Over breakfast, the two craftsmen had informed Sylvia that with a few exceptions, equipment was typically split up into five different types, which all affected how stats were applied to the user. The types were: Weapon, Tool, Armor, Clothing, and Accessories. Weapons, Armor, and Clothing were only able to add a single piece of equipment’s stats to the user, and that being the highest one worn or used. The rest still had their stats, but their effect was solely limited to the physical state of the equipment.

Tools didn’t have a usage limit but were instead limited by the effect only being able when actively using the tool to work. The last and most special one was Accessories, which were limited based on one’s level and all of them added the stats. However, unlike the former ones where one could still wear other equipment, one could only wear the number of accessories their level allowed. As an example of a tool, Enelise had shown her her hammer.

Name: Enelise FlameBorn’s Hammer

Rating: Proficient

Quality: Perfect

Strength: +25

Vitality: +20

Endurance: +25

Mana: +87

Wisdom: +30

Perception: +15

Can only be used by Enelise FlameBorn.

At no mana cost, the user is able to keep their work at the temperature needed to work on it. This cannot be below its regular temperature, nor can it heat the work above its current temperature.

Can at a slight mana cost prime the piece of work being hammered for mana crafting, making it much easier to create a good mana craft later in the process.

The user can at a slight mana cost manipulate their work slightly whenever the hammer strikes, even if they don’t have an affinity for it.

A Perfect hammer crafted by the Proficient blacksmith Enelise FlameBorn for the purpose of personal use. It is entirely made of sextuple compressed blåstål hammer, which has been intricately mana crafted to the limit of what a Proficient crafter should be able to do.

Enelise had called it her masterpiece, which seemed almost like an understatement with the number of stats it provided and the effects it had. The kind of effects seemed quite different to the kind present on her own spear. They had also informed her that she shouldn’t expect to really find effects on the for-sale equipment in most stores, and that the quality likely wouldn’t be too great either.

With that in mind, Sylvia entered the shop denoted as a leather armory. The storefront didn’t do much to give the best impression, but she had seen a couple of adventurers enter and exit already. The inside of the shop looked a fair bit better, with different sections for different types of armor. One corner was full of torsos wearing mostly leather breastplates of different looks and sizes. By far the largest selection of items was the gloves table, which had around 30 pairs of gloves.

A few other people were in the shop besides her, but it was generally pretty quiet. Enelise and Philip had told her to get a breastplate and a pair of gloves, since the former would protect her vitals and the latter would protect her hands, which were the parts of her getting the closest to the enemies.

Taking a closer look, she noticed that there was a bin by the side of the table, a bin full of pairs of gloves. A quick look through showed that they were all made by either trainees or beginners and the quality wasn’t particularly great either. The other take-away was that the gloves were made by a plethora of different people; multiple of whom showed up again at the gloves on the table, though this time their rank had increased.

Besides the difference in sheer number, the biggest disparity between the binned gloves and the ones on the table was the rarity and quality, with most being of Competent rarity and some even reaching Journeyman, not to mention that the quality was Acceptable to Good, rather than Poor to Alright. Though, as the craftsmen had noted, none of the gloves had any additional effects.

The largest stat total that she’d found was on a Good pair of Journeyman gloves, but they were clearly too large for her. The second largest had a total of 15 stats, which she figured was good enough for her. Most importantly, it had a single point in mana, which Enelise had told her to be on the lookout for. The stats of a piece of equipment apparently said something about the equipment itself, with mana representing its mana conductivity.

“Found something of interest?” The rough voice that came from a little behind her surprised her a bit, despite her having already noticed the person’s presence. “Yes. I assume that you’re the owner?” The well-built human standing before her smirked, “you’d be correct in that assumption. That pair of gloves is 6 panis, so pretty much a steal if you ask me.”

Sylvia just mentally rolled her eyes at his sales pitch. ‘Of course the salesman would say that it’s a steal, they all do that. I’m not particularly sure what exactly it’s worth, but it’s gotta be less than what he just said, it’s always like that.’ “Well, I don’t have too much leeway with my money, and I’m also looking for a breastplate, so I’ll have to see about that’s price before I can say whether I’ll buy the gloves.”

The owner nodded as she spoke. “Of course, just call me over when you’ve found something of interest. I can promise you that you won’t find better ready-to-buy leather and hide equipment at a cheaper price than here in this town. The breastplates are over there.” With those words, he left her alone and went over to hassle someone else. Rolling her eyes, Sylvia went over to the breastplate section.

Unlike with the gloves, the lowest rating she found amongst the breastplates was Competent. In fact, the ratings here were superior enough for there to even be an Experienced rated one, but not only was the quality Poor, it was definitely way too small for her.

By far the most interesting breastplate she found was one with a green color in her size that, despite being rated Journeyman, far outclassed the Experienced one, with a stat total of 22 compared to the latter’s 10. It even had an effect, which she had not expected from this shop. All in all, the breastplate seemed amazing, and she was stumped that no one had bought it yet. Figuring that the system would’ve mentioned it if there was any major flaw, then it must be because it was a relatively new piece.

Having found something of interest, she looked around and got the owner in her sight and called out. “Hey, owner! I found something of interest.” The smirk on the man’s face as he noticed the item gave her a great suspicion towards whatever he’d state the price to be.

“Ah yes! You really do have a good eye, miss. I take it you’re talking about Greendahl’s breastplate, right?” At her nod, he continued. “I just got it a couple days ago. It got a great stat total for its rating, and it even has a good effect; what’s not to like? A piece like that would normally cost at least 25 panis, but I can make it 21, just for you.”

That salesman behavior certainly screamed overpriced to Sylvia, so she wanted to get it down at least or panis or two, so she decided to try something she’d experienced working multiple times back on Earth, haggling. “I’m afraid I don’t really have that kind of money; I’m just a simple D rank adventurer, so the rewards for the quests aren’t particularly high, nor for the beasts my party sells. I’m in dire need of both a good pair of gloves and a breastplate, so I’d really appreciate if you could sell me both at a batch discount.”

She then got an idea and made a little show of taking forth her coin pouch and looking through it in such a way that the owner couldn’t see the content, and as she did, she made sure that most of the panis were covered by a layer of caro. “I can give you 23 panis for both.” She made sure to have lowered the pouch enough for him to be able to see the surface, and his initial deadpan expression softened a bit.

With a small sigh, he relented a little. “How about 26 instead? I can’t go much lower than that.” That was still a bit above what she felt like she wanted to pay; sure, it may just be a single panis, but it wasn’t as if they were swimming in cash. As such, she decided to try something she hadn’t really done, not least on purpose, utilize her female charm.

Sylvia brushed a lock of her golden-blonde hair behind an ear and did her best attempt at making puppy eyes. “I’ll have to skip sleeping at the inn for a couple of days, but I can squeeze out 24.5 panis.” After a couple seconds of seemingly deep thought, the owner sighed deeply and said: “25, I can’t go any lower, otherwise I won’t be making a profit.”

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

With as good of a relieved expression she could muster, Sylvia thanked him. “Thank you so much.” She gathered up the gloves and breastplate and handed over the 25 panis before heading out, rolling her eyes the moment she left, and saying to herself: “God, I hate salesmen.” Frank had previously worked a part-time job as an appliance salesman; an experience that only made him hate them more. Due to this experience, she was aware of how the gross profit of a sale often mattered more than the profit on each individual ware, which was why she felt confident enough to try and push the price a little lower, despite not knowing what the common price was.

With that ordeal done, the next stop was the plains outside the town, where she could practice her Earth magic more freely. Of course, only after equipping her new gear and retrieving her spear.

Name: Simple Rock Rat Gloves

Rating: Journeyman

Quality: Good

Strength: +6

Vitality: +3

Endurance: +5

Mana: +1

A Good pair of gloves crafted by the Journeyman craftsman Skrill BoneNeedle. They're made of treated Rock Rat hide and half-successfully mana crafted.

Name: Regenerative Deer Breastplate

Rating: Journeyman

Quality: Great

Strength: +5

Vitality: +9

Endurance: +6

Mana: +2

Greatly improves the Regenerative Deer Hide's self-repair ability.

A Great breastplate made of Regenerative Deer Hide and crafted by the Journeyman craftswoman Lyrissa Greendahl. It is an unusually good piece of work by journeyman standards, but it wasn't made with anyone in mind. It was the first successful mana-craft of the creator.

Standing on an open plain roughly half a kilometer from the town and decked out in her new gear, Sylvia was ready to practice her magic. Rather than just practice at random, she made a little to-do list over what specifically she wanted to get out of the training. The first point was to learn how to just sink into the ground in case tomorrow would get too dangerous. The second was an improvement in her general ability to raise defensive walls. Third was an improvement in either her quicksand or a similar spell.

Her initial idea for the sinking spell, which she decided to call Bomb Shelter, was to use her tactic against the goblins as a base. Though, rather than moving the ground away and then filling the hole back up, she’d instead just fill in the roof and compress her surroundings, such that there’d be at least a meter of solid earth above her and reinforced with mana at that.

To begin with, she kept it quite simple and just experimented with making a three-meter-deep hole of about a meter in diameter by compressing it into the walls. This whole exercise went relatively well, and after a good 10-15 attempts she had gotten the time down to a single second, which showed her improvement over the past few weeks.

Once she was satisfied with that time, she began the practice of making the compressed walls move the excess earth up to form a lid on the hole. By the time she had done that for all the holes she had made, she felt as if she was ready to try the spell properly.

With bated breath, she activated the spell beneath herself and felt the ground rapidly sink her until she was surrounded by walls of earth. Within a second everything had turned pitch black as the entrance had closed. Raising an arm above her head, she barely got a palm width up before touching the ceiling.

With excitement flowing through her, she made the cover retract and had the ground push her out of the hole on its own. By now, she had reached the point where simple movement of small amounts of earth at a slow pace barely took any mana, though that’s probably in large part due to her medium affinity rather than pure personal ability: not that she was going to complain.

Since she now knew that it worked, she repeated the spell some 10-odd times to really get comfortable with it. This allowed her to cross off the first point on the to-do list. The next point was to figure out a way to enhance her defensive walls, since she figured that just using regular walls of earth would not be sufficient as her opponents got stronger.

“I think there are two main ways to go about this. First is compression and second is enhancement. Actually, on the note of enhancement, how does it work in correlation to |Elemental Emission|? The description does say damage, but how exactly is damage defined when it comes to magic? If the damage should be higher, I’d guess that it’d also have to be sturdier, such that it can make actual use of the damage increase, unless it somehow makes the opponent weaker instead.”

Enticed by that idea, she put the foot of the spear onto the ground and created two walls, with one being made through the spear. For the sake of the test, she had not made the walls too thick or tough, such that she was certain that she’d be able to at least punch through the regular one. As expected, she had a pretty easy time making a hole in that wall, but as for the spear wall, her fist encountered a fair bit more resistance, though she still broke through it.

“Alrighty! This is a good first step, but it’s far from enough. Besides, I need a way to create a strong barrier without relying on my spear touching the ground.” To have a more familiar baseline, she opted out of using her spear for the experimentation.

Her first experiment was with compact walls. The mana cost was a little higher than a linear growth compared to the regular walls, but it wasn’t anything extreme. However, while the usual walls would maybe take an average of 5 cm thickness from the surrounding meter of earth, this left a small crater of close to 25 cm. “This could be a bit of an issue and could make maneuvering troubling.” The upside was a great increase in the wall’s durability.

The second experiment, enhancing the walls through mana, left far less of an impact on the world, as it only consumed the same amount of earth as the regular wall. Instead, the mana cost was about 10x, bringing it from negligible to actually something to pay attention to. On the positive side, this wall was quite a bit more durable than the compacted one and even repaired itself. The downside was the upkeep; as long as she kept the mana connection, each strike would consume a fair bit of her mana to replenish the strength and allow it to repair itself. From the moment she cut the connection, she was able to notice its durability waning rapidly as she struck it.

“I think I’ll go with the enhanced walls; I do have enough mana to go around, after all. Actually, maybe I should try a combination of the two at a later point, but for now I want to focus on practicing this technique.”

After getting relatively comfortable with calling forth enhanced walls of different sizes at will she began to integrate her spear into it. To do this properly, she had to practice making either the head or heel of the spear touch the ground while fighting, which was easier said than done with regard to doing it in a natural way.

After gaining some familiarity with doing it this way she naturally began to attempt an integration of more offensive maneuvers. While it might not be the most combat-efficient way of doing it, this development turned into increasing the amount of swings with her spear, making it such that one of the ends would flow through the ground and initiate an attack.

Besides techniques like sending stone spears or spikes to shoot up towards a target area, she also added bursts of water and fire when stabbing, and slices of either when slashing. If there was anything in particular that she had learned from this exercise, it would be how little she actually integrated her magic into her fighting.

While it was far from perfect, Sylvia decided that this amount of improvement to the stone wall and integration of magic into her combat was good enough to cross of her second point. All that really remained now was figuring out how to make her quicksand spell actually viable against stronger opponents.

The main issue was how stronger enemies seemed able to just straight up cancel it by sending their mana into the ground. This act seemed to disrupt the mana she had been using to turn the ground into quicksand, but it weirdly didn’t seem to do much against her more directed attacks. Actually, when looking back on the time she’d trapped an Enhanced Hobgoblin, it wasn’t that it wasn’t doing much to her magic, but rather that she had simply been overpowering whatever it had been doing through sheer mana quantity.

“I should probably ask someone about how to make my magic more resilient against such disruption, as it’ll be hard to figure out a counter without having someone actively try to disrupt my magic.” Since there was a distinct lack of people to ask right this moment, she decided to just experiment a bit anyway; increasing her knowledge couldn’t hurt.

To begin with, she turned the ground into quicksand just like she’d always done, but this time she paid close attention to how much mana was used and how it was used. What she discovered was that since it had never cost much mana for her to make the ground fluid-like with regard to foreign objects, she had always cast the magic in the most mana efficient way she could. Compared to this, her regular use of combative Earth magic was with a clear intent to attack or defend, so she figured that she had subconsciously used more mana to achieve a proper effect.

While this was a good benefit back when she had less mana and using simple magic was more mana intensive, it had already begun to show its flaws when pitted against stronger foes who knew how to deal with it. As such, the only choice she could think of was to throw more mana at the problem, at least until she could learn more about how mana is disrupted and how to counter it.

With her to-do list settled, she spent the next couple hours exercising with occasional water breaks; a great benefit of water magic was that she didn’t need to bring water with her. Throughout this session, she got slightly more familiar with tying magic into her combative flow, raising enhanced walls, and using Bomb Shelter to hide.

With the sun having passed high noon a bit over an hour ago and with her mana running relatively low, she made the trek back to the city to get some lunch and prepare for what would likely be a group expedition the following day. During the session, she had managed to increase the levels of multiple skills by at least a couple levels, with |Elemental Emission| being the most notable by jumping an impressive 8 levels to level 38, showing just how underused it had been.