SoK Chapter 194

In that moment, TJ came to the realization that he didn’t need to replace any of his equipment if he didn’t have every slot filled. The System had told him months ago at this point that there were ten slots. Those were boots, leggings, chestpiece, bracers, right hand’s ring, left hand’s ring, dominant hand, off hand, necklace, and helm. With the equipment he had right now, he had one ring, a weapon, helm, and bracers. Sure, the Raven Mocker’s Remnant was a particularly underwhelming bracer slot, but it was more than nothing, which was more than he had in the other six slots. That left boots, leggings, chestpiece, a ring, offhand, and necklace, so which would work best? He decided against boots, given the materials he was working with. Feathers weren’t meant to be walked on, and he’d destroy whatever he made too quickly to have it be worth it. Thoughts of what he could do to count as the boots without truly being them flashed through his mind, but he pushed the ideas away.

Ring? TJ got the feeling that these materials were better suited to larger items—they were larger, less condensed in their presence, with the bones holding wind, the feathers lightning, and the talons something of a mix of both. Ring and necklace were both out like that.

Offhand? He could create the knife he thought of, but he didn’t want it. He wasn’t going to be using a knife in the fights he found himself in, so that left leggings and chestpiece.

Feather pants didn’t sound particularly comfortable, but TJ didn’t mind that, not thinking any further about the way the equipment looked or felt. He was high enough level now that the slight issues of comfort could be easily forgotten. Instead, he thought about which would help him more, and which might be able to better influence him while he was transformed into a coatl. With that thought, he asked the System, “Do chestpieces or leggings typically carry more Attributes or anything? Is one of them the better piece of equipment?”

Chestpieces are the central piece of equipment for any Participant. As such, a chestpiece typically carries the largest portion of Attributes and Skills comparative to the rest of the equipment.

That cinched it. TJ wasn’t going to find a monster better suited to his developing domain than a thunderbird, and he wasn’t going to be able to kill Silver any time soon. So, for now, he’d experiment. The question was how was he going to extract his own materials? As a coatl, he didn’t have any opposable thumbs or anything, so he’d need help. Sarah, despite being the person that he selected to do it, was almost frighteningly excited to yank out his feathers and cut off scales. To TJ’s surprise, he could will the materials to release their hold on him more easily, so Sarah hadn’t needed to put nearly the same amount of effort as she expected into their extraction. When finally he had two large piles of feathers and scales, he transformed back, feeling as if he’d have a mostly bald head after all the extractions. That was mistaken, though he knew that when he transformed back into a coatl, those places where he’d given up his natural defenses would be more open to attack. 

With plenty of materials to experiment with, TJ first tested how binding one of his feathers and the thunderbird feathers together went. He’d expected a material that’d conduct electricity quite well, but to his surprise, the essence of his own feathers washed out that of the thunderbirds’, leaving a material inferior to either of the originals, given how his feather exhausted some of its own essence to destroy that of the thunderbird’s. 

“Huh.” He muttered to himself as he continued to experiment. Of course, the thunderbird materials worked well together, and so did his own feathers and scales, but the two types seemed to want to fight for dominance whenever they were placed together, unwilling to work in tandem. But they could work together, TJ was sure. The problem largely was, as he experimented more, that his materials had a stronger will for control, to express and exert control over the parts of his Storm affinity that dwelt among the thunderbird materials. So how could he ensure that he wasn’t trying to force the two to combat?

The aspect of his Ritualistic Transfer Skill resettled on him. It was to move resources around, and then he’d used that ability to transfer the essences of various materials to each other. So, instead of just subduing the thunderbird materials for long enough to force them to merge together or with one of his feathers, he could instead push some of his own essence into the materials even before he looked to merge them with the scales and feathers from his back. Thus, as he changed the focus of the feathers from lightning to storm, he felt something break in the first one, and the feather burnt to ash, worthless. 

The second feather did the same.

The third puffed into smoke without burning.

The fifth became mist somehow. 

TJ continued experimenting, celebrating on the twenty second test, since it didn’t burn, break or somehow transmogrify itself from being a feather to something else. It was still weakened from its original potency, but progress was progress, and it wasn’t as if there was a shortage of feathers for him to continue to use. The birds’ wingspans were at least 10 feet, and there were hundreds of feathers to experiment on and accidentally destroy before he got to the Patriarch’s remains. He continued to work on elevating the more “mundane” aspect of gathering electricity to instead be suffused with Storm. The experiment had started as a curiosity and something he thought would be simple, but quickly became a test in understanding what the difference was between “magic” and an “element”, as he began to call it. Something in his head said that the System would call it whatever he wanted, so he didn’t bother to ask. Instead, he needed to understand what these changes were and what they meant, to experiment more, but now wasn’t the time when he needed to understand everything about elevating the concepts that made the aspects of the things he was creating. Just thinking of the sentence made his eyes cross. Instead, he figured he’d learn a lot more by actually doing something.

On the thirtieth attempt, TJ felt as well as saw the change as the feather’s extremities became mist. 

On the fortieth, he felt the beginning of the lightning’s sublimation into something beyond that.

On the fiftieth attempt, he was able to replicate his success from the fortieth.

On the sixty-seventh attempt, he realized that he had been in the process of improving the lightning to something that wasn’t Storm, but instead was a higher aspect of lightning.

On the sixty-eighth attempt, he was forced to adjust his approach entirely.

On the one hundredth attempt, he was interrupted and pulled away to dinner, almost against his will.

After putting Luz to bed and cuddling with her for half an hour, TJ extricated himself and went back to his experiments. The food and break had helped his mind to clear somewhat, and he realized how completely he’d just been throwing himself at the same problem again and again without innovation or thought. He hadn’t changed anything, merely hoping to find different results through his repeated experiments, and he was reminded of that old quote, whoever it was by: “insanity is trying the same thing over and over again while expecting different results.” He got the impression that, if he were better able to control his Divine Affinity, he could subsume the lightning element directly as he’d been trying until now, but while he was still weak and learning, he was too weak to do so. As such, he instead thought about different ways to change the internal structures of the materials he was using.

The first thought that crossed his mind was to flood the material with so much of his own essence that whatever element he shoved into the material took over from its original state entirely, but that would only be even moderately useful if he was working with a blank slate of a material. With valuable materials like these he had now, he was depreciating them by taking away their essences. His mind flickered to what he had done with the wendigo materials when he first harvested them. It didn’t matter why, but he’d been limited by the fact that he didn’t really have anything to harvest the materials with except for the claws of the monster itself. That’d allowed the materials to be the epitome of wendigo materials, having not been touched except by themselves, to be perfect renditions of wendigo materials, but that wasn’t what he was looking to do now. He was looking to enhance and shift the materials’ essences from what they currently were. What else could he do, though? TJ grumbled, and for the first time in a while, turned his attention to the materials he had left over from the Tutorial for inspiration.

The Tezcatlipoca-blessed pelt was ready to be worked with at this point, and wendigo horn was a remarkable material, even by his current standards. He hadn’t come into contact with any other Boss monsters, and while the wendigo horn wasn’t as valuable as its claws were, it still would be valuable for ritual magic. Interesting that he knew that detail without having to think about it. After all, the Boss itself was a ritualist, and TJ would be able to use—

TJ grinned widely as he turned his attention entirely away from crafting for a short time. After all, he wasn’t far off of his next level in Shaman, and that would be another Skill granted. All he needed to do was experiment with some rituals, and those would absolutely help him to adjust and change the make up of the materials as he learned more. After all, he was already using a ritual to do much of his experimentation and creation in the first place, such as with the Spear he’d made. Now, he simply needed to understand the magic more. He spent so long only really thinking of rituals in such basic terms, but his Occupation was one intended for ritualism. Why not start experimenting more with that?

His first thought led him to adjusting the medium of the ritual. After all, what would happen to the ritual if he used something instead of blood? Much of his success that he found recently in creating equipment came exclusively from the combination of Introductory Divine Primitive Craftsmanship and Equipment Fabrication, but why not use the entirety of his Occupation to better understand his equipment? The description of Ritualistic Transfer was focused entirely on resources. “Through the use of this Skill and a base sacrifice of 75 HP, MP, and Stamina, the Shaman can create a ritual which will allow free transfer of HP, MP, and Stamina between themself and the rest of the participants in the ritual. For the willing, there is no loss of resources from one transferred individual to the next. For the unwilling, the Shaman can attempt to force the victim to surrender their resources.”

Despite having it put in such explicit terms, TJ understood that “resources,” regardless of the context they were referenced, were a whole lot more than just those three numbers that showed up on his Status. It was something beyond that, and those numbers were more of an attempt at abstraction of what they represented. How could he transfer some of his own affinity and his divinity into the materials while still preserving what they were? After all, he could already do that, he was only doing it in terms of his resources, instead of his Authority.

With that new flash of enlightenment, TJ threw himself back into experimentation, not noticing as his actions continued on through the night, and the sun started to rise in the east. Just before most of his camp stirred to wakefulness, TJ raised a fist in excitement as he looked down at the wendigo horn.