by James Hunter
But he left a thin hole no larger than a pinprick in that hardened shell—an opening for him to pump in more and more Mana. In the corner of his eye, his Mana dipped. First by fifty, then a hundred, then two hundred. Expending so much Mana so quickly left Sam reeling and light-headed, but he pressed on. To falter now was to fail completely. Sam saturated the concoction with energy until it felt as though the barrier he’d created around the ink was stretched so tight that even one more point of Mana would surely cause the whole thing to pop and explode right in his face.
Minutes passed, and though he was no longer actively pumping Mana into the ink, Sam found sweat rolling down his forehead and dripping into his eyes. His arms shook from the invisible strain, and his lungs labored for air. It felt like he was trying to sprint a marathon while lugging a boulder above his head. Just when it seemed like he couldn’t contain the energy for another second, he instinctively reopened the small breach in the shell, letting the excess Mana bleed off and into the air.
Thin wisps of ghostly blue light drifted up, dissipating into the atmosphere. After a few moments, the hiss of escaping Mana ebbed to a mere trickle, and something *clicked* in place within the ink, normalizing the pressure inside the bottle like the cabin of an airliner. Sam licked his lips, and ever-so-carefully released the sheath around the ink, wincing as he prepared for an explosion to rock his world. Instead, he received a pop up notifying him of a new skill:
Skill gained: Magical Material Creation (Beginner 0). Having a huge amount of raw Mana and no real use for it tends to lead to dangerous experiments. That’s how this skill was originally created! Increase density of Mana matrix by 1n% per skill level.
“Sixty hours!” Sam choked out.
Sam rolled his eyes and sighed but followed the book’s instructions. Sam focused on his five new skills he’d gained, and a new prompt appeared:
Extreme skill synergy detected! Quill Preparation and Maintenance, Ink Preparation, Papermaking and selection, Scribe, and Magical Material Creation all share similar features and can be combined to form a new skill. By paying eight hundred gold, you can combine these five skills into one single skill.
The level of the new skill will be the average of the original skills, and any remaining skill points (rounded up) will be returned as free skill points! If you do not have the necessary gold on hand, you may combine these skills at a later date or choose to have the money taken from your bank account. As this is the first time you have found two or more skills with extreme synergy, you have been informed as a courtesy. You will receive no further information on skill synergy from the system.
New system menu available! Congratulations! You have unlocked the ability to use ‘Soul Forging’! By meeting certain requirements, you can combine skills or even classes! Be careful, as combining skills with low synergy will lower the new skill’s efficacy.
You are about to combine five skills: Quill Preparation and Maintenance, Ink Preparation, Papermaking and selection, Scribe, and Magical Material Creation. Are you sure? Yes / No.
Sam’s eyes bulged at the price tag. Eight hundred gold! After his time spent at the College, his two supply runs—first to Nick’s Knacks and then at The Summoned Scroll—he was down to two thousand gold. If he followed through with this course of action, he’d be down to twelve hundred gold, and he still had the better part of five in-game months to live through.
Sam gulped, pressed his eyes shut, taking a few deep breaths to settle his nerves, and accepted before he could overthink the process and chicken out. In for a penny, in for a pound, right?
Chapter Thirty
Ding-ding-ding! World’s First! Sure, why not just mash five different skills together? Maybe it will turn out well, maybe not, but you aren’t one to test the waters! No, you jump in with both feet. You’re going places… probably to an early grave as a result of some catastrophic explosion of your own making… but definitely places! For being the very first player to use Soul Forge in Eternium, you gain a permanent +5 Intelligence, +5 Perception, -1 Wisdom, and +50 personal fame with Ardania! Title unlocked: Experimental Forger!
Experimental Forger: This title reduces the time necessary to use the Soul Forge by 15%! After creating ten skills or three classes, this title will turn into a skill which allows you to gauge skill synergy. (This is an advanced version of the title ‘Never Satisfied’)
Time until skills have combined: 60 hours. Notice! Title Experimental Forger has reduced the processing time by 15%. 51 hours until completion!
Sam picked up the next bottle of ink—this one a specialty blend that was filtered and distilled with various herbs—and went through the laborious process of learning to saturate the ink with Mana once more. This time around, he went even slower because Sam felt that he should have had an idea what he was doing. It frustrated him to no end to learn that he couldn't remember what he had done last time.
He vastly oversaturated the brew with his Mana. If he had wasted five times as much as was needed last time, this was enough to make his control almost slip time and again. When it was finally time to vent the brew, Mana hissed free like popping the vent on a pressure cooker. The ink had absorbed barely any of the Mana he’d invested, but all of a sudden, Sam realized what he was doing wrong as the skill information came into his head again.
Once more, Sam earned the Magical Material Creation skill, and in an interesting turn of events, the skill was once again Beginner-zero. Losing it meant losing it, apparently, but Sam found that he couldn't seem to stay upset about it. He had too much to do.
Sam complied, arranging a sheet of parchment in front of him before grabbing ink and a fine nib quill crafted from a glossy blue-black raven’s feather.
That didn’t seem so hard to Sam, but that might have been the Instinctual Casting talking. His brow furrowed as he hunched forward, dipped the quill, then carefully sketched out the simple lines and geometric shapes of his most basic spell. Mana had to turn this way, then rebound here to convert the paper from flat into folded. Then it went here for direction, velocity, range…
The moment he finished with the design, his Magical Origami skill activated, and he found Mana bleeding out of him in a trickle, filling the lines he’d scrawled onto the page with potent power. This process had seemed incredibly intuitive, so he was more than a little surprised when he earned a pop-up, and the sheet of paper in front of him exploded into a Fireball and threw him across the room.
Health: 92/120
Skill gained: Words of Power (Written) (Novice I). You have instinctually managed to distill a spell to its most basic design! By writing out the spellform on a scroll, anyone who reads the scroll will have a chance to learn the spell. Base probability of learning spell from scroll: 20%. Each rank in this skill increases the chance of learning the spell by 2%, but personal ability needs to be taken into account. Each scroll will have a minimum characteristic score needed in order to learn the spell. The spell must be in the basic spellform for the scroll to be valid.
“The next one?” Sam demanded even as he swept everything into his flask.
Sam got to it, losing three glass ink bottles and two quills before getting the hang of it. His health had dropped to sixty-eight, and he had no easy way to heal up without using a healing potion; those were going to be really hard to get ahold of in the near future. Still, a few hours later, he had all of the basics ready and had even managed to get Magical Material Creation up to Beginner three.
Sam blanched, envisioning horrid scenes of his body being torn apart… that or an even steeper price tag than the last combination. Sam wasn’t sure which would be the more painful experience. Apparently, some of those images seeped through the mental bond he had with the book because Bill immediately recoiled.
Sam froze at the words. Wat. But… but, Instinctual Casting was really the only thing left over from what he’d started the game with! Bill wasn’t wrong; that ability was his single greatest strength. His edge. It had saved him time and time again, and if he combined it now with Magical Material Creation, it would be gone. Poof. Vanished. Since Instinctual Casting was an essential element to being a Sorcerer, it wasn’t something that could be taught or relearned as far as he knew. Abyss, by Soul Forging that skill with another, he might cease to be a Sorcerer entirely!
Worse, he would no longer instinctively know how to use magic, nor learn a new spell at every third level.
Sam hated this. Absolutely hated it. Making the choice felt like killing a part of himself… but he pulled the trigger anyway. He knew Bill wouldn’t tell him to do it if the payout wasn’t worth it. With only a little reluctance, Sam combined the three skills, which cost him two hundred gold. Combining a skill with another took twelve hours and added twelve hours per skill added. His title dropped the time by fifteen percent, and that meant…
Time until skills have combined: 20:24:00.
“Twenty hours, twenty-four minutes.” Sam sighed as he thought of all of his spells. Right now, they looked like geometric garbage in his head, and he had no idea how to cast them. For the next day, he was absolutely defenseless.
Chapter Thirty-One
A day of mixing inks, sharpening quills, and stacking paper passed slowly. At least relearning how to infuse things brought some light into the tunnel. How had people ever gotten through the day when they had nothing that needed to be done? Twenty-four hours of mindless waiting and infusing, all because neither of them had really considered how much Sam had been relying on his instincts.
Since he’d sacrificed his Instinctual Casting ability, his days of slinging magic unaided were gone. As soon as he’d lost the Instinctual Casting ability, he’d received a minor class change. No longer was he a Bibliomantic Sorcerer.
Now, for better or worse, he was a Bibliomancer.
Still, Bill had been right about getting rid of the Instinctual Casting or, rather, combining it with Magical Material Creation and Words of Power: Written. Thanks to that sacrifice, Sam had earned a new ability—Coreless Spell Infusion.
Skill gained: Coreless Spell Infusion (Novice V). Magic is a rare thing in this world, and the ability to effortlessly infuse magic into anything from scrolls and books to swords and shields is an even rarer talent. To do it without the need for monster Cores? Well, you might as well start walking toward Easy Street. This is a powerful ability, so guard it with care. A wise man might keep this particular skill to himself.
Effect: Infuse any spell directly into a properly prepared item. The monster Core component required for most spell infusions is negated up to Uncommon-ranked Cores. Spells requiring Rare or above Cores are unaffected by the Coreless component of this ability. All other spell infusion effects and required components remain the same.
By infusing a spellform on a scroll, anyone who reads the scroll will have a chance to learn the spell at the tier below it was infused. i.e. if your understanding of the spell is at Beginner, the reader can learn the Novice version. Base probability of learning spell from an Infused scroll: 20%. Each rank in this skill increases the chance of learning the spell by 2%, but personal ability needs to be taken into account. Each scroll will have a minimum characteristic score needed in order to learn the spell. The spell must be in the basic spellform for the scroll to be valid. Variant spellforms cannot be learned by a reader.
Essentially, this class ability allowed him to infuse any spell effect he knew directly into a scroll, book, or item. For lower-tier spells, he didn’t even have to use a monster Core, which would have some enormous benefits down the road since even minor Cores we
re rare and costly. There were some caveats to the ability.
Sam could, in theory, apply magical effects to items now… except for the fact that he had neither the knowledge of enchantments or blacksmithing to do so. With his ever-growing knowledge of scrolls, papers, inks, and books, he could absolutely infuse those spell effects into his books, allowing him to augment any of his Bibliomancer abilities with ease. Fireball Paper Shuriken? Check. Ninja stars that also paralyzed foes on contact? You betcha, as Sphinx would say. Thanks to Bill’s nearly encyclopedic knowledge of the class, Sam’s Bibliomancer spell arsenal had grown at an astonishing rate.
On top of Paper Shuriken, which was still his go-to combat spell, he’d also added a trio of new offensive spells to his roster. Then for the fourth new spell, he learned something classified as a hypnotic spell!
Skill gained: Bookmark (Novice V). Never lose your place again! This spell cannot be cast on its own but, rather, must be combined with any other offensive spell! Bookmark spell scripts must be inked onto appropriate materials prior to combat at an additional cost of 2 Mana per second until the spell is completed or the attempt fails.
Caster may activate a given bookmark during combat, fixing the spell on a specific location or target. Once a bookmark is activated, all subsequent bookmarked spells will automatically target the original bookmark, even if the target is on the move! Increases accuracy rate by 5n% and reduces spell failure rate by 5n%, where n = skill level. Activate a new bookmark at will to change location or target.
Skill gained: Ink Lance (Novice IV). The noble octopus isn’t the only creature to randomly shoot ink at their opponents. You too have joined the vaunted peerage! Does that make you a spineless invertebrate? Hard to say! Launch a goopy blob of Mana-infused ink from the written page itself, entangling your enemies and drastically restricting their movement rate. Additionally, the ink is very hard to get out of fabric. So inconvenient!
