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.
“Sold. This sounds great, how do you want me to start?”
Falk gave it some thought before deciding how he wanted his student to approach it. “It’s a little unorthodox, seeing as how I'll be having you train your connect as well, but I’ll grab you some swords. Use the death magic enchantment and try to apply the drain spell to the edges of the blades. When people start to learn this technique they typically start with magic because the idea of not using the entire thing is a bit more intuitive than just using a piece of a skill.”
“Um, maybe for others, but I don’t think I’ll be able to use a spell I’ve never heard of before like that.”
“Boy even if you don’t have any yourself you know a magic is all about the mental image you have formed of it, if you didn’t you wouldn’t have been able to almost fire an earth bullet in Anailia. Drain is a spell that saps a target's life force, their vitality if you like. When you connect to the skill, focus on finding that aspect of it and attach it to the edge of the blade. I’ll be by every now and then to check how it’s going, or if you have any questions just ask.”
With that Falk left to do his own work, leaving Ben with to focus on his task. The question was how he was going to go about it? He’d never attempted something like this before so first he wanted to try putting together the spell, but it came with the issue that there was only one thing present to test it on, himself.
With a sigh and the knowledge he wouldn’t be able to get out of it if he was going to succeed, he grabbed onto the cube and activated the enchantment, feeling his mana pouring out of him as a result of not having any compatibility with the affinity, and tried shaping the spell in his head. The point was to lower a person's vitality, so he took out his card to check any changes, closed his eyes, and concentrated.
He felt some sort of spell begin to form at least and tried to inflict it on himself immediately only to wind up breathless. He looked down at his card and saw his mana was almost completely out, but there was no change to his vitality.
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He sighed and thought about how to approach it while he let his mana regenerate. Part of the issue was the item the enchantment was attached to for sure. While he didn’t seem to have any issues enchanting with a skill placed on a random hunk of metal, that didn’t mean it was a useful item to have it on if a person wanted to use the skill at all.
It was like trying to make use of swordsmanship if it was placed on the same item, even if it was placed on something that technically had an edge that didn’t mean it would make sense to use it as a sword.
Well, I might be a little better off than that. He thought. He could at least use the skill, it would just make more sense to have it on an item that could handle more mana being passed through it, maybe like a staff. Still, he knew even that wasn’t the heart of the problem, it all came down to skill.
He simply didn’t have the experience working with magic like that. Sure he didn’t have much issue with firing an earth bullet or the few barriers he made use of before, but they felt a bit more intuitive to him, he could at least visualize what he wanted to achieve when he tried putting those spells together. Still, there was nothing else to do but try, so he sat down and prepared himself for a long day of work.
After an hour of watching his apprentice struggle and fail, Falk stepped in.
“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.”