Oh, goddess. The royal family of Dalenos. “You’re... oh. Like a prince or something?”
He twisted his lips, looking uncomfortable. “No. Not precisely. I would rather not explain. Suffice to say that I can provide what you need for the items.”
That put things into a very different perspective. “...I don’t suppose you might be able to get any extra resources for my own projects, since I’m going to be making you so many things.”
He frowned. “You mean more materials?”
“Yes. To practice, and to make myself some items for my own classes.”
Jin looked away for a moment, his face considering. He turned his gaze back to me. “So long as you do not sell them. If you are making things for your own use, this would be acceptable.”
Huh. “That’s what I planned, but can I ask why you’d make that requirement?”
Jin nodded, looking serious. “The people here... you see the souls of monsters as currency. To us, they are the spoils of victory and sacrifice within the tower. To enchant is to bind the soul of an enemy for your benefit.” He paused, then his eyes widened and he hurried to continue, “This is an honorable task if done for one’s self, or for an ally.”
His expression hardened, “But to sell the spoils of bloodshed for coin? That’s an insult.”
He thinks monster cores are souls?
...actually, that makes an awful lot of sense.
If monsters are essentially mana constructs, and the core is the mana that remains when it dies... it sort of is analogous to a soul, isn’t it?
But the cores aren’t alive or intelligent — at least as far as I know. The core is more like a corpse than a soul.
Probably.
It was a little bit of a disturbing idea, but something I could investigate later.
I extended my hand and he clasped it on the wrist. A very traditional gesture. “I believe we have a deal.”
***
It took me another week just to look up the enchantments that Jin wanted, look up the necessary component runes, and then look up the materials necessary for said runes.
I couldn’t make more than two thirds of them, even if I had the materials. The enchantments were just far too far outside of my skill range.
When possible, I suggested alternatives for these. Instead of invisibility, a weak blur effect. Instead of entirely cancelling sound, a simple dampening enchantment, like the one Professor Orden had used outside my room.
It wasn’t satisfying to tell Jin that I couldn’t do most of them, but when I marked down that several of his requirements were Carnelian or even Sunstone level, he understood.
We worked out a new list from the alternates, resulting in a total of eight items I’d have to make.
It was during that process that I learned another important limitation: magical items had a tendency to interfere with other items in close proximity to them. It was something that made a lot of sense, since they’d have overlapping auras, but I hadn’t thought about it a great deal until I started considering the practical implications of trying to fake three different attunements at once.
It didn’t help that Jin wasn’t willing to tell me which attunement he actually had. That would have saved me a lot of work. But it made sense; anyone knowing was a vulnerability in his plan. I suspected the teachers had to know what he was up to, but they were a lot less likely to tell than a student.
By the middle of the fifth week of classes, Jin had delivered the materials for the first set of items he’d requested, as well as a handful of small crystals for me to use for my own experiments.
That handful of crystals would have cost, by my estimates, about eight times more than my meager stipend up to that point in the year. I was pretty pleased.
The enchanting itself, however, was a lot of work.
Having an attunement on a part of my body that I wasn’t willing to use made everything inefficient. Channeling the mana from a single small crystal into a rune only took me a few minutes, but it also drained some of the mana in my own hand, which was used to facilitate the transfer. That meant I needed to wait hours between each enchantment, just to recuperate the mana I was using.
Since my attunement was linked to my mind, that mana would have regenerated much faster — about four to five times faster, according to my books. But the more I thought about the possible side effects, the more I worried the harm I could cause if I did anything wrong.
It was the end of my fifth week when I finished my first enchantment, a copy of the standard university shield sigil, etched into the inside of my room’s door. I’d need to recharge it periodically, but it felt amazing to power a rune myself for the first time and see it flicker to life.
I was working magic. For the first time, I felt like my attunement was real, something to be proud of. I basked in that for a little while, even as my hand throbbed from the effort of moving the last bit of mana into the runes.
It was great finally having that simple defense in place, but it also made me think about how many other defenses were missing.
I had a lot of work to do.
***
Patrick and I were on our way to dueling class when I noticed something unusual. I stared at the machine blankly for a moment, not quite processing what I was seeing.
“Is that... an automobile?” I pointed at it as I spoke, and Patrick turned his head.
“Oh, wow. I’ve never seen one!”
We both walked a little closer to the horseless carriage, which was a simple open-roofed design. It was parked at the moment, and there was already a growing crowd of other students standing around it. It would have been easy to mistake for a normal carriage that simply didn’t have horses attached if it wasn’t for the metallic pipe jutting upward from a box on the rear.