Invent ~ 18!

Quest complete: Novice Rituarchitect II. You have created all ten of the buildings that you scanned in the first part of your quest! You sure can follow instructions well! Reward: 5,000 class experience. Record breaker reward: you have completed this quest faster than any other Rituarchitect in history! All ten buildings have been upgraded to Uncommon rank and Tier.

Joe and the Dwarves were cheering as the final building was completed, but they went still and silent as all of the new buildings were upgraded. The changes were minor to the naked eye, simply a tightening, a shifting, and finally ornamentation that was added to each building. To see what the difference was, the Reductionist scanned the perishable goods warehouse they had just created.

Warehouse (Perishable goods, 13,200 feet of storage). Uncommon. Durability: 11,100.

“The storage and durability doubled?” Joe looked at the building, unsure how that would work. “The building looks the same, so there’s magic involved?”

“Buildings are buildings.” Ciril was looking around the area with wide eyes. “The space they take up is always the same, the space they capture can differ greatly. Even so, I’m shocked you would let this happen, at this juncture.”

“What do you mean?” Joe’s question had barely passed his lips when a notification with the sound of a massive gong arrived, making everyone in the area wince.

A new Hamlet dares attempt to exist!

Area quest: A new Dwarven camp is getting delusions of grandeur, and is attempting to break into being a Tier 1 Hamlet!

• For those aligned with the Elves, destroying the campground before it tiers up will give rewards as though it is a Tier 2 town!
• For those aligned with the Dwarves, defend your newly hatching settlement for one week to gain a Hamlet!

“Ah. That’s what you mean.” Joe looked over the information one more time, then closed it with a shrug. He had known this was coming, he just hadn’t expected it so soon. “Anything we can do about this?”

“Literally: no.” Ciril told him sadly. “Just defend for a week, then you can start creating more buildings to improve this place further.”

“I can’t make more buildings for a week?” Joe gasped in horror, looking at the next item on his agenda: the Ritual Ziggurat. He had been near foaming at the mouth to get that up and functioning.

“Nope.” Stan walked over with his hands in his pockets. “Good job on these buildings. I can charge half again as much rent for an Uncommon building as I can a Common one.”

“I don’t care about that so much.” Joe muttered as he tried to mentally rearrange his plans for the next few days. “Now what?”

“Now we hunker down and get this place ready for a siege.” Ciril told him sternly. “The destruction of a Tier two town is worth thousands of resources. Even split by a raiding party, it’ll be a juicy target.”

“We don’t even have a wall.” Stan’s monotone rang out. “Next week make a wall. Then make a town hall or something. Anytime you rank up a town after tier one, the town hall is automatically upgraded. Don’t waste that, it’s free. Free is great.”

“I have plans for a guildhall? Would that work?” Joe looked to the other two for confirmation, but both of their faces were as neutral as possible, with just a hint of disgust.

“You can have a guildhall as your town hall… if you want to make this a guild town. Somewhere people even aligned with Elves can just walk into if they’re part of your guild.” Ciril spat the words with a sneer. “You have any guild members aligned with Elves?”

“I… I don’t know?” Joe looked over his status, noting that he had a few quest notifications to look over. “I am the ‘First Elder’, or will be when my guild gets strong enough to upgrade to a Sect. Does that change things?”

Stan and Ciril looked at each other, and Stan sighed heavily. “I suppose all things come around again, given enough time. Sects are coming back in style? Ugh. That was a nightmare last time.”

“If you have the power to refuse entry to people in your guild, then yes… a guildhall can work.” The words were clearly difficult for Ciril to spit out. “You’re going to have some pushback from the Oligarchy.”

“I understand that.” Joe smiled brightly, then decided that he should hurry along. He paid each of the Dwarves that helped with the rituals, then rushed back to his workshop. “No defenses, possibility of a lot of people attacking. No real militia. My weapon usage at the… Beginner rank. Whoo, boy. Now what?”

He tapped on the golden eye tattooed on his forehead as he contemplated his options. “I can set up defensive rituals. I can’t get good enough with my weapons in a week with no trainer, but what I could do is make them stronger. Maybe I could get out word that I have Uncommon housing for anyone that wants to be here? I never saw more than Common ranked for anyone in the Legion, that should be a big draw?”

Joe looked at his Ritual Orbs, minorly frustrated with them. The only way to empower them right now was to bind them to a characteristic, and that made him… nervous. “I could start with one that I don’t really need to worry about so much? Like Charisma?”

There was nothing to do but get to work, even if it was reluctantly. Since he was attempting to increase his skills and spells at the same time, Joe worked to create the ritual diagram entirely free-floating. The first two circles went without issue, and Joe switched over to only using a single Aspect Inscriber for the third circle. When he got to the Student-ranked ritual circle, he spent long seconds agonizing over each mark that he made with his dwindling Rare aspects.

He was in an enclosed building right now, and even a single mistake at this would turn his workshop into an oven. “I really should have done this in the reinforced lab area…”

“Or opened the door so I could leave if I needed to do so.” Cleave told him dryly. To Joe’s credit, her words didn’t cause him to flinch and burn down his workshop: which had remained at the Common rank as it was not done during his questline.

“Almost done… then I’ll have a Student-ranked ritual diagram, and be ready to use the Rare ranking of it to help keep the enchanting work I need to do stable.” Joe whispered to himself as he completed the final line. It held in the air as he backed off, then a light blue energy drained from the outermost ring and connected to the remainder of the ritual, lightly dying the ritual. “Success!”

“You can use the ritual to help with enchanting?” Cleave wondered aloud as she stared at the inactive floating diagram.

“Not this one, but it was a good way to psych myself up.” Joe informed her with a goofy grin. “No, I need to enchant my Orb directly, this won’t help in the slightest.”

Cleave shook her head, moving to the other side of the room and slumping to the ground. “You should get some chairs in here.”

“Magic is done on your feet! It’s a real stand-up profession.” Joe quipped as he pulled out a few chunks of scrap metal. “I need to practice this enchantment before I actually attempt it. You wanna go to sleep for a while? I’m going to be at this for hours.”

“Just do your magic.” She waved at him while holding her head in her hands. “I’m getting paid even if you aren’t doing anything interesting.”

With a shrug, Joe turned to his wildly exciting work. “I’ll speak out loud so you can get an idea of what I’m doing.”

“No~o.” Cleave moaned into her palms.

“As I was saying!” Joe loudly spoke over the complaints. “This enchantment is… an interesting thing. I need to create a sympathetic link between myself as well as my personal understanding of the characteristic that I’m attempting to bind. Now, some of this is formulaic and can be widely applied. For instance, I’m human, so that means the enchantment uses a shape like… this…”

He spent the next twenty minutes creating an enchantment diagram for ‘basic human’. “There we go, not entirely terrible! Now I need to add in things that hold meaning toward the characteristic I’m trying to bind from myself and onto the Orb. Let’s see, how about… Charisma?”

That was when Joe ran into the hurdle that would be impeding his work every step of the way from this moment on.

“Feces, how do I create an enchantment that means Strength, much less ‘Charisma’?” Joe gently slammed his head on the table as he tried to think of anything that could possibly work. “I suppose I can think of something for Strength… that’s just moving stuff with physical might. Even intelligence has something to do with the mind, and I can kludge something together.”

After testing a few more diagrams, he found that he could even figure out what to do for Constitution, by making the body that he drew ‘resist outside influences’. When he tried to do the same by showing two people interacting, there was a magical backlash because the image was no longer drawing from him.

“I can do basic Strength, Constitution, Intelligence… everything else is not gonna work for me.” Joe thought about trying to assign Karmic Luck to something and just ended up shaking his aching head. His knowledge would need to advance far beyond what he had at this point in order to make those characteristics viable for ritualistically assigning them to an Orb. “On that note… Knowledge, Architectural Lore!”

He had chosen to increase this particular section of his lore skills because this was the only one he could increase at the moment. That changed in the next moment, as two thousand mana drained into his skull and opened his mind to new information.

Architectural Lore has reached Beginner IX.

Knowledge has reached Apprentice 0! Cooldown decreased to 18 hours. This skill is not impacted by cooldown reduction from spells, skills, or items under Artifact rank!

Congratulations on reaching a new rank with a Legendary skill! Reward: Compendium of Skill and Spell Rankings up to Rare rarity.

For a long moment, Joe stared at the five different lore skills that he would be able to start increasing again, starting only three quarters of a day away. Then he looked at the book that had appeared in his hand. Barely able to hold back from opening it and looking up his skills, he placed it in his ring for some light reading at another time.

“Too much to do right now, I can’t just start perusing random articles.” Joe looked at his Orbs, and decided that it was time to make his choice. “I’m going to assign…”