accomplish and trying to build a false reputation – a conman, through and through.

With these facts in mind, he had to ensure that the way he went about this clearly spread his reputation, but in a manner that came off as generous and only perhaps a little eccentric.

This took more than a little planning, but by the end of the month he felt he had an appropriate idea worked out.

He would first find someone young, like himself, that seemed to be down on their luck. Someone who wanted to be a mage but for whatever reason was having a hard time. This would require some scouting but was nothing he couldn’t figure out.

Then he would offer his scepter – it would be a stylishly designed staff that screamed high quality – on the condition that they use it to help clear out some of the surrounding caverns, doing so in a public manner that would help him garner a ‘reputation’.

Doing it this way might seem a little… strange… but if he played his cards right, everything would work out. To help this along, he would promise that so lang as the result satisfied him, he would make a proper weapon for whomever he ‘sold’ the scepter.

Additionally, because he admittedly didn’t really know what he was doing, he would separate this reputation from who he really was.

This way, no matter what happened, he could keep some distance between the result and his actual reputation and status.

He was weary of putting too much creativity into this alternative persona he would be donning, so he simply decided to coin it with a simple mark of a well-trodden path leading beyond a hill. The name of this mysterious, fictitious brand would be the seekers – suitably mysterious, and different from himself.

None of these actions were random – they were all meant to confuse and mystify anyone trying to tie himself to this reputation, as if this worked – something that was still up in the air – he would be using them going forward for things related to his Myth.

At least when it came to situations such as this one.

Whether this would work at all, or fail because of this distance to himself, he didn’t know. But he wasn’t comfortable with attaching himself to this – it was just a little too… weird, and who knew if someone was looking for his Myth? By not using it as inspiration for anything related to the seekers, this might help him avoid the notice of anyone who knew of its existence.

After all, it must have been possessed by someone before him. It didn’t make sense for something like his Myth, something that could reside inside his soul, to have been anything other than some incredible creation by an awe-inspiring crafter.

Through all his learning, nothing explained that easy fact – that it resided inside his soul. It simply wasn’t something even mentioned in all his lessons, as though it was so beyond belief it wasn’t even worth a mention.

So, he had to be careful. Even now, he wasn’t sure what his Myth would do, but over time he had convinced himself it was a heavenly treasure he could never reveal, even if it meant he had to… kill someone to keep his secret.

Evan was no saint – he knew that his actions had, even now, no doubt been used in countless violent acts to take another’s life. Some of his first creations had been weapons of war, after all, but the idea of doing the deed himself was different.

He shook away those dark thoughts – none of that mattered right now.

***

The river of time flowed incessantly as months passed. Evan continued his daily routine as a normal technician of level 15, but with every day that passed it became harder to contain his excitement as the fateful day approached.

He had sorted everything out regarding how he would sell the scepter, prepared a disguise, and was only days away from finishing the design for his weapon.

It was unexpected that it would take him this long to finish his designs, but he wanted everything to go perfectly, and he demanded nothing less from his own work.

Staves were a different category altogether from what he usually worked on, and it took him a while to figure out the ‘spells’ his scepter would hold – they were complex, and he had foolishly underestimated this when he first started on the design.

Despite this setback, it was worth it. He found he truly enjoyed working on the scepter, designing spells that were meant to be impressive and deadly. After spending so much of his time crafting each day, for what was soon approaching two years, much of the mystery and larger-than-life excitement surrounding formations had long ago dissipated.

It just wasn’t quite so exciting when the first thing he did upon seeing a formation was mentally dissect it and figure out how it worked.

Working on the staff, though, had brought some of that back for him, even if he was intensely aware of how everything worked. Testing the weapon filled him with childlike glee every time, no matter how many times he tested it.

He admired it in his workshop, staring at the richly designed scepter that was nearly as tall as he was – he wanted it to be imposing, but still practical.

It was thin, easily gripped with his hand, and painted black with a gold-colored trim. He had considered a brighter color, something like red, but he didn’t want it to be gaudy, so he stuck with black.

Now that it was finished, he was a timer to get it handed off to whomever would use it for it’s purpose, so he quickly picked it up and made for the stairs.

Everything was coming together.