CH138

It had been about one and a half months since Thera’s birthday and Ben was laying in bed, wide-eyed despite the time of night and struggling with a question. How to train the areas he was falling behind the most in.

Ignoring agility since he had no bonuses to it, he wanted to train his mana and vitality attributes more. Both could be improved by spending either mana or life force, but any way he could think to go about it wasn’t desirable. Mana didn’t seem like it should be too bad given that his recovery rate was so high, but he would spend all day working on different enchantments when he wasn’t focusing on his crafting and even if he put his all into powering them, he hadn’t seen much benefit.

As for vitality, he’d gotten to enjoy some pretty severe beatings in order to get a skill that would hopefully help him keep more of it in a fight, but it was no substitute for a bigger vitality pool as a whole. The only issue with training that was he’d need to lose vitality regularly in order to improve his growth, and he wasn’t big on the idea of frequent beatings to make it happen.

So what could he do? Ideas swam around his head and only one stood out as being exceptionally terrible, while at the same time being the most viable if he didn’t want it to take time out of his more important training, time that went towards what he would consider his core skills.

Damn it, this is going to suck. He thought to himself as he quietly got up and dressed before making his way to the shop.

When he got to the shop he started heating up the forge before he removed a few materials he was going to need from his bag, namely deathstone and moribusal. Two materials that once went into a weapon that his teacher described as savage would be going into a tool he’d be making to try and train himself, he was pretty sure there was some irony there but he wasn’t sure if he could see it at the moment as the thought of what a crazy idea this was filled his mind.

Still, he pressed on. He had a bit of processed moribusal left from making Will’s gauntlet and cut a square centimeter of it, placing it on the table with his hand on top of it for a few seconds while looking at his card to determine the rate of mana loss. Even that small amount was far more than he needed as he saw the numbers drop on his card and he kept shaving it down, taking care that none of the slivers got away from him, until the value on his status didn’t change.

From there, things took a turn for the truly dangerous as he repeated with the deathstone. He was even more cautious with that metal than the last, knowing it would be a dumb way for someone to find his body in the morning if all of his vitality had been sucked out from mishandling it, and he was sure his god would be screaming at him if Myriad had been watching, but he tried to ignore both of those facts and instead focused on figuring out how the stones volume affected its vitality absorption rate.

Once that was done and he got a piece big enough to do its job without killing him he got to work. He heated up a small strip of steel and shaped it so it would be just slightly too large to fit on his pinky finger, all the while melting down the few slivers of the other metals he’d gathered.

He carefully coated the inside of the ring with the particularly dangerous alloy and watched it from the side as it cooled before cleaning up his mess, taking extra care to ensure he didn’t lose track of anything that might be a danger to his teacher, or worse, a customer, before he carefully picked up his creation by the safe outer rim and looked at it admiringly.

You know, if I made it so this couldn’t be taken off for as long as it was able to suck vitality, I’m pretty sure this would qualify as a cursed tool.

But this small item wasn’t something he ever intended to use on anyone else. No, he’d be putting it on himself, and forgetting the small bit of hesitation he was feeling slid it onto his pinky finger.

He was immediately aware of its presence. Unlike the numerous other rings on his hands, this one had a notably unpleasant feeling to it, and he didn’t doubt for a moment that it came from the slow draw of his internal energies.

He was taking his life into his hands doing something stupid like this so he had to be sure it worked. That meant that instead of doing something productive with the next few hours, he sat down and stared at his card, wanting to be sure there wasn’t a steady decay in his attributes, and like that, he watched and waited.

“Boy, what in the infinite hells are you doing!” His teacher yelled as soon as he got in and saw what Ben was staring at.

“Oh hey Falk, just testing a new magic tool on myself. Since it would be a bit dangerous if I didn’t make it right I figured I should observe it for a little bit to be on the safe side, but my attribute decay is slightly less than my regen rates so I should be fine.”

The yeti could only shake his head. “What, you makin’ torture tools now?”

“No, I just figured that since I have bonuses to my vitality and mana I should make something that would let me train them a bit. It’s not like it matters how I use them, so I figured having it forcibly sucked out of me should be fine.”

“Only crazy people think like that,” His teacher told him, pinching the bridge of his nose as he held out his hand. “Let me see if you’re gonna get yourself killed wearing that.”

He obediently handed it and his card over when Falk asked for them as he looked at both, hemming and hawing before finally returning the items.

“Well you won’t be killing yourself with it, but I can’t say it’ll be fun to wear. Just what put that crazy idea in your head?”