Aedifex was skipping with glee over his find. Well, in his mind he was skipping. Actually skipping would be a little hard, as he was wearing full body leather armor, and his joints were still wrapped in rags. The point is, Aedifex was very happy right now. In his mind the precious orb was already hanging inside his chest.
Wait, hanging by what? He had a fair amount of silver wire, and even some mithril ones, back in his storage box, but for this he wanted something cheaper and sturdier. Detouring to the same blacksmith he’d visited earlier, Aedifex was delighted to learn that not only did the man know how to make steel wire, he also kept a supply on hand that he could sell on the spot. Aedifex was... less delighted to learn that the reason steel wire was kept in stock is that it was used for holding together old mechanisms no one knew how to repair anymore.
Shaking off a few cynical thoughts, Aedifex remembered his plans. Not letting anything else distract him, he rushed home to his tools and workbench. Stripping off his armor and clothes, he tossed away the wickerwork filling in his lower abdomen before pausing to take a look at himself.
“Ah, after over a week in disguise, I’d almost forgotten I’m a skeleton now.”
Well, a skeleton and some weird patches of foamy limestone. Well, of course his body looked strange to him. Except for the hours after he’d shed his flesh, he’d spent the rest of his unlife (all 2 and a half weeks of it) covering it up. Forcing down that strange feeling, he spread out the steel wire loosely on his workbench, and cast a simple but effective rust prevention enchantment on it. He then took a moment to load his Melting Rod, before placing it to one side for now.
Now, it was time for some self-improvement. Grasping the orb with his finger tips, he pushed it up from underneath his rib cage until it was positioned just behind his sternum. It was fortunate he didn’t have any muscles now, or they would definitely cramp from holding 22 kilos in such an awkward position. Now for the hard part. Simultaneously moving and softening the steel wire with earth magic, Aedifex looped it around his right 4th rib down, at the front, curved it under the orb before looping it around the left 3rd rib down, at the back. Moving back and forth across his rib cage like this, he wove something like a cat’s cradle of steel wire around the orb.
Controlling an object this precisely using magic was very taxing. The mana cost might be low, but it required great concentration, and on top of that Aedifex also needed to soften the steel to pull it through all these loops. But what else could he do with only 2 hands? Actually... as an undead, shouldn’t it be possible to attach an extra arm or two? No no, he wasn’t going to make himself into more of a monster. Although when he thought about the number of times he'd wished he’d had a third hand... NO!
His thoughts became more frivolous, as his concentration was overtaxed. He began taking breaks to rest his mind, falling into a pattern of making three loops, letting his mind wander, three more loops, ect. During the breaks, he would daydream about thinks like a skeleton with a ridiculous number of arms waving them around, finding weird shapes in the coils of steal wire like he was cloud gazing, he imagined dashing out of the home of Scrutaria’s enchanter in the middle of the night with a box of crystals under his arm, and the crystals weepingly praising him as their savior... Wait, did he always have such weird dreams before? Hm... maybe he had? But being asleep, those dreams had been forgotten. Dreaming while still awake might actually be the weirdest part of being an undead, at least to someone like Aedifex
Those... Thoughts? Daydreams? Bouts of temporary insanity? Whatever they were, because of the need for them weaving the steel wires around his orb took 6 hours. During this time, Aedifex stayed in that awkward posture without moving 1 millimeter. There were definite advantages to being undead. Finally finished, he used a focused Heat Metal spell to weld the overlapping ends of wire together. Still holding the orb with his left hand, for fear of the wires being gradually pushed aside by its weight, Aedifex picked up his Melting Rod with his right hand. It was a relief to move things normally again. Well... “normally” if you ignored the fact that said hand was made of bone and rock.
The Melting Rod was a perfect 6-sided prism of rose quartz (the best variety for heat enchantments) left untouched save for a narrow hole painstakingly drilled through its center. A complicated enchantment created heat using the whole crystal, while simultaneously channeling all that heat to the prism’s tip. A wire of impure silver was passed through the hole, melting as it emerged from the tip.
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Quite a few of Aedifex’s tools were made from varieties of quartz. Common quartz actually had the highest mana capacity of any known material, but it lost large amounts of that capacity with every fracture or inclusion. Finding perfect crystals was actually harder than finding rubies or emeralds (both of which, ironically, had terrible mana capacity), and purchasing them was made even harder because, even when someone found a perfect piece, they often thought it was just another crystal. Well, he’d gained his new orb thanks to such ignorance, so he couldn’t really complain.
Channeling mana into the Melting Rod, Aedifex dripped a few drops of molten silver onto each point where the steel wire crisscrossed, fixing it into a stable web. He could have welded them all together using Heat Metal again, but that would ruin the steel’s tempering. He only needed to keep the wires from shifting around anyway, the silver mixture should be fine for that. Finished, he could finally remove his hand. He should probably rest his mind for a bit, but he couldn’t wait. It was finally time to enchant the orb!
At this moment he realized that he’d just wired the orb inside his rib cage before enchanting it. Not technically an obstacle (it was well within range of his mana after all) but Aedifex liked to hold an object in his hands as he enchanted it, just out of habit. After a moment of hesitation, he pushed his fingers between his own ribs to rest his fingertips on the orb. He then focused all his attention on it through his Sense.
It would be fairly simple (for him anyway) to turn the orb into a giant mana battery, which he could tap for casting large scale spells. However, that would be boring. Instead, he was trying to make a trap for something he couldn’t be sure even existed. Ever since his near death (well, actual death) experience, Aedifex had been thinking that binding a soul was a more complicated matter than the necromancers seemed to think. He had the feeling that his own refusal to die had as much influence, or more, than the Soul Bind spell. He had also heard that those who willingly became undead were on another level compared to those raised unwillingly. Could it be that only the willing ones had souls? He sincerely doubted binding a soul was something so simple any apprentice necromancer could do it, yet even apprentice necromancers could raise skeletons. So that begged the question, just what were they binding?
Aedifex had a theory. When a person died and reincarnated, they left behind everything that they’d gained in that life. Not just material things. Memories, skills, their mana pool... did those just disappear when someone died, or did they stay behind as a sort of residue of a person? If that residue existed, he had a feeling it could be used for more than just moving old corpses around. But could he capture it? Well, there was only one way to know.
He started with Soul Bind as the core (still the only necromantic spell he knew) but he removed the part that designated the target, and he left it without borders. Around that core he spread branching strings of runes, each thread made of the runes for conduct and attract alternating one after the other. Where the threads branched from each other, he inserted the runes meld and refine as well. Finally, at the tip of each thread he added 2 runes side by side, attract and the rune for person with the center of the rune missing. The shell of a person, as best he could represent it.
Relaxing his Sense at last, Aedifex discovered he had no idea what time it was. Moving to his home’s entrance he opened the door a crack, making a mental note to drill a peephole soon, and discovered it was dawn. Around 14 hours then? He guessed he shouldn’t be surprised, considering what happened last time he cast Soul Bind, but had it worked? He carefully examined the orb with his Sense. It was definitely enchanted, the enchantment wasn’t leaking any mana, which should mean it was functioning properly, but was it doing anything? He thought he felt an intangible something being pulled on by it, but perhaps that was just wishful thinking on his part.
Clearly, he needed something to test it on. Something not someone. No matter how curious he was, there were things he just wouldn’t do. No, it was time to return to the Adventurers Guild and take his second job. Something other than hunting rats this time.