Reaching level 10 meant I would finally be able to acquire the enchanting skill from Belat. I had only learned a skill called “brewing” from her when I was level 9, which was the skill needed for potion making. I had learned from the older woman that both potion making and making enchantments required quite a lot of magic, which Belat naturally assumed I didn’t have. She taught me in the abstract, as an intellectual exercise, refusing to allow me to practice.

Of course, I was able to turn theory into application on my own, since I did already know magic and had leveled up enough to have sufficient MP for simple potions and enchantments.

I learned a lot about plants, specifically flowers and herbs, from Belat. She had been brewing potions for a long time and was a wealth of information. I was able to study her recipe book, which was a tome similar to a grimoire, but since I didn’t have access to parchment and ink of my own, I couldn’t copy it. Instead, I studied it, memorizing all that I could. If I couldn’t commit the information to paper, I would commit it to memory.

Hopefully I would be able to afford some ink and parchment of my own one day so I could write some of the information back down. My head felt over-full and I didn’t want to forget anything.

One flower in particular, called a glowbell, was uniquely capable of pulling down environmental magic. It was roughly the same color as the magic crystals, and the primary ingredient for MP potions, hence the similarities. The concoction to make the potion was simple enough, but the resulting potion wasn’t actually that MP restorative, once brewed. A straight concoction would only restore between 1 and 7 MP, from my observations. The flowers didn’t bloom and survive long enough to pull down any more magic, hence the limitation. Concentrating the brew made the potion undrinkable; it would get disgustingly bitter, but it also concentrated another toxin in the brew that was hard to counter. The toxin was mild enough in low doses so as to not have much effect.

I could probably brew a hugely concentrated potion, deal with the bitterness, and then cure myself of any effects of the toxins with forbidden 6-point magic, but that wasn’t an option for most magic users.

The solution for a potion brewer was to supply the MP themselves. Belat poured magic into a softly glowing pot of glowbell potion, not that different from how a tamer might infuse a treat for a familiar. So much of this world came down to the exchange of magic between lifeforms. MP restoration potions weren’t cheat items that would allow for free magic power; that power came from somewhere. It was banked power.

No wonder Belat had been so upset about a couple potions being stolen. It was less about the cost and more about the principle. I had stolen a part of her magic.

In this world, people didn’t have a clear idea of how much magic they had. A magic user could eventually come to get a feel for how much magic they were channeling, but without a menu displaying the actual numerical values like I had, there was some guesswork. Trying to use too much MP, by over-infusing a potion, would lead to real injury for the caster.

I had plenty of MP by this point, and was already familiar with the idea of banking magic for later use by way of prepared earth magic and my inventory. This would be another tool, but not necessarily a game changer like I had hoped. Belat knew of other plants with different traits, potions which could be made to act as a poor-man’s cure spell, but each plant only cured a specific status effect. If one didn’t know exactly what condition they had, they would have to drink many potions before it solved their problem. Each potion also had enough minor toxicity that consuming enough of them would ultimately lead to potion poisoning, which would require a different potion to cure, and that plant was–unsurprisingly–a controlled substance by the Church. At a silver for each potion, taking countless different status cure potions and maybe curing your ailment while also getting potion poisoning made no sense. Getting cured at the Church for a gold coin was a better choice, although the price was still much too high. A large silver would be a more fair price.

My metasystem helped with this problem, as I could identify my exact status conditions, so I committed all the herbs and flowers to memory. Knowledge was not the issue anymore. The bigger problem I faced was acquiring potion bottles.

Part of the expense of potions was the cost of the glass bottle, but no other container would preserve the potion quality properly. Anything porous was an obvious write-off for containing other liquids, but for MP potions in particular, the magic contained within had a tendency to bleed back out into the environment, trying to achieve an equilibrium, and the particular glass potion bottles Belat bought mitigated that. She wasn’t aware of the manufacturing process which went into this feature, she just made orders from the manufacturer and merchants would deliver them to Mirut.

That put some of my longer term plans on hold. Belat wouldn’t sell me the bottles, just the potions, and at their regular cost. I could go on to reuse the bottles and secretly make potions of my own, but most of her customers sold them back to her, at a horribly low price. Perhaps I could intercept said customers and offer them a better price to build up my stockpile.

With my advanced inventory, I could hold more stone and more weight in general. I had made some stone containers for potions before I learned about this. That wouldn’t work for sales, if that were my goal, but for storing my own potions in my inventory–which didn’t allow for potion degradation–gave me some other options. The extra weight sucked, but beggars can’t be choosers.

Belat cultivated glowbells in her home garden, but I found them growing in the jungle as well. They were common enough in midsummer and I collected lots. That was how poor Whiskers the first had died; the toxicity had killed him when I tried feeding him some to bust his plateau, even at such a low dose, because he was a tiny little mouse.

I had picked up the brewing skill fairly easily after learning the theory, making a weak MP potion on my own time with the materials I had on hand as soon as I learned the recipe and technique. Problem was, the potions were uselessly weak, and I never had enough MP to waste on infusing them fully when I had access to the jungle again. I needed to figure out how to make them stronger some other way.

On the beach, enjoying the privacy the winter afforded me, I brewed myself some potions and then ground away at a magic crystal with my homemade mortar and pestle. The magic crystals were still a source of minor confusion to me. They came out of magical beasts, and when consumed by beasts with maximum potential could trigger magical evolution. That wasn’t MP restoration, so I doubted they worked as MP restorative pills, if I ate them myself.

I actually had no idea what would happen if I ate one, and wasn’t particularly keen to find out.

But they were, clearly, magic of some kind, and so I assumed there was a way to use them to power-up the potions. The glowbell could absorb quite a lot of MP–the amount of magic Belat used had more to do with her limits, creating sufficient quantities, and the amount novice magic users tended to require for recovery–and I could pour a full 100 MP into a single bottle of potion easily enough. The problem was, I could at best make one of those each day, and that was with eating a lot of MP restorative meat. I needed a shortcut to make stronger potions, and I just knew that the crystals were the solution.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

I turned this one into a fine powder, and prepared a basic potion that only restored 2 MP in one of my glass bottles. I made a little stone funnel, poured the powder into the potion, put the cap back in, and watched to see what happened.

Seconds ticked by as I stared into the glass. The powder sunk, collecting at the bottom of the bottle.

Nothing happened.

I popped it in my inventory, read the description of 2 MP of restoration, and pulled it back out.

“Why won’t you work?!” I exclaimed, shaking the stupid potion.

I sighed, and lay back in the sand, staring up at the orange and purple-banded giant in the sky. Oh well. If this wasn’t the solution, maybe I could find a way to draw MP out of beasts to make stronger potions that way. Once I leveled up my 6-point magic more, absorption might work faster, letting me more regularly make strong MP potions for emergencies. There were still plenty of mysteries to uncover with brewing, and I got the impression the skill wasn’t limited to just potions, so perhaps I could use Earth knowledge to create previously-unseen things in this world and still make great use of this skill.

I pushed myself up, and started collecting my stone tools and items, dropping them back in my inventory. I tossed the 2 MP potion back in my inventory as well. I probably wouldn’t drink it now that it had a magic crystal in it, just in case that turned out to be very bad for me, but I’d keep it for now. Maybe if I gave it to a beast to drink that would work to help them evolve. Had the description changed at all after adding the crystal? I checked my inventory again, and paused for a second when I saw the potion now displayed 3 MP of restoration.

I pulled the potion back out and stared at it. The powder was still swirling around from when I had shaken it. What kind of molecular agitation happened to a potion when you infused it with MP directly? I had no idea. Perhaps this potion just needed more mechanical agitation…

Many minutes of hard shaking later, the potion was finally clear, the powdered crystal fully absorbed by the solution. My exhausted arms trembled and my heart pounded as I dropped the potion back in my inventory to appraise it.

135 MP.

I grinned. That was more like it.

* * *

Enchanting was a different story. Making an enchanted item was a fairly involved process.

First, you needed an item, obviously. Less obvious were the complicated rules enchanters had for what items would work for what enchantments, and what quality of item was needed. I had no idea if this was tradition, or ironclad enchantment law. Without doing a lot of testing, it would be hard for me to find out.

“Enchantment starts with the enchanting circle,” Belat explained, pointing to the gold engraving.

I had noticed a commonality in the enchanted items in her shop. “Do they have to be engraved in metal?”

She peered down her nose at me. “As opposed to?”

“Stone? Leather?”

She frowned. “Stone would be too brittle. Even if you could engrave a clean enchantment, the magic would probably shatter it. As for leather, the engravement needs to be made on something non-malleable. Can you imagine how disastrous it would be to channel magic into a magic circle that was folded over itself or wrinkled?”

I actually had no idea what that would do, but I could intuit that it would probably fail spectacularly, so I nodded. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder about using stone. Magically shaped stone that was as close to purified silicon as possible could work. At the very least, it would probably work once, before shattering, but I understood how pointless that would be. Enchantments were designed for the weak and unpracticed magic user to repeatedly use simple magic.

“The actual engravement is done by a metalsmith,” she continued. “I order mine in from outside of Mirut. The design of the engravement is something I do myself, and send out with the order. Precision is key so that the metalsmith can produce exactly what I need.”

“Seems like that would be good to learn to do yourself,” I commented absently, thinking about my own needs.

Belat lightly smacked me on the back of the head. “I’m too old to learn a whole new trade,” she snorted.

“How does the design work?”

“The enchanting circle has two parts. It contains the base 4-point or 5-point magic circle within, and the command ring around it.”

The outer circle surrounding the magic circle contained the part of the enchantment that was the most interesting to me and where I would need to focus my study.

The formulas themselves seemed to be a hold out from the old types of magic in this world, which predated magic circles. The script wasn’t like the script I had learned from Sharma when I first awoke to my reincarnation. I suspected I would need advanced literacy for this, or at least a teacher who was more willing to share these secrets, which Belat was not willing to do for a literal child.

“An engraved design alone does nothing. In order to create an enchanted item, the enchanter needs to channel the spell into the enchantment,” Belat continued. I nodded at this as well. Channeling magic like this was also how potions were made and how tamers infused treats for their familiars.

As Belat explained more, I came to understand that this was more nuanced. Instead of channeling pure magic, like into a tamer treat or an MP potion brew, this was channeling specific magic to set the instruction of the desired, enchanted spell. The enchanter wasn’t actually trying to cast the spell in doing this, which was the main way this step could fail–casting a fire spell instead of channeling a fire spell would destroy the item–but rather channeling the command structure for the spell, and the spell that was being channeled had to match the enchantment’s formula. If the magic set into the command ring properly, the enchanted item would work repeatedly and reliably when the end-user provided their own MP into the enchantment in the future.

There were all sorts of hard and soft limits to this process, and Belat had another tome of recipes full of proven successes and known failures, as well as specific formulas she knew of and had learned from other enchanters.

“You’re decades away from being able to do this,” she said derisively. “But you asked, so there it is. Now leave me be, I have potions to brew.”

I considered copying an enchantment I saw in her shop, into a stone-based item, but was just worried enough about blowing myself up that I decided against it. Ultimately, enchantment wasn’t as useful for my immediate needs as I had hoped, and I could wait before learning more about it if I wanted to pursue the skill as an income source. If I wasn’t going to be learning enchantment now, I would use my 10 SP on something more useful.

I had been increasingly relying on 5-point magic in the jungle, both to dodge or trap beasts but also to avoid being caught by the guards. I put all 10 skill points from my most recent level up into 5-point magic to advance it, like my other magic skills. Now that I had advanced all three types of magic, it would be a long trek to the 100 SP necessary to advance any of them further. While the next tier of magic power seemed quite far away, I doubted there were many level 10 people in the world who had advanced three different schools of magic, especially at age seven.

The results spoke for themselves. I was having an easier time in the jungle, which meant I could kill stronger enemies and in larger numbers, and so I could more easily gain future levels. I would gain 155 SP by the time I hit level 20. I just had to figure out the best use of these points, and push forward. If I could get three or four levels a year, I would hit level 20 by the time I was ten and was expected to take on an apprenticeship. I pondered my future and continued honing my plans.