Spell mastery rank up, Will-o'-Weal Basic > Intermediate

Will-o'-Weal - Intermediate Mastery. Novice Rank. 25 Mana / cast. Incomplete spell, upto Early only. Summon your very own good-natured tenderhearted creatures to assist you in your journey, foremost, to provide Light and Ignite a fire. Also keeps you and the vicinity Unsoiled, Disinfected or Distilled, they too, grant a modicum of health regeneration on contact that compounds with each additional creature. Five may fuse into a weal-spider with the tools and skills to Harvest Fauna. These mana creatures and their abilities are fueled by ambience mana. May dissipate on command or from mana overuse. Each creatures are capable of assimilating themselves into [20 cubic centimeter of] dirt, stone, bone, wood and metal, allowing the creature to alter and shape its form in accordance to their caster's intent; when suffused within a material, they may be wholly immersed or select to leave an external presence in the shape of an eye stalk or a thin layer of semi-camouflage coat. By providing double the mana cost, a control Core—if none are present—will manifest on the caster's hand, while a pseudo-karmic mana thread connects the control Core to each and every summoned creature allowing anyone utilizing the Core to freely communicate with them.

The answer has been here all along! In the form of Will-o'-Woe. Like it, Will-o'-Weal now summons a control Core to the palm of any user who prefers exerting finer Spell control. Through it, commands may be directly given and a fine karma-like thread-of-mana may be used to keep track of where and how many Weal-Lifes said spellcaster has conjured. This spell has gone from being mere simple convenience to, well… complicated convenience.

It is currently about the perfect time for brunch or a second breakfast, I had been busy Infusing Shape Stone to a few Rumah owned Mana Core before inspiration struck like lightning. Another alternative to keeping the walls under control; with how Weal-lifes are now capable of Assimilating with a large variety of material, and the newly implemented control Core. I came up with a brilliant idea.

"Agus, what metal do you know of have a good ratio of being both cheap to buy and durable enough to endure several attacks or offensive spells. Oh, and it should be easy to acquire." I ask our resident prodigy crafter.

"Steel!" He replies in an instant.

… that's so mundane, "oh come on, Mr Runic Enchanter~! What about Oricalcum or Adamantine or, I don't know; is there a Frigid Silver or some kinda Meteoritine? Maybe a Heart of the Earth or something?!" I was totally making things up of off the top of my head.

"Expensive, expensive, brittle, impossibly expensive. And lastly, the demand for that one exceeds the supply so much that even the richest people in our current reality can't find a single one put up for sale." He replies nonchalantly, "so no! Steel is produced locally, it is therefore cheap and can be processed—folding, for example—to provide it with ample durability."

"Isn't that an old technique rendered moot by technology?" I ask him, I remember reading somewhere on the internet that it's used to make good swords out of poor material. By spreading out any impurities—which will otherwise be an area of weakness—or something like that, while modern technology have advanced enough to more than adequately clean any impure contents to a level folding no longer helps much quality-wise.

"It was." He replies. "Yet now, mana have to be considered. I have read somewhere that folding metal under constant and controlled infusion of mana enriches it somehow."

"Understandable. Well, I have an idea…" and I tell him all about it. How my Weal-Lifes can assimilate into various materials; in this case metal and stone. And how I plan to give them a tough metal casing where they may hide. We would then embed said metal into the walls where the creatures may send out strands of their mana to do their job of keeping the walls infused and un-growing. Hopefully made well and being very tough, the metal would withstand any incoming attacks bar overpowered abilities or magic.

"Something feels off," Agus said after listening to my plans, he gestures please give me a minute with one index finger. But it is after ten times that amount of minutes that he finally says. "Your Weal-creatures assimilate themselves---all of their being, into the material---so in the event we do provide them with a strong metal casing. Only the part of them that are actually in the metal would be relatively safe from harm."

"I… didn't think of that." This time, it is my turn to gesture at him to give me a minute. Either they need to regenerate fast, or instead of the mana that constitutes their body, they use external mana… or both! Still stuck within my own thoughts, I cast the spell. As the new mastery have increased its cost by a factor of two, this time; I sacrifice a bit more of the Weal-life's individual sizes in exchange for giving each of them a tiny core that acts as a pseudo-Mana Core. This allows the creatures to grow by storing the ambient mana they are already absorbing and utilizing it for itself—size increase for example—or their intended tasks. Of course in order to make this work, I had to once again introduce Mana Manipulation into the spell. A little like how I incorporated Mana Sense into Magico Disk months ago.

Will-o'-Weal - Novice Rank, Intermediate mastery expanded

Skill level up, Artificial Infusion 23 > 24

Skill level up, Visualization 48 > 49

Skill level up, Inspect 41 > 42

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Skill level up, Mana Manipulation 55 > 56

No combat, no gains… or well, there are some improvements, so that's something. "Alright, I got it fixed!" I finally tell Agus, "they have a Core now, the Core will hide in the armor and they can manipulate mana to infuse the walls."

"You make it look so easy," he muttered, barely audible even with my inflated Attributes. But, before I had the chance to say what? He continued to say, "alright, so you've currently got three options regarding how we can mana-process your acquired steel—if and when you acquire them as ingots. First, as we've previously discussed is folding; for this we will need to cooperate with one of our smiths. Second is melting it and manually separating all the impurities—now this may sound primitive, but our techs no longer work, while this does the job just fine—because generally; less impurity equals sturdier metal, this is also done with the help of our smith. And lastly, by magical-unorthodox means; like a Spell I know is called Bend Metal. Of course it was stated that we will need to understand its more profound masteries before the refining can be achieved."

"Can we only use one method?" I ask instead…

—

1 kilograms of Steel costs 8 Creds in the System Store, while 1 kilograms of coal and iron ore both cost 1 and 2 Creds respectively. Expensive if compared to local prices, but consider it a benchmark for comparison. Here, our smiths sell steel for half that price. Cheap! They are made with material gathered from the Chamber of Goblins Dungeon near Rumah. I think they buy 15 - 20 kilograms of crude mixed-metal goblin weapons for 1 Cred. Smelting it while adding trace amounts of coal to make the versatile alloy. It's a very profitable business.

The smith we visited blabbered non-stop while he worked since the time I bought 50 kilograms worth of steel and asked him one question. How do we make steel? He then did a step by step naration—-while not actually making steel, he just described the process in great detail as we work. To summarize; first was something about extracting oxygen from iron ores, which will give us about 62.5% the initial weight in pure iron. Add coal into the molten metal—about 1 to 2% of the Iron's mass, pour into a mold and wait for it to cool... Steel, get! He was quite repetitive, but especially so regarding mana being a game changer, turning previously unusable ratios into infinite possibilities by being a universal fix to minor but significant defects that people tend to disregard.

So, for exactly 200 creds, I purchased a majority of his stock. And then we tried methodically folding the various ingots of steel while I kept it saturated with mana during every fold. Each piece of ingot is one kilogram; approximately 10 centimeters long, and 4 by 3 centimeters wide and tall. The folding process itself took quite a while and is greatly limited by the physical capabilities of the blacksmith; with exactly 10 folds on each ingot, he would spend 10 - 15 minutes to end up with a magnificent 5 centimeters solid cube. Unfortunately his speed gradually slows down as his physical stamina dwindles.

So, before he stopped for a lunch break. I requested to be taught how to do the folding myself. After all, I am sure to have overqualified Attributes for the task. Where to hit, how strong each time and when to fold, are processes I understood in minutes. One or two ingots were ruined and reset through Bend Metal, but overall, I finished the leftover 40 kilograms worth of steel in the time span our expert blacksmith took to fold 10; by being faster, stronger and much more accurate… and being able to fold the metal with my bare hands. Accomplishing 2 or 3 folds before the metal cools down and needs reheating.

When the two pitiful humans who still needed mundane lunch returned, I thanked the good smith-man and gave him an extra 100 Creds tip for the job. Then dragged Agus back into his Chamber before saying. "I think we can try the third method by hollowing these carbon steel cubes from the inside using Bend Metal, to provide my Weal-Lifes a snug spot to store their Cores, while still maintaining or even further compressing their current size."

"Goodluck!" He simply replies while nodding.

---

Bend Metal - Basic mastery. Journeyman Rank. 100 mp /cast. Brainchild of Ingothar, Magmlaze and Laminut. Freely bend the shape of a metal. And manipulate its metal's density to better alter its properties, limited only by your capabilities.

During the moment I acquired the spell, I was busy with Will-o'-Weal. So Blinking into the nearest source of random metal bits—which is exactly this Chamber I am currently in—I simply infused a piece of metal with Mana Manipulation, intend for the mana to affect said piece and randomly changed it shape into a lump before tossing it away into the exact same container I found it in, before once again Blinking away. I may or may not have altered its density. But what matters is that the Spell's description says I can!

Without further ado, I got myself comfortable and grabbed one cube of steel from my Repository. Casting the spell and allowing mana to thoroughly infuse the item was completed very easily. Next, I mentally locate and grab hold of the cube's center point and simultaneously yanked in all directions, pulling in a burst that lasted for a fiftieth of a second. Successfully creating a small hole within the object, about one fifth of its total length. Did I just create a va—

"Did it work?" Agus asks me. "You've been staring at that cube for the last few minutes now, doing nothing. I can tell from how your mana is stagnant."

"Yeah, I would say this constitutes a success. Can't you sense the situation inside of this cube?" If he can tell my mana is stagnant, he can surely Sense deeper.

"Not really. To my Mana Sense, everything inside is just mana—your mana."

"I see, well. I had just managed to make a one centimeter hole in this." I lift the cube for him to see. Outwardly there are no changes to its shape.

"You made a vacuum?" "Pretty sure I had just succ—yeah!" We say together, only that my longer sentence was cut short.

… "Cool!" He shrugs. "Is that large enough?"

"I believe it should be, but I wanna try to compress it further. And slightly alter its form to make it easier to wedge in between the stones. Besides, I don't need a vacuum, better to give it several very very narrow ventilation." So I did just that. Slowly, I open a straight one millimeter tunnel from the center of all 6 sides into the tiny space within. Also very slowly, I pull at the small center hollow to enlarge it to twice its previous diameter. Next, I slightly decrease the angle of all 8 corners to slightly less than 90 degrees, giving the cube a barely noticeable concave. Just enough that it would not easily slide off the wall it is embedded upon. Satisfied, and deciding a 5 centimeters cube is small enough, I repeat the process another 49 times.