The next morning, we were awoken by a knock on the door.

“Good morning.” I said, beginning to dress myself as Ember finally awoke.

“Morning, hope you guys slept well, I have a few orders on the table that the two of you should be capable of completing, that way I can focus on the more important projects. Come down in half an hour and I will tell you about the problems your ring has.”

With that he left, and soon, the two of us followed. Ember too tired to talk beyond a motivated grunt, and me too excited to learn more.

Soon, we were led to his workshop, where a bunch of materials laid haphazardly strewn about, tools hanging from a rack that were probably not made for them and sygils forged in silver decorating every spare edge on the wall.

“You two will probably learn a lot of new things here, but the most important is how to make an enchanted item, and not merely a ritual focus as you did yesterday. Do you know the difference?”

I bit my lip as I tried to remember, one of my lives having had a brief touch with this difference once.

“An enchanted item is meant to last longer?” I guessed, and he nodded.

“That’s right. We do that by remembering the four key parts of every enchantment. The conductivity of the material, a charger, a battery and an output.” He explained gesturing to three books and a long piece of what seemed to be silver wire.

“Silver wire is the most cost-effective enchantment material, highly resistant to any magical effects, be they arcane or sygil in nature. The other three need to be written in runes. Now, I can simply reform this wire with a few tools, but if you have the power to overcome its magical resistance, you could melt it with flames as well. It just generally takes longer and is pretty exhausting to most novice mages.”

At that, Ember and I exchanged a glance, a plan beginning to form between the two of us as the giant continued explaining.

“Otherwise, just take the materials, carve a form deep enough to hold the enchantment and then put gold above it so they do not see the enchantment and reproduce it. Now get to working, I’ll quickly fly to a friend of mine and buy more silver wire, that stuff runs out too soon, and he closes for a week, beginning tomorrow. I pay you a gold for every one of these rings that you finish.” With that, he went to a weirdly carved out hole in the back and said something in the elvish tongue one would require the two tongued trait to pronounce, and then the ground immediately below him began lifting into the air.

“We need to figure out how to get to the second ring, its almost geos and I really don’t want to wait another year before we can enroll. The new school year starts during New Year's Eve, so we better hurry up.” Ember prompted, now finally somewhat awake to a fat grin on my face.

“Want to make a lot of money by ripping off the guy who is helping us? Don’t worry, I got a plan.”

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I carved the top off a ring he had given us, observing the runes inside.

“The enchantment is bent into shape by him. Do you think you can top that by melting the silver? All we need is a really hot flame, and if you can do that, we’re going to be rich before he notices.”

At my friends confident nod, I began copying the runes into wooden rings he had prepared for us to train with, before it went to the golden ones, while I used a piece of parchment to decipher every one of the runes.

Meanwhile, Ember meditated and worked on the hottest flame he could produce. The two of us needed an hour before we were done, a wide grin on my face.

“These rings are contraceptives. This job is perfect and exactly the kind of thing I need. I bet many of our fellows will buy this type of ring the moment we sell them on academy grounds.” Ember nodded at my outburst of joy, focusing a little as he produced a small amount of flickering blue fire.

“This thing is so disgustingly pervasive, it burns me despite my own fire resistance. I can even focus how much power I put into it.” He exclaimed, his grin turning manic as he began melting down a spoonful of silver wire.

“We get about 0.5 gram of silver for each ring, and we’ll need o dot three if my calculations are right.”

I quickly meditated with the finished and the unfinished ring in my hands, putting my entire focus on channeling necros into the ring in the form of the runes we needed, imagining it as a knife that cut out the smallest possible amount.

Analyze, alchemy and ritual knowledge working in tandem to help me decide upon the best possible way to carve these sygils without risking unplanned side effects, my soul was the focal point connecting me to the place the Arcana came from and channeling it into my body, which had become a pretty decent conductor for spatium Arcana thanks to my unbound mutation. My body strained under the continued pressure, before the power finally landed in the ring, where it fulfilled its purpose before dissipating.

If this was some kind of story, I probably would have started flying or something, but it was merely me channeling untamed Arcana for the purpose of mass production, and when I was done, Ember took the ring from me and filled it with the now slightly cooled down silver, inspecting it and giving it to me, so I could do the same.

Soon, we decided it was good enough and probably worked, and as I analyzed the way they looked through my arcane gaze, they seemed to work exactly as intended.

For the next eight hours, we went to mass production, with me carving runes until my body was sore, and ember melting down silver and inspecting the rings.

The first five took us about an hour each, before I found a rhythm of some sort, and a way the gold this ring was made of already influenced the world around it, giving channels to my power that accelerated them. With this, it took merely three quarters of an hour, giving us another four rings, to a total of nine before our teacher returned.

Ember made sure to take the right amount of silver, coat the top of the enchantment with the gold we cut out and put the difference into his purse, making us about two gram of silver for a single days work. Witnessing our work, our boss decided to take us out to eat something that evening, and thus we saw the third district in the light of dusk for the first time.

People were flying and driving all over the place, magical constructs and steam engines traveling freely in somewhat organized chaos, a group of people wearing silver helmets discussing how magic is a tool meant to control their minds by the evil people of the academy.

We approached a train with sausages roasting all along its one wagon, which each of us got two from, because we forgot to eat something in the morning.

Everything was great, and if we didn’t have some conscience, we would have considered that day perfect.

“You know what I love about enchantments?” Our boss asked, his voice sounding almost cheerful as he drank from the beer he had been given when he sat down.

“They are simple and logical, the script of the world, and every single one has a clearly designated effect. It's different from the volatile nature of Arcana, changing the world without having to consider the way the plane of death might want to react to a specific kit of instructions. Arcana is alive, while sygils simply work. We are at odds with mages, you know? Those bastards don’t think the power this world offers is enough, and just have to connect their souls to some twisted realities, I heard some graft additional souls to themselves just so their corruption can spread better. You two might be mages, but you’ll never be as bad as those old geezers, with your efficiency, you can probably join the city of university and become scientists, follow the two branches of power the system offers us that aren’t this obviously cursed.”

I nodded at that, ember and me trying hard not to exchange a gaze as we subtly made notes into the system. Merely being closer to our target would allow for us to learn things no one ever told us about the nature of Arcana, maybe his were just the ramblings of a madman and hater, but it was everything we had. And as I considered the world of death I had witnessed upon my first refinement, it didn’t seem too far-fetched that these arcane lords lived in a different plane of existence.