The next morning I said goodbye to Samantha as the caravan of ten wagons pulled out of town. She would need to find at least two hundred and fifty wagons and horses to pull them. The standard trader’s wagon could haul two tons of goods, and required two horses or oxen to pull them. Normally you wouldn’t bring oxen with you if you were moving troops, but food might become and issue, and oxen made great sources of food. You could fit twelve people and their supplies, not including food, into a wagon, and most military units were divided into twelve person squadrons. They probably wouldn’t like riding all day, but we would stop every four hours to let them eat, use the bathroom, and stretch their legs. This meant that two thousand troops would require at least one hundred and sixty seven wagons, though we would need extra wagons for the service personnel we would need to bring with us, like smiths and cooks, and their equipment. That would mean that we would need at least two hundred wagons, plus another fifty or so wagons just to carry enough food to last us a month and a half or so. All in all, it would take a lot of logistical work to get the troops ready. And thankfully she was doing that for me in exchange for escorting fifty to one hundred trade wagons to the warzone so that she can trade up there. The Mercenary group did have several quartermasters, though, among the support staff, so they would be working with her. The merchant’s guild had plenty of people trained in Warehouse Management that could be hired.
As I didn’t know any reason I would need to conserve my mana, I decided to get in some practice. I wouldn’t be able to increase my mana pressure until my new necklace was finished, as I was already slightly above the pressure of my current Core necklace, but I could work on some of my techniques and my overall mana capacity. After all, I would be riding my unicorn while we were on the battlefield, as its healing abilities were too useful to avoid, and I needed the mana to keep it summoned. The larger your capacity, the more reserve you would have before the pressure gets too low to maintain a summon. And, up to a point, the amount of mana your metabolism produced was based on your total capacity, so if you doubled your capacity you would double the rate of regeneration from burning calories. This meant that you would need to eat twice as many calories, but soldiers also had to eat more when in heavy fighting, so it wasn’t a problem.
One useful spell I rarely used but which was needed on the battlefield was a shield spell. It essentially let you cover the entire body of a creature in a field of mana which will block damage. The spell’s performance was on par with a set of armor with the same Toughness rating, so a level three spell was on par with a standard set of leather armor, and a level five was on par with a nice set of leather or steel armor. As my maximum pressure was currently at five point six, I would be maintaining a level five shield as long as I could, and letting it drop down to almost a level two before cutting it off. Based on how much mana the necklace put out, I should be able to maintain it at level five until I became mentally exhausted. At least, that would be true as long as nothing hit it. In actual combat the spell needed more mana to restore its strength, so it could use up your reserves quickly.
For the first day I sat in the back of the wagon meditating, though they knew that if they needed my help they could just get my attention. By the time we stopped for lunch I was starting to get a headache from the concentration, but I hadn’t needed to use my own internal mana for the last three hours, as the necklace produced slightly more than the shield used. The initial activation of the shield was the worst, as essentially charged the shield from zero to one hundred percent, but that was all of the usage my internal mana saw when I went back to meditating after lunch.
I only managed to maintain it for another two hours, even after the break, but that should be enough practice for today. Obviously, I had enough mana pull it off, but more capacity and therefore more regeneration wasn’t a bad thing, especially when I would need to use far more in battle. I could still do physical exercise tonight, as it was just my mana that was low, but I couldn’t do so until the carriage stopped. With nothing else to do I started a conversation with the driver. Apparently in Mansource there was a large market for leather, certain medicinal and magical ingredients, and finished magical trinkets. They tended to export manacite, other magical ingredients, and occasionally refined iron, as Ironsource was producing more iron ore than they needed for their economy. As for the tax, enough food has come into the country that it is no longer in demand, so they have been bringing in more trade goods and just paying the ten gold tariff, as they would earn larger profits that way instead of hauling food.
That night I summoned my unicorn and lets it hang around camp for two hours or so. Any time I felt my mana reserves get almost too low to maintain the summon I channeled the mana from my necklace into myself, refilling my reserves. Technically, it could stick around if the pressure dropped to four, but it would be weakened, which would annoy it. If you had worked with and developed a relationship with a monster for long enough it might tolerate that for short periods of time, but I didn’t yet have a strong enough relationship with my unicorn for that to work. That meant that I needed to stay at or above five pressure, so that it could receive mana at the proper pressure to remain at full strength, or it would return to where I summoned it from. I had two ways to fix that, which I would implement once the jeweler was done with my amulet.
The next day I decided to push myself by keeping a shield around myself and the driver. This used mana faster than I could regenerate it, and by the time my mana pressure stabilized it was barely above four, with me channeling everything I can from the core, which I now held in my hands so that I could completely surround it and absorb all of the mana from it. That wouldn’t be necessary if I was good enough at the channeling meditation, as my body would drain the higher-pressure mana from it before it could leak out, but I was a bit behind on my practice. Hopefully I could at least reach a point where I could carry on normal activity other than additional magic while channeling.
Once I started getting a headache after two hours I stopped. Not knowing what else to talk with the driver about, I pulled a book out of my backpack. Other than the Artificing and Enchanting books I had already read, I had only brought the training manuals that a branch of the mercenary group would need, so I had already learned the magic in these books. With nothing else to do, I worked out a weight reduction circle for the cart and drew it on. Without the proper materials, I couldn’t properly add an artificed device to his cart, but I could make it work well enough for a few hours, until the chalk overheated and destroyed itself. Well, technically it wouldn’t get very hot at all, but if you overtaxed a magic circle it would either become more efficient in spots, unbalancing the device and making it less efficient overall, until the power source wasn’t enough to keep it running, or it would drop in efficiency in certain spots, directly wasting more mana. Chalk circles tended to rapidly do the second one for anything over level three, and the only power source I had was this necklace.
“Hey, I’m going to try something back here. If it works, it should make the cart much easier to pull.” The driver acknowledged this, and I removed my necklace, laying it on the circle in the area meant for a power source. Soon it started to glow and after about five seconds I noticed that the road seemed much bumpier. After being bounced around a bit, the driver asked for me to turn it off, so I removed the necklace and the ride got reasonably smooth again.
He then explained to me that the carts had a shock-absorbing system to make it ride better. Lessening the weight meant that those springs could bounce the cart higher. In order to make it work, the springs would need to be adjusted for the lighter weight, which he couldn’t do while they were on the road. I briefly considered making a spell that lessened the force of gravity on the cart, so that the springs wouldn’t be pushed on as hard, but I without seeing how the shock absorbing System worked I didn’t know if that would make things worse or better.
Since a modified version of the weight reduction circle of a magic bag didn’t work, and the space expansion was too dangerous to try outside a container, I decided to try enchanting instead. My backpack had a level three weight reduction and a level three space expansion effects woven into it, but I didn’t want to risk damaging it by studying its construction.
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Enchanting basically took a magical essence and transferred it onto an object, making it grant that property, or part of it, to either itself or the wearer. For example, the essence within a healing potion could be transferred onto an earring to make one that constantly slightly boosted healing rate. It would have a much weaker effect than the potion, unless the person could provide it enough mana to make the effect work, so that particular enchantment was only really used by mages to avoid bleeding. Some things, like magic weapons, would instead use the mana of the user to produce effects, like covering the blade in flame. And then there were things like Sam’s Infertility Bracelet, where a weak effect would slowly accumulate due to long-term use of the item but no valid spell target to become a stronger effect. Technically, with females, the effect would only activate if they had released a viable egg cell and kill it, thus making pregnancy impossible. Because it only needed to do that every month or so, however, the effect can just build up until needed. With a male it would work differently. The effect would be constantly active, killing off some percentage of sperm cells, thus lowering but not removing the chance of pregnancy. That is why men favored potions or the blessing of the goddess of lust, which killed all such cells for an hour or more, but women could just use an enchanted item.
I didn’t have any essences with me, and I couldn’t properly extract them, so I wouldn’t be able to make more until I got to Manasource and my company. This left only a precursor to both enchanting a artificing, scroll making. While pieces of paper were a common form of scroll, the word specifically referred to any single use magical spell which used a magic circle to trap the effects of a spell. One could use a scroll by damaging the magic circle, thereby releasing the effect. Paper was common because it was cheap, but its durability was so low that accidental release of the spell was common. More durable ones used wood or even metal to trap a spell, though metal foils were also somewhat dangerous to use. There was a bit of skill required to make the effects target what you want upon release, which is why scroll making was a separate branch of magical object production, but it wasn’t really difficult enough to demand its own certification, instead being part of the background of artificing and enchanting. Artificing was first developed as a way to make the effect reusable by feeding a circle mana, and enchanting was developed as a way to give an object the desired spell instead of it just holding the spell.
I pulled out a bit of magic ink, normal ink with powdered mithril in it, and tore a page from my notebook for a piece of paper. I quickly drew the spell catch circle on the page, powered it, and shoved a level two light ball spell into it with enough mana to stay lit for five minutes or so. I then did the same with another sheet of paper, this time taking the time to optimize the catch circle so that it only worked on ball-shaped light spells. This time when I powered it up the catch circle used far less mana. I also stored an identical light ball spell into this scroll.
After we stopped for the night and I had worked with my unicorn I released him and gave the driver both scrolls. “If you don’t mind, can you use both of these? I want to verify that anyone can use them, and make sure that I didn’t mess something up in making them.” I also wanted to make sure that limiting the effect to save mana didn’t weaken the effect, though I might need to wait longer to see if that happens, as the circle will feed on the spell trapped inside it if the initial energy is used up, making scrolls a perishable item.
He activated them both and, while the non-specific one did last three seconds longer, the result wasn’t exactly conclusive, as I might have just put slightly more mana into it.
The next day, around noon, we arrived in Manasource. The caravan leader paid the gate guard the tariff, as we hadn’t run into any patrols, and was given proof of that in the form of a stamp in his official log book. I agreed to meet them here in one week, as that was how long it would take them to sell their wares, look for new deals and load up the new merchandise. We hadn’t stopped at any smaller villages this time because they were being serviced well enough by the local merchants.
I immediately went to the palace and arranged for a meeting with the governor to discuss opening up a mercenary branch here. Once the peace treaty was signed, I was able to bring in military goods, which included training troops and making proper medicine. His secretary set me an appointment for tomorrow morning.
I then went to my brewery. After greeting the old man in charge, I looked over the books. Since the peace treaty was declared the demand has had a massive shift. The importation of food meant that few people needed nutrition potions locally, so for a few weeks the sells plummeted. Then news of the war became public, and a new market was opened, sending it north, as nutrition potion was also used to restore blood to those that had lost it. Several merchants had bought up all that they could produce and taken it north, where they sold the supplies to the militaries of Celine.
The luxury potions were also selling well, but I arranged for enough ingredients from a local apothecary for a large batch of level two healing potions and a batch of level three mana potions to be created. They would need to either hire temporary workers to bottle it, or do it themselves, which would be difficult to accomplish between the other products. The materials to make level four mana potions also existed here, but the adventurer’s guild would have to have them collected, so I wasn’t sure how quickly we could get them. Still, I could go by the guild tomorrow after meeting with the governor. I might need to hire instructors from there anyway.
The next morning I cleaned myself well with magic and put on the best clothes I brought with me before going to the palace. There I was shown to a room with two other merchants waiting in it. They were playing some sort of board game. I introduced myself. They were surprised to see a Ferin Noble coming here, but had met many Ferin merchants in their travels so it wasn’t especially strange. After I explained to them that I already owned one business in the city and was hoping to open another, my presence there made much more sense. The Governor had been rapidly expanding the city’s production and trade capability, so any merchant that he had done business with before and still trusted would be welcome to open another business.
After ten minutes the older merchant, a jewelry trader interested in setting up manacite refinement facilities, left to talk with him and I was left talking with the thirty year old orc livestock merchant. He had hopes of starting a ranch outside of town to breed cows and sheep, but needed to purchase several square kilometers of grassland to expand to the size he wanted. This was above the normal limit of what a commoner could purchase, so he would need to either get the Governor’s permission to buy the land, or would need a noble partner that he could lease the land from in exchange for a cut of his profits. I told him that, while I was certain the Governor would see the value of his business, if he couldn’t work out a deal with the governor I would be happy to talk with him about purchasing land and leasing it to him. After all, livestock would be a very lucrative market for the next few years, as most of the country’s livestock was slaughtered for food before the peace treaty was signed.
After the livestock merchant left an elf woman entered the room. She wanted to build a temple. Normally, that wouldn’t be a big deal, but the deity she served was the Merchant God, having come from his island city-state off the East coast. As the Merchant God had founded the merchant’s guild and selected its first head, opening up a temple which would offer training in trading and investment, as well as function as an import/export business for the other temples, would greatly conflict with the Guild, so she would need the Governor’s backing to avoid conflict. I suspected that with a large enough bribe she would be able to get her support. The Merchant God believed in market competition, so if the Guild tried to block her to enforce their current monopoly on training, she would also have religious reasons to censor them.
Eventually I was allowed to go talk to the governor, and we opened the conversation by discussing the workshop and how well it was doing. His company had earned significant profit exporting what the workshop had produced, so when I brought up the possibility of producing healing and mana potions he loved the idea. We quickly worked out a deal for him to buy a set amount of each for export. He wanted a monopoly on sales outside the country, but I convinced him to let my mercenary company buy as much as it needed, as well as letting us sell to shops in town that will sale them to users, thus securing my ability to use the potions I made and to earn money locally by selling to clinics, the Adventurer’s Guild and apothecaries.
Getting him to accept me opening a branch of the Great Oak Mercenary Company here was much harder to do. Essentially, because the war with Ferin wasn’t that long ago, he was weary that I might be training his own people to fight against him. I ended up promising to either remain neutral or fight on his side in any conflict against him or this nation. He wanted me to specifically agree to fight for him, but I realized that would mean that I wouldn’t be able to take offers from other lords if, for example, the Demon Empire made its way this far south. That would allow him to barely cover my expenses if I continued to fight, as he would be the only one I could work for. Eventually, however, we agreed that I could open a company branch in the city if I agreed to train his own troops for half the normal rate. He would still have to cover equipping them, but that was less than anyone else would charge. Once I got set up we would need to contact his chancellor to arrange for a group of city guards to come by for training. Once we had proven ourselves by training the guards, he would start sending actual soldiers. He suspected that the Demon Empire would find its way this far south eventually, and wanted to be ready when they arrived.