109, 1/2

Erick sat in bed and gazed out his window, at the twilight purple land of the Human District, and the tall stone buildings of Spur. A line of greenery made up some of that distance, but the Garden was closer to the buildings beyond, than to Erick’s house, and at this time of day, those tall trees and verdant fields were little more than shadows.

Taking a long moment to feel his feelings, then let them go, Erick put on a smile and skritched Ophiel between two of the [Familiar]’s bright, white eyes. Ophiel chirped a violin song as he pressed into Erick’s petting, halfway closing his eyes in delight. And now, Erick’s smile was genuine. Feeling much better about everything, Erick got up and patted his own shoulder. Ophiel gladly hopped aboard, as Erick got ready for the day.

Ophiel still had to sit on a perch outside the bathroom, though. Oh, how he wailed! Quiet, so not as to wake anyone. But still! Oh! The inhumanity! The disgrace! Not taking Ophiel into the bathroom! What was wrong with his creator! Was there no love for Ophiel! A million lashes for creator! A million hurts for the man who hurt—

Erick finally finished his morning ritual and came out of the bathroom. He stared at Ophiel for a long moment.

Ophiel didn’t care. He took his shoulder spot, and happily returned to quiet violin notes; a cheery sound to start the day.

 

– – – –

 

Knowing that he might have to fight his way out of a dangerous situation, possibly without having the rings on his fingers or the clothes on his back, Erick got down to an experiment that had been bubbling around in his mind for a little while. It involved a handful of spells, and a different way to create Stat items.

 

 

 

All you had to do to create a Stat item was to have some resonant mana light of the appropriate wavelength inside your aura, right? The enchanting books went on about process and materials, but gave no real reasons why all the assorted rituals had to be obeyed. Could Erick get away with a different sort of Stat enchanting, all together? It was possible, and that’s what all of Erick’s own experiences had taught him. But even diamonds broke with too much mana, so how about using nothing at all as the resonant medium?

Erick stood in his tower. Dense air surrounded him and usually protected him from various smaller scale explosions in a faster-than-thought sort of action, but he had laid down another [Absorption Ward], to ensure that if there were explosions, that they wouldn’t be too detrimental to anyone’s health.

With a casual wave of his hand, a dark sphere took hold of the air in front of him. It was only a handspan across, but if it were anything like the football-sized diamond he had enchanted and exploded a while ago, it would shatter rather extensively. Perhaps. The dark space was full of air, and nothing else, though. Could air explode?

… Perhaps.

A touch of magic brought forth a purple maskward over the dark space. Another flash of magic turned the dark sphere into a perfect, purple reflection. Three spells, cast together, maybe this would work, maybe it wouldn’t. Erick saw himself in the mirror for a moment, looking all distorted upon the sphere.

The mirror would stop all light from falling in, but it wouldn’t stop him from stuffing his hand into the magics, and forcing mana into the space, would it?

Erick paused. Hopefully he understood his spells…

He cast a [Perfect Mirror] around himself, to see how the light behaved. He was plunged into complete darkness, exactly as he expected. All light outside of the space was denied to him. He flared a bit of undifferentiated mana through his hand, producing a white light that illuminated himself and a small circle of orange stone under his feet, that he had caught in the casting of the spell. But nothing else. All outside light stayed outside, and everything except himself and the stone circle below his feet was darkest black. This was correct.

Erick stepped to the left, putting himself halfway in the mirror sphere. With his eyes outside and his hand inside, Erick channeled light through his fingers. He expected to see light spilling out of the sphere, and that is what he got. His illuminated hand glowed just behind the mirrored surface of the spell. Light went out, but none went in.

He dismissed the mirror sphere, and cast [Luminous Trap], at the same size.

A void space dominated the central space of his tower, soaking in all light.

Erick stepped inside, and almost went blind from the brilliance. He stepped right back out, saying to himself that he should have expected that reaction. With a thought, the dark sphere vanished. Erick returned his attentions to the small, purple mirror, hanging in the air.

He stuck his hand inside and began channeling mana through every Stat he had; Strength, Vitality, Willpower, and Focus. He channeled a thousand mana, then two thousand. The football-diamond would have broken long before that. But Erick kept on keeping on. It did not take long, but six thousand mana became a myriad of colors, that were winnowed down into the main four, that came together to become a nice purple. Erick couldn’t see any of this, though. It all took place inside the sphere; outside of his sight. All he saw in his Status, and all he felt, was his mana dropping.

Erick stepped back. He looked upon the sphere.

A slight trickle of sweat dipped down the back of his neck. The orb hung there, stable and serene. For all Erick knew, it was going to explode right then and there…

But it didn’t.

Erick’s rings were already off, so in charging the purple sphere, he had ripped through his extra mana and was way below a comfortable minimum. He reached forward, and touched the sphere, ostensibly joining his aura to the increased Stats in the sphere.

… And his Stats were the same as before. No change.

Erick pulled his hand out, and thought.

… Ah. Right. He should have seen this coming. In his haste for results, he had overlooked an important part of the usual process. The wrought-quality iron, or other metal, that needed to be a part of the enchantment, in order to interact with the wearer’s aura—

“Nope.” Erick said to himself, “That’s wrong.”

He had forgotten about that part of the process because he had long since moved on to creating true diamond rings, and those had no metal at all in them—

“Err.” Erick said to himself, “Do my rings have wrought metal?”

Picking up his ring he had set aside, Erick looked upon the shiny silver coating bonded to the diamond. By the process of deduction, it must be a wrought-quality, silver coating.

That was weird.

There was no big secret as to what made wrought-quality metal wrought-quality: it had to soak in the power of a [Metalshape] for a full day, with constant turning and kneading and folding the whole time. This process imbued the metal with inherent magical qualities for reasons Erick could only guess upon, but it wasn’t a perfect process. Some merchants and makers were better at the process than others. One world-class vendor of the stuff was the Adamantine Smiths of Underworld Nelboor, with their head offices in the Northern Chasm Region of the Tribulation Mountains. Their metals could even cure Wrought Rust, if a good diet was undertaken early on in the affliction.

… And that was interesting, but not immediately relevant.

Erick’s enchanting books had said that wrought-quality metal was a necessary bridge between gem and wearer in order to create a bridge between mortal being, ephemeral magic, and personal aura. Wrought-quality metal was the perfect stabilizer to fill this gap, because wrought themselves were magical beings. They had no organs like fleshy people. They had no separable body parts, like everyone else. They were a joining of Script, soul, and substance. Wrought-quality metals allowed everyone else to bridge that same gap. Those metals allowing rods to be enchanted with [Treat Wounds], or any other spell, and the gems within surrounding rings to increase the Stats of the wearer.

So why did Erick’s silver coating do the same?

Erick had never considered it a mystery until now.

So he organized a few Ophiel. They called down platinum rain onto a desolate part of the Crystal Forest, collected that rain into deep pools, then separated silver from water, with the help of [Distill]. When they were done, Erick had way too much silver-white metal, which he decided to just call grey. He left a good portion of it behind and had an Ophiel blip a good thirty kilos of the stuff, split into three bars, back to the tower. Each bar was the size of Erick’s forearm. Each bar responded well to [Metalshape]. It also had no reaction to a [Cleanse], so that was good.

Looking up at the floating, purple sphere mirror, Erick metalshaped a bar of—

He stopped. He stepped out of the room. He gave a bar of the silver-white metal to an Ophiel and had the Ophiel [Metalshape] the bar around and into the sphere, like a wire coiled around an intangible magnet.

… It did not explode. Not immediately. This was good news.

Erick walked into the room, and touched the contraption.

… Nothing happened.

An hour of consistently less and less fearful approaches to [Exalted Storm Aura] metal and its interactions with the floating purple sphere, came to a conclusion, with nothing exploding. Nothing burning up. Nothing melting. No harm done. Because nothing happened.

Erick took a normal gem he had enchanted with some Stats, and strung it through a little bit of the grey metal. He slipped it on his finger. He got a few Stats, exactly as he expected. Discarding the small ring, he decided to recreate his purple-mirror-light-trapping sphere onto a grey metal ring; something he could move around as though it was a normal ring.

This was what he was going for, after all. This was why he started this experiment. The metal experiment was just a tangent.

If this worked, Erick knew he could remake his rings whenever needed…

… As long as he had access to the sky, and some time, and… Maybe not. Hmm.

What he was going for didn’t matter anyway. The resulting ring did nothing. He had slipped it on his finger as soon as he made it, but even though it had been there for ten seconds, he got no change in his Status.

Erick had another idea, tangent to the metal issues, so he had Kiri go out and buy some raw ingots. Not wrought-quality. Specifically not wrought-quality. Anything else would do. With some directions from Poi, Kiri left to visit Quartermaster Liquid of the Army. She had some readily available supplies Erick could plunder.

In the mean time, Erick covertly [Duplicate]d a few bits of gold and other super expensive metals he had laying around, from other experiments…

… It wasn’t like he was going to sell what he copied! They’d probably burn up in whatever fool thing he finally ended up doing. He was not ruining an economy here. He was just being prudent. He had no time to go searching for and purchasing weird metals that he’d need to go to Oceanside to purchase, anyway. If they sold platinum or Rustless Steel or adamantine or Deep Sky Silver around these parts then maybe he’d go buy…

… Okay.

They probably did sell that stuff in Spur. There was likely a store that sold all of that. Spur was a happening place. Whatever. Erick was an archmage. He could stand outside of the economy if he wanted. He was busy. It was barely nine in the morning and he was already feeling crunched for time.

By the time Kiri got back with her basket of varied metals, Erick had experimented with a +20 All-Stats blackvoid and mirrored diamond, and every odd metal he had under his purview. Some of them, like the Rustless Steel, were made for wrought consumption. Some of them, like the gold he got from a sliver left over from Oceanside, and subsequently turned into a full bar of gold, were not made for wrought consumption. The silver bar he made, was also not ‘wrought-quality’, which Erick was beginning to believe was not even a true thing. Or at least, the gold and the silver weren’t supposed to work.

Every single metal Erick tested conducted All-Stat gemlight about the same. Gold was a bit better than all the rest, except for the bar of Deep Sky Silver he had managed to make out of a sliver of the stuff. That blue-tint silver bar conducted +20 All-Stats at +22. Which was odd. Good, sure, but also odd.

But none of them compared to plain old, [Exalted Storm Aura]-coated diamonds. The blackvoid mirror diamonds held more light, but they weren’t artifacts like the silver-coated diamonds.

But then the tests with Kiri’s metals began, revealing a curious thing. None of them worked for enchanting. Not a single one!

Okay. Well. The slag iron was able to impart 1 point out of the 20 point All-Stat gem Erick had been using. But otherwise, they were all inert, lifeless metals.

“Of course they’re lifeless,” Kiri said, watching Erick work. “Mana has a hard time soaking into dense metals. That’s why they fold it so much when they’re making the wrought-quality stuff.”

“… I had overlooked that obvious viewpoint.” Erick asked, “This conduction business is just a matter of mana soaking into the metal, then?”

“Far as I know.” Kiri pointed a casual finger at the bar of gold on the counter, saying, “So. I have to ask. That’s a frickin’ lot of gold. Where did you get that?” Her pointed finger drifted left, to the blue-silver bar. “And Deep Sky Silver, too. We got some back at Oceanside, but that block would beggar an Elite adventuring team.”

“… I farm monsters when you’re not looking.”

Kiri eyed Erick, with a joyful glint in her eyes. “Is it wrought-quality, too? That doubles the price.”

“It transfers Stat enchantment, so yes.”

“… Really? How did you even find a seller for that?” Kiri looked to the block of blue-silver metal, saying, “It’s supposed to be really hard to imbue, but once imbued, it stays like that forever. I heard that buyers usually could only buy the plain version, and had to fold mana into it themselves. I heard it takes a year of folding, too.”

Erick smirked, saying, “I’m an archmage, so I got one in the mail from Rozeta as a congratulations gift.”

Kiri leveled a glare at Erick. “If you don’t want to tell me, that’s fine.”

Erick smiled, having already given the answer he was willing to give…

Mainly because he had no idea what he had done. Was it [Duplicate]? Or something else?

Kiri waved dismissively as she walked away.

Returning to his work, Erick wondered if [Duplicate] was all it took to make wrought-quality metals. There was a test for this. He could use a coin. The common copper piece, silver piece, and gold piece were slag iron at their core, each wrapped in layer of the appropriate metal. They were also horrible for enchanting. Ophiel retrieved coins from Erick’s bags upstairs in his room and brought them to the tower.

Erick made rings out of each kind of coin, and then he copied them.

The copied rings all worked as wrought-quality metal.

“… What?” Erick sat back in his chair. “I guess… The act of copying makes them semi-magical metals? Is that all?”

But then an anomaly appeared.

The original rings were also wrought-quality metals.

They should not have been wrought-quality metals. They were mixed metals, and though Erick [Cleanse]d them first, they were still partially rusted on the insides of three of his coins. Erick couldn’t even tell that they were rusted on the inside until he [Metalshape]d them, but they were. And the rust didn’t interfere with the enchantment-capability of the metal!

“What is going on here?” he mumbled to himself.

He got Kiri involved, at that point, because this was too silly.

Kiri took one look at the coin-metal rings, and said, “That’s not possible.” She smiled wide, seeing something that should not be, so it obviously needed investigating. “Let’s get more coins.”

And so they did. From inside the house, first, but Kiri quickly moved to outside sources. While Erick worked on the rings, he had Kiri purchase a few necessary items at four different stores before it was strictly necessary to purchase them, like milk, and meat, and a few spices that were running low. She got coins in exchange, which was the true purpose of the buying spree. She even stopped by the Mage Bank to turn in some rusted gold coins for fresh ones.

[Mend] didn’t work on rust, for some strange reason—

Nope. No more tangents. Get back on track.

Every single coin gained from outside the house acted as it should have. In other words: it did not work as wrought-quality enchanting metal. There were a few 5% Stat-resonance pieces, but even that was considered a failure by any measure of enchanting.

Every single [Duplicated] coin, worked.

But then came another problem. Kiri figured out the full extent of Erick’s current experiment when he absentmindedly copied a coin-ring right in front of her. As soon as he did it, he froze, thinking horrible thoughts, yet knowing them to be untrue. Kiri froze, too.

And then she laughed.

“Wow. The look on your face.” Kiri smiled, saying, “I already knew that you had this spell, Erick. But… I thought you just had access. Like. A helper. I mean… You had a small box of darkchips and then you had a million. I didn’t see it, but I heard the story.” She shook her head, then said, “I’m not telling anyone, of course. I know how big this spell is— Let’s just… Never speak of this again.”

Erick smiled softly. “Sounds good to me. And now, you can help me experiment some more!”

“Well… Then…” Kiri pointed to the dense air, saying, “Experimenting inside a [Ward] is bad enough, but this thing is probably a lot worse.”

“… Fair enough.”

They moved the entire experiment to the empty third floor room.

The first [Duplicate]d coin ring gave 0% resonance. So did the next one, and the next one. Copied gold, Deep Sky Silver, iron bars both wrought-quality and not, all metal was ‘dead metal’ once copied outside of the [Prismatic Ward].

Not a single bit of copied metal worked when it was copied outside of the dense air.

It took an hour to prove this, with every bit of metal at Erick’s disposal, but it was proven easily enough. Even the innately ‘magical’ grey bars taken from the condensation of [Exalted Storm Aura]’s platinum rain, turned non-magical when copied.

This was the normal outcome, now that Erick thought of it.

 

 

“[Duplicate] does not copy magical items,” Erick said.

Kiri said, “Your [Prismatic Ward] is even better than I thought.”

Erick shook the inert grey-metal bar in his hand, at the other metal bars sitting on the table before him. “But why?”

“No idea!” Kiri said, all cheerful. “But it means you can make wrought-metal from any metal. That’s… That’s a lot of money and saved time. I wasn’t kidding about that Deep Sky Silver. The wrought-quality version is a delicacy to them. I heard royalty eat it.” She added, “Oh yeah! Royal wrought like those blacklights you made, too. I heard you gave Killzone one of them. Someone saw him glowing purple and thought it was an attack but then he got all meek —which was a weird look, let me tell you. He got all meek and showed off the bauble you made. If I hadn’t seen it myself, I never would have thought the General of Spur’s Army could turn from black to vibrant purple, just like that.” She got to the question she needed to ask, “It’s some form of light, right?”

Kiri’s words knocked something loose in Erick’s mind.

With a small part of his attention on Kiri’s question, he said, “Yeah. It’s a form of… light…”

With the major portion of his attention, he took control of an Ophiel and had the little guy pluck the +213 All-Stat crown from its hiding place in the walls of his mage tower. In a white blip, the crown landed in his hand, in the third floor room. Kiri’s previous line of inquiry died, as she eyed the off-black iron crown and its three void-dark octahedron diamonds. It was different than Erick remembered. The whole thing was tinted purple, even though Erick had only put the lightmasks on the diamonds themselves.

Kiri asked, “Did you make another one of them? That looks different than I remember.”

“… No. This is the same one as before.” Erick put it on his head. He breathed deep as he saw his Status. He took off the crown, saying, “Plus 224 All-Stats. It grew again. It was 210 when I made it, but then 213 the last time I used it. Now it’s at 224, and the permanent lightmask has shifted to cover the whole object.”

Kiri eyed the piece with a more critical eye, saying, “That shouldn’t happen. Lightwards don’t shift unless under extreme magical stress. Lightmasks shouldn’t shift, either.”

“None of the other magical items in the house have been affected by the [Prismatic Ward].”

“… But none of the other ones suck in all light, like this one. But you keep this one in the wall. No light in the wall.”

“It’s still subjected to the [Prismatic Ward].”

Erick brought up the blue box, and handed a copy to Kiri.

 

 

“The Headmaster called it a ‘well-made spell’.” Erick asked, “Have you managed to make it yet, Kiri?”

Kiri said, “Not yet. Not as good as this one. I’ve tried. I’m still trying.” She chuckled, adding, “This is a career-culminating spell, you know.”

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

“Eh. You’ll get it sooner or later, and then make something better. It took me a while.” He asked, “You have all the ritual parts I gave you, right?”

“Yup.” Kiri said, “All I have to do is succeed.”

“You’ll get it, sooner or later.” He added, “But anyway. That solves the mystery of the coins…” He looked to the crown in his hands, saying, “But not the mystery of this growing crown, or the problem of creating Stat items out of thin air.”

Kiri stared at the crown for a long moment. She said, “I don’t think you can solve that last one. Even Tulamana Blackvoid’s rings were made of glass. You can use almost any old sand to make decent enough glass. Or crystal. Your rains can bring the metal. That stuff is automatically wrought-quality, for whatever reason.” She guessed, “Possibly due to the fact that it was magically pulled out of the atmosphere.”

“… As good a guess as any.”

Kiri eyed the crown again, saying, “If the void spell lasts more than the full hundred days, it could actually be an artifact. ‘The Growing Crown’. Otherwise it’s anomalous magic interacting in weird ways.”

Erick held the purple crown for a little while longer. Were the points on the twisted metal slightly longer than before?

… No. That had to be his imagination.

Erick blipped the crown back in its hiding place with a [Teleport Object], then he gestured to the metals laying before them. “Take your pick, Kiri. Want to do some enchanting of your own?”

“Deep Sky Silver. The wrought-quality version.”

No hesitation. No deliberation. Just a straight-up enthusiastic answer. Erick laughed, and then he obliged.

When he eventually remembered about it, he dismissed the purple-mirror-void ball he had conjured in his tower. Nothing had come of that experiment, for whatever reason.

 

– – – –

 

Erick’s new view on his [Prismatic Ward] caused him to reevaluate how he had used the spell in the past. The spell was currently active in five locations, his house, under his own power, and the three springs of Candlepoint, and the dense air at the bottom of the Crystal in the center of town, under Ophiel’s purview.

The Crystal was the trading area where people turned in darkchips and got items, but the giant, 50 meter tall black quartz crystal was also a magical item that had created the greatsword-wielding automatons that had occupied the city. Maybe. It might not be a magical item. It could have just been a diversion. But in case that it was a magical item, Erick had put a [Prismatic Ward] across most of the bottom of the 50-meter tall black quartz, if for no other reason that to keep curious fingers from touching hidden switches, of which Erick had found none.