CH35

Once dinner was done and they’d cleaned up, Ben went back to bed to work on the cloth while Sonya sat nearby applying more life magic to his wounds. Ben was interested in watching at first since the last two times he had needed treatment he had been unconscious, but it wasn’t anywhere near as visual as Thera’s earth magic, with only a small amount of light being produced by the spell, so instead he devoted his attention back to his enchantment, pushing the limits of his focus as well in the hopes he would get it done by tomorrow.

Eventually as he was working Sonya left, though that fact was only barely acknowledged in the back of his mind, and the hours passed as he concentrated on his enchanting before stopping to get some sleep for the night.

When morning came and he woke up he got back to it immediately and was able to finish it in a little over an hour before he decided to get up and grab something for breakfast. After having more healing applied to him he was feeling a lot better, though still not in top shape, and was feeling ready to face the day. He knew Falk should be by at some point to check on his progress and hopefully have a cloak ready for him to work on, and in the meantime he leafed through one of the books his teacher had brought while he ate.

It was a book on enchanting, one he had already read, but at the time he had thought a lot of the techniques would still be outside of his reach, now though he wasn’t so sure. He was fairly confident that he would be able to twist and weave his enchantments if he tried, unfortunately there just wasn’t much reason to. A skilled enough enchanter could do some interesting things, from lowering the mana cost of an applied spell to combining different skills to get certain desired effects different than what an individual skill could be capable of. But given that he had no magic and only a few skills, none of which he could see any reason to use together, such a technique was currently meaningless to him.

His greatest drawback was not having grown up in the world. While an average person may have developed around twelve or fifteen different skills by his age, even if most were a low level, just by living their life and having gone through a couple jobs by this point, he still only had a handful due to his recent appearance here.

For his classmates it wouldn’t have mattered, they all had powerful skills that weren’t affected by their lack of others, but for his enchanting it was brutal. With the few he had he couldn’t do anything complex with them, and the worst part was that he couldn’t even get the most out of enchanting being a blessed skill.

Normally for every level of enchantment you could apply an equal level of a skill, but he should be able to get 50 percent more than that. At his current level of two, he should be able to apply level three skills, but enchanting was already one of his most powerful ones, meaning he couldn’t even use it to its full potential.

If he wanted to get more out of it that really only left two options. Either he could try and get more skills, or he could try and power-level up one he already had.

Both options had their pros and cons. While getting more skills would be useful, they would all be stuck at level 0 for a while at least, and while power-leveling a skill would have its benefits there was no telling how long it could take. Not to mention the only skill he currently had that could be worth focusing on would be stealth, and as useful as he thought it would be to get it to a higher level, especially after their run-in with the alseer, he didn’t want to neglect his enchanting or crafting to get it up.

He sighed and slouched back into his seat. He would at least try and find a copy of the book of skills and acquisition conditions from a merchant. He assumed it would be on the expensive side, but it would be immensely helpful to have the reference around, and now that he had been using his blessed skills for a while he had a much better idea of what would be useful to him and what wouldn’t.

It was while he was dwelling on this he heard a knock at the door, and with Sonya already up and at the clinic and Thera in no position to answer it without a cloak he went to check it himself.

Opening it up he was greeted by his teacher and they quickly went back inside.

“Everyone else busy lad? Not sure a patient should be the one getting the door.”

“Sonya’s at the clinic already and Thera’s still in her room, anyway I completed the piece you gave me if you want to give it a look.”

“Perfect, then I’ll give it a look over and show you the final step.”

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

“Final step?”

“We’ll get to that when I see it, come on now.”

At his teacher’s prompting he hurried to grab it before going back to meet him in the living room and have his work reviewed.

“Looks like you’ve got the technique down well enough, all that’s left to do is seal it with an enchanting spell.”

Finally something a little more exciting. He currently knew four spells linked to enchantment: harden, soften, strengthen, and weaken, and had practiced them all a bit from time to time, occasionally using them in his work too. Still more of the more interesting spells had the same issue that he had been just thinking on, they worked best when used on enchanted skills than on their own.