Will found Koma jumping between piles of bones in the first courtyard, trailing a large skeleton which was covered in fresh blood. Will rushed over to Koma, but soon realized he was entirely unharmed. The cleaver in the skeleton’s hand looked far too small to get through Koma’s fur anyway. When Koma finally saw Will, he jumped over and laid the skeleton down at Will’s feet, and placed a paw on it.

“Good boy?” Will said questioningly, and Koma’s tail started to wag harder. “Well, it is time to get rid of the skeleton, there are things we need to do.”

Koma’s ears drooped when he heard this, and started to whine.

“Ok, let's try this then.” Will leaned over and grabbed the foot of the skeleton, and tried to pull it into his inventory. He felt resistance from the skeleton. It didn’t have a spirit and so it couldn’t contest him directly, but the enchantment keeping the bones moving resisted him. But enchantments were Will’s area of expertise, and after a few seconds he was able to overcome the skeleton’s resistance and pull it into his inventory. Koma jumped back in surprise, looking around for the skeleton in confusion.

“Don’t worry bud,” Will said, looking at his inventory, “The skeleton is safe and sound and you can play with it later.”

Koma wagged his tail, and then grabbed Will by the sleeve and took off. Will flew along, his entire arm in Koma’s mouth. By the time he was able to get across to Koma that he needed to let him go, they were in what seemed to be a small hidden crypt. There was an altar covered in blood in the middle of the room, as well as piles of bones that seemed fresh. Oddly, there was no meat to be seen. This was confusing until Will thought to take a look at Koma’s very full belly. At least the bones seemed to be from monsters or beasts. There didn’t seem to be any ritualistic significance to what was going on. Simply an undead butchering monsters. This did ask a lot of questions, but Will didn’t really care.

“What did you want, Koma?” Will asked, and Koma bounded to the other side of the altar. Will found a large bone that had been cast halfway into concrete. The bone was glowing slightly to Will’s normal eyes, but it was blazing with mana. He could see Koma drooling as he stared at the bone. Will sighed and pulled out his mace. The concrete was hard, harder than it should be. It only flaked at his first blow, and his second and his third. Will had been counting on cracking it so that he could pull the bone out entirely. Like this, getting the bone out would take hours.

Will looked at the mace. Fortunately the sturdiness enchantments had held up and the mace was undamaged. The real problem was the weight enchantment. It wasn’t good enough for this. It multiplied the weight tenfold, but that only ended with a mace around thirty pounds. The whole mace was far lighter than Will had expected when it was given to him, and that limited how much the enchantment could do.

If only… but why not? The sturdiness enchantment worked on the mace, why not his fist? He spun up the necessary enchantments in his spirit, making them far more robust than they were in the mace. His arm started to glow slightly as he raised it. As soon as he activated the enchantments, it felt like his arm was wrenched with the force of a moving car. His fist fell to the ground, and there was an explosion of dust and concrete fragments.

When the dust cleared, Will found his fist in a slight depression, the size and shape of his fist. His hand and arm were completely undamaged, but that couldn’t be said for his shoulder which hadn’t been positioned properly to have nearly a hundred pounds suddenly added to the end of his arm. Still it wasn’t too bad and after a minute his regeneration stopped the pain. Will looked at his pitiful progress and grimaced. He needed better.

Will hefted the mace. It was good for what it did, but not as powerful as Will’s fist simply due to the relative power of the enchantment. Still, it added more base weight for the enchantment to enhance, as well as an extra foot and a half of leverage. Will felt where his spirit curled around the mace, overlapping his hand and extending past just slightly like an aura.

An Aura!

Will looked at his concepts. Desolate Heart of the Frozen North, and Inferno of the Tumultuous Mind were still too much for him to control properly, even in their reduced states. His soul concept was still a mystery to him. That left his two physical concepts; The Feathered Winds, and The Unbroken Stone. The Unbroken Stone was rather ironic given the situation, but he still figured that it would be the best given the situation. He ran mana through his concept and felt an aura surround him. He was surprised he hadn’t tried this before. An aura of stability surrounded him a good foot in every direction. He felt his spirit sing with the slow song of a rock that could not be weathered, could not be broken.

Will dialed it back slightly, until his aura only extended an inch from his skin. He then tried to push it out around the mace. His aura responded sluggishly, but it did as he wished, enveloping the mace. From this alone, the mace became heavier, weightier. Will checked his spirit map, and was delighted to see what looked like a nebula of faint runes extending from the part of his spirit that corresponded to his right hand. Will then started to enchant. He wove sturdiness not just around the mace, but around his arm and shoulder as well. He also added the same weightiness enchantment, one, two, then three times around his arm and mace. When he was done he pulled them all tight and watched as they settled into something more powerful than he had ever been able to achieve on merit of his enchanting alone.

With a grin, Will looked at the stubborn concrete. He raised his arm, and activated the enchantment.

Will came to, covered in rock debris. His clothes were shredded and covered in blood, and he was laying face down on the ground. With a groan he deactivated the enchantment and pulled his arm and mace out of the ground he looked to see Koma whimpering over him. A quick check of the system told Will he had only been unconscious for a few seconds. Will finally looked around.

The crypt was in a sorry state. Most of the floor had been reduced to gravel, and several supporting pillars were looking far more precarious than they should be. Will realized what must have happened. The force of the mace must have been far more than Will had predicted. This was confirmed when he saw that the leading face of the mace had been flattened even when under the sturdiness enchantment and the effect of the Unbroken Stone. Moreover, when the blow had landed, since the rock had nowhere to go but up and out, Will had been bathed in a shower of sharp gravel. His enchanted arm and mace ensured that he went nowhere, forcing him to take the full brunt of the wave of stone to his unreinforced body.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Will was lucky that he had the Unbroken Stone and his constitution stat. He was unsure whether he could have survived something like this back on earth. Will shakily got to his feet. He was pretty sure his bones were pretty messed up too. Will sunk his attention into his body and was able to find a number of fractures all over his body, though centered on his chest where the sturdiness enchantment ended. That was fine. His regeneration would take care of it. Until then he would channel mana into his concept of the Unbroken Stone. He could keep that going for an hour or so which would hopefully be enough. Will patted Koma to let him know he was alright.

“Go get the bone, we should get out of here.” Koma trotted over and pulled the glowing bone out of the gravel and then laid down so that Will could clamber atop him. They left the crypt as fast as they could, leaving the sounds of groaning and scraping stone behind them. They met the rest of their worried looking team halfway up the house lined road, and had to explain what had happened. He was scolded, then spent a half an hour being told how he needed to go to Aetherglow to learn magic properly. He fended off Amalise eventually, and they returned to the courtyard above. They all returned to their rest to give Will time to recover.

Amalise approached Will again.

“Please, Amalise. Give it a rest. I am not going to Aetherglow. I have had more than enough of school for the time being.” Amalise sat down on a rock across from Will.

“That is a foolish choice, but I can tell you have made up your mind. I am not here to try to convince you anymore.” Her prim voice and straight posture made it very clear what she thought, and Will snorted in response. He would be hearing more about it, he was sure.

“What did you want then?”

“I have some small proficiency with healing magic. I do not have a healing related concept, so I am not very powerful in this regard, but I can help speed your recovery.” Will’s heart softened toward the woman. He was still annoyed at her, but she was doing her best. Besides, Will was pretty sure that there was some sort of magical compulsion at this point forcing her to convince him to go to Aetherglow. That only made the idea of going less desirable.

“That would be really nice, thank you.” Will bit back all the other things he wanted to say. They wouldn’t help, especially when she was going to be healing him. She came over to him and held her gloved hands a few inches over his chest. A soft golden light streamed from them, and she ran her hands over him from head to toe. He felt quite a bit better after that. The healing magic got all the wounds reconnected where they were supposed to be. He would need a few more minutes for his regeneration to strengthen the connections until they were a strong as they were supposed to be. But her healing magic jump started a process that would have taken more than a day so that it would be done in another half an hour. Someone without his regeneration, one power that had thankfully not been suppressed by the bracelet, would have needed days more recovery even after the healing.

After she was done, Amalise simply stood up and left. She was replaced by Emerys a few moments later.

“You know she lectured me the entire time you were gone?” Emerys asked. His voice jumped to a mocking falsetto. “Aetherglow is the only proper place to learn magic. You are liable to kill yourself if you don’t go! By the gods, if she weren’t my sister I would be tempted to kick her out of the party here and now.”

“Yeah, I thought I would never get her to stop.” Will said. “A small accident doesn’t require me to commit ten years of my life to Aetherglow.”

“That is only if you can pay the tuition. You would be kept for another thirty years of service afterward to pay off the debt.” Emerys said. Will looked at him wide eyed.

“You are saying that Amalise spent forty years at Aetherglow?”

“No, only thirty. Our entire village spent a dozen years saving to knock ten years off the service term.” Emerys grinned at Will’s dumbfounded look.

“How old are you?” Will asked.

“Nearly sixty. Why?” The man looked to be in his mid to late twenties.

“Oh, no reason.” Will said faintly. A look of understanding came across Emerys’ face.

“Look, you are still thinking in terms of mortal time frames. Anyone with a concept gains a significant degree of longevity. Reaching two hundred years old is kind of short. With concepts as powerful as yours I have no doubt you will live to be five hundred on the merit of that alone. With that in mind, is forty years at Aetherglow really such a long time? That is less than a tenth of your life if you never manage to reach tier two. If you do reach tier two your lifespan gets doubled. And then doubled again at tier three. That's two thousand years for you as a competent mage. You just have to be willing to give up your self enchantment.”

It took Will a minute to wrap his head around this. His lifespan could be measured in thousands of years if he chose to believe what Emerys was saying.

“When did Amalise go to Aetherglow?”

“Both of us went to Aetherglow when we were twelve. I didn’t have a mental concept, so I enrolled as her retainer. It allowed me to attend certain courses, and the price was included with her tuition. Actually Sam, Mike, and Tara were also her retainers.” He pointed to three of the followers. “After the schooling was done, we helped her with her assignments from Aetherglow. It wasn’t until afterward that Amalise and I took the trial of the gods. The other three opted not to take the trial until they had more experience and levels. That was a good idea by the way. I should have waited too. Without Amalise’s magecraft behind me I nearly died.”

“Why don’t you want to go to Aetherglow then?” Will asked. “Is it the money?”

“No. Adventuring is lucrative enough. A few years would be all it took to raise the money if I was determined. No, I’ve just been there, done that. I lived on that tiny island for thirty years, and it hasn’t even been twenty years since then. Maybe I will consider it when I’m over a hundred, but not till then.” They fell quiet for a few minutes.

“What was that about having to give up my self enchantment?” Will asked.

“The Mages trained by Aetherglow are real purists when it comes to magic. It is part of that damn oath all the mages take. They consider any magic other than spellcraft and concept manifestation to be taboo. They paint it as inherently dangerous, and contrary to the teachings of the god of magic. I think it is all a load of dung. After thirty years in the place, you learn to see between the lines if you are of the mind to do so. The official histories state that a war a long time ago wiped out a bunch of fringe magic groups that then came to Aetherglow and adopted the correct form of magic which allowed them to fight against the heathens. However if you search a bit deeper, not much deeper mind, they don’t seem to care about hiding that information, you find a different story. I believe that Aetherglow was the fringe group, that their purism made them outcasts. But when the war started, they survived because they are both isolationist and well defended on their island. This was only about three hundred years after the appearance of the god of magic who introduced the art of spellcraft. When the mages of the other groups went to Aetherglow, Aetherglow made them give up their other disciplines.”