The trip to the tailor turned out to be a lot more fun than Clarity expected... for Esmeralda. 'Do all women love shopping this much? Does that mean I need to pretend to like shopping now?... No! I'm a slime! Nothing says that a slime has to like shopping!'

If it wasn't for how Clarity had blown off Esmeralda for the past week, she would have gladly fled halfway through. Instead, she did her best to go along with Esmeralda's wishes, at least for today.

The way Esmeralda's eyes gleamed when Clarity admitted she could alter her body size to try on differently sized clothes was positively terrifying. The only thing that saved Clarity from the fate of being forced to try on every set of clothes in the store, both large and small, was the tailor's insistence that “No! Clothes must be made to fit the person! Not the other way around! You demean my profession by suggesting such a thing!”

Esmeralda nodded in thanks to the tailor for her services, and Clarity added her own heartfelt bow of gratitude to the robust woman, as they walked out of the store with a bag of clothes under each of their arms. One of the bags held clothes Esmeralda had bought for herself, while the other three were meant for Clarity.

Clarity also wore a black sweater and black dress pants of Esmeralda's choosing, having already disposed of the shredded remains of her previous robe. Apparently, sweaters were one of Esmeralda's favorite examples of native fashion, and she swore up and down that it would surely help Clarity “fit in” with the local adventurers.

“You look kind of uncomfortable over there” Esmeralda pointed out. “Is it the clothes? Should we have gone with the floral dress instead?”

“No! No, it's just... I still don't have any money” Clarity admitted awkwardly.

“Oh, it's fine, don't worry about it!” Esmeralda shrugged “I have more money than I know what to do with in a small town like this. Enchantments are basically the highest luxury items available out here.”

“Tell you what” Esmeralda added, seeing that Clarity was still uneasy with so many gifts “why don't you leave those tusks with me and we'll call it even? Their mana is quite dense so they would make acceptable enchanting materials.”

“Okay” Clarity agreed, glad to have some way to repay Esmeralda, though she suspected she was ripping the enchanter off quite badly with this trade.

By the time they made it back to Esmeralda's shop, the streets had already begun filling up with adventurers. A pair of young adventurers waited outside for the enchanter to return. “Let me deal with these guys before we get to enchanting!” Esmeralda whispered as she unlocked the door, ushering in both slime and customers to her little shop.

“Well? What are you here for?” she demanded, after the adventurers spent a good 10 seconds doing nothing but staring at the monster in their midst.

After of a bit of badgering, Esmeralda drove the two adventurers out with their desired Firestarting and Coldstone enchantments, and turned her attention back to Clarity. “Now, let me show you what real enchanting looks like!”

“Normally, my guild would make you go through years of study and tests before teaching you any actual enchanting” Esmeralda explained. “Because they want to make sure you're worth investing a valuable core in, but we're not going to worry about that!”

“Are cores that valuable?” Clarity asked. 'Wouldn't that make the forest a literal pot of gold?'

“Hmm, how should I put this?” Esmeralda began to lecture “Our society is built on specialization. People who make money with fighting focus on increasing their strength as much as they can, while those who make money through crafting focus on perfecting their crafting skills! Sure, my guild could provide pathetic goblin cores to all of their trainees and have them spend the next decade improving their core and their skills to the point they are actually useful, but it's much more efficient to weed out the duds ahead of time and provide proper mage or wizard variant cores to the talented students who can now spend all of their time on enchanting instead!”

“Oh... what's the difference between a mage and a wizard?”

“Ah... that's not really relevant to enchanting.” Esmeralda cringed. “I don't want to dig into the politics of it too much, but mages value control, while wizards value big, flashy, powerful spells. They're basically the same thing, but they love fighting each other too much to admit it. If you ever run into a magic user and you don't know which they are, just don't mention it until they tell you, because they love to feign outrage if you get it wrong.”

“Anyways! There's two types of materials that are commonly used for enchanting; magical materials and monster byproducts. Magical materials would include metals such as silver, gold, mithril, and above, as well as most gemstones. Monster byproducts usually don't hold enchantments as long, and aren't reusable like most magical metals, but they're much cheaper to make.”

Lowering her voice as though she was sharing a dirty secret, Esmeralda added “Most enchanters are only good with one or the other. If they're institutionally trained, they usually focus on magical materials, and if they're self taught, they usually work with monster byproducts. They see each other as stuck up pricks, or primitive fools, respectively.”

“But I'm an expert at both methods!” Esmeralda declared. “Well, maybe not an expert, but pretty good! Here, try these on and watch” she handed her bifocals to Clarity and pulled out a small ball of silver.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

Clarity placed the frames in front of her glowing eyes, and suddenly her normal vision overlapped with swirls of mana, similar to what she was sensing through her mana peception, but even more confusing as it seemed to merge with her regular vision. She quickly removed the glasses and rubbed her eyes to illustrate her dislike for them.

“Ahaha... I guess they do take some getting used to” Esmeralda laughed awkwardly. “I guess we can try without them at first. We'll start simple! The first enchantment any enchanter should learn is the Glowstone! It doesn't take much material and is easy to practice with.”

Placing both palms around the silver ball, Esmeralda closed her eyes and slowly directed small strings of glowing mana to weave together within the metal, causing the small ball to begin to light up with a dim yellow light over the course of several minutes. Clarity watched the entire process through her mana perception and felt incredibly thankful she didn't need Esmeralda's glasses to make sense of the process.

“Tada!” Esmeralda exclaimed, holding up the glowing ball. “One Glowstone complete! This small enchantment can last for years, so long as you don't do anything to the mana inside. Of course, since this is for practice, the next step is to remove the mana, and then do it again” she explained, stripping the mana from the ball of silver much quicker than she had placed it.

“Now you try!” Esmeralda handed the ball to Clarity.

Clarity grabbed the little ball, repeating the process Esmeralda had just shown her, while Esmeralda donned her glasses to observe the work. It took her several tries to get the hang of merging the mana with the metal so that it wouldn't dissipate into the surroundings, but she soon got the hang of it and managed to copy Esmeralda's glowing ball, the only difference being that where Esmeralda's had shone a normal yellow light, Clarity's glowed a light blue, similar to her eyes.

“Wow, your mana manipulation is even better than I thought.” Esmeralda stared. “This is great. It would probably last at least six months on its own. With some practice you should be able to improve that! Though, I'm not sure why the color is... Wait, do you have an affinity?”

“Yes...” Clarity admitted “I think I have an affinity for magic itself”

'I probably won't be able to keep that a secret forever, and Esmeralda seems like a decent person to confide in.'

“A magic affinity?” Esmeralda scrunched up her face in thought. “I've never heard of such an affinity, but they do say that there are affinities for everything. Maybe that would explain your exceptional magic control? Most enchanters don't use magical cores with affinities, because it would interfere with unrelated enchantments, but I couldn't say how yours will affect things. We'll have to experiment to find out!”

Esmeralda looked excited about the thought of learning about Clarity's affinity, but pivoted to another topic instead “First I should show you monster byproduct enchanting. Huh, actually, you're a monster too, aren't you? You don't take offense to this or anything, right? I know humans have outlawed enchanting with human bodyparts, and elves have...”

“I'm fine” Clarity reassured her with a smile.

“Right, let's use those boar tusks you brought!” Esmeralda pulled out a small knife and quickly sliced through the tusk like a knife through butter, cutting off two small pieces.

Handing one piece to Clarity and keeping one for herself, she explained “Now, unlike magical materials where we infused our own magic into the silver, these monster byproducts are already filled with magic. What we want to do is imbue our own will onto the mana left behind by the monster to create the enchantment.”

Once again holding the enchanting material between her palms and closing her eyes, Esmeralda began to imbue her will into the mana. The tusk already held a high density of mana within that was effectively inert, but through Esmeralda's will it slowly transformed into an enchantment of its own. Within a span of only a dozen minutes, it had transformed into a glowing chunk of boar tusk, just like the silver ball from earlier.

“Now you try!” she said, holding up the enchanted boar tusk.

Again, Clarity tried to copy her, but this time nothing happened. No matter how hard she willed it, the mana within the boar tusk clipping refused to change. Esmeralda waited patiently as Clarity concentrated harder and harder, glaring at the piece of tusk like it was her mortal enemy.

Nearly two hours later, fed up with her repeated failures, Clarity attempted to push her will into the mana one last time, using all of the strength she could muster, but her effort backfired as she rapidly absorbed the mana instead. She stood there, shocked, as the manaless chunk of boar tusk slowly crumbled to dust in her hand.

“What the hell was that?” Esmeralda yelled, unable to comprehend what had just happened.

“I'm sorry, I'm not able to alter the mana because it doesn't have my affinity, so I accidentally absorbed it instead.”

“Oh... I guess that makes sense?” Esmeralda put her hand to her chin in thought. “Wait, are you telling me you absorbed all of that mana, right out of that piece of a fully matured boar's tusk, just like that?”

Clarity nodded apologetically.

Esmeralda looked around the shop frantically for a second, before her eyes came to a stop on the boar two boar tusks Clarity had brought and grabbed the larger one. Pushing her glasses up, she presented it to Clarity and energetically demanded “Absorb this!”

“Didn't I just give you those to pay for my clothes?” Clarity asked awkwardly.

“That's not important right now! I want to see how this absorption ability of yours works!”

“Okay, I will... but... do you want me to absorb the entire thing, or just the mana inside?”

Esmeralda's eyes lit up as she picked up the second boar tusk and handed it to Clarity as well. “You can do both? Then let's see both!”

Clarity chose to absorb the first in its entirety, the tusk slowly dissolving into mana over the course of a minute before being absorbed completely. Esmeralda kept her hand on her glasses the entire time, staring in shock with her mouth wide open.

For the second tusk, Clarity attempted to rip away the mana inside and absorb it like she had done earlier with her failed attempt at enchanting, gaining slightly less mana than the first. The entire task took less than a second to complete. The boar tusk once more began to crumble away as all of the mana was depleted. Looking up, she noticed that Esmeralda's mouth hung even further open now.

“That was amazing!” Esmeralda yelled. She began pacing back and forth, muttering “There are so many things I want to try. So many experiments to test!”

Clarity watched, speechless, as Esmeralda got caught up in her own little world, writing down all of her thoughts on a piece of paper she pulled out of her desk.

Just as Esmeralda was preparing to start on a second sheet of paper, the shop door swung open and a voice called “Hello! Is Clarity in here?”

Amy walked in and took in the scene “She is! Oh, am I interrupting something?”

“She's just making plans for the future, I think” Clarity informed her.

“That's right!” Esmeralda agreed. “So many plans!”

“Well, that's great, but I've got something to talk to Clarity about if that's okay? Guild business.” Amy stated.

“Sure, sure, Clarity I'll catch up with you later! There's so many things I have to prepare! Oh, right” Esmeralda shoved the silver ball from earlier into Clarity's hands “Don't forget to practice with that!”

Amy laughed as Clarity simply nodded, before Esmeralda rushed back to her papers.

Walking outside, Amy asked “Hey Clarity, do you remember those personal quests I mentioned you wouldn't have to worry about as a new adventurer?”

“Yes?”

“Well, you've got one. And the receptionists bugged me to come find you and tell you about it, because the person offering it severely overpaid.”