After a few more days of hunting and travel, we arrived at Teichar to find it bustling. Being the first foundry town we had freed from occupation, Teichar had quickly set itself up to redevelop and help the war effort. The clang of blacksmiths turning steel into blades filled the air, and the merchants and businesses needed to support the industry had blossomed to fill the void. I waved to a few familiar faces, which included some hunters who, like me, had just returned to the city with some game to bring to the butcher.

Unfortunately, food was limited as Teichar lacked trade partners. Once the other Velgein towns and villages had recovered, they could trade among each other, and while most of the north was freed from occupation it would be years before it was healthy again.

If only Horuth had simply engaged in trade with the Velgeins, I thought to myself bitterly. The royal lineage of Horuth was historically war-hungry, conquering the south under previous rulership, and the current king, Tobar Horuth, was clearly no better. Rather than grow both the kingdom and the Velgein nation through trade, Tobar had seized the north all for the kingdom’s benefit, mostly to lay claim to the steel.

I shook my head. It was so short-sighted. The Velgeins, for all their physical strength and industrial development, lacked for many things, notably magic and large-scale agriculture. Steel could have easily been bought for grain, which would have grown the Velgein nation’s population and thus industrial output.

Unfortunately, part of the problem was more than likely a healthy dose of racism, given the treatment of the southern people who had been integrated into the Horuth Kingdom. Between that and Tobar’s greed, Horuth had instead engaged in warfare and horrific slaughter.

I pushed away the unpleasant thoughts as I took in the sounds of life in the town around me. For the moment, these Velgeins were safe and happy, and I stopped at a butcher to sell some of the meat I had hunted to contribute what I could. I immediately set out to spend my earnings and then some on steel from the foundry, feeding back into the local economy and collecting some of the valuable metal for future use. The Velgein people used a different currency from what I had from Horuth, and I spent it about as fast as I earned it. I was sitting on a small fortune in Horuthian currency, but that did me no good in the north, aside from the raw value of the precious metals the coins were made from.

After my shopping was complete, I made my way back to a small workshop I had first discovered shortly after helping to free Teichar from oppression. The familiar tinks of metal chiseling led the way, and I entered the shop quietly so as to not disturb the engraver in his work.

There was a small living area in the back of the shop with a kitchenette where I pulled out some meat, spices, and firewood. I got the stove’s fire lit, seeing that it was stone cold with no signs of recent use, and started preparing a small meal. Soon, the sound of searing meat filled the air of the small kitchenette, and the smell of spiced meat cooking caused the engraver to pause in his work.

An old Velgein man shuffled in and seated himself at the table. I glanced over and gave him a smile. “Hello, Ivar.”

The surly metal artisan grunted in response, but I was familiar enough with the man by this point that I knew he was not displeased to see me. Ivar had led a hard life even before Horuth’s occupation, having lost his wife and child years before, and single-mindedly pursued his craft of engraving since.

“The stove looked unused. Have you been eating?” I asked him while I plated the meal.

“Revkah brings food sometimes,” Ivar mumbled as I set the meal down in front of him. He was gaunt, and based on how quickly he dug into the food, he had not eaten very recently.

I sighed, watching him for a moment before I ate with him in silence. I would bring some extra food and supplies over to his neighbor Revkah later. The kindly woman was at least willing to take care of him to some degree, so I would see if I could get her to feed him with a little more regularity if I provided her with extra food. Times were still tough for many of the people here.

In a way, the Horuthian occupation might have kept Ivar alive. The man barely took care of himself, but at least when he was enslaved and working the steel production line, he was fed the same gruel that all the workers had been with regularity. It was distressing to see him even thinner in the months since, rather than healthier like many of the Velgeins who were taking back control of their lives.

When we finished eating, I brought him a warm herbal tea to sip on while I washed up the cookware and dishes, stoking the fire again to get some heat into the building now that the nights were getting colder. I would have to look into how the locals heated their buildings through winter and make sure Ivar had a stockpile of fuel. I had not seen a good source of firewood in the north. Maybe they use coal for heating, since they use that for steel manufacturing, I thought.

“All right,” I said after finishing up in the kitchen. “Show me what you’ve finished.”

* * *

Ivar laid out several creations with familiar engravings etched into them, designs I had left with him before heading out with Golchev and the rest of the freedom fighters. I had been back a few times to test out some of the earlier creations, like the pendant I had given to Leiren, and to leave more advanced enchantment designs as I iterated on them. I had used some skill points to advance my enchantment and literacy skills in order to better choose my enchantment control words after some early experiments failed.

My focus was captured by one thing, in particular. It was a small piece of spring steel, which I had designed to attach to a specially designed enchantment, with a place to set an object at the tip. I pulled a deepwater pearl from my inventory, which I had used as the basis for the size of the setting, and it snapped into place between the springy prongs.

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I glanced at the workbench and picked up a simple modified light enchantment. It was not that different from the enchantments I had commissioned back in Roko, but this one was designed in such a way that the magic circle intersected with a second circle, containing a degenerate digon.

In the past, I had hypothesized that a so-called “2-point circle” like this could be used to channel magic. It was not a proper magic circle, like 3-point or higher order magic circles, because the polygon it contained was not a proper polygon: it had fewer sides than it had points. The sole line it contained crossed through the middle of the magic circle, unlike all other magic circles which had an open center.

I knew from previous experiments that a magic circle needed an open center in order to use magic, but my goal with this 2-point circle was not to use magic, but to control the flow from a source to a destination, in this case the 5-point light enchantment. Before that would work, I first needed to enchant the engraving, which I did with relative ease, given that this was effectively the same enchantment I had learned the skill on in the first place.

After the enchantment was done, I clipped the spring with the seated deepwater pearl—a source of raw magic, concentrated by blueclams in the ocean—to the enchantment. The pearl was set on the spring, which was positioned so that the pearl hovered just above one of the points of the degenerate digon.

I pushed the pearl down, actively avoiding using any of my own magic, and the enchantment lit up, fueled by the magic pearl. I grinned, then released the spring trigger, and it bounced back to the released position.

Ivar stood by, watching in amazement as he always did when I performed magic. I handed the device to the old man. Holding it delicately, Ivar pushed down on the pearl, and as the enchantment lit up, an incredibly rare smile broke out across his face.

“Magic,” he whispered softly.

I sat on a nearby stool, watching with satisfaction as the old man played with the magical flashlight. My understanding of enchantments was that they were created for the untrained mage to use their MP on simple, predetermined spells as defined by the control ring of the enchantment. In theory, this democratized certain parts of magic, making spells that required dangerous training accessible to anyone who could afford the enchantment. In practice, I rarely saw them used. The cost was high, but the bigger issue was that any person who had so little training in magic that they needed an enchantment would have a very limited magic pool in the first place.

The people of this world did not have access to their personal information like I did. I could see my own HP and MP, as well as the HP and MP of others, thanks to my appraisal skill and the 3-point magic I had created from it. Back when I lived in Mirut, I had created 3-point magic as a method I could use to teach others how to use this skill as well as other types of ‘information’ magic. However, due to the danger that would put me in with institutions like the Church, who had forbidden 6-point magic from the masses, I had yet to share that with anyone.

In Roko, I had used enchantments to teach a young orphan, Soa, how to feel the use of her own MP prior to having any formal training in magic. Enchantments had a caveat in that the caster needed to have sufficient MP to activate the enchantment, otherwise it would fail. A true mage could overcast beyond their MP, at the cost of their HP—converting their health, their very life itself, into magic—but it was hugely dangerous. Mages died from it, and it was one reason why magic education was so slow paced and limited in this world. If they were aware of how much MP they had and could track its use, it would be a lot safer, and allow them to push closer to their limits. That was how I had grown so quickly as a mage.

As it so happened, enchantments were an incredibly useful tool for training magic. Regularly depleting one’s MP was the main factor which forced the growth of their magic pool, causing their MP to grow when they leveled up. My student, Soa, had used a light enchantment just like this in order to drain her MP as she gained experience, which helped her MP grow when she leveled up. After that, I was able to teach her how to cast light magic without the enchantment.

The Velgein people had zero magic whatsoever. My only hypothesis about this was that they evolved this way from living in such a low magic environment. It locked them out of magic entirely, but as a result, they grew physically strong and had larger HPs. With 0 MP, they would not even be able to use enchantments.

I knew that magic was some kind of elusive element in this world. It was a real, physical thing, and could be concentrated into deepwater pearls or magic crystal inside the body of an evolved beast. The Velgeins may not have the necessary mechanism for concentrating it in their own body, but with access to the element itself, I could bypass the need for human intent entirely.

With this invention, magic could be mechanized. A spell could run as long as it had a fuel source.

I had proven this with earlier experiments, but by seating a source of magic directly into the 2-point circle—the flow circuit, really, for the enchantment—it would run constantly, burning out the fuel quickly. The first switches I designed were made of softer metals, which meant that once depressed, they stayed depressed, the trigger bent permanently. That was the case with the pendant I left with Leiren, hence why it would only work once, as well as the small amount of magic crystal it had for fuel. The pendant had a particularly special enchantment, though, which was the reason I had designed it with such a small magic fuel source.

With spring steel, we were able to make triggers that would return to an off state when no longer depressed. It would be a magical-mechanical revolution. Of course, prior to invading the north, Horuth had not had any spring steel, and even after claiming it with force, it was only used to make better armor and weapons.

I grinned as Ivar strobed the magical flashlight, playing with it gleefully in a way that would be childish if not for the fact that this was revolutionary. It was good to see the old man excited, some life in his eyes. He had already helped me so much; he helped me convert a sizable chunk of the gold in my possession into high quality magic circles, from 3-point all the way through to 9-point, future proofing for if I ever dared attempt anything above 6-point. These days I wore small 3-point through 6-point magic circles at all times, hidden away under my armor, and had larger 4-point and 5-point magic circles in my inventory for combat if they were ever needed. Gold was so much more effective at channeling magic than the stone magic circles I had grown up using that I rarely needed anything larger.

Just that would have been sufficient, but he was quite keen on helping me push the boundaries of enchantments as well. Unfortunately, I had no formal training, so while I could make massive leaps forward in the methods surrounding enchantments, like 2-point flow circuits and potential mechanization, I was limited in what I could do with the actual enchantments themselves. Mostly, I copied those that I had seen from my time studying with Belat in Mirut, and small iterations on top of that as I pushed my boundaries, although that was at the cost of many failures.

With my upgraded skills, I had been able to intuit a bit more, and used that new knowledge to try some things that had probably never been done before, including 6-point magic enchantments. Healing items like that would be another source of revolution in this world, so long as the user was free from the Church’s magical oppression.

Bit by bit, I was making progress. I knew there was a huge amount of potential here, and I intended to take that as far as I could, in time.