by Andrew Rowe
“I don’t think we’re going to get blood or anything like that. Would something he used, like a pen, be good enough?” Sera asked.
“Ordinary objects do not generally contain a spiritual imprint unless the user is extraordinarily powerful. Memory sorcery can attempt to tap into the past history of an object, but that is a different discipline and requires a distinct mana type.”
I blinked. That was interesting, but not exactly what we needed. “Okay. Probably nothing mundane, then. What about a magical item he enchanted?”
Researcher put a hand to her lips, her expression turning thoughtful. “I am uncertain. There are spirit-based interactions in the Enchanting process, but I have not personally tested spirit-based tracking in that way. If you’ll permit me a moment…”
She closed her eyes. “Yes, your items do contain a spirit signature. It is minor and may be unreliable, however. My suspicion is that it will decay over time.”
I shrugged. “Better than nothing. Are you willing to teach me all those spells?”
“Of course, Master Cadence. I would be delighted!” Researcher smiled. “Summoner, you may watch us, of course, for the time when your mana is sufficient to cast these basic spells.”
Sera groaned. “I…really wish you wouldn’t put it like that. But fine.” She sighed. “Let’s learn some magic.”
***
We spent much of the evening learning a few new spells. Researcher was a surprisingly good teacher, and it helped that everything she was teaching me was just variations on spells I already knew.
Within a few hours, I felt like I had a handle on a few basics: Detect Spirit, Spirit Perception, and Spirit Tracking.
She also taught me one more spell that was only tangentially related: Identify. This was a straightforward upgrade to my existing Lesser Identify spell. It provided a bit more detailed information on the functions of the rune or item I was trying to identify, which would be useful if I came across any unusual objects during my search.
From there, Researcher taught me how to add one additional parameter: tracking distance. This was something I’d wanted to learn for my original Arrow of Direction, but the mana cost was prohibitive at the time. Now, with weeks and weeks of training behind me, it was only somewhat prohibitive. I could cast a new “Analytical Arrow of Direction” spell a few times without feeling it too much, but it depended on how high I wanted to set my maximum range.
Finally, I finished our training by learning the spirit-based variant on that spell: Spirit Tracking Analytical Arrow.
With all that finally completed, Researcher headed back to the other hotel room. I had a mild headache, so naturally I switched to reading boring paperwork to finish out the evening.
I spent a while reading the file on Warren Constantine, but Sera had already summarized the most important bits. Employment records weren’t exactly the most tantalizing reading material, and I didn’t find anything that gave me new leads.
I did find one thing that added to my picture of him. There were no records of any local family members. Not a lot of talk about friends, either. He didn’t even have an emergency contact listed.
There was something about a mother in Valia, but weirdly, all the details on her were redacted. I figured I could dig into that when I got home, but it didn’t seem likely to turn up anything useful while I was in Caelford.
There were a few notations about disciplinary action for “erratic behavior” in the file, but no details on them.
I asked Sera if she’d talked to anyone else about Warren. She’d asked around about him a bit, but he’d been gone so long that most of the employees who had been there during his time had already left the company. The others were higher-ups and executives, and she didn’t want to raise any alarms by approaching them about Warren. I agreed. I didn’t want to bring any extra scrutiny on us.
I finished reading, slept very little, and prepared for the last two days of my tour.
***
I woke early the next day with a plan. It wasn’t necessarily a good plan, but it gave us the slimmest bit of insurance against Farren’s machinations.
First, I cast the Analyze Attunement Composition spell on my own Arbiter attunement. Symbols flooded into my mind, near incomprehensible in the first moments, but progressively clearer as I began to focus.
Next, I cast Accelerated Computation. I couldn’t maintain it for long, but it made the next part of the task vastly easier.
As I continued to concentrate, I focused on individual sections of the sub-glyphs. I could pick out familiar symbols here and there, but I was still far from being able to understand the entire language. That would take months at a minimum, and more likely years.
I did, however, understand enough to pick out some major sections of the sub-glyphs. As I envisioned the sea of symbols, I identified sections that were identical to my Enchanter attunement — things like a section that caused my body to generate transference mana, as well as things I now understood to be baseline attunement functions, like creating a rune symbol on my body and activating specific functions at specific safety levels.
I ignored those sections and focused on the parts that were different.
There were some that were similar, but different. A section that controlled the generation of life mana, for example, and things like the proportion of the attunement’s mana that would be allocated toward that specific mana type. That latter part was interesting, since it meant I could potentially learn to tune the specific proportions of mana in my attunement if I had a slightly better understanding of what I was doing, but I ignored it for the moment.
The sections that I was looking for would be completely unique — things that didn’t resemble the sub-glyphs in my Enchanter attunement at all.
Fortunately, the Analyze Attunement Composition spell sorted the sub-glyphs into clear sections in my mind, which made the process of sifting through them a little bit easier.
Maybe a clearer visual would help.
When I cast the spell, I saw something in my mind that looked like dozens of pieces of paper laid flat on a table. Each piece of paper was covered in sub-glyphs that represented an individual attunement function, with sections of papers grouped together for related functions. There were symbols hovering above each group of pages, giving me a quick idea of what function each section covered.
For example, there was a section of papers that all related to the generation and control of transference mana, and another section of papers that controlled shroud functions. Connected to those were another set of papers that handled things like mana-type specializations, which I didn’t currently have.
This wasn’t quite how Ashon had described it to me before. Apparently, the spell’s visualization varied a bit from person to person. I suppose paper simply made sense to me on some kind of sub-conscious level.
Anyway, I could “look” at any individual paper to see it more closely. I could also “move” the papers in my mind without actually changing anything in my attunement, just in my visualization.
There was only one small problem: when I picked up some of the stacks of paper, they looked blank.
I stared at them in my mental space, confused and annoyed. As I focused, I poured a little more mental mana into my spell and saw…
Gibberish. Unreadable, blurred symbols. A headache blossomed in my mind, sudden and sharp in my temples. I found myself dropping the strange papers and pulling away from them in my mental space, momentarily losing my grip on the spell.
Back in the real world, I blinked, rubbing at the sides of my head.
What was that? Why did those…?
Oh.
My jaw tightened.
Security measures. Of course. There are probably certain sub-glyph functions the visages don’t want every random person with mental mana to be able to reverse engineer.
I wished I’d been warned about that, but it wasn’t entirely surprising.
It did add another level to why artificial attune
ment design took so much work, even with spells like Analyze Attunement Composition available. Even if looking at some attunement functions was possible, if some were protected by some kind of anti-tampering or anti-viewing functions, that meant attunements could not be entirely analyzed and reconstructed even if someone understood the entire sub-glyph language.
Breaking the security might be theoretically possible, but it would be ludicrous to put it in there at all if some Carnelian could handle it. That’s probably Emerald-level work at a minimum if I want to brute force it. More likely, I’ll have to either find a way to circumvent the security measures or simply try to reconstruct the parts that are hidden from context.
Annoying.
Let’s see what I can find without having to worry about that.
I cast Analyze Attunement Composition again, refocusing on my original task.
Fortunately, that hidden text didn’t handle the sections I was looking for. It took me some time to sift through and find the right parts — the text was still in a language I barely understood, after all. But eventually, I’d found the critical components: The two “unique” functions of my attunement. Automatic purification and the ability to transfer mana to others.
Once I’d identified those sections of sub-glyphs, I began the next section of my task, which was rather tedious. I remembered the shape of a few glyphs, then dismissed the spell and wrote those glyphs down. Then, I recast the spell and wrote down the next line of glyphs.
I repeated this until I had copied down the entire list of sub-glyphs for each function.
There was the possibility that some necessary parts were in the hidden sub-glyphs that remained unreadable to me, so I couldn’t count on these glyphs being enough to reproduce the functions elsewhere. That was a little irritating, but I was still very early in the process of analyzing my attunement, and I figured it would be solvable eventually.
I wanted to do the same thing with Sera, to find what distinguished her own Invoker attunement from a standard Summoner, but I didn’t have a “normal” Summoner to compare her functions to. Thus, that part would have to wait.
For the moment, I needed to do something important before going to the lab for the next part of the tour—
I headed to the closest local patent office.
Then I did some research, confirming that sub-glyphs for attunements could, in fact, be patented.
…And there was no existing patent on the sub-glyphs for the unique functions of the Arbiter attunement, nor any broad sub-glyph patent that clearly encompassed them.
I borrowed a few coins from Sera to pay the modest fee and filed my first patent with Caelford’s patent office.
I’d have to wait for a while for the patent to be reviewed…
…But if it worked, I’d have a patent on the unique portions of the Arbiter attunement.
And even if Farren Labs somehow got a chance to steal a glance at my attunement’s inner workings, if they decided to try to make artificial Arbiter attunements — which I expected was their plan — they’d have to deal with my patent first.
And that meant they would owe me what I hoped would be a near-incalculable amount of money.
I took the time to mail off a second copy of patent paperwork to Valia, in order to register the patent with my home nation as well. That would take even longer to process, but getting the first step done was important.
My patent-in-progress wasn’t foolproof protection by any means. I knew Farren Labs would have powerful lawyers on hand that could dispute the patent if it went through. My patent also wouldn’t last forever, even if it was approved. I was hoping for about fifteen years at best. Still, any tool at my disposal was better than none.
I felt a little better when I made my way to the office that day to continue my research. Now, at least, I had a new card to play.
Chapter VI – About Arbiters
Since I have a mental attunement, you might think that I’d be naturally disposed toward investigation. In some respects, that’s true. I love reading books, learning new spells, and experimenting with enchantments.
My trouble begins as soon as other people are involved.
If I was Sera, maybe I could have subtly manipulated people, teasing secrets out of them gradually over time. If I was Keras, I probably would have just walked up to Farren directly and demanded answers. Maybe punched a wall or something, too. If I was Jin, I probably could have just walked straight in and taken relevant documents without any of them noticing.
But I wasn’t any of those people. And while I was pretty good at pretending to be the noble heir to a house when dealing with specific social circles, playing that particular role wasn’t of any use in this situation.
So, I fell back on doing what I did best: avoiding people entirely.
Kahi was still responsible for my tour, but over the last few days, she’d given me more latitude to wander about the facility as long as I didn’t interfere with anyone’s work. As I mentioned, most of that time was spent studying sub-glyphs, which seemed perfectly fine — it was reasonable preparation work for a future career at Farren Labs.
When I felt sufficiently clear from direct observation, I turned my research toward a different subject that still was easily justified — tools used in the process of creating artificial attunements. There weren’t any full books on the subject, but they had plenty of documents for me to read through, including some that were primers intended for new Enchanters.
I took a stack of them and sat down in the cafeteria to read. Most of them contained information I was already familiar with, but occasionally, I’d come across something interesting. For example, I found one on the subject of mana purification that was potentially relevant.
When creating artificial attunement vials, we must first ensure that both the mana in the primer solution and applicator are properly purified. There are three authorized procedures for this process.
The most common procedure, which is employed by most of our Enchanters, is the process of purifying the mana through the use of a distillery. This can be done with the primer solution, but not the applicator, since the applicator’s mana is never in a liquid state. (Liquefying the mana and then moving it to the primer afterward will add a mana signature, invalidating the process.)
For this reason, low-level Enchanters can handle the primer process, but not the applicator.
Purifying an applicator requires a second process, referred to in this document as Mana Signature Erasure. This process utilizes light mana, which is available at Citrine-level in the Enchanter attunement, to purify the mana in the Enchanter’s body before transferring it into the applicator. This process is not discussed in this document; see the Mana Signature Erasure document for more details on this subject.
Finally, the Arbiter attunement is known for automatically purifying the mana in the Arbiter’s body. For this reason, Arbiters who also possess an Enchanter attunement are able to create primers and applicators without any additional steps being needed, provided they have sufficient understanding of the process and enough mana. Unfortunately, Arbiters are rare, and Arbiters paired with Enchanter attunements are even harder to find.
Due to early incidents of mana poisoning occurring from improperly purified primers and applicators, an early member of the project developed a process — known as the Constantine Process — for verifying the purity of mana.
The Constantine Process requires a three-stage check of mana purity for the primer and applicator before distribution. The first step is to use a Seal Verifier to determine that the bottle and applicator are both properly sealed, preventing any mana from leaking into the primer or applicator from the environment.
The second step is to manually use a Mana Structure Comparison spell to compare the primer and applicator’s mana signature to a stored, Arbiter-purified sample. If this is conducted properly, the mana signatures of the two should match, since they should both be pure.
The third step is a final check with a Si
gnature Verifier to test the mana signature of the primer and applicator. This is a redundant procedure with the second step due to the possibility that the Arbiter-purified sample could have been contaminated at some point in time.
Each step is capable of detecting distinct forms of impurities, and thus, they are all necessary for safety. We are gradually working toward eliminating the first two steps, but currently, the Signature Verifier tool is not sensitive enough to detect some of the differences a Mana Comparison spell can.
I set the primer down. I’d found what I was looking for, or at least a lead. Several, really.
If the Constantine Process was named after Warren Constantine, it was very likely that he had designed — and possibly personally Enchanted — some of the tools that were being used.
Perhaps more importantly, they had Arbiter-purified samples in storage somewhere. Those samples could have come from a different Arbiter in theory, but given how rare the Enchanter and Arbiter combination was, I thought there were good odds that at least some of the samples were from Constantine himself.
I scanned through the remaining documents for anything relevant, but I didn’t find any leads that were as solid as that one. I returned the documents. The next step of the process, unfortunately, would require talking to people.
I debated who to talk to. Kahi was ostensibly responsible for me and the obvious option, but she reported directly to Farren and seemed like the type to be paying close attention to everything I was doing. If I behaved suspiciously in the slightest, she’d probably notice. And, frankly speaking, I’ve never been great at being sneaky or subtle.
It was very plausible she was monitoring me regardless of where I was or what I was doing, but I didn’t want to be hyper-paranoid about that. I didn’t really have any way to work around it without behaving more suspiciously. And if I was already being watched, going straight to her still didn’t feel advantageous.