Chapter 44

Chapter 44

“Let’s see... if I recall correctly, you wanted to focus on consumable enchanting, but learn both types of enchanting, right?” Asked Cecilia, looking at Alice. Her twitchy and nervous expression slowly faded as the topic of enchanting came up, and Alice could see that the girl was truly passionate about the subject.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought made the most sense – you said you mostly specialize in consumable enchanting, and so I figured you could probably teach me more in that subject.”

“That’s true, but based on what you’ve been describing, you might actually want to focus on traditional enchanting first. Traditional enchanting is what you would want in order to make, for example, the walls of a manaless room,” said Cecilia. “And your Perks will help you out a lot in choosing a specialty anyway – after all, Perks won’t lead you astr- Ermm.” Cecilia looked at the pile of rubble sitting on her enchanting table. “Perks are... usually reliable, at least. I have never been led astray by one before today.”N0v3lTr0ve served as the original host for this chapter's release on N0v3l--B1n.

“If that’s the easiest way to make a room with no mana in it, I guess I can focus my attention on traditional enchanting for now. But would you at least give me a basic overview of how both work? Right now, I know what distinguishes consumable enchanting, traditional enchanting, and System enchanting from each other, but I don’t know how everything actually works when making an enchantment.”

Cecilia seemed to think it over, before she nodded.

“All right, we’ll start with the very basics then. To create an enchantment, you need 3 things – first, you need a concept. This is akin to the heart of an enchantment – in essence, it is what tells the enchantment what to do. For example, the novice ring I showed you the first time you came to my shop – it has the concept of ‘lock onto an object moving faster than the speed I described using my mana, then stop its movement.’ This can, theoretically, be anything, as long as you have the right seeds to go with it,” began Cecilia, as she pulled out an iron ring. Alice recognized it as the first enchanted object Cecilia had shown her – it had stopped a piece of iron she had moved using her mana.

“That being said, remember, Enchantments are dumb – they can’t remember instructions that are too complicated. It’s one of the reasons why Organic magic isn’t very popular for [Enchanters] – you just can’t get an enchantment to remember the dozens of different ways you need to be able to interact with even a small and seemingly simple bone because there are way too many variations on how a bone can break. Heck, even humans often struggle with learning all of the weird complications that can occur if their [Intelligence] is lower – usually, [Organic Mages] rely on their Perks to help them figure out the best and safest way to heal a patient, because memorizing everything without assistance would be time consuming and difficult. Perks offer a massive shortcut here – they make it much easier to feel out and remember how you need to deal with most situations.”

Cecilia paused, absently fiddling with the ring she was holding. “In fact, some people argue that, at least as far as information retention goes, [Organic Mages] get even better options than [Scholars], although it’s also far more specific. But that’s besides the point I’m trying to make here. The first aspect of Enchanting is the instructions you want to encode into an object. These instructions are processed via your magic seeds – which is why Traditional and Consumable Enchanting can only be done by mages. If you don’t have any magic seeds, no matter how well you fulfill the other two requirements for making and using an enchantment, you can’t made anything. And, of course, you also need to actually be able to do whatever you’re trying to get your enchantment to do – you can’t make an enchantment somehow warm up a room if you have never figured out how to do so without an enchantment. In short, enchantments can never exceed their maker in terms of control over mana. That being said, there is ONE area where an enchantment can do more than the wielder. That is mana quantity. An Enchantment burns through Monster cores to work, and that also means the Enchantment might be able to have access to dozens or hundreds of Mariums beyond what the actual enchanter has available. Even if Enchantments tend to be inflexible compared to humans, and can’t seeds with the knowledge and intelligence of humans, when it comes to sheer quantity of mana enchantments have much better fuel sources available than most humans do. Monsters have more mana than humans, after all – they just waste much more when using magic and waste most of their advantage.”

Concept and mana? Alice frowned, absently thinking through the idea. While she didn’t have a good idea of what it meant to process a set of instructions via her magic seeds, the fact that it seemed possibly to directly translate her ideas into an enchantment once she knew what she was doing was important information. If she was understanding Cecilia correctly, as long as she was able to manually do something with her magic and had whatever materials enchanting needed, it would be possible to turn it into an enchantment. It would definitely make her first major goal, a room with no mana inside of it, much easier to achieve. Alice shook herself out of her thoughts, refocusing on Cecilia’s words as the other girl continued speaking.

“However, you’ve probably also noticed, a variety of materials are needed to create enchantments as well – it isn’t as simple as just dumping mana into any old material and then calling it a day. At least, not without other factors,” said Cecilia. She held up the ring that she had been toying with, revealing the inside of the ring – Alice could faintly make out that the ring was actually composed of two layers of material. The outer band of material, exactly as she had previously assumed, was just regular iron. There was nothing particularly special about it, and it seemed to mostly be there for the purposes of helping the ring maintain its shape and keep the inner materials safe. However, the inner band of the ring was made up of totally different materials – there was a band of some sort of green rock inside of it, and Alice could easily make out glimmers of grey and silver mana flickering around inside of the ring. It was actually somewhat similar to the way the strange rock’s chunks of mana had looked, except that it was dozens, if not hundreds, of times less complex.

“Usually from monsters?” Cecilia actually flinched.

“It is... technically possible to use human mage organs as a power source as well. However, don’t do that. Ever. It is illegal, and it is wrong.” Cecilia shivered. Alice, realizing she had touched on a bad subject, quickly switched the subject.

“Are these three things also needed for consumable enchantments?” Cecilia looked at Alice, and seemed to ease her way back into the flow of the conversation, putting her revulsion and the mention of human enchanting materials aside.

“Yes, although for a consumable enchantment you don’t need much of an ‘information’ managing material – the amount can be much lower. Usually just a little fleck of it. You also don’t need to worry about keeping the base material safe – after all, everything is going to get destroyed after one use anyway. Who cares about keeping materials safe for long-term use?” Ceclia shrugged. “Basically, you can just ignore adding things like iron coatings and just slap a bit of greenstone together with a mana core and use a perk to glue them together. Should be available at level 10. If you’re not interested in spending a Perk slot, there are some material options like glue available, but they’re kind of expensive since they need high level craftsmen to make them. That kind of defeats the point of a consumable enchantment, which is to make otherwise low-value materials into something useful and sell it for a cheap and quick profit. But if you’re planning on just buying them or creating them for research purposes, it might do well enough.” Alice decided she would think about it whenever she got to level 10 in [Enchanter]. Right now, she didn’t even have the class, so while making plans in advance wasn’t a bad idea, it was still a bit far away from her.

“That makes sense. So, for making a room with no mana in it, I’m assuming I would need a material to remember instructions, some walls I can throw those materials into, and a pure mana seed to actually make the enchantment?”

“That’s the easiest way that I can think of to do it, at least. If you’re willing to pay a blacksmith, you could put the enchanting materials inside of some sort of metal wall, or something. That being said, that’s probably both expensive and overkill – you could also make some sort of ‘paint’ that blocks mana out, and then just manually drain a room afterwards. There are a few enchanting materials that are liquids, even though most are solids – the liquid ones are a bit sketchier because you NEED to make sure they’re mixed properly if you combine them with other stuff. Otherwise, the whole enchantment might break down. Of course, even before then, I recommend getting a few levels in [Enchanter] to help you actually make enchantments without screwing up.”

“That sounds like a good idea to me – what do I actually need to do to get the [Enchanter] class? Or the [Apprentic Enchanter] class?”

“Make three enchantments. They don’t have to actually work - you just need to try to do so three times while using the correct materials and going through a process that should give you an enchantment. Basically, you can screw up and it won’t be a big deal. Apart from that, study enchanting for 10 hours under a teacher or twenty hours on your own. The teacher doesn’t need to have a [Teacher] class – they just need an [Enchanter] class. Pretty easy.” Cecilia walked towards a bin of various rocks – Alice could see that several of them had similar colors and textures, and most of them resembled the band of green stone inside of Cecilia’s first ring.

“These are also greenstone. You can try to make a few basic enchantments with these,” said Cecilia. “I’ll stick around and help you for a while – we can... we can put off telling Illa about the rock destroying itself until tomorrow, hopefully, right?”

“... Probably?” Alice felt like Cecilia was trying to avoid the problem a little bit too much, but given the awkward circumstances of Cecilia accidentally destroying a strange material she was asked to investigate with no results, Alice didn’t blame her for wanting to push the problem away for a little bit longer. Besides, at this point, Alice was excited to try to make her first enchantment.