Caeden was lost in thought on his way to Forge One. It was the day after his sword instructor had asked Caeden to be his direct disciple and to teach him martial arts one on one. At the time, Caeden had asked him for some time to think about it. Afterward, he immediately talked to Lily, who nearly tore his head off berating him for not automatically accepting.

"It's the opportunity of a lifetime!" She glared at him. "Why wouldn't you just accept?! If it doesn't work out, who cares? It's at least worth a shot."

"I'm responsible for making gear for our whole group, trying to learn how to use six different kinds of weapons, and also keeping up with everyone's IP. I already have enough going on without adding another thing on top of it. I'm just not sure it's worth the time."

Lily had huffed and called him an idiot but hadn't pushed any further. Caeden was still debating what to do. He would have to come up with an answer by tomorrow for his next swordsmanship class. He wanted to learn, but he was genuinely feeling the pressure of all the other responsibilities he had taken upon himself. He was looking forward to emptying out his mind and getting back into the forge.

Today he planned on making a tool for Lily. They had discussed her plans last night in more detail while they did IP training. She wanted to use her ice as weapons without constraining herself to a forged piece of metal. Plus, her ice was earlier to hide with concealment sense, whereas a whole sword would be much harder.

Fortunately, Caeden had already looked into this after their first day when they used Sharp to splinter her shroud. Lily had started making weapons out of ice immediately, and Caeden had been curious about how other object shrouds in a similar situation armed themselves. What he found was interesting from an ethersmithing perspective while also being useful for Lily.

There was a concept in ethersmithing called an independent infuser. It was a type of infused object that could add semi-permanent infusions to other items when supplied with power. Object shrouds would use these to infuse weapons they created with their shroud while powering the independent infuser, also using their shroud. The independent infuser had to be created specifically to receive that individual's shroud as a power source, so they weren't mass-produced like other infused weapons.

Caeden had been brainstorming ideas for what kind of infusions to add to Lily's ice whenever he had free time, mostly for fun. He enjoyed the mental challenge of coming up with busted, powerful infusions and then working backward, coming up with the materials, ether, and techniques he would have to use to get to that infusion. He had two that he was proud of that he thought Lily would like. Once he explained them to her, she was ecstatic.

With these two, he was attempting to create the very best work of his life. The family students would have access to infused weapons made by smiths much more skilled than him, so he needed to surpass himself if he was going to create something worthwhile. That meant creative, novel infusions, as well as flawless execution. It was going to be a challenge.

First, Caeden needed to familiarize himself with his equipment and the basic design structure of an independent infuser. At Forge One, he found an open smithy and set about running a few tests with the automated hearth, testing various air and ether supply models. He felt confident in the equipment. It was designed for accuracy and ease of use. After all, it was meant to make forging easier. Plus, there was an option that tied the air and ether supply mechanism to a set of foot pedals, so Caeden would still be in control of airflow and additional ether intake.

Next, he checked the workbench. Caeden wasn't just going to be pounding some basic raw ether into metal today. No, he was going to be working through some complex and specific ether refining to reach his end goal. He was ready for a few test runs and failures since this was the first time in a while that he would be refining ether, and he was trying to create a new type.

After he was confident he had all the refining equipment he needed, Caeden took the time to review the designs for the independent infuser and make a few mock pieces. The design itself was ingenious. It involved creating channels in the material with higher Crystal Integrity than others by adding more ether to those areas. If the pattern was correct, it would cause the infusion in the material to bleed out, temporarily infusing whatever was touching the exit point. Caeden's mock-up worked perfectly, so he felt like he understood the gist.

Now he had to get to work. After some back and forth with Lily, Caeden was going to make her a glove. That would let her infuse whatever she touched easily, as well as make using concealment sense even easier. He decided to use ivory bamboo weave since it was a supple and breathable cloth with high durability. It wouldn't negate any blunt or energy attacks, but it would offer decent defense against slashing and piercing.

Pulling a decent-sized ream of the cloth from storage, Caeden set it on the anvil before adding a heap of water essence into the hearth and increasing the airflow to the max. Instantly, all the heat disappeared from the flames, even as they turned a deep blue. The flames almost looked like rippling waves. Just because the heat was gone didn't make the flames less dangerous. They would cause his blood to turn to pure water if he stuck his unprotected hand in there.

Instead, Caeden clipped the two ends of his ream of cloth to poles and stretched it out over the fire. He would have to leave that in there for over an hour to get the ether density he wanted. In the meantime, he went back over to the workbench and organized the equipment and ether he would need for making his own original infusion. This was the least realistic part of his design since he had made a lot of assumptions about the ether combinations he wanted to try.

Luckily, some of the more commonly used varieties of refined ether were already in stock, so he didn't have to make it from scratch, which was amazing. Some of them were incredibly tedious. His first step was taking a chunk of water ether the size of his fist and melting it in a beaker. He just ran the beaker with the chunk in it over a light flame and the ether liquified in moments. It was water ether, after all.

After that, he added plant, mind, and solid ether in tiny crystals the size of peas to the liquefied ether in equal proportions. Then he stirred and waited. When the smaller crystals started to dissolve and mix, Caeden added a piece of alteration ether the size of his thumb in the very center of the beaker. The clouds of mind and solid ether seemed to get sucked into the chunk completely, but only a small portion of the plant ether flowed into the chunk.

Then the glass exploded.

Caeden, who had been more or less expecting that, had erected a barrier of Sharp around the whole mess. Luckily, none of the shards of glass or volatile ether got on him. He didn't want to know what that imperfect mixture could do to a living person. "Well, it looks like equal ratios are out. Time to iterate." Caeden sighed. He was going to be testing and retesting for a while.

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It took almost the whole hour that the ivory bamboo was in the forge, but Caeden eventually landed on the ether he wanted. He now had a swirling purple chunk of ether with black lines through it that his investigative sense told him was confusion ether. His aura classes were one of the reasons Caeden had been inspired to try making new types of ether. After learning of investigative aura sense and its ability to automatically distinguish the nature of ether, he had real confidence in creating something new.

Caeden took a minute to pull his cloth off the fire, then went back to work. For now, his base material was going to have to wait. Next, he placed his new confusion ether in an evaporator. It was a brass pot with a small glass window at the top and a heating infusion running through the whole thing. He set it on a stand so it didn't burn the workbench, then added equal proportions of poison and blood ether. Then he set it to cook and watched all three ether crystals liquefy and then evaporate. They all did it at different times, with the blood ether being first, followed by the poison ether. The confusion ether took ages to liquefy and even longer to evaporate.

Once the gaseous ether in the evaporator had enough time to thoroughly mix, Caeden used a specially designed funnel in the pot to add a small piece of combination ether. The instant it was in the evaporator, a portion of the combined gas was sucked into it. Using his aura, Caeden inspected the new ether. Even through his investigative sense, the little piece of black and green crystal with specks of purple in it made his head hurt. The fact that it could affect him through his aura was mildly terrifying, but that was pretty much what he was going for, so he considered it a win. His aura identified this new creation as mind loss ether and indicated it was highly destructive and poisonous.

This still wasn't Caeden's end goal. This ether would be just as dangerous to Lily as her opponents. He needed to shift it into something within her domains, or it would be useless to her. To that end, Caeden continued adding combination ether to the evaporator until all the gas was gone. He ended up with many tiny mind loss ether crystals, perfect for his forging project.

Finally, Caeden went over to his ream of ivory bamboo. It was a beautiful cloth with a soft white coloration complemented by a slight silvery sheen. The hour it spent in the forge had added a slight blue tint to it, which Caeden found mesmerizing. He cut the fabric using Sharp according to the measurements he had taken of Lily's hands and arms. He was planning on making these gloves elbow length for added protection.

Using Sharp as a sort of telekinetic mold, Caeden made a red wireframe copy of Lily's left hand and used it to check that his cuts would make a proper glove. He had gotten more cloth than he needed in case his cuts were less than perfect, but it was unnecessary. The two sections met around the wireframe hand perfectly, creating a fit just snug enough to stay but not so tight as to be constricting. He even wiggled the pseudo-hand around to test the dexterity.

Caeden placed the two mirrored cloth swatches on the anvil and moved to the forge. He had previously tamped it down after the ivory bamboo was done, allowing all the water ether in the fire to dissipate. Now he kicked the flames back up, giving them a moderate amount of air. Then he added a bunch of merge ether, turning the fire grey and causing all the heat to vanish once more.

Once again, Caeden was so glad he had a lot of refined ether on hand. Merge ether was the platonic ideal for a flame when trying to get majorly incompatible ether into your base material. Caeden had no illusions that his mind loss ether would play well with the water ether already in the ivory bamboo. He was spending a fortune in merge ether to get this to work when it really shouldn't. Good thing the Academy was footing the bill.

Now on to the second to last step, resonance. Caeden removed the tiny mind loss crystals from the evaporator. He kept his hands coated in shroud. No way in hell was he touching this stuff. He even had Physical Enhancement infusing his hands, just in case. He put those crystals in a bowl on a stand next to his anvil and used his shroud to move them onto the cloth as he set about beginning his resonance. After a quick dip in the merge flames, his ivory bamboo was ready. Caeden brought out Forged Infinity and shifted it to hammer form, the dial again reading 007.

Caeden began swinging his shrouded weapon according to the Hammer of One Hundred Hands. The hand he used this time was number 47, raiment of the king. It was a hammering technique designed specifically for integrating ether into cloth. It involved soft, feathery taps in rapid succession from multiple angles, slowly coaching the small crystals into the cloth.

It was a stressful, intense resonance. Caeden followed the pattern for an independent infuser, hammering the mind loss ether into the cloth in specific channels. Several times he could feel the ether rejecting his resonance, almost forcing itself back out of the cloth. He continually shifted through the sub-variants of raiment of the king, trying to find the most effective one. It was touch and go throughout, with Caeden never truly feeling confident that he would manage to finish without the infusion unraveling, setting him back to square one.

Ultimately, he managed it. It must have taken hours, with Caeden feeling mentally worn out even as his body maintained itself through Physical Enhancement. He stared down at the nearly complete work. His ivory bamboo now had veins of blackish-green with small flecks of purple running through it in an interconnected, swirling series of loops, ultimately culminating in the palms and at the tip of each of the fingers of the glove. Here the swirls all ended in small dots.

Elated at the end of his project nearing, Caeden prepared the last step. He filled a rendering barrel with water from a tap. There were other taps with other common liquid rendering mediums alongside this one, but Caeden actually needed plain water this time. He added an absurd amount of water ether into the barrel, literally pounds of the stuff, until the water was glowing blue throughout. Then he stirred it all in, mixing ether thoroughly.

Then he dumped the two cuts of cloth in. They swirled around in the ether-rich water, not reacting at all. Caeden let out a sigh of relief. If the mind loss ether had started to bleed out into such an ether-rich environment, it meant his resonance had been sub-par, and he would need to start over. Next, Caeden got a small crystal of bluish-white ether and put it into an eyedropper. He heated that over a flame until it liquified, which took several minutes.

"Finally, the moment of truth. If this fucks up, I have to start all over again." Caeden let out an exhausted sigh. "Oh well, free ether. At least this will be a learning experience. Hopefully, it doesn't explode."

Crossing his fingers, Caeden used the dropper to drip a tiny little bit of liquid ice ether into the barrel.

The barrel exploded.

"Fuck!" Caeden blocked himself with Sharp, stopping the wooden debris from stabbing into him. "Oh, shit!"

Caeden's emotions instantly shifted upon seeing the brick of ice sitting where the barrel used to be. He realized the rapid expansion of all the water in the barrel when it flash-froze caused the barrel to explode, not his infusion failing. There was still a chance…

Casting out with his investigative sense, Caeden felt through the ice. "Yes! Fuck you bitch, scaring the shit out of me! Oh, I can't believe that it worked! First try, suck it!" Caeden pumped his fists in the air. In that brick of ice, he could feel a brand new type of ether merged into a brand new infused item. He used Sharp to cut the ice apart, revealing the two sections of the glove.

The previously white, slightly blue-tinted gloves were now a lovely dark navy blue. They had lines of icy white and blues running through them in the exact same pattern that had once held black and green. The flecks of purple remained. Caeden's new invention would cause any ice infused through the glove to take on a virulent poison. It would enter through open wounds into the bloodstream and sap away at the victim's energy, slowly numbing and cooling the limb as the poison traveled through the body. Once it reached the brain, it would cause deep, shooting pains, very similar to a brain freeze, but never-ending until the poison was neutralized.

Caeden's aura recognized the new type of ether: chill vein.