The silver worker was growing slower than her sister, and looking at her I could tell that it was because of whatever special thing she had going on was being efficient, using more chemical energy over magical energy to grow. At the rate she was growing the next generation may be laid by the time she is fully grown, which is interesting since I thought the bonus would have made her grow faster. Although taking it slow may be a blessing, Christina's armor changed shape because I managed to cram in a bunch of extra training before she was an adult, if she grew slower I could have fit even more training in and maybe unlocked something else. So this worker, in addition to whatever the bonus itself gives, could gain an extra bonus from being given intense training before she was fully grown.

While I wanted to continue leveling power coat I had noticed there was a sort of soft cap on levels, it only really kicked in with skills I could gain more than five levels in a day with. Such as dirt control, at first I thought it was just the levels needing more exp per level, but it was a combination of both that was really making it hard to grind. Instead I wanted to see if I could get the system into a catch22 by forcing two different skills to fight eachother over the result of an action. Noticing the soft cap also let me see that the class locked skills were sort of firm locked instead of hard locked, so I thought a huge burst could break through. To begin I cleaned out the furnace of ash and got a new fire burning and put in the crucible with the mangled copper ring. A little pump action gets it plenty hot enough, once ready I put a clay mold into the fire with a ring hollow in it, since I could form clay with magic there was no seam, just an entry hole for the metal.

Once it was nicely baked I carefully maneuvered the crucible out with some dirt gripper and using a second gripper I had the mold poking out of the fire and poured in the copper. I had plenty of practice with this from the failed attempts so it went in smoothly, but this time instead of taking it out and letting it cool down in the air I put the mold in the top area and put the crucible to the side and snuffed the fire. The chamber was still hot so it kept the mold toasty and thus the copper was still molten for a while, but eventually it cooled enough that the copper became tar like. In that state I reached into it and started burning in an enchantment, with it still hot I could burn with dots instead of trying to make lines so I made it a triple line enchant instead of just a single.

I carefully keep everything even and make sure nothing collapses or shifts as it cools and shrinks. Eventually it became fully solid but still hot so I pulled the mold from the furnace so it could cool off better in the open air. Finally, after a long time of fussing with it while juggling some dirt balls on the side it is cooled enough that I could touch it without burning. The moment of truth, applying a sharp crack with a rock to the side, the clay mold shatters and a perfectly formed copper ring lands on the ground. When I touch it the system will need to decide ether to let the ring be formed and give me exp in ring making, or having it fail and give me a massive boost to enchanting skill due to the "learn more from failure" effect it had going on.

I reached out and gripped the ring solidly between my index and thumb, on contact it started vibrating wildly and a steadily building headache started up. I kept magic sense up as long as I could manage and I saw the enchantment rapidly turning on and off, every time it turned on it pulled out some of my magic and when it turned off the magic vanished into the ether, unlike how the magic circulates with dirt control or fills up like with the bush it is just gone. I gripped it harder as the headache became too much and I had to turn magic sense off to alleviate some of the pain, it helped for a minute before it worked itself back up to that level. I lied down and held the ring on my chest so I wouldn't let go by accident, soon the headache hit a peak and I passed out.

I woke up it was several hours later, luckily when I opened my hand the ring was intact, and it appeared I had a notice from the system in the corner of my vision. I sat up slowly and I was relieved that I didn't have any residual pain, I must have been fixed after it resolved the conflict of skills. I went to the cooking fire and grabbed a bite to eat before I got around to seeing what the blue box had to tell me.

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Loop detected: isolating

Loop analyzed: skill conflict

Conflict resolution: grant skills and mastery to discoverer and add prioritizations and exceptions to conflicting skills

Skills granted: "blacksmith: casting", "enchanter: stabilization"

Masteries granted: "enchanting: intermediate" "magical feedback resistance: intermediate"

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

Warning issued: memory analysis shows loop was created intentionally, do not do so again, this is your only warning.

Wow, uh, damn, I am probably the only person to get a warning from the blue box itself that I did something stupid, at least it mentioned intent so if I run into a loop by accident hopefully it wont decide to just nuke me to deal with it, instead of resolving it by giving me the skills to make it no longer a conflict. This did confirm the system was sentient, if not sapient, it was capable of patching itself and saying things other than raw information. Attempting to bring up any info on the skills, including the ones that are now intermediate, still didn't give me any info at all. The fact the new skills had headers makes me think that I could only get introduction skills rather than the actual skills a class gives. 

For instance, a blacksmith doesn't just level the actual blacksmithing skill but his level in that class, which at milestone levels probably gives him access to new kinds of smithing or bonuses for his current skills. This is also probably how the apprenticeship concept happened, to become a blacksmith class you need enough levels in the blacksmith skill. This combines with their overall cautious nature regarding using skills and they take an age and a half to get the skill high enough level for them to change class. If I went to a city and touched the class shrine or whatever I would probably have access to all classes I had the relevant skills for. Not like I was going to switch, consort was a weird class but it was powerful in it's own way and made it a lot easier to manage this place.

Anyway, I can put those skills into my rotation and also make some more copper rings, eventually, I don't have enough copper coins to melt into more jewelry. I really wanted to try making a gold ring, but I had a feeling that even though I had the skill to cast rings that working with gold required a very high level in the skill. For now let's see how well this copper one worked, considering all the hassle I went through to get it. Without bonuses I had eleven point five points in my Int stat, point three per level and I was level five, but the stat screen only showed whole intergers. Putting the ring on and checking showed it jumped all the way up to fourteen, so it was giving me something between two point five and three point four, more then that would have made it fifteen. 

Next was stress testing, if it exploded when pushed it was worthless. The test was simple, doing the one thing I knew used Int as part of the calculation, the mass of dirt that a single tentacle of dirt control could support. Reaching out was strangely difficult, like I was swinging something big and heavy that needed to be moved slowly to keep control instead of momentum pulling me. I jammed the end into the ground and started increasing the energy flow while keeping an eye on the ring with magic sense so if it started overloading I could throw it away before it detonated. I hit my normal dirt capacity and nothing terrible happened so I kept adding more force to the power stream to see which hit the limit first.

At some point I hit my limit, as in I become literally incapable of adding any more energy to the thread of dirt control, and the ball of dirt it was holding was a fair bit larger than normal. Watching the ring closely I saw no warping or shaking or anything dirt and stone rings did when they were stressed. There was one interesting thing, only two of the power loops in the ring were active, and one of them was slightly dimmer than the other one. There must be some weird enchantment rules that I don't know about that was causing that weird thing. I could only surmise it meant the ring was not fully active and could give a bigger boost somehow. I needed more data points, so all the kids had to try it on and tell me how it changed their stats in relation to their base. 

First up was a nearby soldier, her base Int was three and when she put on the ring only the central line lit up, but barely, and it did not change her Int in any way. So it lit up because it linked to her properly, but the fact it didn't just give her two point five points of Int like it did for me confirmed that the points it gave people was a variable, but I needed more data to know what determined how much it gives, it could be class based or some math thing I don't know about. I also asked her why she didn't seem overly worried about the fact I was passed out in the middle of the base a little bit ago, turned out Victoria basically told them I had a weird knack of passing out during training and somehow waking up stronger, which was technically true but correlation was not causation.

Point was she saw me laying there and since I wasn't dead or physically injured she didn't see any sort of problem with that fact. Anyhow, I tried the ring on a worker next and they had the same deal, three stayed three. I skipped over a celestial for now since unless it woke them up I wouldn't get any data from them. So instead I had Victoria try it on, she got the same result I got with it, and cheekily asked if my power nap was why I now had a copper ring when just the other day I was complaining about how I couldn't make copper rings. One of the soldiers must have come down and told her what I was doing before I woke up. I had no reason to lie about what happened so I told her what I did and how the blue box was probably annoyed with me for being a little fucker, and she was impressed.

I decided to get back to training dirt control for a while with my ring granted jumbo dirt balls, practicing complex maneuvers with my relatively large Int was difficult at first, it was like trying to swing a heavy object, like it had a sort of magic based momentum. I only got one level before Christina got back from her hunt and I could get her to try the ring. Her base stat of six point five Int went up to eight, which gave me a boost range of between one point five and two point four, and only one line on the ring was powered up. Looking closely and comparing it to when I wore it, the central ring was the exact same brightness, the difference between us was that I partially lit up a second loop in it. I'll have to test it out with my training partner celestial tomorrow, but this was pretty interesting data so far.