by Andrew Rowe
***
With that minor delay out of the way, I finally made my way into Court.
“Oi! Corin!” Lars grinned and waved at me as I entered.
I looked around, noting a few other customers already browsing. Unusual, given the early hour. “Morning, Lars. How’s business?”
“Can’t complain. That lad you nearly crashed into bought one of my favorites, so I’m in mourning. Fortunately, I have a new bed of silver to cry into.”
I laughed. “You have my condolences for your loss. What’d he buy?”
“Quick-keen. A dagger that can pass through armor like it ain’t there. Saved my life more than once, it did. Why, back in my third year as a climber—”
“How’s it know what qualifies as armor?” I interrupted.
He folded his arms. “Don’t ask me how it works, boy. You’re the one with the toy maker’s mark, not me.”
I made a rude two-fingered gesture and he gave a deep-belly laugh.
Lars leaned on a nearby countertop. “So, what’re you here for today? Going to try to cheat me out of my hard-earned loot, or maybe just my hard-earned money pile?”
“Well, if you’re offering to part with it—”
“Bah!” He slammed a fist on the counter, then winced and inspected the wood for cracks.
Typical.
“Just here for research, really. Although it might help bring you some business.” I stepped over to the closest table, pulling out a blank journal and a fountain pen. I’d bought them both recently out of necessity; the latter was an excellent tool for practicing runes, but much more expensive than traditional quill pens.
“Oh?” he asked skeptically. “And how’s that?”
I made a wide gesture across the store. “Everything here is too expensive for students. If I could sell you some cheap items—”
Lars shook his head. “Noble idea, lad, but I don’t sell cheap items for a reason. My customers know that anything they’re going to pick up here is going to help keep them alive in that tower.” He gestured toward the Serpent Spire’s location outside.
“Sure, but even a veteran climber could probably use a few more small trinkets, right?”
“Maybe, but I’m thinking no. When you wear items too close to each other, they tend to interfere with each other. You can only carry so many before they stop working. Or worse.”
I scratched my chin. I’d heard similar things before. “What if I could make something useful that you could still sell at a low price?”
“As a rule, I don’t sell anything below Carnelian-level. Much as I might like you Corin, you aren’t a Carnelian yet.”
“Fair, I’m not. But I can make a few Carnelian-level items.”
A “few” might have been exaggerating, but I’d made one. How hard could it be?
“Won’t give you a deal without seeing what you’re offering. But go ahead, do your research. Can’t hurt me to take a look.”
I grinned at that. “Thanks, Lars. You’ll be the first on my list when I get around to making this stuff.”
Professor Vellum had mentioned selling the items herself, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t sell some on my own.
I snickered to myself and got to work.
***
It turned out that magical items were reshing expensive.
I’d known this, of course, but I hadn’t really seen the scale or ubiquity of it until I left the court and hit the other three nearby shops I’d known about. Lars liked to brag about how good his deals were, but I never expected those boasts to be true. I liked Lars, but he was the kind of guy who turned chasing a mouse into a story of mythic proportions.
As it turned out, he was beating his competitors not only in variety, but also in prices. Even his stuff was nowhere near my price range, though.
On the low end? Two or three hundred sigils for a basic Carnelian Mage-class item with a single function.
Something Sunstone Mage level? Several thousand, and they were scarce.
Citrine Mage enchantments? Tens to hundreds of thousands, and I didn’t even find any on display. Not surprising, considering that was enough money to buy a house. A nice house.
Anything higher wasn’t even listed.
In fairness, there were some items that were considerably cheaper, but they were all of the limited-use variety, and I fully supported Vellum’s view that those were vastly inferior. I’d have considered buying one if it had a life-saving function, like a really powerful healing or teleportation item, but I never saw any of those for sale.
So, on the minus side, I wasn’t going to be buying any of these items outright any time soon.
On the positive side?
I managed to find a few Carnelian-level items up for sale that were similar to the ones Vellum wanted me to work on. And, when I checked the material costs — usually about four to five medium-sized crystals of varying mana types for each of them — I knew I could make them for a fraction of what they were selling for. About a sixth of the sale cost, in most cases.
That meant that even with Vellum taking half of my net profit, I’d still be making almost triple the material costs. Of course, that was assuming Vellum sold the items for a similar price to Lars, but I thought that was a fairly reasonable approximation.
The main problem?
I didn’t have enough money to get started, and Vellum hadn’t been willing to give me a loan.
That was when I realized what she’d been trying to get me to think about in the first place — the obvious idea that I’d somehow been missing for weeks.
***
I headed back to Vellum’s office almost immediately, finding her still inside.
“How do I make my own mana crystals?”
The ancient professor cracked a rare grin. “That was faster than I expected.” She waved a hand to the chair on the opposite side of her desk. “Let me show you.”
Vellum extracted herself from her chair, trudging over to one of the shelves on the left side of the office. She groaned and reached for a box on a high shelf. I expedited the process by walking over and pulling it down for her.
The box was a simple wooden one, maybe twelve inches across, and closed with a simple latch. I handed it over to her.
“Thank you, dear. Now sit back down.”
I sat. She took the box over to the central table and opened it. Inside were about a half-dozen clear crystals. It took me a moment of inspection before I realized they were hollow, but they didn’t have any obvious openings.
“I haven’t had to look at these in years. Students usually don’t bother looking into making their own mana crystals.”
I scratched my chin. “What are those? Some sort of mold?”
She nodded. “That’s a good way to think of them, but ‘practice mold’ would be a better way of putting it. They’re a tool for learning, but you shouldn’t need them once you’ve mastered the process.”
Vellum lifted one from the case. “These prisms are made of quartz, which is magically inert and capable of containing mana. The simplest way for a student to create a mana crystal is to channel mana of the appropriate type into the hollow interior.”
I leaned across the table, taking a closer look. “Wouldn’t that just be energy trapped inside a prism, rather than making a crystal?”
“Initially, yes. Once you have enough mana to fill the chamber, you must condense the mana into a solid state. This occupies less space than the mana does in a solid form. Typically, students find it easiest to focus on ‘pushing’ the mana into a corner of the crystal, then ‘hardening’ it.”
She paused for a breath. “It is also possible to simply continue to channel mana into the structure until there is enough to harden it into crystal all at once, but most students find that more challenging.”
I tilted my head. “That sounds like shaping, not enchanting.”
Vellum sighed. “It’s a common misconception that only specific attunements can perform certain basic activities. There’
s a significant amount of overlap between some similar attunements. You’re not a Diviner, are you? And yet, you can still see mana while activating your attunement, something that would be typically classified as Divination.”
She offered me the prism, and I took it, turning it over in my hand. While I inspected the device, Vellum continued speaking. “Similarly, Summoners can call on elemental magic from their bonded monsters, even though they’re not Elementalists. The more you learn about attunements, the more obvious it becomes that they’re just parts of a greater whole. When you start seeing attunements from other towers, you’ll see even more examples.”
I nodded, but the idea of changing the state of mana just seemed so integral to the Shaper Attunement that I was having trouble accepting that I could do it myself. “Should I try it here?”
“Goddess, no, boy. I don’t have time to watch you embarrass yourself. If you can’t figure it out in a week, come see me again. If, by some miracle, you manage to fill all these crystals, you can bring them all back here and I’ll show you how to extract the mana. Do not break my practice prisms trying to get the mana out.”
I set the prism back inside the container. She shut the lid and pushed it over to me.
I accepted the box, pondering aloud. “If Enchanters can make our own mana crystals, why isn’t every Enchanter in the school doing it?”
“It’s difficult, and not particularly rewarding. The first crystals you’re going to make are going to be weaker than the smallest type found in the tower. Stronger crystals have a higher density — that is, more mana in a crystal of the same size. You can’t just keep adding more mana to a crystal you’ve already made, however. Once it’s solid, it’s solid. You can’t force more mana into it.”
I nodded, following the logic. “So, I need to be able to pack as much mana as possible into a small space...then solidify it after that.”
“Precisely. And because you need to do it in a single session, it’s not possible to make a crystal with a greater value than whatever portion of your mana capacity you’re capable of expending all at once. Which, at your level of skill, isn’t much.”
“Okay, that makes sense, but it’s essentially a way of making free money. I assume it’s easier for more advanced Enchanters than it would be for me. Why aren’t they making dozens of crystals and flooding the market?
“There’s no point. If you’re a Citrine-level Enchanter or higher, you probably don’t need the kind of crystals you can make yourself. Most crystals are relatively cheap, because most non-Enchanters have no use for them, and practically every monster in the tower has a crystal at their core. Magical items, however, are quite expensive. For a veteran Enchanter, it’s vastly more efficient to buy crystals for a pittance and then make and sell fully-assembled items for ten or more times the cost of the materials.”
That made sense, but I still figured it would be a useful skill to be able to make the components I needed to enchant something. There was a key flaw — I’d only be able to make crystals for the mana types I could generate in my own body — but that still meant I could make the crystals necessary for some basic devices, like more shield sigils. I could live with that.
I did have one more question, though. “You said these are for practice. What’s the next step?”
“Focusing your mana in the air, forming a solid crystal without a shell. It’s vastly more difficult, since mana quickly dissipates when exposed to air unless you force it not to.”
Vellum steepled her fingers. “You can either learn to make and solidify crystals so rapidly that there’s minimal mana loss, or you can learn to create a solid shell out of mana. The latter effectively mimics the current function of the prism, and then form the rest of the crystal inside the shell.”
Both approaches made sense to me conceptually, but the latter definitely sounded easier. “Okay. How long do you expect me to take to learn to be able to do that?”
The professor chortled. “You probably never will. Once you’re over your little financial hurtle, you’ll probably stop bothering with this process entirely. Almost everyone does.”
That sounded like a challenge.
“But, if I wanted to, how long would you expect it to take?”
She shrugged a shoulder. “Hundreds of practice attempts. Most likely several months to a year.”
I resolved to figure it out by the end of the week.
***
I sat in my room, focusing on channeling mana from my right hand into the empty space inside one of the crystals. It was a familiar enough process, similar to powering a rune, but I wasn’t used to trying to push mana through something.
The crystal wasn’t very porous, which I’m sure was part of the point. The structure made it harder for mana to escape, but it also made it tricky for me to get mana through the crystal and into the empty space within.
It took a few minutes before I was confident I was managing to get any mana into the prism at all, and even then, it was slow. Excruciatingly slow.
Several times, I wondered if I was doing something fundamentally wrong. Was I supposed to be able to just manifest my mana directly inside the crystal without forcing it through the prism first?
Probably not. That was probably what made the process different from what a Shaper could accomplish. I could shove mana out through my hand, but I needed to stay in contact with the energy to do anything with it. A Shaper could sense and restructure mana remotely, which was how they could make things like phantasmal swords that floated in the air — or, at more advanced levels, things like simulacra.
I felt a pang of disappointment that I’d ended up with an Enchanter Attunement rather than something as obviously useful as the Shaper one would have been, but a Shaper couldn’t make permanent items, and I was enjoying that too much to feel too bad about it.
If the goddess really had played a role in giving me my attunement, she’d probably been closer to right than I’d given her credit for. And there was nothing saying I couldn’t get a second attunement later on. The trials in the tower would be much more difficult, but I was confident I could face them eventually.
After an hour of practice, I had a pounding headache.
I may have panicked a little bit when I realized that.
I hadn’t been trying to use my mental mana. My hand was throbbing from the mana I’d syphoned out of it, but I’d expected that, and I was fairly used to it.
I wasn’t just pouring raw mana into something this time, though. I was actively concentrating on detecting the structure of that mana, both to get it inside the crystal and so that I could eventually try to condense it into a solid.
That meant I was using my mental mana to monitor my progress, without even realizing it.
And I’d used more of it than I’d ever knowingly used before.
I stopped immediately, barely having the presence of mind to lower the crystal back into the box. With my focus gone, the mana would dissipate, but I didn’t care.
I just sat there shaking, agonizing over the possibility that I’d caused myself permanent mental damage through some stupid practice exercise.
Deep breaths.
It took me a good ten minutes to calm myself down. I reminded myself of the lectures — how I’d get headaches long before I suffered permanent damage, that I’d notice if I was causing myself cognitive harm — but they weren’t particularly reassuring.
No amount of reassurance could completely neutralize an irrational fear.
I ran fingers through my hair, massaging my own temples. I might have made the headache worse by fixating on it, but I couldn’t not think about it.
After another few minutes, I managed to get my head together sufficiently to realize I needed a distraction. I chewed on an iros fruit while I headed to Sera’s dorm. I didn’t know if she’d be around, but just having a goal helped me defocus somewhat.
Fortunately, she answered her door when I arrived. I didn’t know what I would have done if she’d been gone.
“Headache,” I offered, as if that explained everything. “Do you remember Derek Hartigan? One of Tristan’s friends?”
She folded her arms. “I don’t think so. I was never as close to Tristan as you were.” There was a hint of something sharp in her tone. Was it resentment? I couldn’t tell.
I just nodded along, not wanting to stir up any more negative feelings she might have had. “I didn’t remember him, either, but I guess he remembered me. And I’ve heard of the Hartigan family. I think I’ve read a book by one of them. Anyway, he’s apparently fighting in something called a Survival Match tonight. He said my mother used to compete in them?”
Sera shifted her footing, giving me a quizzical look. “Yeah, she used to love those when she was younger. You didn’t know that?”
I felt a momentary pang of shame. Or maybe that was just the headache again.
Probably shame.
I’d been close with my mother once. Before Tristan’s disappearance, we used to sit and read together. Sometimes, she’d tell me stories about our family history — she seemed equally familiar with the genealogy of both sides — and the legacy I’d need to live up to. At the time, I’d been proud to be descended from war heroes and famous politicians.
She’d scarcely said two words to me since she’d left. Not that I’d put in the effort either, though. That letter I’d written her about Keras was the only communication I’d sent her in at the last couple years. I wrote her more often right after she’d left, but I gave up after a while.
I told myself that it wasn’t my responsibility, that she was the adult, and that she was supposed to be the one taking care of me.
I was starting to realize the situation was more complex than that, but I still didn’t have the will to do anything about it. Not yet.
Getting Tristan back would be the first step toward repairing my family.
I shook my head, dismissing errant thoughts. “She might have mentioned it. Anyway, he invited me to watch, and I figured I’d see if you wanted to come along.”
“How uncharacteristically social of you. I should wear my best, since this is clearly a special occasion.”