Invent ~ 26!

Even though Havoc protested, the first thing Joe did when they got back to the settlement was take a nap. Something about combat, perhaps getting his foot chopped off, had really put him in a bad place mentally and he needed to sleep it off.

When he woke up, he felt wildly refreshed and ready to take on the entire Elven Theocracy. Before then, he had dozens of notifications to go over. He collapsed them so that he could choose to read them based on their categories. After that, he had only three broad choices: reputation changes, quest updates, and skill increases.

Reputation gained: 8,000 Legion, 2,000 Dwarven Oligarchy.

Quest updated: Ranker II Peerage. Major Elven incursions fended off: 1/5.

Skill increases:

• Acid spray (Apprentice V -> Apprentice VI).
• Dark Lightning Strike has reached (Student 0)! This spell can now be recast a second time in the cooldown period for an additional 10% mana cost. This will not impact cooldown time.
• Exquisite Shell (Student V -> Student VI).
• Lay on Hands (Student IV -> Student V).
• Neutrality Aura has reached (Journeyman 0)! Congratulations! You really made this poor skill do some work with all that blood! Journeyman bonus: The range of this aura has doubled, but the extended range is only half as effective as the main area of effect.
• Retaliation of Shadows (Journeyman IV -> Journeyman VI). I hope you enjoyed the slap-show!
• Ritual Magic (Expert IV -> Expert V).
• Somatic Ritual Casting (Beginner V -> Beginner IX).

“Ugh… all this shows me is that I need to go out and participate in heavy fights more often.” Joe chuckled at that thought as he settled on his plan of staying inside and crafting for the foreseeable future. “Let’s add the last chunk… Knowledge, Architectural Lore.”

Architectural Lore (Apprentice VII -> VIII).

Knowledge (Apprentice 0 -> I).

With all his goals met, Joe heaved a sigh of relief. Now he could get back to completing his class quests, and maximize the bonuses that they gave him. He got to his feet and walked to the door, throwing it open and gasping in shock at what was on the other side. “What the abyss…?”

“Well, good morning, sleeping whatever!” Havoc called from his position around the table that he was sitting at. Joe stepped out and looked at his room, which for whatever reason now opened to this outdoor meeting area. A moment later, the ‘room’ began to shift, and collapsed into a flat cube that picked itself up and walked away. “Havoc… did you turn my apartment into a golem?”

“No, that would be ridiculous.” Havoc ‘reassured’ him with a casual wave at a chair, “Sit down. If you must know, I had that golem mimic your room so that you would be here as soon as you were up and attem. Now we can get started right away.”

“How big can you make… no, why would you waste…” Joe gave up on trying to sus out the intentions of this mad Dwarf, and simply walked over to inspect the table he had been working on for the last few days.

“To answer your question, I can make my golems as large as I need to make them.” Havoc grinned around his cigar, tracing some of the lines Joe had lightly drawn on the table. “I just need a good enough reason to justify the expenditure. Now, I see that you’re planning on enchanting this… rock. I’d call it a table, but that would be like calling a landslide ‘landscaping’. Disasters don’t get pretty names.”

What followed was a mix of Joe showing Havoc his plans for the table and enchantment, back-and-forth bellowing on turning the town into a guild town, as well as discussion on the basics of sculpting as well as the finer points of what Joe was trying to accomplish with the enchantment itself.

Not wanting to spend too much time making a table when there were so many other things to do, Havoc eventually handed Joe a cube that reminded him of the training device he had given up in order to achieve his Reductionist class; though this one was a much larger, thirty-six-sided version where each face was a hexagon.

“This is a training tool that works well for enchanters.” The Dwarf explained as Joe fiddled with the device. “It’ll slowly boost your intelligence, but the main point of it is for training Mana Manipulation. That’s the most difficult part of most high-level enchantments: getting your mana to go where you need it to go.”

“How does it do—*bleahgh*.” Joe managed to activate the cube, and it drained his mana to nothing in an instant. He sagged and almost fainted from the intense headache it imparted, but managed to hang on through the shock.

“Aww. Most people pass out the first time they use one of these.” Havoc seemed actually upset that Joe was still upright, and tossed a coin to a Dwarf that ‘just happened’ to be passing by. “You need to stop costing me money.”

“How about you just stop betting against me?” Joe growled around the mana deprivation headache. “Why isn’t my mana regenerating?”

“Oh, it is.” The Dwarf pointed at the device, where one of the hexagonal faces had lit up. “But you only get one point of mana to work with at a time on the first face. There are internal pathways that you need to massage your mana through, and the most difficult part for you is always going to be manipulation. You have so much mana that you can just flood any magical device until it’s so saturated that it activates. Making an enchantment… how to say… higher level enchantments almost always correlate directly to your ability to manipulate your mana. Too much, in the wrong pattern, boom. Too little mana, the extremely expensive matrix fails and nothing happens other than losing those resources.”

“How do I do this, then?” Joe set the device on the table, instantly feeling his mana begin to regenerate at the normal rate.

“Mana speed, flow, convergence, divergence, input, and finally output are the six variables that make up Enchanting, and therefore Mana Manipulation.” Havoc informed him succinctly, his eyes twinkling as Joe put his hands back on the device and went green as he had his mana drained away again. “Each face has different requirements for six variables. Some of those sound similar to each other, but they aren’t. They’re opposites. Mana speed is how fast a unit of mana moves when you control it, but flow is how ambient mana moves and finds the pathways you made to keep the enchantment alive near-permanently. The next two are easy, so explain them to me.”

Joe thought for only a moment, since Havoc started twitching almost as soon as he ordered an answer. “Convergence, that would be how the mana moves through the model at various angles, eventually coming together.”

“Coming together without…?” Havoc puffed on his cigar and motioned leadingly.

“Blowing it up?” Joe guessed, getting a nod of affirmation for his trouble. “Or without colliding the mana and making it spill from the model, I’m guessing. That would mean divergence is taking it from a single flow and splitting it off to fill other areas? Without causing a catastrophic failure.”

He added the last part because Havoc had started glowering at him, but the Dwarf nodded when he finished. “Good enough for where you’re at, Apprentice. Input and output, now. These are special cases. One you are testing; one you are guessing.”

Joe didn’t interrupt, knowing Havoc was baiting him. The Dwarf paused, then continued with a dissatisfied grunt. “When you activate an enchantment, you add a lump sum of mana, then send it along the pathways you’ve carved. If there isn’t enough, it fades away and you can start again. That’s input. Even the same enchantment, made by the same person, has tiny variations that need to be accounted for when they are being activated. You need to learn a new pattern every single time, meaning input is gonna be hard for you, Mr. Mana Ocean instead of mana pool.”

Deciding not to mention the perfectly cloned enchantments that his rituals could make and activate without his Mana Manipulation factoring in, the Reductionist simply nodded and continued to listen. “Output is the final effect of the enchantment, as well as how long it will last. It could be permanent. Every enchantment could be. That would be a problem; tell me how.”

“Because…” Joe thought back to the first time he had ever needed to get his enchanted gear fixed up. “Enchantments are at least a little bit alive, and slowly gain a mind of their own?”

“Yup.” Havoc didn’t take his eyes off of Joe’s. “That means that each and every mistake you make will cause that enchantment to lose its mind just that much sooner. Until you are a Master enchanter, you won’t be able to take out the built-in self-destruct sequence that every low-level enchantment comes with. Otherwise, you’d be making cursed enchantments that will one day destroy themselves and everyone that interacts with them.”

With that happy thought, and Havoc informing Joe that he needed to be at least a Journeyman Mana Manipulator to complete the enchantment he was working on, the Dwarf pulled them away from the table and started walking. Joe looked into the distance, seeing nothing but flat stone. “Where are we going?”

“You have at most an hour until the settlement finishes upgrading.” Havoc told him with a hearty slap to the shoulder that sent Joe tumbling through the ash. “Whoops. Moving on. It’s important for you to maximize your efficiency, and that means getting the next buildings up as soon as possible. We’re going to where you’re going to build your town hall-”

“I can’t.” Joe hopped to his feet as Neutrality Aura cleaned the last of the ash from his clothes. He could see the question in Havoc’s eyes, so hurried to explain properly. “I can’t afford it. I’m too low on aspects.”

“What in the bloody abyss have you been doing this last week?” Havoc rumbled in a low, threatening tone. “No additional buildings, the cheapest rituals I’ve ever seen you produce, barely holding together a defense even after you managed to wipe out nearly the entire attacking force?”

“I was holding out for a quest reward.” Joe winced as Havoc’s cigar went from barely lit to a stick of charcoal as he heaved in a huge lungful of air.

The only fragments Joe could remember about the dressing-down he got at that point was: he probably shouldn’t ever let himself get so low on resources in the future, there were going to be some changes to how and who managed his time, there was also a short but vehement recommendation that Joe should never reproduce. At some point, the Dwarf tossed ‘compliance powder’ in his face and reached for his neck.

He came back to consciousness a short while later, finding that Havoc was stuffing him sideways into a garbage chute in the capital city. The Dwarf bellowed in his face, “Don’t come back till you’re ready to be worked to the edge of death at least three times!”

As Joe slipped down the slimy tube, he could only mumble, “My ears really hurt.”