After defeating the Gator of the Feathered Depths, Rory realized something during his tedious ascent up the mile-long cliff.
He was weak.
That wasn’t technically true; he had a decent number of raw attributes to his name thanks to the advantages of investing in Growth in earlier tiers, but as a fighter, he was weak. Usually, that would require gaining combat skills or such to remedy such a problem, but Scholar’s Retreat prevented that from happening without him going on some martial arts pilgrimage.
One day, but not today.
So, understanding his own weakness, Rory had begun formulating ideas during his climb. The easiest remedy to that problem was simply taking advantage of gaining more attributes density. You couldn’t exactly do that mid-ascension, so the other way around that problem was through the usage of his blood weave. It had shown the ability to boost his attributes temporarily, so in theory, if he worked on developing a bloodwood tree that was matured, given time to digest far more monster essence, the resulting blood weave made from such a tree could potentially allocate far more attributes.
The issue with that plan was time, and how those attributes would be usable. If you had a one-thousand-gallon tank, whether you sprayed it with a garden hose or fire hydrant wouldn’t change how much water it could draw from. Inversely, if you had a one thousand- and ten-thousand-gallon tank, if both were releasing water from the same garden hose the output pressure would remain the same either way.
All of that was to say, if he did take the time to nurture a more matured bloodwood that had been fed hundreds if not thousands of monsters, there was a very real possibility that the result would just be a bigger tank, and not a higher-pressure hose, his overall attribute boost would remain the same, just sustainable for longer periods.
So, Rory had been forced to consider other areas he could improve upon.
The next obvious area of improvement was his gear. Both his bow and his blood weave were uncommon grade items, made from uncommon grade materials. If he were to either improve his crafting ability to the point where he could craft rare grade items, or get his hands on rare grade materials, he could directly improve his combat prowess through sheer ‘pay-to-win’ bullshittery.
Yet that also had its own issues. The first, and most obvious, was that there was a rather massive wall between uncommon and rare grades of items or materials. Crimson Steel, the material he’d developed after inspiration from Earth-based steel and a lump of Crimsonite he’d received after clearing the first floor of the Maw, was only ranked uncommon. Rory had done quite a few tests intending to improve the material further, to break through the uncommon grade wall. Yet it had seemed impossible, a hard limit due to the base materials. The same could be said, to an extent, for bloodwood trees. Immature or otherwise young bloodwoods were always classified as uncommon regardless of how starved or stuffed with monster essence they were, all it effected was the essence reserve contained by the bloodwood.
Rory, of course, had a theory that if he could raise a bloodwood to the point, it was considered a ‘mature’ bloodwood, then it might break that uncommon grade ceiling. The issue there was that Rory had no idea how long such a bloodwood would need to grow for. On earth, trees could live for hundreds of years. On Aelia, where humans could already live for hundreds of years within their first two ascensions based on his current estimates, a mature tree might take thousands of years of growth. Even with his growth ritual array, that could still be decades, if not centuries.
Thus, the problem of his weakness couldn’t be easily solved by simply obtaining better materials or making better gear.
What he needed was an outside idea.
What can I do?
Turning that thought over for nearly two hours of his climb, Rory almost made the mistake of smacking himself in the forehead, his own idiocy astounding hi,
Stupid.
“Moron,” Rory muttered mid-climb. The answer was so obvious. It had been his most reliable and potent tool in his arsenal as a crafter.
Inscription and Akashic Records.
Well, not exactly those two. Moreso the concept behind them.
If you made a bow, without either Inscriptions or Akashic Records, it was just that, a regular old bow. Sure, the firepower of a bow made of bloodwood was undeniable, the ability to withstand impressive draw strength, an arrow fired from such a bow could fly at insane speed.
But when you combined it with either an Inscription effect or let an Akashic Record take hold?
It was suddenly elevated to an entirely new level.
Even outside of bow or armor crafting, Runic Inscription was the bread and butter of most of his creations, able to outline magic in a formulated, unwavering and systematic fashion. For something so profound, there was just one question.
Why hadn’t he tried to do more?
Not more Inscriptions, but more innovations in the world of crafting. Forging, woodworking, tailoring, Inscriptions, they were all methods of crafting or improving crafted items.
But what was to say that was the limit? Hell, Runic Inscription hadn’t existed until he made it.
Taking that thought, for most of the rest of Rory’s climb, he’d debated new ways, new methods of crafting and how they would work. The difficulty Rory quickly ran into, was that most of the things he thought of were simply deviations of pre-existing crafting methods. What he needed was something entirely new.
That thought circled round and round his mind, no answer coming until he was inevitably distracted by the entire ‘nearly dead apprentice’ issue that Apostolos presented.
But, while it had also been a distraction, it had also been the source of an idea, his method of saving Apostolos crystalizing the nebulous idea into a tangible direction.
Which brought Rory to the present.
----------------------------------------
“I’ve got more than an idea; I’ve got a plan.” Rory said with half a smile. “And it’s because of you.”
“Me?” Apostolos questioned, confused.
“Yes. To save you, I took an Ossified Blood Gem, saturated it in a pool of ichor from the slain Golden Shoebill, and charged it with Pneuma. Afterwards I dropped some of your blood within, and the product was a specially adapted Blood Gem, an Ossified Gem of Radiant Ichor. It was a sub-rare grade creation, technically the highest grade of anything I’ve ever made. Most importantly, aside from saving you, it was a successful proof of concept.”
“For what?”
“Gem crafting.” Rory said. “You see, gems are viewed as aspects of power, hell, we’ve utilized it ourselves when we’ve produced our artificial crystals.”
“Yeah, I guess so.” Apostolos acknowledged.
“For a long time now, years in fact, I’ve wrestled with the question of why Akashic Records and Inscriptions are seemingly unable to co-exist. I still don’t have an answer for that, but it did get me thinking, and that thinking has led here. Craft and or carve an already existing gem, instill it with Pneuma and intent, and then socket the gem into an item.”
“Isn’t that basically Runic Inscription?” Apostolos asked.
“Not quite. Runic Inscription is magical script added directly to something, it fundamentally alters the item itself. If I had any theory as for why Akashic Records and Inscriptions don’t seem to play too nicely with one another, it’s that they’re both altering the ‘DNA’ of an item. With Gem Crafting, you wouldn’t be altering the item, they’d simply tap into the power within the gems themselves. Furthermore, to not overlap with Inscriptions, the way they channel their powers will be through the actual craftsmanship of the gems and the intent instilled within them. More ‘freeform’ than Inscription, yet not as random as Akashic Records. The downside is, they won’t be permanent. They’ll burn out over time.”
“How do you know for certain?”
“I don’t.” Rory admitted. “But I’m thinking that a give-and-take will be necessary for such a development to be possible, Eon doesn’t like free power without a semblance of cost. If they were to be permanent, I have a feeling that they simply wouldn’t work in tandem with either Akashic Records or Inscriptions.”
“Okay, I can see the idea.” Apostolos said. “But again, how do you know it will work?”
“I don’t.” Rory repeated. “It’s all concept, but concept is often what Eon loves to play with. Building new ideas, new things. It will make shit up on the spot all the time if it believes it will provide long term value. Hell, I’d add the ‘Spiritual Body’ and the idea of a variable attribute such as Anima were literally conceived just for you.”
“For me exclusively?” Apostolos asked, taken aback.
“Well not exactly. More like, exclusively for you for the moment, as it uses you as a test bed to drive a new idea and see if its something it wishes to continue offering elsewhere.”
“Oh.” Apostolos deflated, now that he wasn’t as puffed up about Eon exclusively selecting him like some chosen being.
“You get used to it.” Rory waved Apostolos’s reaction off, focusing on their topic again. “Point is, I believe that if I can successfully employ this ‘Gem Crafting’ idea, it might give me the edge, in addition with my general arsenal of items and such, to tackle slaying a single tier-six solo.”
“And where do you plan to find this tier-six?” Apostolos asked.
“Easy, where I know one has been lurking for some time now.”
“The boss of the second floor of the Maw.” Apostolos said, realization dawning upon him.
“Two birds, one stone.” Rory said, winking at Apostolos. “Wait, is that offensive now? Aren’t you basically half bird?”
“Shut up.” Apostolos said, flipping Rory the bird for his teasing.
“In a way, you could call that shoebill a cousin now,” Rory said, keeping up the ribbing of his apprentice.
In return, Apostolos flipped Rory the double bird.
“You know, there were people out there on Earth who were far less accepting of such behaviors.” Rory said with a snort. “Some would have beaten you for the disrespect.”
“Yeah, and you’re not some of them.” Apostolos said with a snort of his own. As much as Apostolos had a deep-seated respect and admiration for his master, Rory existed in a weird relationship with Apostolos, a master, but also like an older cousin or even brother. “So, this ‘Gem Crafting’ how exactly do you plan to tackle it?”
“First, going to need to use some of our already grown crystals and try with them. They should be, in theory, largely inert and devoid of any sort of ‘slant’ like the Ossified Gems which are all attuned to my blood essence. I’ll experiment with those for some time, before I begin pushing the idea, both in how to make new crystals, how to shape, and how to instill them with some form of intent.”
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
“What should I do?”
“You focus on yourself for the time being. You need to recover back to one hundred percent, then begin working on those Radiant Embers. Also, probably best to start developing your skill with magic further along. I said it before, but Scholar’s Retreat is going to make your path forward far more annoying than others who might take the same path you are, as you’re going to have to develop any combat skills the hard way.”
“You don’t need my help for anything?”
“Ehh, if I do, I’ll ask for your assistance when the time is ready. For now, do your own thing.”
“Well, if you say so…” Apostolos said, frowning.
The two stood around awkwardly, before Rory sighed and made a shooing motion with his hands.
“I mean, like right now.”
“Oh.” Nodding with embarrassment flush across his face, the young man walked away, in the direction of the camp’s bound circle. Standing next to it, he seemed to contemplate for a moment before simply laying down in the middle of the ring.
He did say he needed to use Solar Regeneration to recover. May as well attempt to take advantage of the bound ring to maybe enhance the effect. Not like I’d know, it’s his skill. I’m just a boring human.
Proto-Human to be pedantic, but human, nonetheless.
Ignoring his apprentice who may as well have been sunbathing, Rory made his way to their small storage shed. Rummaging around inside the cramped space, Rory yanked open a small drawer, filled with random knick-knacks or potentially useful objects, before snatching several small clear colored crystals. Small as opaque as they were, they looked almost like manmade quartz.
Bringing them with him, Rory also snatched his crafting knife as he sat back down by the fireplace, thinking.
First, how do I want to start this off?
He’d outlined a general direction of how he wanted Gem Crafting to work when he’d explained it to Apostolos, so deciding there was no reason to deviate, Rory decided to start by shaping the crystal.
Well, first problem.
It was one thing to say he needed to shape the crystal; it was another to consider what that meant. How exactly would ‘shaping’ the crystal do anything? What shapes represented what ideas? How did you even carve a small gem to begin with?
Keep it simple, stupid.
Shrugging, Rory decided to start by hacking the small crystal into a hexagonal shape. Within only a few moments, Rory uncovered his first roadblock.
Crystals were not malleable. Applying too much strength to a specific area, the entire thing exploded in a shower of smaller baby crystals.
Baby crystals, or crystal guts? Ehh, not really important.
Ignoring the intricacies of what the shattered shrapnel of a crystal was closer in alignment with, Rory picked up the next crystal. Already having learned from his initial mistake or applied less strength to fracture points. It went better.
For all of twelve seconds.
Shit. Is it just me, or does this feel arbitrarily more difficult than it should?
Rory had worked with crystals and crystal-like objects before, and he could swear that hadn’t been as precarious to shape as they were now.
Eon’s doing is my guess.
Grumbling under his breath about why he should have never created the stupid thing, Rory picked up a third crystal.
Then a fourth.
And a fifth.
It wasn’t until three hours later that Rory held up his first general success, a cubic-looking crystal of fake, magical quartz.
Not bad if I say so myself.
Rory began to channel Pneuma into the crystal, curious how it would react.
Violently was the answer.
Exploding in a shower of crystal shrapnel darts, Rory winced as suddenly his skin was pierced by a plentitude of small crystal splinters.
“Son of a bitch.” Rory yelped. The splinters hadn’t inflicted severe damage -more annoyance than anything- but that didn’t change Rory’s irritation.
There goes three hours.
It was like that that nearly two weeks passed as Rory experimented with carving crystals with precision before channeling Pneuma through them. During that time, he learned several important lessons.
Precision was the name of the game. Even tiny flaws in the crystals could result in them exploding the second they were filled with even a small amount of Pneuma.
As the days went by, gradually his success rate in carving crystals with enough precision that they wouldn’t explode increased. To begin with, he kept his shapes carved into three main shapes, a cube, a circular marble, and three-dimensional hexagon. Once Rory could carve all three with a seventy-five percent success rate, he began to move onto his next step.
Figuring out what the hell the shapes meant.
In a way, it was a lot like making new runes. Take a thought or idea, then pair it was a symbolically matching design. Unlike when working with runes which were one concept idea matched with a singular design, Rory wanted each geometric crystal shape to represent a swathe of things, concepts or schools of thought, the ‘first’ step in defining the power of Gem Crafting.
With that in mind, Rory started first with the cube crystal.
Cubes. In nature, well they don’t really appear in nature all that often. They’re structure of high generally structural strength, equal angles and side lengths. Seen as embodiment of dimensional representation. Hmmm.
Puzzling out a concept from his soup of thoughts, Rory found himself orienting on a single main attraction point.
Not something seen in nature very often. Ergo, a representation of artificiality, in a way.
Taking the idea, Rory mentally earmarked it as he put the cubic crystal away. Holding up the marble-like crystal next, Rory rotated it in front of his eyes.
Unlike cubes, spheres are far more common in nature, eyes, stars, planets, etc. In fact, you could argue a sphere is a representation of gravity, of pulling or collapsing.
Already liking the idea, it was also mentally earmarked as Rory moved on to the final crystal.
Finally, the hexagon thing. Such geometric shapes are more common in nature them squares. You can see them in the crystalline structure of many areas of geology, just as easily as you can find hexagonal patterns in the walls of an animal and plant cells.
Order, if Rory had to put a label on it.
Works for me.
What the crystals had to represent didn’t need to be perfectly defined for the time being, if he had a general idea for his initial crystals, it would be enough to get by.
Next, we’ve shaped the crystals, so it’s time to decide on how to instill them with power.
And so, another few days of crystals exploding in his face did pass, Rory becoming exceptionally tired of crystal shrapnel lodging itself in his skin. Unlike runes or even free form magic, you couldn’t simply add a general intent into the crystals or expect them to freely house Pneuma. No, what Rory found was that you needed a very keen eye. Focusing with all his might, it was as if Rory began to find fault lines and consolidation points within the crystals, and each one of those points was like a linkage for a greater equation. Before you could even hope to make a crystal capable of anything, you first had to correctly tally the convergence points.
Once the nearly imperceptible convergence points were tallied, one then had to properly consider each point as a network of ideas. It was like a strange puzzle. If point A was representative of one idea, then the connected point Bs had to relate to point A.
In layman terms, it was like the word relation game. If someone said ‘Pizza’ you’d have to say something related, but not the same. Pizza could turn into an oven, which could turn into fire, which could turn into passion, which could turn into emotion, etc.
Which made the instilling portion of a crystal exceedingly complicated. Even if two crystals looked nearly identical, they could have wildly varying amounts of convergence points. A crystal with fifty convergence points, for example, was far easier to work with than a crystal with two hundred and fifteen points.
If Rory had thought shaping the crystals took a large amount of time, then learning to count, map, and connect the convergence points so that one could add an instilled power that was magnitudes more complex. On that alone, Rory spent three months.
In that time, Apostolos had gone from lounging in the sun, to switching between experimenting with Pneuma manipulation or else going through what looked like martial arts forms.
How true to real martial arts they were, Rory had no idea, he wasn’t a martial artist after all, and neither was Apostolos for that matter. A real martial artist may have gone blue in the face laughing at what Apostolos was doing, but it didn’t matter because it was the act of discovery that was important, something Rory found himself immensely proud of Apostolos for seeking.
But, as proud as Rory was of Apostolos for attempting to find his own answers, it didn’t take away from the fact that Rory was entirely absorbed with making Gem Crafting work. If Runic Inscription had been an evening stroll worth of effort, now he felt as if he were storming the beaches of Normandy.
It wasn’t until three months, two weeks, and three days in total had passed, the Rory, for the first time, held up a success in front of his face.
Which is to say it hadn’t blown up in his face yet.
It was a sphere, eighty-six convergence points total. His initial convergence point he’d started with the idea of attraction, which had quickly evolved into repulsion, which had further evolved into opposition, then enemy, conflict, and many more, until finally ending with a single finalized core concept.
Barrier.
“Apostolos!” Rory shouted, as moments later the young man appeared, covered in sweat.
“Yeah?” The young man asked.
“Throw your strongest magical attack at me.”
“What?” Apostolos asked, shock on his face.
“Just do it. I’ve been watching you anyway, it won’t kill me, you still aren’t that good.”
“Whatever you say,” Apostolos said without further argument, the gentle ribbing having annoyed Apostolos enough that had wasn’t about to continue debating. Miming as if he were drawing the string of a bow back, a single flickering bar of golden light appeared in the air next to his ear.
Oh, that’s new!
Before Rory could wonder what exactly Apostolos was doing, the bar of golden sunlight flashed forward directly at Rory’s chest.
Shoot!
Acting on reflex, Rory gripped the gem, a single spark of Pneuma traveling into the small gem. A spark of energy seemed to jolt out of the crystal, as instantly a concentric dome appeared around Rory, the golden bar of light rebounding and blasting off into the sky before twinkling out of existence a moment later.
“Holy crap!” Apostolos said, eyes bulging. “Did you learn some new magic?”
“Nope.” Rory said with a wide grin, opening his hand and turning his palm toward Apostolos as he revealed the small gem. “Say hello to my first success.”
“You did it?”
“Of course.” Rory said before frowning. “Why would I ask you to attack me with your strongest magic spell if I hadn’t?”
“I don’t know, boredom? Inspiration?”
“Bah.” Rory shooed the boy and his silly ideas aside. “No, of course not.”
“How’d you do it then?” Apostolos asked.
“Way too much damn effort and crystal shards in my face.” Rory said with a sigh. “It’s an extremely complicated and engaged effort. Shape effects the starting principles of your gem, then after that you’ve got to figured out how many convergence points the gem has.”
“Convergence points?”
“You can think of them like stress points any geometric shape has, except that exist on a more metaphysical level.”
“How do you determine how many they are?”
“Straining my eyes really hard, mostly.” Rory said, snorting. “I don’t have an elegant answer for it yet, it’s sort of instinct, sort of eyesight, sort of cognition effect. The point is, you need to tally up the convergence points, then decide what core concept you want to start and end with, and then all the interlinking points between, which is a little brain breaking. One point must connect to another, which must connect to another, all without running afoul of others. Two points misaligned. Boom crystal explosion in your face.”
“Finicky.” Apostolos pointed out.
“Exceptionally. But the reward for properly mapping them all out and weaving together a web of networked sub-concepts, is a greater final product. Would you believe me if I say that the barrier that appeared took barely a spark of Pneuma?”
“I don’t think I could form that barrier if I tried my best,” Apostolos said, his eyes widening in shock.
“Each convergence point acts as a magnifying effect; the more points there are, the greater the overall lensing of the power becomes. Of course, with each set of convergence points, a gem becomes exponentially more difficult to work with and to map out properly. If I had to say anything about Gem Crafting, it’s impossible without significant cognition investment or serious planning in advance.”
“You think you’re ready then?” Apostolos questioned.
“Not quite. While I’ve finally got one gem made, I need to be able to produce usable gems consistently, and then I need to determine how to integrate them into my equipment. Carrying around a bunch of gems will be annoying, if not outright unsustainable. Something like this gem here would be best placed within a piece of defensive equipment; the defensive effect of the gem would likely have a far easier time being added into equally defensive equipment.
“How exactly do you plan to do that?” Apostolos asked.
“Easy... sort of. I take whatever I’m working with, carve an indent to fit the gem, and then socket it with some paste. Boom, upgraded equipment.”
“Sounds a bit too easy.”
“Probably,” Rory said, exhaling loudly. “Which means probably more exploding gems and crystal splinters in my face.”
“That bad?”
“You wouldn’t believe it,” Rory said with a frown as he recalled all the splinters he’d been forced to pull free from his face with a pair of hastily made tweezers. “That aside, how have things been on your end?”
“Successful, to an extent,” Apostolos said. “I recovered my Spiritual Body to maximum strength. After that, I suddenly realized that next, I needed to splice my Spiritual Body into pieces.”
“Sounds counterintuitive,” Rory noted.
“Yeah, and damn painful. Lop too much off? Well, have fun recovering. Too little? It’s not enough to form a Radiant Ember. The sweet spot appeared to be around twenty percent worth of my Spiritual Body.”
“How exactly do you ‘lop off’ part of your Spiritual Body, if I may ask?”
“Surprisingly easily. You figure out how much of your body makes up twenty percent. Then you chop it off. Since I no longer take bodily harm, what happens instead is that within my internal space, whatever you want to call where the representation of all this stuff occurs, a fragment of myself is split away. From there, I must draw it outward into the physical world.”
“Then?”
“Good question,” Apostolos said, sighing. “Haven’t gotten that far yet. I’ve been stuck on the ‘maim myself and then trying to spit out pieces of my spirit into the physical world’ part.”
“Fun,” Rory said dryly, not at all meaning it. “You do know that until you’ve-”
“Until I’ve figured it out and gotten a Radiant Ember made, you’re not letting me do anything dangerous. Yeah, I could guess.”
“Well, as long as you know,” Rory said. “While you can’t help me defeat the tier-six, I want you nearby to save my ass if things go south. Which means having a Radiant Ember produced.”
“How long until you think you’re ready?” Apostolos asked pointedly.
“Good question,” Rory said, returning Apostolos’s earlier words to him. “Honestly, I doubt it should take me over a week or two to master implementing the gems into equipment. Once that’s done, I plan to craft a new set of gear entirely.”
“Even your bow?”
For a moment, Rory paused, his gaze trailing toward his hovel where his bow was currently hung up. Letting a slow stream of air out of his nose, Rory nodded slowly.
“Yeah, even the bow.”