Chapter 99

chapter 99 the next step involved looking at each of the enchantments he’d already placed and copying them all onto new cubes to the best of his abilities. even though it felt tiring in its own way, it wasn’t as bad as trying to find the skills within a person, and he was able to get it done rather quickly. falk looked over his work before recording the results onto each cube again. most of them were the same with the exception of three cubes, the one with level four dance, level four earth magic, and level four death magic, all of which dropped down to level three. “so i can only enchant with skills up to a level below what i currently can?” he wondered aloud. “a bit hard to say for sure given what we currently know and only have three skills for you to test at that level, but it’s not a bad assumption. now the question is how will it change as you level it up? will you be able to get more out of it as your ability increases until you can enchant with items as well as you could with a person, or might the distance increase as you improve?” “i’d just be happy if they could stay the same. being able to enchant with anything just one level below by skills isn’t exactly a handicap.” “true, but it’s still good to figure out if you can, never know when that information might come in handy. doesn’t matter right now. thera i think that’s all we needed from you if you wanted to go and focus on your own training for the time being. i’m going to be keeping the boy pretty busy today so don’t worry too much about him.” “sounds good, in that case, i’ll be at home if you need me.” she had plenty of books to try and go through to raise her medical knowledge level now that she realised it could help with her acquiring life magic. at a total of three skills she wanted to try and train up or acquire she would be busy for a while. as she left falk turned back to ben. “alright boy, looks like it’s finally time to really begin on your enchanting training.” “absolutely, what are you thinking first?” ben was pulsing with excitement. up until now his teacher had mostly ignored his enchanting in favour of focusing on developing his crafting, but now that his level had gone up enough to create more complex things with the skill, as well as having so much more he could potentially enchant with, how could he resist the prospect of finally being on the path to crafting powerful magic items? his teacher seemed to sense his enthusiasm and tried to ease him down. “alright relax, what i’m having you focus on today isn’t exciting by any stretch, but it’s fundamental to making powerful mana efficient tools to use. you’ll need to learn this if you want to make whatever dreams are buzzing around your head a reality, and mastering it can make all the world of difference to your work. especially for you since you won’t be able to lower any mana costs with your affinities,” falk could tell the boy was at the edge of his seat despite his warnings, but oh well, maybe it was good for him to have so much enthusiasm in his work. “what i’ll be having you do is partial enchantments,” the yeti went on. “the idea is like this. up until now, you’ve taken the totality of a skill to make your enchantments. there's nothing wrong with that and it will get the job done, but it wastes a lot of mana in the process. instead what you need to learn to do is enchant with a single property of a skill to make it smaller and easier to work with. in the case of any of the magic skills, you’ll have lots of options to work with, it just comes down to placing a single spell into an item. for regular skills it becomes a bit more complicated. you’ll need to be able to understand some of the separate properties that make up your skills to use them that efficiently. an example for you would be how your dismantling skill makes it slightly easier to cut and pierce things when it’s used.” ben didn’t understand why his teacher thought this wouldn’t be exciting, he was completely absorbed by what he was being taught. maybe it was the couple of life and death situations he’d been in recently, but the prospect of being able to lower an item's mana cost seemed incredibly appealing at the moment, and he knew he was going to have to master this ability. “alright boy, what part’s giving you issues?” “i can’t even make the drain spell,” ben said with a sigh. “i didn’t think the first hurdle i would need to get through would be getting used to making magic enchantments.” up until this point he'd only been using ones he’d made himself and properly understood, as well as some that had been made by other people with the intent of being user-friendly. now that he was trying with a magic that didn’t make intuitive sense to him he was struggling. “alright, well i got two things that might help a bit. first, take this.” his teacher told him, handing ben a ring. “um, okay? but what’s it for?” “watching you try to do this while holding a block of metal is ridiculous, a ring should feel a bit easier to use. i put my full skill onto it so it should keep you busy for a while.” ben inspected it, surprised. to put six levels of magic on something as small as a ring couldn’t be easy. he already knew that his teacher had to be level nine in his enchanting at least given that he could tell what skills and levels he’d enchanted with, but it didn’t make it any less impressive. “second,” falk went on. “stop aiming the spell at yourself. try it on me.” ben was surprised but slipped on the ring. “you sure?” “it’s an easy enough spell that i think you may just be feeling a resistance to using it on yourself, which is fair enough to be honest. you shouldn’t be able to do anything that could hurt me though so just give it a go.” well who am i to argue? he thought to himself, stretching out his hand and doing his best to activate the spell. once again he felt his mana decrease drastically, but it felt different this time and judging from a small wince that came from his teacher he was sure he’d finally had his success. “alright,” falk said. “if you can remember that feeling then get started enchanting with it.”