CC 9: Tenacity ~ Twelve

Despite being classified as a Journeyman rank, internally Joe nearly regarded the ritual as a Master rank due to its overwhelming complexity. Not wanting to damage the original containing document, Joe held up a piece of paper that he'd been transcribing the beast of a diagram onto, gently slapping it with the back of his right hand. “This is ridiculous! I can't even activate it manually, I have to meet each of the activation requirements? Mate, pop your head out so I can complain to someone!”

*B-burble!* The coffee elemental bravely poked its head out of the mug, expecting to be met with the same frigid environment as the last time it had materialized fully. Noticing with relief that the temperature of the air was only slightly below zero, the coffee bean eyes focused on Joe as he began his rant.

“Look at this! First off, the ritual is just abyssally expensive!” Joe tallied up the requirements in his head, spitting to the side as he figured out a useful comparison. “I could build two Rare apartment complexes with special attributes for the same price as just setting this up. Then, then? Right here! These are the activation requirements. Do you know what it says? Of course not. You don't actually have eyes, you can't read this.”

AutoMate nodded in dignified agreement. The entire mug Mate lived in waved back and forth, seeing as Joe hadn't unattached it from his belt. The human didn't notice, completely lost in his own thoughts. “Basically it goes like this. I get to set the activation requirements. There have to be at least five different requirements, since it's a Journeyman ritual, and the ‘more specific’ I make them, the better the end result of ‘power released’. What does that even mean? That’s like telling a chef to add a pinch of salt and a dash of paprika! Where are my hard numbers? I love numbers.”

*Burb-*

“That's not even going into the sheer purple prose that goes into the design of the ritual. Mate, I kid you not, there’s a haiku built into it. Right here, on the third circle.” Joe started laughing as he read off the words that he'd translated. “Magic flash at start. Monsters fall with a thunder. Victory is now.”

His chuckling continued for a long few seconds, until he finally trailed off in thought. “Maybe it’s actually being literal. If I go over this section for usage again, I suppose it could be very generously interpreted as ‘only when all of the requirements have been met will the ritual activate’. If that’s the case, then putting in requirements that are easy to fulfill would result in the ritual activating prematurely, and… not building up much power? But where’s the section on how it builds up that strength?”

Without the Ritualist realizing it, Mate sank back into its cup and unsummoned itself. Joe knew that he had a bad habit of going off on a tangent and forgetting to release the elemental, so he'd granted it the ability to send itself home when it knew it wasn't needed. The sound of pages flipping and incensed muttering were the only sounds for the next long time, as the light outside of Joe's bubble ever so slowly increased. “Ah-ha! I've got it!”

Storing his original document in his codpiece, Joe started writing down his insights into the ritual. “The cost of the ritual is so exorbitant because of the potential for destruction. If I used this correctly, I could complete my quest in a single activation, slaughtering a full one thousand monsters. Let me see… right here! The final damage dealt to the target of the ritual is based on how many creatures have fulfilled each of the activation requirements. But right here, it shows that the ritual itself is activated as soon as one of the targets fulfills every requirement.”

That gave him plenty of ideas on how to make this work for best effect, but Joe knew that unless he had an extremely accurate metric of how each of the monsters in this world reacted, he could create a Ritual that could never be activated. For instance, if he were to set one of the requirements to be a creature ‘flew’ over a wall, it wouldn't activate if something ‘jumped', ‘hopped’, or ‘was thrown’ over that same barrier. Not that he would ever use that as a requirement: seeing as this world produced massive creatures, Joe was guessing that very few, if any, of the monsters on this world would be able to fly.

“If I make the activation too stringent, they’ll never activate, and the ritual will have practically no power at all. If I make it too open, there won’t be enough power input into the ritual before it's activated. This is actually kinda fun.” Joe was scribbling furiously at his paper as he tried to decide what he should make first. “This is such an interesting logic problem… where will I have the best effect, and where will I have diminishing returns?”

Eventually, he had to slow down on his research, as the ritual itself was an extremely dense piece of magic. It was going to take him hours, possibly days, to set up the final product once he got started. There were far too many things to do before he could let himself get sucked down the rabbit hole of setting it up. “I'm betting that this round of Beast Waves is going to be taken care of fairly easily, since we have so many defenses set up, and I figured out the trick right away. That means I should start planning for the next stage, going from a Village to a Town.”

The Ritualist was less excited about this portion of his work, as there was no direct benefit to it… other than eventually escaping this world. It didn't afford him personal power, he wouldn't be able to take the buildings with him when he left, and once again, any currency he gathered would be rendered useless as soon as he left Jotunheim.

At this point, he was so sick of having to deal with accumulating wealth and losing it that he was actively opposed to making an ‘income’. “I bet this is what vampires felt like on Earth, if there were any. They work really hard and build an empire, only for the country that they had their money invested in to fall. Eventually, perhaps everyone realizes that the pursuit of money is useless if they live long enough. Need to build my tower somewhere and spend a few decades learning. Knowledge is the true currency of the universe.”

Wisdom +5! You have stumbled onto a great personal revelation, even if that insight is only a small part of a greater pattern.

Joe didn't even notice that notification, as he was neck deep in planning for the next stage of the town. “Forget buildings, I've got everything I need to make those, and whatever it is that we need for them. We need to focus on the morale modifier, that was what always held me back in The Shoe. What were the big things there that I needed to take care of? I think it was heat, light, shelter… no, living spaces. That’s the right one. Water sources, air quality, and resources.”

“Let's break it down into the easiest ones to fix.” Joe's finger lightly trailed across the paper and came to a stop on the word ‘light’. “I've already done this one, so I should be able to do it again. I learned my lesson last time; it's not enough to just have light, we need a proper circadian rhythm. Day night cycle. I don't think people will appreciate a full two weeks in either the sun or the dark, but the challenge is going to be how to make sure we've enough light to take on any monsters that manage to make their way into the area?”

For the next few hours, Joe was content to sketch out his plan on an oversized piece of paper. When it was done, he had a drawing that a five-year-old could've made, but it had been enough for him to get his thoughts in order. “Perfect. If I create a flat barrier half an inch thick directly above our heads, I can set it to let in light only half of the day. Then it’d be easy to set up ‘street lights’ in the form of circular points in the air where I don’t block the light. That way we still maintain excellent visibility, without having to sacrifice our vision.”

The next step was going to be figuring out how much space he needed to cover with all of this. That was how Joe found himself walking from one end of the walled-in area to the other, taking careful, measured steps. He tried to tune out any distractions, and was extremely thankful that the Dwarves had defaulted to planning a grid pattern for the city. Even though he got quite a few strange looks as he moved along, loudly counting each step, it was nothing he wasn’t used to. Still, whenever anyone asked him what he was doing, he took the time to pause, carefully remember where he was at, then answer their question with a smile.

One of the most important factors in maintaining a low profile was ensuring that he was cheerful and pleasant to anyone that he ran into. If he wanted to make a building extremely sneakily, pretending that it was for something exquisitely specific, he resolved to ensure that he invited everyone to help build an ‘ice block storage center’ and ensure it was painted beige. That way, he could be assured that people would leave him alone, or else they’d be put to work. “Boring is the best camouflage.”

Charisma (Dark) +3! As your charisma has been aligned to darkness, by plotting to manipulate and deceive, your Characteristic progression has drastically increased!

That gave Joe pause for a moment, as he reevaluated his actions. After carefully thinking through it, he found no fault in his logic. He decided that if the system wanted to characterize what he was planning as manipulative, that was its problem, not his. He was just trying to be careful and intentional with his plans. Then again… it was rewarding him for this behavior, so perhaps he should lean into it?

When his calculations were finally complete, Joe went back to his secluded corner and started creating the design. His Calculus and Number Theory came in exceptionally useful at this point, as he found that not only did he need to calculate the square footage of the day-night barrier if he wanted to leave what were essentially flood lights in it, he needed to determine how large of a cone of light would pierce through the darkness based on the circumference of the unblocked area. It was a different challenge than he was used to, but nothing was trying to eat him at the moment—a positive spin that Joe could put on nearly everything these days.

“Sheer size and complexity is going to make this a Student ritual.” Joe muttered gently as he continued his process. Checking over his inventory, he found ten Uncommon cores, and a single Rare. Then, of course, there was the Mythical core shining brightly and practically begging him to use it for such a simple, throwaway ritual. “That's… very strange. It wants to be used. Of course it does, otherwise the World Boss can't respawn back on Alfheim.”

He resolved to get it out of his inventory at the soonest possible moment. Happily, he only needed the Rare core. Taking that out of his codpiece so that he wouldn't be tempted with the sight of its much more powerful companion, Joe placed the flat tile he was working on into the ground, added the last variables that would determine the location of the ritual manifesting, ensured that he had a secondary repository so that he could keep this ritual going either with injections of mana, or the use of a Mana Battery—-then, checklist complete, he began to alter the sky.

It only took a few moments for concerned citizens to start shouting and pointing at the sky, which was rapidly darkening as circles began swirling in the air, shifting into what appeared to be low-flying black clouds. They quickly spread over the entirety of the town, from wall to wall, then reverted into a matte black; as if the sky had been deleted.

Class experience gained: Reductionist +200.

Moments later, that blackness filled with stars, constellations, and the view of the worlds floating in the distance. Joe walked along the perimeter of the open area to make sure that every part of the darkness lined up perfectly, wincing in annoyance when he saw that he'd missed three inches on the Eastern side, allowing a large flood of light to brighten that area enough to overpower his false stars. “Still… got pretty close for just eyeballing it.”

“Joe! Bring the sky back.” Havoc’s voice rolled over the area. “You're going to mess us all up, it's supposed to be daytime right now, night time starts in seven and a half hours!”

Blinking a few times, the bald human went back to the Ritual Tile, reached down, and scratched a few markings over the top of the active diagram. Instantly, the night was replaced with day, and he was pretty sure the gap issue was fixed. No more shouts or commands were sent his way, so Joe took a moment to surreptitiously scoot some loose dirt over the top of the tile. Someone looking for it in earnest would be able to find it, but after a few days of blowing snow, this would be more than enough to hide the ritual near-permanently.

“I should probably get a dedicated vault to hold my active rituals. Sure would be a shame if someone stepped on this and it went off like a landmine.” That made the Ritualist chuckle for a second, until his smile froze in place. “Then again, I'd bet money it'll be me. Yeah, maybe we take some time to sink this into the stone. Eh… tomorrow.”