B5 C17: Fiery Rewards

Immediately upon opening the chest, I was gratified to see a full four items waiting for me inside. Better yet, two of the four were, in fact, rings, just as I’d hoped. Neither of the two were what I truly had my eyes set on, and it took a monumental amount of self-control not to jump directly to my own reward, but for Verin’s sake, I examined the rings first.

My initial satisfaction quickly faded away as I identified them. Indeed, one of them clearly was for Verin, but I somehow doubted it would be cheering her up much.

Band of Refractory Conjuration

+2 Intelligence

+1 Constitution

Conjured materials gain minor resistances to most outside influences and moderate resistances to flames, heat, and melting.

Given that only one of us made ample use of “conjured materials,” I could be certain the dungeon had Verin in mind for the ring. Not even considering the stat increases, the effect was useful, too, strengthening both her glacier and her ice walls. 

To top it off, the dungeon had been kind enough to design a ring fit for Verin’s noble tastes: the band was carved from some sort of subtly red crystal, its edges curved and flared into a tastefully understated suggestion of flames. Admittedly, it wasn’t her usual color palette, nor was it what you would expect to find a frost mage wearing, but even without the enchantments, its craftsmanship would have made it worth a pretty penny.

On the flip side, the effect was very obviously tied to Verin’s recent dismemberment. I was obviously thrilled that she’d be better protected against similar situations in the future. At the same time, the dungeon seemed to reward us for our contribution to the boss fight. In this case, the ring was basically a constant reminder that all she’d done was lose an arm.

Maybe I can hold off on giving it to her for a bit. I was sure her practical side would appreciate it eventually, but eventually didn’t mean now.

The second ring was similar in style, but entirely different in effect.

Burn Balm Band

+2 Constitution

+5 to Heat Resistance (up to Journeyman rank)

While worn, Heat Resistance grants improved resistance to direct flames and burning. Additionally, any burns (including acid burns, frostburns, etc.) will heal faster and hurt less. 

Strictly speaking, it wasn’t a bad choice for any of us three, and the pain reduction likely would have come in handy for Verin. I wouldn’t have minded the band myself back when I’d lit the Ore Muncher on fire. 

In this case, though, I was willing to bet Cal had earned the ring for her deep dive into the boss’s scorching torso. Both the extra Constitution and the resistance levels fit her class, and she’d been liberally covered in burns by the battle’s conclusion. 

Truthfully, while I’d done the bulk of the initial damage and Cal likely couldn’t have won on her own, I thought her furious hack and slash warranted a slightly better reward. Whether due to my abnormally high Luck or perhaps my defense of Verin, though, it seemed that I was the main winner this time around.

Rather than skimping out with a tiny little ring or other accessory, the dungeon had seen fit to finally reward me with a much-needed offensive upgrade. Taking up the bulk of the space within the chest, a breathtaking recurve bow awaited me, complete with an arrow-filled quiver to its side.

Thematically paired with the rings, the bow was shaped from the same muted red crystal and featured similar flame-like patterns running up its sides. The gentle eye-catching curves lent the bow the air of a museum piece, or perhaps that of a weapon meant to be hung upon a mantle. That illusion was quickly banished when, on a whim, I grabbed the bow and channeled some fire mana into it, causing the crystal to glow before bursting into angry, red-hot flames.

The set was completed by the unconventional arrows, all of which were shaped like the boss’s quills. Somehow, I doubted Verin would find that fact particularly thrilling, but if the arrows packed even a fraction of the punch that their larger counterparts had, then I was in luck.

Flame Quill Launcher

+2 Dexterity

+2 to Fire Magic (up to Adept rank)

Attacks deal additional fire damage on hit. Greatly amplifies the power of all fire-based weapon enhancements applied to the bow.

It was only my fear of giving Verin a heart attack that kept me from firing off a maximally overloaded fire arrow right then and there, and I was eager to flee to the mountains soon to do just that. Afraid that the dungeon would somehow rob me of my reward, I immediately soulbound the bow, making sure I couldn’t lose it.

I strongly doubted I’d have much use for my previous bow anymore, but since finishing the Bind Weapon class trial, I had a full ten weapon slots to fill up. As this was only my sixth soulbound weapon, I didn’t bother ditching the mundane bow quite yet.

If not quite vibrating with excitement, I was filled with a sort of giddiness I hadn’t felt in a long time. I ran my hand down the surface of the bow and gave the string a few experimental tugs, marveling at how perfect it felt in my hands. Full appreciation could wait for later, however. I’d only opened the chest in the first place to try to cheer Verin up, and working myself up over a weapon themed after the very attack that had nearly killed her wasn’t helping.

With all three of us accounted for, I was a bit taken aback by the fourth item still sitting in the chest. A seemingly simple black lump, it didn’t suggest its usage in the least bit, leaving me baffled until I opted to activate God’s Eye.

Forge Heart

An everlasting source of fire.

When lit on fire, running mana through the forge heart will produce tremendously hot flames. Materials heated by the forge heart will have their fire resistance reduced and their melting point lowered. The exact temperature of the fire can be adjusted by altering the amount of mana supplied to the forge heart.

A utility item for smithing? In some sense, that only increased the guilt I was feeling. As the sole smith in the group, this was essentially a second reward just for me.

On the other hand, no one said everything I made had to be for myself, right? 

Hadn’t Verin said her old ring was made from mithril? The last time I’d tried to work with the rare metal, I hadn’t managed to melt even a bit of it. With any luck, the forge heart would be just what I needed to fix that.

She said it was a mithril band with blue gemstones. I had a few blue gems lying around, didn’t I? The secondary effect of the mining version of my Gloves of the Arcanist -- Miner’s Mitts -- increased the frequency with which I discovered gemstones, and by now, I had a decent reserve sitting idle in my storage. Not that I really knew how to polish or cut them, but I could try, couldn’t I?

With a clear goal in mind, I waded through the tall grass until I reached my forge. 

Maybe I couldn’t perfectly recreate the ring Verin had lost, but at the very least, I could try my best.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Jewelry Making has reached level 7!

Smithing has reached level 5!

As the two skills inched closer to the Initiate rank, each skill level noticeably slowed down, and frankly, I hadn’t expected either to level for a while longer. Even the clumsiest attempts at working with mithril, however, seemed to supercharge my leveling speed.

Originally, I imagined that getting the metal to melt or even bend would be the first real challenge. In actuality, I ran into issues before I even touched any metal. The moment I tried to use my new forge heart, I discovered that it wasn’t nearly as intuitive to activate as most magic items were.

Rolling the inert lump around in my hands, I kept expecting to feel some pull, some instinctive activation point that would serve as an on switch for the glorified mass of coal. When no such switch was forthcoming, I was forced to take more active measures, taking hold of my mana with External Intrinsic Mana Manipulation and pushing it out of my body.

At first, the forge heart resisted the mana, and it took a conscious effort to shove the energy through its rough exterior. When I at last pushed through the resistance, the heart finally activated, catching fire all at once. Luckily for my hands, I already had Forge Fingers activated, the Smithing variant of my gloves preventing me from having to run to Arbor for another limb regrowth.

As advertised, the temperature was adjustable, though the mechanism was inexact, forcing me to shove more or less mana into the heart. Or, perhaps that wasn’t fair: The temperature control probably could be exceedingly exact if I actually trained up my mana manipulation enough. With any luck, working with the forge heart would passively help me level the skill as I smithed.

With my current skill level, using the heart was practically unbearable. While I could activate it in my hands, once I threw it into the forge, keeping it active at a distance was much harder. Add in my need to constantly cast my bellows spell and then actually work the metal in the forge, and I felt both my Wisdom and Intelligence strained in ways I never had before.

All that effort proved to be worth it when I finally stuck a chunk of mithril into the flames. While it refused to melt at first, I kept adding more and more mana to the heart until the oppressive heat crept past my protected hands and arms and forced me to activate my frost armor lest I melt along with the mithril.

Unfortunately, even once the metal began to melt, working with mithril ended up as a lesson in frustration. Luckily, the makeshift tongs that I created with Arcane Armaments were able to stand up to the intense heat, but just about nothing else was. Both my Forge Fingers and the forge heart had secondary effects that let me lower the melting point of the metals I was working with. Even heavily leaning on both effects, however, the stone crucibles cracked and melted long before the mithril showed any changes. 

I got around that by further abusing my Arcane Armaments, in a spark of inspiration, using the skill to create a spiked gauntlet. While I had little desire to follow in the path of the pugilist, the entirely mana-formed gauntlet served as a workable cup to hold the molten metal.

Sadly, that still meant that casting was out. The moment the metal touched the stone casts I’d been using up till then, the stone cracked and deformed. I was sure there was something I could use that had a higher melting point, but I wasn’t sure exactly what. Clay? Something involving sand? Some other fantasy material I knew nothing about? I’d have to play around.

For now, that meant a lot of banging on heated metal with a hammer. Eventually, I formed some workable bands, although they were overwhelmingly plain. After throwing several hundred points of mana into a thin dagger, I confirmed that I could scratch the material, which would theoretically carve patterns into it, but the going was slow, and even with my stats steadying my hand, the end effect left something to be desired. I had slightly better luck with filligreeing other metals onto the bands, although that destroyed the pure mithril aesthetic.

Gem cutting ended up being relatively much easier. I imagined that there were entire courses I could take on all the different methods of cutting a gemstone and different names to go along with all the exact shapes I could cut them into. 

Unfortunately, I’d never been much into rings back on Earth, and the extent of my knowledge came from discussing wedding ring options with a few friends before their engagements. I vaguely knew what a cushion cut was, princess cuts were squarish, and there was something called an “underhalo.” That was about all I could recall.

Thankfully, I did know my shapes.

Circle. After one incredibly exacting cut with a summoned mana blade, I had a perfectly round quartz crystal. The gem dust made the cutting more difficult, but charging my blade with water mana took care of that issue nicely, letting me pull off exceptionally smooth cuts.

Square. Even easier. Four clean cuts, and I had a square of jade.

All the faceting was much more difficult, and the polishing went rather poorly. I still had some rudimentary sandpaper I’d created by glueing some actual sand to a rock back when I’d first started fine woodcarving in the dungeon. On some gemstones, it did absolutely nothing, evidently not hard enough to scratch them. On others, it roughed the surfaces, the grit too coarse.

If I found time, I’d play around with better ways to cut and polish the gems in the future. For now, though, it was good enough. From there, I devoted a full day just to practicing different ways to attach the gems to my rings.

The easiest solution was to make some gold wire and bend it into a basic clasp before welding it onto the bands I’d made. Slightly harder was slowly etching indentations into the bands and glueing the gems into the holes using a similar mixture to what I’d made my ore muncher glue traps from.

In the end, I spent a full four days at the forge, playing around with every conceivable way I could shape metal and gem alike. Though the Satiated Stomach variant of Arcane Choker let me work without taking breaks for food, I chose to do so in any case, cooking double portions of whatever I made for Verin.

Not that I actually ended up eating with her. The first time I knocked on her door with food in hand, she mumbled something about being occupied and had me leave the meal at her doorstep. This became concerningly routine as the days rolled by, and if not for her voice and a surreptitious usage of Vitality Sight to confirm that she was still alive inside, I might have busted her door down by now.

Still, she was an adult, and she’d just gone through something fairly traumatic. If she wanted to be alone, then that was her prerogative. At least for now, anyway.

At the end of my forging extravaganza, I was sad to say that I didn’t end up with anything I was all that proud of. Some were farmer’s-market level, and the materials involved probably made a lot of what I made pretty pricey. None of them ended up as named items, though, and there was nothing I would feel comfortable giving to Verin as a replacement for her old ring.

While that was a disappointment, I’d known from the onset that I wouldn’t be crafting masterpieces in four days. All I could do was keep practicing.

And besides, Jewelry Making and Smithing weren’t the only skills I was focused on leveling right now. One skill in particular stood out to me in the wake of our last boss battle, and leveling it would take far more effort than was necessary for my burgeoning Novice professional skills.

Finding a nice spot out in the prairie grass, I removed two items from my storage, both of which I’d acquired from the same place. The first wasn’t all too dissimilar to the forge heart I’d been using lately, although it was rounder and a deeper, more lustrous black. On top of that, under my Mana Sense, it radiated a potent mana that played with my sense of distance.

The Orb of Isolation was no stranger to me by now, and though I hadn’t used it much, I’d taken it for a few spins since escaping from the spatial region. The less familiar object was the small corked glass vial in my other hand. Filled with a gently bubbling liquid no less dark than the orb, it was something I hadn’t planned to use quite yet.

Spatial Affinity Tonic

Steeped in the energies of the cosmos and imbued with the concept of space, this brew increases the imbiber’s affinity with spatial concepts.

On consumption, grants a minor, permanent increase in the imbiber’s connection to spatial concepts. Additionally, increases the leveling speed for the imbiber’s next ten levels of Spatial Magic. This effect only works at full strength up to Adept rank, at which point it offers diminishing returns.

Originally, I’d been planning on drinking the tonic once I hit level 30 in Spatial Magic. That would maximize the benefit of its increased leveling speed, making it last all the way until I reached the Adept rank. 

Now, however, I was tired of being so slow.

While a lot of things had to go wrong for Verin to lose her arm, a lot of things had gone exactly right, too. In the grand scheme of things, I hadn’t been that far from the forest. Verin had fallen asleep, saving her from a great deal of pain and trauma.

What if that hadn’t been the case? What if one of us lost a limb somewhere far off, like the mental region? Assuming Tal’Ket’s disk was on cooldown, it would take weeks to get back to the forest from there.

As much as I loved my Spatial Step, I was realizing I needed something longer-range and more flexible. I doubted that there were any spells I could learn at level 30 that would let me teleport directly from the mental region all the way to Arbor, but I was hoping for something that would drastically cut down on the travel time. 

Anything that sped up the time it would take for me to get a spell like that was worthwhile to me.

“I guess I just open it up and throw it back?” The description hadn’t said anything special about dosage or how to consume it, so with no other instructions, I popped off the cork and took the entire vial as if it were a shooter.

Tastes like… black chalk and raspberries? Not bad actually. Wonder if that’s artificial flavoring or if there’s something particularly space-like about raspberries that I’m missing.

At first, nothing seemed to happen, not that I knew exactly what I was supposed to be feeling in the first place. Right as I was beginning to worry that I’d done something wrong, a splitting headache consumed me.

All at once, it was as if someone had turned my skull into rubber and inflated it ten times too large. My vision swam, and without activating my Spatial Sight, I could clearly sense the spatial grid surrounding me. The sensation grew overwhelming, and I reflexively closed my eyes, but it didn’t help, every centimeter of space screaming out to me.

The nauseating feeling of expansion only continued to intensify, and my sphere of awareness rapidly grew until it felt like I could sense every bit of space in the entire dungeon. For a split second, my spatial sense pushed up against the very edge of the patchwork sky, and I recoiled as I detected the spatial seal that locked us into the dungeon. Further yet, the tonic pushed my mind, pushing through the twists and bends that made up the seal until all I could feel was a profuse sense of vastness.

Too large. Too much. I willed my senses to pull back, but unheedingly, they continued to expand, forcing me to perceive more than my fragile human brain was ever meant to.

Then, for the briefest of moments, it all clicked. The headache vanished. The expansion stopped. All of infinity had been successfully shoved into my head. I understood. With a single step, I felt as though I could reach out and travel anywhere.

Before I could act on that feeling, all the pain came flooding back. Space began to spin in a much simpler way as I lost my footing and began to fall. 

By the time I hit the ground, I was already out cold.