B5 C19: Journeyman

While it was hardly the original intention, two weeks turned out to be just about the exact amount of time I needed to finish my two major goals.

Much as my gut feeling had alluded to, my last level of Spatial Magic came first. Not all too dissimilar from the previous, it arrived while I was using the Orb of Isolation, doing my best to straighten out the mess of space surrounding me. 

For some variance, I’d started casting Summon Pebble again and throwing the stones into the warped space. This time around, however, I bent space before throwing the pebble, trying to control where it would land. I wasn’t always right on the mark, but I was getting pretty good at throwing the pebbles directly forward and having them loop around to end up directly in front me.

It was during this form of training when the long-awaited notification appeared.

Spatial Magic has reached level 30!

What was that? Three-ish weeks since the last level? I’d hit level 29 days before Cal had returned, so it had to be about that long. So at that rate, to go up ten levels, it would take about 30 weeks?

That was a bit reductive, I knew. Each level got successively harder, which meant 30 weeks was probably a dramatic underestimate. Maybe closer to a 60? A full year of hard training to go up a rank… 

And that was with the spatial tonic.

Increasingly, I was starting to see how people like Barb could get stuck, unable to grab another level even after years of trying. Plus, this was just the Journeyman rank we were talking about. How much would things slow down once I hit the Adept tier above it? If I ever wanted to reach the vaunted Master rank, would I have to be like Sett or Archmage Callis, slowly leveling up my skills over the course of centuries?

A daunting future, but ultimately, it was a problem for later. For now, all I had eyes for was my first Journeyman-tier augment and the accompanying class quest completion.

Congratulations! Spatial Magic has reached the Journeyman rank!

For achieving a new skill rank, you have been offered a new skill augment.

Augment of Opposition

Strengthens your spatial magic when undoing or fighting against opposing spatial effects. Increases the power of all spatial spells when used to straighten out space or return it to its default state. Grants minor resistance to opposing spatial effects, making it harder to teleport you without your consent.

Not all that surprising given how I’d received my last ten Spatial Magic levels. Almost all of them had been from directly pitting my magic against the Anchored Spatial Spirit’s. The augment also sounded a good deal stronger than most of my others, but I supposed that was to be expected from an Apprentice-ranked augment.

Class Quest Completed: Raise an Advanced school of magic to level 30 (Repeatable).

+6 Class Points

+15,000xp

It was a ridiculous amount of experience, more than enough to go from level nine to ten in a single instant. On top of that, while I’d long ago disabled the system from showing me experience notifications for leveling my skills, the experience went up at each rank. Simply leveling up an Epic-rarity skill to 30 granted its own wealth of experience.

At level 17, though, it was just a drop in the bucket. If a single class quest was enough to earn me a full level at this point, I’d have already reached level 25 long ago. 

It also didn’t escape me that the amount of experience and class points I’d earned was arithmetic instead of exponential. It would have been nice if each rank was double the last, in which case I would have earned 8 class points and 20,000 experience, but I had no such luck. Doubtlessly, this was another reason that leveling speeds slowed down around level 20.

Still, it was hard to stay disappointed for long when I remembered why I’d been pushing so hard to level Spatial Magic in the first place. I’d at least wait to see if the others also needed anything from Sett -- even with the first collection site destroyed, the demon could be a bit grumpy about being woken up too often -- but after that, new magic was right around the corner.

Having reached my goal with Spatial Magic, I had all the more time to focus on crafting, which I put to good use.

In the past two weeks, I’d made two minor breakthroughs with my ring forging.

The first was largely accidental. Having completed the Arcane Vision trial, I now always had the basic version of the skill activated, greatly enhancing my ability to visualize mana. Without that bump to my Perception, I likely wouldn’t have realized it, but on one of my attempts to shape mithril, I noticed the mana in the forge moving strangely.

It was slight. Exceptionally so. But whenever the mithril grew hot enough, the ambient mana seemed to move towards it, even if just barely.

Initially, I thought this meant that the heated mithril had some sort of mana attraction effect, but a bit more experimentation proved it was one step past that. As the mana flowed towards the metal, the mithril grew slightly brighter to my mana sense. As best I could tell, the metal seemed to be absorbing the mana.

While the mithril was in the forge, I was completely occupied with keeping the forge heart activated, running the bellows spell, and maintaining my Forge Fingers and frost armor. When I took the soon-to-be ring out from the flames to hammer on it, though, I took the chance to extend some of my own mana into the metal, much like I had with the forge heart. To my surprise, it worked perfectly, with the mithril greedily sucking up whatever mana I offered it.

My joy was short-lived when I stuck the ring back into the forge for its next round of heating, discovering that the mithril took even higher temperatures to grow pliable this time. The mana seemed to have raised its melting point, making the rest of the forging process more difficult. 

Still, I was excited to have a new variable to play around with. From my experience, the more mana something held, the better and stronger it would be, and I was eager to see just how much mana I could pack into the metal before it became unworkable.

My second breakthrough revolved around sanding. Actual sandpaper failed to leave the smallest scuff on mithril, which meant I needed something tougher. What did I have that could possibly sand down the rare, wildly tough metal?

Well, naturally, I had a lot of mithril. The metal could scratch itself, couldn’t it? I’d already proved that I could cut into mithril if I created a dagger and powered it up with Overload Weapon. That process ended up creating a small amount of mithril dust as a byproduct. One flat stone and some glue later, and I had some makeshift mithril-dust sandpaper. 

Better yet, I found I could combine this breakthrough with my last: Forcing some of my mana into the dust seemed to improve its toughness, letting it smooth out my rings all the better. For whatever reason, water mana worked best here, and soon my rings went from slightly bumpy and hammer-beaten to near-perfectly smooth. The process took forever, and I would have vastly preferred some sort of spinning electric sander, but for now, this would suffice.

In light of my advances with sanding, I settled on inlaying gems into the ring, gluing them into carved out holes and sanding them down until they were flush with the rest of the band. If a bit less sophisticated, this looked far more professional than my still-amateurish gem cutting.

That was a bit less than ideal. In retrospect, with God’s Mind, I could recall which ring Verin was talking about. With the rest of the jewelry the noble often wore, it had faded into the background whenever I saw her, and I’d never consciously examined it. 

Gods only knew that I’d seen Verin a lot over the last year, though, and my enhanced memory had little trouble summoning up the image of her hands. With the extra spatial reasoning granted by Intelligence coupled with my freakish Perception, I could even confidently craft a ring to her exact finger size. 

Only one ring on her left hand matched her description, and it had contained multiple, elegantly cut blue gems evenly spaced out along its surface. I wasn’t skilled enough to create something like that. Yet. Instead, I’d offer her something a tad more humble.

A simple mithril band, imbued with as much frost mana as I could stuff it full of. A line of inlaid lapis lazuli, running horizontally along its surface. Nothing more, nothing less. By the time we left the dungeon, hopefully I’d be able to do much better, but for now, I was satisfied. I carved the Common equivalent of a tiny V into the ring’s interior to signify its intended owner, and then I nodded to myself.

Understanding that I was finally finished with my craft, the system at last piped up to judge it.

You have crafted an item: Mana-imbued Mithril Band.

The quality of your work is: Passable.

Note: This item was made using components looted or created by the crafter.

For creating an item using your own materials, a vertical bonus will be applied: Quality upgraded to Standard.

Unfortunately, it looked like I hadn’t managed to make a named item, but without a more complicated design, I hadn’t expected to. The vertical bonuses were enough to almost make up for that, though. Most of the glue had been created from the last dregs of the plants I’d harvested back in the jungle instead of the ones from my garden. Ignoring that, I’d grabbed just about the maximum vertical bonus possible: I’d mined the ore and the gems, cut the gems into the required inlay shape, crafted the glue from herbs I’d harvested myself, and then done all the forging and smithing.

The system strongly rewarded those who involved themselves in multiple facets of the crafting process, and I got to watch that reward in real time as the ring’s quality was bumped up. The mithril band subtly changed before my eyes, the edge of the lapis melting into the surrounding mithril until it was impossible to imagine that they’d ever been separate. The gem also grew slightly lighter and filled up with frost mana, while the mana within the mithril itself seemed to move about, growing more uniform and structured.

For crafting a Standard item at the Novice tier, you have been awarded 2xp.

For crafting an Uncommon item at the Novice tier, you have been awarded 3xp.

Note: This item uses skills and materials significantly above your current tier in the related crafting skills. All awarded experience has been tripled. 

Not the best way to earn experience, but every bit counted. The skill leveling was nice, too.

Jewelry Making has reached level 9!

Smithing has reached level 7!

In the end, even without any sort of purposeful enchantment or system-given name, the ring was still a magical item, and I grinned as I examined it with God’s Eye.

Mana-imbued Mithril Band

+1 Wisdom

+1 Intelligence

+1 to Frost Magic (up to Apprentice rank)

Considering that Verin was already past the Apprentice rank in Frost Magic, that last bit would sadly be useless to her, but it was neat to see that all the frost mana I’d used actually had an effect on the final product. I had a feeling that only two stat points was probably quite bad for the rarity of materials I’d used, but my skill levels were still too low to expect much more.

If I’d had a few more months, maybe I’d toss the ring and start fresh, but I didn’t. With all of my smithing and magic training, two weeks had passed in the blink of an eye.

Counter to our hopes, Verin had notably not left her room to interact with us. It was clear she’d slipped out now and then, if just to dispose of her dirty dishes and use the restroom. With how often we were out of the cabin, though, she had little trouble timing her brief escapes for while we were out.

Today, however, there would be no avoiding us. United in our desire to pull Verin out of her funk, Cal and I stood side-by-side outside our noble companion’s door. I knocked gently before calling out.

“Verin? Cal and I are both here. Can we come in? We haven’t seen you in a while. We want to check in.” While we weren’t planning on taking no for an answer, I had little desire to resort to kicking her door down if we didn’t need to. Not that I’d actually installed locks on them in the first place, so that was entirely proverbial in any case.

A mumbled response quickly arrived. “I am not feeling quite well. Please leave me be.”

Is she actually sick? Can we even get sick with our stats? Despite her mumbling, Verin still spoke with the tone of one who was used to their commands being accepted, and a part of me wondered if we should give her some more time.

Cal, on the other hand, had no such reservations. “Yeah, well, too bad. If you’re not feeling well, we’ll handle it together. We’re done with the annoying self-isolation act.” Thus said, Cal flung open the door and barged into the room. If a bit more tentatively, I followed behind her.

Immediately, it was clear that something was wrong.

The interior of the room made that obvious enough. Contrary to what I’d assumed, it appeared that Verin had largely not been leaving her room or cleaning up. Piled up stone and metal dishware filled up her tables and even sat on the floor in some cases. 

Worse yet, it became clear that she hadn’t finished all the meals I’d given her. While the plates were all clean, a block of ice sat in the corner, encasing the remnants of much of the food I cooked. I couldn’t tell if her Etiquette had pushed her into doing it to keep the room from smelling, or if she’d been trying to hide her current state from us. Otherwise, I would have easily noticed the smell of the unfinished food from outside the door.

All of that paled in comparison to Verin herself. While she was almost completely hidden from view under blankets, that didn’t last for long as Cal stormed over to her bed and ripped the blankets off.

Already, Verin had lost a few pounds from surviving the spatial region. A broth diet was not known for helping one bulk up, after all. The figure before us had taken that several steps further, growing visibly gaunt and sickly in under a month.

Even that wasn’t my main source of worry, though, and it quickly became clear that something far worse than a simple flu was to blame for Verin’s state. All around her, the room’s mana churned in an unnatural way that I couldn’t fully follow. Rather than sporting the standard fever of most illnesses, she looked impossibly clammy, with parts of her extremities already turning blue. Frost Sight only further confirmed her dramatic drop in temperature, Verin’s entire body lighting up under the skill’s effects.

Even Cal was momentarily taken aback by Verin’s unexpected state. Rather than softening her tone and fretting over the noble, however, Cal only doubled down on her earlier brusqueness. “Seriously? Were you just going to try to hide this from us forever? We get it. You’re a noble. You don’t want us to see you looking like shit. Big deal. Tell us what’s wrong so we can go fix it.”

Evidently needing them for more than just hiding herself away, Verin grabbed at the removed blankets, yanking them back over her, with only her head exposed. “It is fine. Do not concern yourselves. I will be fine. I will… adjust. Do not worry. I can still cast. I can. I will not hold us back in the next region.” As if to prove herself to us, Verin poked a hand out from under the blankets and summoned an icicle. 

The room’s mana momentarily went wild, rushing into her while angrily churning right around her skin. Verin’s resulting pained wince made it clear the spell wasn’t half as easy as she’d made it out to be, either.

What’s happening? Did the limb growth go wrong? Did she damage her mana core? How do we fix this? Can I heal her? I cursed as God’s Eye revealed that her health was completely full, making me doubt that my own magic could do any good. Should I be heating her up? Would that even help? 

More than the desert crypt’s undead army, more than the darkness region’s Forsaken Seer, more than the Mind Reaper, the scene before me terrified me, half because Verin was visibly too sick to function, and half because I had no idea what to do about it.

Rather than admitting she wasn’t in any shape to be showing off, the noble went one step further, removing the blankets and shakily pulling herself to her feet. “See? I can cast. It will be fine. You will need to carry me like you used to do. But I can use my class skills. I can prove it.” Frost began to form atop Verin’s already-blue skin as she activated her Advancing Glacier, her Etiquette failing to fully mask her face twisting into a rictus of pain.

For all of Verin’s boasts, it appeared that she was mistaken. Before we could so much as yell at her to cancel her skill, whatever was ailing Verin grew too much for her. 

Still covered in ice, the noble’s eyes drooped shut as she passed out and began to fall to the floor. 

Before she dropped a single centimeter, Cal was there to catch her. Ignoring the intense cold of the ice against her skin, she turned to me with an intense look in her eyes.

“We’re waking Sett up. Now.” Without waiting for my response, Cal rushed out of the cabin, effortlessly hefting Verin’s frail form. With my Dexterity, I easily overtook her, intent on rousing the grand magus so he would be ready for them.

We could only hope that, with his wealth of magical knowledge, the mage would know what was wrong. And more than that, we could only pray that he would be able to fix it, too.