Dyani and Pikawon didn’t wait for Nymin’s seal of approval to make preparations to leave the city.
With her newfound wealth, Dyani thought she’d never have to worry about money again, but she was quite effectively humbled when she visited an enchanter’s shop specializing in dimensional bags.
“How are these so expensive?”
The smile on the woman running the shop didn’t leave her face, but it did go flat and brittle.
“It takes someone at least level 10 to start the process to make any spatial storage item. They provide the raw material that our enchanters use to create the finished products.” The words came out in a well practiced stream, as if she’d given the explanation a thousand times before, and would a thousand times again.
“I didn’t think there was anyone that powerful in the city, besides the city lord.”
“There isn’t,” the woman said, this time more casual, “We have to order all the way from Lintukoto, and the supply chain isn’t steady. It all adds to the price.”
In the end, Dyani nearly emptied her bank account to buy one of the bags with the least amount of storage, which ironically, was the largest in the store.
According to the shop worker, most people preferred smaller bags with the ability to warp space around their opening, to accept items that would otherwise be too large to fit. Dyani’s new backpack had no such enchantment, so she wouldn’t be storing any houses.
Despite her bag’s relatively small storage, it was more than large enough to hold everything they would need. Dimensional storage items were limited more by total mana stored than physical weight or volume. Most of what they needed were completely mundane items; camping gear, food, and water.
Neither one of them wanted to risk fighting monsters out in the wilds while also starving. Of course, some of the gear they bought was magical, once Dyani had recovered financially from buying her new backpack.
But nothing was too extraordinary or high level.
* Bottomless Water Flask:
* Level: 2
* Condition: Exceptional
* Description: A simple flask enchanted to summon water over time. This enchantment is fueled by ambient water mana and is not compatible with personal mana.
* Wardstone of Alert:
* Level: 2
* Condition: Good
* Description: When activated, projects an invisible sphere of up to 10 meters in diameter. When the sphere is breached by dense mana or a living being, or is otherwise disrupted, this Wardstone produces an alert. This alert may be set to be an interface message, a specific sound, or both. These enchantments can be fueled with level 2 notes or Mind mana crystals.
A reliable source of fresh water was an obvious need, as was something to watch for monsters as they slept. Dyani had considered a more powerful wardstone that provided actual defense, but Pikawon advised against it, since they were more expensive to run and spiritually loud. They would be safer with something that wouldn’t sense and investigate.
Dyani had also purchased a set of armor for each of them.
* Padded Cloth Armor:
* Level: 3
* Condition: Exceptional
* Description: The fabric is woven primarily of Leafling fibers, which provide moderate defense against cutting and slashing attacks, and low defense against piercing attacks. The padding is Cloud Sheep wool, which utilizes cloud affinity to disperse blunt force. In addition to the armor’s natural properties, it has been enchanted with a self repair function, which is fueled with level 3 notes.
She had her artifact chest armor, which she still needed to bind, but wanted something that could cover her extremities. They had settled on cloth armor, instead of something stronger, so as not to inhibit their fighting styles, both of which relied on high mobility.
Dyani also acquired a couple new weapons. She’d offered to pick something up for Pikawon, but he was satisfied with his claws, which were more dangerous than ever, now that he could coat them in poison.
She’d grown accustomed to using a spear, but she’d also spent years practicing with a shortsword.
Lucky for her, she had the funds to afford both. She bought a standard, level 3 shortsword with a self repair enchantment, something vital for all their combat gear, since they would be far away from anywhere they could get anything repaired or replaced.
Instead of a spear, when she entered a shop specializing in polearms, Dyani had fallen in love with a halberd on display. She hadn’t practiced with a halberd before, but she guessed that spear forms would work for the more unusual weapon, which consisted of a spear tip, with an axe and a small scythe protruding to either side, all mounted on a long pole.
* Mercurial Halberd:
* Level: 4
* Condition: Pristine
* Description: A halberd forged of quick cast silver with the ability to shift from its general form to specialized forms which enhance and enlarge its component weapons. The weapon may be repaired by shifting to an alternate form, with a mana cost from the user proportional to the level of damage. Shifting forms when undamaged costs no mana.
* Attributes:
* Soulbound (Any Attribute)
* Shifting Form:
* Halberd
* Spear
* Poleaxe
* Scythe
The silver metal was layered with delicate folds, which shifted and warped like the ripples in a pond.
Its painful price tag reminded her once again that, as rich as she felt, there were plenty of items outside of her reach. She could’ve settled for a cheaper option, especially since she wouldn’t be able to fully utilize the level 4 weapon until she was at least level 3, but she couldn’t get this one out of her head.
Her avarice for the Mercurial Halberd was what finally convinced her to sell skill cores besides Mana Jump, just to afford it.
After Hoss’s explanation of skill deviations, she now included a couple useless components in each skill she crystallized which she could alter to make each one unique. Her skills still registered as closer to standard than average, but not enough to draw attention from that alone.
She still had the problem that every skill she’d created was different enough from preexisting skills to be considered new skills. A single one could be passed off as a skill variant, but Dyani was selling far more than one.
She didn’t know how big a deal that was, but Hoss expressed enough concern that she limited her new sales to the least impressive of her skills, the various, affinity-specific forms of Crystallize Mana. No one could get excited over something so boring.
***
Terrin huddled over his station, not eager to be the next one to be dragged into the owner’s office to be yelled at. He took the next mana crystal from the bin to his left and used his manameter to detect its relative mana values.
* Mana Crystal:
* Level: 4
* Quantity: 36.2
* Composition:
* Fire: 74%
* Heat: 12%
* Light: 8%
* Pure: 6%
Terrin dropped the crystal in the fire affinity bin. Once that bin was full, it would be taken to have the non-fire affinity mana extracted, leaving completely pure, fire affinity mana crystals to be sold to various workshops and resellers. There was mana loss, of course, even from a crystal’s primary affinity, but using a smaller mana crystal was always preferable to using one with incorrect affinities, which could damage or burn out enchantments.
His station had bins for all the standard affinities, as well as one for rarer mana affinities, to be processed by a more specialized sorter.
There were always people willing to spend their mana at their donation centers in exchange for a couple of notes. It wasn’t the most lucrative option, but it was simple and easy, and would keep you fed.
And while the bigger operations utilized automated crystal sorters to handle larger volumes, it was cheaper to hire a few human sorters to do the work. Terrin’s job had always been a reliable one that paid by how much he sorted, so his hard work and diligence was rewarded.
But the skill core the assistant manager had brought to the owner in such a hurry and the worried and angry expression on the owner’s face when he identified it made him worry that his job might not be reliable for much longer.
***
Dyani even visited a logomancy shop to see what kinds of upgrades she could purchase for her interface. For some reason, the oily salesman kept trying to sell her a brand new interface, even after she informed him she already had one. He made repeated comments about their products’ superior quality and trading up, which steadily increased Dyani’s level of irritation.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
In a moment of freedom where the salesman pounced on a new customer, she got a look at the other items on display. She was intrigued by the frosty cubes, which a display with a magnifying glass revealed were comprised of paper line layers inscribed with text so fine, it was illegible, even with the magnification.
They were databases of information that could be fed into an identification or analysis function, each focused on different items, creatures, runes, affinities, or other topics. She was sorely tempted to purchase one, but her identification function was still unavailable, undergoing evolution.
Her interface still hadn’t provided any indication of progress, or when it would be completed, but she could tell the process was still going strong. The function was constantly shifting and bubbling like a simmering pot. Whatever it became, there was little point buying something that might not be useful to it.
Pikawon already had one of these, provided during his imprisonment. And considering the wealth of its source, Dyani doubted he would benefit from any database she could afford.
The shop also had a number of individual interface functions on offer. After reluctantly asking the overeager salesman about them, she was forced to endure a combined sales pitch and explanation.
Apparently, when the average person allocated experience to their interface, to the whole device, instead of specific parts like Dyani had done, it slowly grew more efficient. Connections could transfer more data across greater distances, Identification could hold more information, and Analysis could process information more quickly. But, in addition to those gradual improvements, an interface would eventually bud off new slots for skill functions.
Unlike Dyani’s damaged functions, which required experience to repair and adapt themselves, these slots wouldn't fill naturally. They required you to purchase one of these individual functions.
There were even some cheaper interface options that started out with empty slots, rather than coming with their functions installed.
After carefully feeling out her dead interface functions, Dyani got the distinct impression that if she wanted, she could discard them and install one of these pre-made functions.
She was tempted.
Besides the functions she was already familiar with, there were a whole slew of options, including some that sounded amazing. There were functions for diagnosing injury and assisting healers, Simulating the interactions for runes for enchanters, assisting ranged fighters with aiming by taking into account gravity, wind speed, and enemy movements, saving pictures and recordings, and creating a simulated combat training environment, complete with an instructor.
There were also less interesting options, like automatic veils, increased mental resistance, and financial calculations and record keeping.
Most tempting of all was a training function, but for spellcraft instead of combat.
Both spells and skills were lines and tangles of mana, which took in external energy to produce a magical effect. Skills just happened to be inside the spirit, which spells were created outside.
From what little she’d learned from skimming a single chapter in a single book, the shapes and forms were totally different, but the concepts were similar enough that Dyani thought there was a decent chance she could hammer and evolve the spellcraft function into one for skill design.
Considering she didn’t know if the first function she’d prompted to evolve would turn out into anything useful, or even usable, it was a bit arrogant.
It wasn’t humility that stopped her. It was sentimentality. Discarding any part of her father’s legacy felt like a betrayal, so she settled on repairing the existing functions first, before considering replacing them. The effort would be worth the experience, even if they turned out useless, just to avoid the guilt
Who knows, maybe they’d turn out to be better than all these other options put together.
***
Objectively, Pikawon’s newest mutation was amazing. It was entirely unnoticeable from the outside. It had caused a complete overhaul of his digestive system, along with a few other organs, like his liver and kidneys. The only reason he knew the specifics, was that he could now feel and manipulate the new setup nearly as well as he could his limbs.
But suddenly having intimate knowledge and control of a part of his anatomy that had previously run automatically was more than a little unsettling. Beside having the ability to do useless things, like regulate the speed of his digestion, the purpose of the changes were clearly to support his new skill.
* Twin Fang Cauldron (Unique)
* (Transformed from Acid Spray)
* Type: Crafting, Affliction, Poison
* Affinity: Beast, Poison
* Range: Self
* Cost: Variable Stamina
* Effect: Allows the cultivation of alchemical substances within your body. You are immune to any toxins you produce.
He doubted the skill could be used by anyone who didn’t have a similar mutation.
As for the specific layout of his new organs, they were reminiscent of an alchemy set, but with less glass and more mucus.
There were dozens of tubes coiled around his stomach and each other with apertures that could exchange substances between them, like an internal sorting system. The internal organs of his chest cavity followed a similar pattern, with dozens of empty sacs with walls of varying thicknesses. In the center was a single, spherical organ, with tubes that connected it to each organ around it, and three other strands that branched off to his teeth and claws, presumably to release whatever venom he produced. A compressed version of a normal digestive tract was pushed off to the side to make room.
Unlike with his ability to absorb experience by eating monster meat, Dyani hadn’t pushed him to use this ability by eating something poisonous. He almost wished she had, just so he could pretend it wasn’t his decision.
But he’d been the one to choose that skill and he’d sleep in the bed he’d made. He’d started with the mushroom on the back of the omnipresent fungal rats, since they were easy to find and his interface told him their poison was survivable, even without his new abilities.
* Rat Back Mushrooms (Common)
* Level: 1
* Condition: Fair
* Description: Mushrooms harvested from the bodies of Fungal Rats, a common decay-affinity, monster. These mushrooms contain a weak poison which temporarily inhibits physical senses and has various alchemical uses related to poisons and medicine. They also produce weak blue light when healthy.
He hesitantly took his first bite of mushroom, after washing them thoroughly. Unsurprisingly, it tasted sour and dank, with an unpleasant spongy texture.
It wasn’t until the bit of mashed mushroom hit his stomach that anything out of the ordinary occurred. His stomach acid ate away at the mash, breaking it down into its component parts. His newest skill stirred the slightest bit, assisting in the separation of a few drops of liquid, which went down one of the many thin tubes to collect in the attached sac.
The edges of his vision went dark, as the sense-dampening poison his skill and body had failed to extract went to work, but he was safe enough in his underground base. The effects cleared up over the next few minutes, leaving him ready, and barely willing, to take another bite.
He repeated the process with ever increasing quantities, until he was eating an entire mushroom each time, which provided around six drops of poison. By the time he was finished, he had just barely enough to fill a soup spoon.
Pikawon estimated that he was only extracting two thirds of the poison, while the rest was going straight into his digestive tract. That had unpleasant implications for consuming anything more dangerous than these mushrooms. So far, he hadn’t exerted any control over Twin Fang Cauldron, or his internal alchemy set, so hopefully he could do better with a bit of effort.
After stepping out to find and kill a few more rats, he ate another mushroom. The first thing he tried changing was the amount of stamina fueling his skill as it extracted the poison. The skill accepted the power as its due, and became marginally more effective, extracting around three quarters instead of two thirds of the poison, but further increases to stamina quickly had diminishing returns.
He reminded himself that it was still progress, resisting his instinct toward pessimism. His enforced optimism took the form of a little Dyani in his head, giving generic advice like, ‘do your best’ or ‘the only real failure is giving up’.
The advice itself was useless, but the image of his friend bouncing around was amusing enough to keep him going.
While attempting to take more manual control of the process, he came across the same issue he’d experience while learning how to use his two other skills, especially Bestial Instincts. Since his talent transformed his skills into unique versions that barely resembled the original, he missed out on the collective experience and knowledge on how a skill functioned and was best utilized.
He reached into the skill while pushing his spiritual senses to the limit, wishing that Dyani was both actually present, and had the ability to perceive the structures of skills within others’ spirits, instead of just those in her own spirit, or cores. The very basics of what she described about how skills were laid out was easy enough to understand on a conceptual level, but he was lost as soon as she got into the specifics of how this complicated, fiddly design shifted the effect of the entire skill because of how it interacted with some other nonsense.
And besides, he couldn’t get more than a general feel for the structure of his skills, not even enough to puzzle out their component runes.
So he was on his own, just like usual.
Manually controlling the extraction process proved futile, as he lacked both the ability to sense where the poison was, and the control to collect it together. All he managed was to reduce the extraction rate to a tenth of the total, wait out the tunnel vision and other muffled senses, and enjoy the smell of sewage coming back with a vengeance.
Through sheer persistence, he discovered that the extraction rate increased on its own, the more he ate. He suspected this would only prove true for specific substances, not poisons as a whole, since the latter would be far too easy, but he lacked anything else poisonous to check.
Once he’d finished his unpalatable feast and reached an extraction rate of nearly ninety percent, Pikawon turned his attention to the next feature of his mutation. The spherical organ in the center was clearly the ‘cauldron’ the skill, Twin Fang Cauldron, referred to. He wasn’t sure exactly what he could do with it or if it would be best to leave it to function on its own, but there was only one way to find out.
A valve opened, and half of the poison he’d collected poured into the cauldron. Sensation immediately flooded him, touch, smell, texture, taste, mana, and other less defined senses. He suddenly knew much more about this poison than he’d ever wanted. It was oily, bitter, and was such a dark blue it appeared black. It was also a mundane poison, enhanced with mana, instead of something purely magical.
The mana within was predominately shadow affinity, but had hints of death and decay, like the Fungal Rats it came from. There were subtle hints of more esoteric and complex affinities, but Pikawon lacked the knowledge to properly identify them.
As for what he could do from here, he sensed he could direct the poison out of the cauldron and to his canines or fangs easily enough, but that was far from all he could do. He felt out the abilities of his organic cauldron, testing them one by one as he discovered the organic mechanisms that provided them. He could heat and cool the contents, stretch or condense the walls to alter the pressure, or even electrify the contents.
And those were the more mundane options.
He could add or remove air through his lungs, even creating a vacuum. He could extend and reshape tendrils to physically manipulate the contents. He could inject, extract, and otherwise manipulate the poison’s mana.
He even discovered, with no small amount of panic, that one of the valves on the cauldron allowed him to add his own blood. The valve was only open for a second, but that was enough to match the meager amount of poison inside.
By the time he’d tested everything, he could sense the poison was completely ruined, becoming little more than blood soup with a bit of shadow mana. He still tested out the extraction process, letting drops, then dribbles of dark red liquid leak from his claws, and his two enlarged canines that he was trying very hard not to think of as fangs.
He doubted the mixture was poisonous enough to hurt so much as a child, but Pikawon still drained it entirely from his body, instead of rerouting it to his stomach to digest. Once the cauldron was empty, it pulsed and twisted, cleansing itself of any lingering residue until it was ready for his next attempt.
While he was tempted, Pikawon held off until he could ask Dyani to get him some books on basic alchemy, instead of flailing around in the dark. For now, he could simply use the sense dampening poison as it was. The ability to switch between a variety of standard poisons alone was worthy of a skill, even if he’d have to drink them first, limiting how deadly his options could be.