The next few days followed more or less the same pattern. Jeb would wake up, eat with his family, go into the forge to work on sharpening and repairing tools with his grandfather, and then go to sleep. When his grandfather had finished fixing all of the tools, he left for a few hours, muttering something about “time to find the lathe.”
His grandfather came back carrying a lathe identical to the one Jeb had used when he worked with his aunt. “I think that this should be good to go,” his grandfather said, setting it down beside the grinder. “If it needs any oiling or repairs, though, please let me know.”
As he watched his grandfather begin to walk away, Jeb noticed an issue. “Grandfather,” he said, and his grandfather turned around. “There’s no wood here. I can’t make new rods without wood.”
His grandfather shook his head. “I knew I forgot something. I’ll be back in a moment.” He left, and Jeb shrugged, getting back to the knives he was working on.
When his grandfather returned again, he was wheeling a large cart of wood. Most of it was already shaped into at least an approximation of what he would need for the different handles, which Jeb questioned.
“Your aunt tends to make a lot of extra blanks because she says it saves time in the long run to only need to finish carving handles down to shape, rather than doing the rough shaping as well.”
“That makes sense,” Jeb replied, thinking about the way that his aunt had taught him. “Would you like me to start making new handles now, or wait until I’ve finished sharpening all of the tools?”
“If you have no objections, starting on the handles would be greatly appreciated,” his grandfather said.
“Sounds good!” Jeb replied. By the time that he had finished replacing all of the wooden parts of the harvesting implements, winter had truly come. He left the forge to see that the first flakes of snow were coming down onto the ground.
“Have you considered what you’ll spend the winter focusing on?” his grandfather asked. Seeing Jeb’s confused expression, he continued, “Most members of the family choose some particular project to work on during the winter. Ideally, it would be quiet and unobtrusive, but if you have a project that isn’t, we can make that work as well.”
Jeb went through the list of tasks he knew he needed to work on. “I think that my highest priority would have to be raising my Statistics,” he said. “My Physical Statistics are lower than they need to be. Since they can be higher, I would really like them to be. My Mental Statistics are also completely unbalanced. I need to increase my Charisma, which will require doing a lot of music. If that would be too loud, though-” he was interrupted by his grandfather.
“That’s completely fine, Jeb. We’ll find a space for you to work. How long do you think it will take you to increase your Charisma, though?”
“I’m not quite sure,” Jeb replied, looking at his Status. When he did, he saw that he had a Quest Notification he hadn’t accepted.
Congratulations! You have completed the Minor Quest Become Personable Third Tier “Become More Charismatic” Use this Charisma to lead others on your Quest. Rewards: 4 Charisma, 58 EXP, Gift of Gab improvement
When he accepted the Quest, Jeb ran through the math again. “I only need one more point of Charisma right now,” he replied. “I think that number will increase, though.”
“Why do you think that?” his grandfather asked.
“The only Quests that I have which improve my Mana Depth also increase my Magic Affinity, which is my highest Statistic.”
“What do you need to do to increase your Mana Depth?”
“There are technically two Quests I have which would improve my Mana Depth. When I modify a Spell Glyph, I gain Mana Depth and Magic Affinity in equal measure, which doesn’t seem particularly useful.”
“And the other Quest?”
“When I make a new Glyph, I only gain Magic Affinity from increasing my Spell list. If the trend continues, making a Third Tier Glyph would gain me eight Mana Depth and Willpower.” That made Jeb pause.
“Though if I increase my Willpower that much, it will become my highest Statistic.”
“Other than Charisma, though,” his grandfather redirected the conversation, “raising your other Mental Statistics is something that you could do anywhere without needing sound blocking?”
“I think so,” Jeb replied, going through his Quest log. “Hmm,” he said after a moment, “I don’t know if I have a good way to improve my Intelligence. Other than sharing the Glyphs that I’ve made, I don’t know if I have any ways to raise my Intelligence that I can do over the winter.”
“Why can’t you share your Glyphs over the winter? The Library is still open.”
“Right! Sorry, I was just thinking of Quests that I could complete from within the home, since I thought that was what I was supposed to do. I guess that isn’t totally true, though.”
“Well, then, why don’t you start making new Glyphs?” his grandfather said, gesturing out of the forge.
Stepping out of the forge had never felt so cold. As he thought about it, Jeb supposed that made some amount of sense. After all, he’d never been in the forge during winter before. Looking down, he saw the snow that was starting to stick onto the ground suddenly melt as the heat from the forge poured out.
“Don’t let all the heat out!” his grandfather jokingly chided. Playing along, Jeb cast Least Create Fire for a moment, and his grandfather laughed.
Back inside the house, Jeb looked at the different Primers he had. Though he didn’t want to lean into his Class, especially since he wanted to change it, Jeb knew that it would be easiest to learn a Lesser Spell that was Mud.
Then again, another voice commented in his mind, Lesser Move Mud will be a Fourth Tier Glyph. Is the difference in difficulty going to be offset by the fact that it’s a Mud Glyph? Ultimately, Jeb decided to go with learning a Glyph that he knew he would need again. He pulled out the Water Primer and flipped to Lesser Shape Water.
As a quick sanity check, Jeb also looked at Lesser Shape Earth and Lesser Shape Mud. Though he couldn’t arrange the Glyphs perfectly without learning them, it seemed as though the portion of the Glyph attuning the Mana to Lesser Shaping was the same in all three Glyphs.
With that in mind, Jeb got to work. As he always did, he first fed a small stream of Mana into the book in front of him. Now that he’d worked with it so much, it was obvious to Jeb that the book was written on Manaweave, at least on the pages that had Glyphs.
Shaking the distraction away, Jeb focused in on the Glyph. As he expected, the first few points were identical to every other Water Glyph he had learned. There were more connections, obviously, since this was a Third Tier Glyph, not a First Tier Glyph, but those were easy enough to fill in.
Taking a quick break, Jeb counted the number of points in the Glyph. As he remembered, there were thirty five points. He tuned out the first layer and noticed that the sixth point was the first point to connect back to the starting point of the Glyph. Diving even deeper, Jeb was grateful that the Glyph remained the same in the third layer as well. The first point still connected to every other point, the second to every even point, and so on.
Because this was not an Efficient Glyph, the connections were far straighter, which was a little confusing, at least until Jeb accepted that his mind wasn’t well equipped to think about high dimensional projections of even higher dimensional realities. Or, at least, his mind wasn’t well equipped yet. He held out hope that this would be easy for him in time. With the connections he had just noticed in mind, he began to draw the Glyph in light, overlaying his own with the Glyph from the book.
The first five points were as easy as he had expected them to be. He connected the first point to itself twice, then to the second twice. The second point he connected to the first, and then added a link from the first point again. When he got to the fifth point in the Glyph, Jeb realized that he might have made a mistake.
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It was taking a fair amount of mental energy to keep the untethered connections in mind as he worked through the Glyph. When he looked at the sixth point, he saw that even in the first level of connections, it connected to other points somehow. It almost seemed like it was connected to each of the other nineteen points that he knew made up the effect of the Glyph. Dropping his own attempt at engraving the Glyph onto his soul, Jeb probed that instinct harder.
When he finished looking at each point, he could tell that there was absolutely a pattern underlying which points connected to which. Try as he might, though, he could not understand it. “I hope that it becomes clearer once it’s on my soul,” Jeb muttered, leaning back for a moment to take a drink of water.
Making an effort to refocus himself, Jeb began working through the Glyph. This time, he took the lesson from when he had learned Least Move Earth -Efficient, and began by only working through the first layer of connections. When he got to the sixth point, he traced the web of connections in the next twenty points. At the end of the web, the final ten points were almost too easy for him to do. The light of his Mana seemed to fill in the points before he could consciously force it through.
Once the first layer was done, Jeb realized that the hardest part was finished. At this point, it was just some simple algebra to understand which point connected to which. He started connecting the second layer, putting the first point to itself, the second to the fourth, and so on. When he got to the sixth point, he pushed it to the final point and the first, noting how in this Glyph, it seemed like it was a strand broken in two, rather than the two distinct strands he had seen in the past.
When he had finished the second layer of connections, the mental strain was growing quickly, and Jeb rushed through the third layer. The first point flowed into every other point, which helped release a lot of the pressure on the Glyph. When he had connected the seventeenth to the thirty fourth, Jeb expected the entire Glyph to sear into his soul. After all, he had finished connecting each point in the Glyph.
When it didn’t, he double checked each connection in the third level of the Glyph. Without the stress of an unstable Glyph, it was far easier to go through slowly. But, there was no mistake that he could find.
The same was true in the second layer. When he moved to the first, he double checked the web, making sure that each point connected to each other point the way that it was supposed to. Each point within the web was touching the right other points in the Glyph, but Jeb saw his mistake. As in the second layer, the flow needed to come as a single branching path, rather than discrete paths. Why that would make a difference, he had no idea. Still, when he fixed it, Jeb felt the familiar burn of a new Glyph settling into his soul. Double checking his Status, he saw that it had been added.
Jeb’s Status Sheet at End of Chapter:
Jeb Human Age: 16 Class: Least Mud Initiate Level: 1 Experience: 8346/100
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Total Statistic Load: 380 ->385 Physical Load: 139 Strength: 33 Dexterity: 26 Endurance: 35 Vitality: 41 Presence: 4
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Mental Load: 241 ->246 Intelligence: 47 Willpower: 54 Magic Affinity: 57 ->58 Mana Depth: 39 Charisma: 44 ->48
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Mana: 1580
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Glyph Attunement: 29 Least Shape Earth (Modified) Tier 1 Spell Least Hold Earth (Modified) Tier 1 Spell Least Create Earth (Modified) Tier 1 Spell Least Destroy Earth (Modified) Tier 1 Spell Least Shape Earth - Efficient (Modified) Tier 3 Spell Least Shape Water (Modified) Tier 1 Spell Least Shape Water - Efficient Tier 3 Spell Lesser Shape Water Tier 3 Spell Least Hold Water (Modified) Tier 1 Spell Least Create Water Tier 1 Spell Least Conjure Water (Modified) Tier 1 Spell Least Destroy Water (Modified) Tier 1 Spell Least Move Air (Modified) Tier 1 Spell Least Hold Air (Modified) Tier 1 Spell Least Create Air (Modified) Tier 1 Spell Least Destroy Air (Modified) Tier 1 Spell Least Move Fire (Modified) Tier 1 Spell Least Hold Fire (Modified) Tier 1 Spell Least Create Fire (Modified) Tier 1 Spell Least Destroy Fire (Modified) Tier 1 Spell Least Create Mud (Modified) Tier 2 Spell Attune Earth Mana (Modified) Tier 0 Spell Attune Water Mana (Modified) Tier 0 Spell Attune Water Mana - Efficient Tier 2 Spell Attune Air Mana (Modified) Tier 0 Spell Attune Fire Mana (Modified) Tier 0 Spell Attune Sand Mana Tier 0 Spell Least Create Sand Tier 1 Spell Attune Sand Mana - Efficient Tier 2 Spell
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Bard Songs Known: 1 Lute Enforcement
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Skills: Least Mud Magic Meditation Mana Manipulation Spell Glyphing Improved Glyph Groking Gift of Gab Running Identify Soil Savvy Animal Handling Fertilizing Lifting Athletics Lute Playing Singing Musician Pollination Brewing Distilling Bardic Magic Smithing Wood Identification Woodworking Soil Improvement Enchanting Glassblowing
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Achievements: Focused Meditator Student of Magic
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Quests: Major: Slay the Dragon of the West (Progressive)