It turned out I wasn't allowed to make bronze, I could mix the metals in the crucible, cast it, and enchant it but when I touched the bronze ring the metals flowed over eachother until I had a copper ring with a tin band on the outside. Since it didn't destroy the ring my enchantment stayed perfectly fine so no bonus exp for that, the issue was that the band of tin was causing interference since it's magical conductivity was different from copper's. I could wear it fine thanks to that stabilization skill the system gave me but if someone else put it on then it slowly started "heating up" in a magical sense. No idea what that would do if it got hot enough since I didn't want to risk blowing a soldier's finger off to find out.

It was essentially another copper ring when I wore it, it also had the same levels of brightness in the loops, but since it was unstable in other hands I decided to keep it for myself and let someone else wear the pure copper ring. Moving on, I wanted to make the other stat boosting item I knew about, but modify it a bit. From what I could tell by looking at the runes the thinking cap had no reason it needed to be a hat, it was just a loop of magic like most enchantments. To be fair, it was just presented as a hat by whatever skill Jeremy had that told him how to make it instead of someone figuring it out on their own. It was also a good one to test against itself since I needed six burning dots to carve three loops for it but I could only handle four right now.

After putting the two loop ring on I should have gained two Wis and hopefully that would let me handle six dots, which I can then use to make a better version. Course it turned out that wasn't how it worked, it seemed that the Wis enchant needed more area to produce the same effect, aka size mattered. At ring size I estimated I was getting point five per loop which meant it only gave me one whole point in wis, it didn't mean I needed to jump to a full size tin crown for full effect, the next size up was bracelet. I was pleased to see that that was enough material to make it work properly, although, looking at the enchanted items I ha... acquired, it should be possible to make an enchantment smaller without losing power somehow.

Still, with a two line bracelet of wisdom I now had access to an extra two Wis, bringing me up to thirteen, but compared to Int I knew I should be able to have more with a better item so I added some more tin to the fire. First I did some tests with a dirt version of a bracelet to feel how the increased status effected me, it seemed that with just a wis boost I had a state of hyperawarness, I could just feel everything, but this had the side effect of making it harder to go full force. My actual limit didn't go down, but because of how much I could feel as I neared my limit I could acutely feel the pushback from pressing so hard so it made me subconsciously think I would hurt myself. Too much int made magic hard to control, like a heavy axe, too much Wis makes you subconsciously hold back, worried you were going to hurt yourself.

Putting on both rings was even worse than when they were alone, I became hyperaware of the giant axe and I had became terrified of my own power for a few seconds. I thought the side effects were caused by overwhelming one stat, but no, they were caused by having boosted stats. The celestial probably didn't notice because most of her power was being actively drained so what she had left was easy to manage. I didn't notice any weirdness with the dirt enchanted items, perhaps side effects were tiered, and the dirt rings were too weak to trigger what was happening to me now. Once the fear subsided I started to feel more confident I could overcome this, that I was only freaked out because I wasn't used to this boost in power.

Looking over I saw that my next thing of tin was ready to become wis bracelet mark two, I took off the Int ring because I needed accuracy for this. While working I could tell that if I still only had novice enchanting than the bonus Wis wouldn't have been enough to push me to six dots, but I had intermediate now, so I did. It was a weird sensation to use more complexity than I could handle naturally, I was already used to handling multiple invisible limbs but this was different in a way that was hard to describe. I suppose the closest analog would the difference between having an extra limb naturally like the ants and having one attached to you like doc ock. It acted and reacted like a real limb but you could just feel they were not the same, in a way that shouldn't have mattered.

Regardless of how it felt to use, it worked just fine, and I traded up in bracelet potency. The old one was crushed and put into into crucible to be melted back down later when I needed it. With that secured I put the Int ring on and waited a minute for the overload to dissipate a little before I started training. Reaching out with dirt control I was pleased to feel that it gave me two extra tendrils to work with, which I used to create a halo of different kinds of dirt. Normal dirt, pure clay, sand, ash, dust, mud, and on the seventh I tried again to hold gravel, as in bits of rock larger than sand grains. Turned out the enhanced tendril compression let it penetrate into the rock, the bonus Int let me provide enough energy for that penetration, and the bonus Wis let me maintain my grip.

This ridiculous setup resulted in the exp just pouring in, I rapidly earned four levels before the soft cap kicked in and it began slowing down. I managed to get to level ninety before the drop-off got so intense that it slowed to a crawl, so I took the ring and essentially stuck it to my back before I worked to finish off power coat, I had gotten it up to level forty eight with the celestial's continuous healing but it was a lot harder to level than magic skills seemed to be. I mean, with magic all I had to do was force more power into it until ether it or I broke from the overload, but I can't just force more physical energy into a physical skill... can I? I didn't see any reason I couldn't, I just sort of assumed physical energy was less malleable than magical energy but nothing said it was.

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Best way to do that was fiddle with all the normal knobs on the Power coat control board until I could feel something from the changes in energy usage. Thus I stared at my hand as I spun it through a kaleidoscope of color, switching the different flavors of coating and the number of layers as fast as possible. I stared so hard I accidentally went cross eyed, which made me split the coat into two separate sections of two layer coats with blank space between them. This finally let me feel a thing, the blank area had less power than the coated areas, but it was a sort of hazy feeling that didn't tell me much. It did give me a starting point though, so I pulled on the feeling itself to try and make it have even less energy.

With a bizarre suction action the area I pulled on suddenly felt like it went to sleep and the sensations slid into sharper focus. Next I shoved harder on the feeling in the coated areas and the color wobbled a little before the coat just expanded to cover more of my arm. Hmm, so power input was attached to area for power coat, but what if it was contained by a zero energy zone? I pulled back so the coat was back to just my hand and slowly moved the sleeping area off my hand and down my arm. Once on my forearm I expanded it into a ring all the way around, energy was flowing into the coat through the inside of my arm so I didn't cut the power coat off from energy.

With that in place I once again pushed on the coating and it once again started to expand, but this time it hit a blockage. With something to keep it contained I was able to focus more and more energy into it instead of it automatically spreading itself out in response. Finally I hit a peak and everything jumped into full focus all at once and I was acknowledged to have done it correctly with a level in a brand new skill. I could now see the flow of physical energy through my body, it closely followed my blood flow, I could pull on it a little but when relaxed it was like a second parallel bloodstream. Unlike magic sense I could not see other people's energy only my own, and even then it was vague unless I focused on a particular area.

Pushing and pulling at it without a skill to focus the energy into an effect had no results, forcing all the energy on my arm into my finger just resulted in my finger hurting. Now that I could focus properly I tried again to overload power coat, once more I forced all the power available in my arm into just my finger, but this time I had it flow into the skill. The coat reacted strongly with the overflow, without any ability to expand outward it went upward, changing from a thin laminate to a half centimeter thick shell of energy. Just holding it like that quickly ticked the xp up and I passed by fifty and settled at fifty three. Several weird sensations passed by me as I hit fifty, the most obvious was when the coat crunched down to a quarter centimeter thick but I could tell it didn't lose any potency. Opening up my new notifications told me.

Physical skill: Power coat mastery changes from "intermediate" to "advanced"

Your trait "one in ten years genius" is upgraded to "one in one hundred years genius"

Due to improving the mastery of skills in two separate categories to advanced without formal instruction

You have have gained trait "epic newbie"

Due to obtaining an epic trait before level ten.

Nice, opening up power coat told me the obvious, the mastery improved the energy density, and it looks like I can now triple layer the coatings, the next one on the list was much more interesting.

"One in one hundred years genius"

An epic trait awarded for performing a large feat of intellectual perseverance in different areas

Grants access to more detailed information on skills and traits

Grants access to data on off-class skills

Grants access to limited view of skill tree, request "skill tree 'skill'" to open

The epic newbie trait was simple but kinda useless for me, it relaxed drawbacks for switching to a different class, but I wasn't going to change class so it was whatever.

Now let's see the secrets of all these skills I have but wasn't able to see before now! Uh huh, hmm, uhmm, I see... everything below level twenty five told me the name and level of the skill but I already knew most of that. On the other hand, the things above twenty five were super interesting. The enchanting mastery lowered the resistance of materials I was enchanting, meaning my whole "enchant metal while it was still semi molten" thing was actually pointless, maybe with particularly strong materials it would still be useful. Magic feedback resistance mastery let me absorb feedback from someone else, letting me to take the hit from something, like when I link to a celestial instead of them needing resistance to withstand my linking to them. Now let's see what the hell is going on with this skill tree 'skill tree: earth magic: dirt control'.