Chapter 33

Chapter 33

After eating and cleaning up Ben went back to the room he had been given and started to figure out how he was going to try and approach this. Up to this point he had never tried applying anything less than the totality of a skill, and he figured that would give him the most trouble, so he carefully attempted that first.

He started to use his enchanting and decided he would try focusing on using a fragment of dismantling first and got to work, trying to feel the way the skill was being laid down as he went. Aside from his usual method or any of the ways he had read about but had only dabbled with, this actually took more concentration. Even if he stopped placing the enchantment almost immediately it would create a small area that properly had a significantly weakened version of the skill, much in the same way he would do when he was piling up enchantments to break a material for his statues. He just had to get smaller.This chapter was first shared on the Ñøv€lß1n platform.

The cloth now had five small sections enchanted with dismantling, a skill all but useless to have on a piece of fabric, before he finally got it right, creating a grain of skill that couldn’t possibly affect anything else in a meaningful way. With that success under his belt he was ready to start for real, but his practice created another problem he had to deal with first.

Having practiced on the same fabric he was meant to enchant, Ben now had five sections he would have to remove the enchantment from, an application of his skill he understood in theory but had never tried before. After all the basic means he used to enchant tools with his resistances wasn’t complex enough to require correcting as he went, and when he would make statues the point was for the enchantments to damage the material to get the end product.

Freaking great. He thought to himself, and got to work, doing his best to remember how the technique was done and finding it coming back to his mind easier than expected. It essentially came down to activating his enchanting and using raw mana with it to pry it off. It was a tedious task and the mana cost was higher than it would be to apply a skill or resistance instead, but his teacher only gave him the one sheet so there was no wasting it. He didn’t really think Falk would have any problem with giving him another, but it was a pride thing now. He wanted to get it done with the materials at hand.

So he started his slow march towards completing his task. In the early stages he tried to fail a few times, just to see what would happen. He applied the same skill fragments beside each other, curious as to what would happen, and it caused them to combine into a bigger one, destabilizing the fragments around them and erasing the enchantment. It was a curious result. When he layered resistances in the past it had never happened before, making Ben assume that the skills may be uninclined to exist in a partial state, but once whole would destabilise the rest. It would be worth looking into more in the future, but for now he was content to know what would happen should he mess up, and began focusing on the task in earnest.

Even with his focus and a generally patient attitude when it came to working on a task he had to admit this was a bit too monotonous, but his teacher did say he would be able to take a break while he worked. He would aim for about an eighth done and then stop to have a little rest.

So maybe he went a little longer than the eighth he intended once he got into his groove, having gotten about a fourth complete, but he really needed a break now. He had originally been counting the number of skill fragments it would take to make, but he gave up around three hundred after he lost count. It was times like this he desperately wished he had access to some sort of portable music player. Supposedly there were some magical music makers, but they were rare and expensive, not something he could manage.

Okay if you say so, but I'm still not into it. So what's your punishment?

So back to having no one in their right mind to ask then? Gotcha.

You're right, sorry. Not sure how much you've been watching but things have been a little stressful.

Can't you just see it in my mind or memories?

Ben decided to file that away as something that could be useful later before getting back to the main matter and told his god about the events of the last few days while he was unconscious and what happened after he woke up.

Ben felt himself blush again as he remembered the embarrassingly honest exchange he had with Thera. Not really the main point here. Can you find this Roan guy?

Okay, thanks Myriad.

I’ll try and figure something out. The connect skill did just save my life so maybe there’s an angle we can work there. Of course that was a pretty specific situation and I still almost died. Pretty sure most people would prefer a skill that could save them before they had something sink their teeth into them, but I’ll see what I can do.