CH174

The next day Ben went to the shop while Thera focused on training her earth magic. There were too many things he wanted to work on and not enough time to do it all, but since this was regularly his day off to hunt anyway he had the benefit of not needing to help out too much, instead focusing on using the tools around for his own purposes.

First and foremost what he wanted to improve came down to the church of Myriad itself, his coat. There were a variety of ways he wanted to enchant it to try and improve it now that he’d grown more comfortable with his skills and knowledge, having leveled up a few times since he first made it, with defense being the biggest target to improve.

When he first heard that the church would be strengthened by its believers, it seemed he’d overestimated by just how much. Any enhancement it would get would come from the number of believers and years of giving their belief, meaning that for the time being it was still weak, but at least would improve as time went on and more people joined the faith. Still, that also meant he’d have to improve it a bit himself to enhance its effects.

With that in mind, he went to his library and pulled out his rings, choosing the perfect ones to suit his needs. Selecting the same armor, shield, and defense enhancement rings he’d used for Thera’s brace, as well as sturdy, and barrier magic, he slid the rings onto his already crowded fingers as he got to work.

The important part was what method he would use to place them. While he was more experienced with weaving his enchantments, the method of blending that Myriad’s race used might have been unusually suited for the task seeing as how it was being put on the church. Both methods had their positives and negatives, but even more important was the fact that he didn’t need to choose one or the other, instead taking both to make something greater.

The first task was figuring out just how he intended to arrange them and split the skills into two groups. The first would use armor enhancement as its base since it should be able to be applied to a coat in an almost completely unaltered form given the fact that the skill applied to leather armor as well. To that though he had to take the aspects of both shield enhancement and defense enhancement that would be able to complement it and blend them all together.

From there he went to focus on what was left. With barrier magic as the base, he blended it with not only the properties of sturdy, but also his magic resistances, each of them but light and life, just in case he ever needed to be healed while wearing the thing.

Once that was done and he had the blended mana created, each filled with the properties they would need to enhance the base one to what he considered its current maximum potential, he stretched them out, weaving them not just with each other and the coat itself, but also with an enchanting spell, activation condition.

While he hadn’t used too many enchanting spells since he gained access to any skill he could get his hands on, this one was arguably the most valuable for an enchanter to learn, making it so that either specific effects or entire enchantments wouldn’t activate without cause. In this case, he’d designed the enchantment so that a thin layer of the barrier magic wouldn’t deploy around the coat unless the armor enhancement picked up any form of impact, but when it did it would be instantaneous. While hypothetically it might have been better to have it always active if the coat could support the mana cost, if any attack was fast enough to get through before the barrier went up, the enchants would be powerless to stop it anyway and he would likely become a fine red mist.

As he was putting on the finishing touches he was feeling particularly proud as he looked at what he’d created. Such a thing would have been all but impossible if he still only had a single mind available to him, and he couldn’t deny the value that came with his mental skills, even if their improvement did tend to make his thoughts feel crowded. To push his mind to the limit, arranging skills and their aspects, blending what he needed and weaving it all into something functional, he couldn’t have imagined something better as his new and improved coat was completed.

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