The harem party delved two weeks ago. They should be returning to the surface any day now. I'm sure they'd run out of sex supplies for now. As for , aside from buying so groceries and getting another shipnt of materials whether I'd used up the ones I had (I didn't) or not, I stayed ho all the ti.
Craft, lt, purify, craft. Separate the high-quality items and save them to enchant later. I was now adding gems to my high-quality copper rings. Feldspar and quartz were the cheapest gemstones to grind for Skill levels. I was working with crystals with five-hundredths of a carat, embedding them in the copper rings without a setting.
It was ti to start on my second Profession. Enchanting. But I hit a wall when I finally pulled up my Enchanting Skills to think about enchanting. The explanation is a bit technical.
To enchant an item, you had to inscribe glyphs on the object as you wove the energy required to empower the enchantnt. On a success, the glyphs would work as a circuit to draw in magic residue the ambient and keep the item empowered. In a place with low magic background energy, the enchantnt turned itself off. A person's aura naturally sheds excess magic energy so items worn by a person with MP seldom shut down, only in cases of extre magic use when the MP pool remained empty all the ti. That step of engraving was the biggest culprit for failures. Strangely enough at a first glance, Dexterity had not much to do with getting the glyphs right or not because they were more taphysical constructs than physical engravings. It depended heavily on Skill coupled with Willpower and Luck.
It was an expensive Profession and a kind of hit-or-miss gamble. Four factors weighed to cause that.
First, no retries. You either enchanted the item properly or ruined it. A disenchanted material couldn't be enchanted again even if it was slted and recycled. Over ti the material would soak with enough residual magic energy to beco enchantable again, but that took decades.
Second, enchantnt points. Items had a limited amount of enchantnt capacity. My copper rings had one or two without gems. Each enchantnt had a cost and cramming a big enchantnt in an item that didn't have enough points to support it was a sure-fire way to get it to blow up. Gems were used because even the tiny flakes of quartz I was inserting in my copper rings gave between four to ten extra points.
Third, the Exp cost. Enchanting cost Exp, non-refundable, and in relatively large quantities. Definitely more than the amount gained by actually investing the enchantnt. While making the jewelry gave a small trickle of Exp, enchanting the sa jewelry would drain a dozen tis that amount.
And fourth, the icing on the shit cake, resonance. Enchanted objects mostly remained dormant when not in use or in contact with a living (or un-living) person. When active, it drained a tiny flow of MP or SP depending on the type of enchantnt. But these tiny flows, when multiplied by dozens of enchanted items, create resonance. This ant that two flows could mix up and both items would fight for the energy and tear the body apart because of this conflict. The losing enchantnt would stop working, the other received the strengthened flow and overloads. It would overheat and cause so damage. In the worst-case scenario, it could go boom.
Enchantnt resonance tuning is an entire branch of advanced enchanting techniques. Like wifi routers in an office building, one wanted their enchantnts' frequencies to be very far apart. An enchanter would need to asure the resonances by ear alone.
Addendum to the fourth, the resonance is not entirely random. It partially depends on the enchantnt. Two copper rings of Dexterity 1 have a crazy chance of being impossible to wear at once. There was a Skill for tweaking it, so wearing two rings of 10 to Magic wasn't impossible but damn near it. One of the effects might beco dampened, though.
I reviewed everything again before I started. It was already giving a headache. I didn't need to train my enchanting Skills because they were already at the maximum level with the extra Skill Points from my racial levels and the professions. There were dozens of Skills for enchanting, a veritable maze. I took a glance at the basic ones.
- Each Skill grants Rank x 0.5% extra chance of success. - Rose
Enchant Resources (rare): Add resource bonuses (HP, MP, SP). Base cost: 1
Enchant Physical (rare): Add Physical Attributes (Strength, Dexterity, Endurance). Base cost: 2
Enchant ntal (rare): Add ntal Attributes (Mind, Willpower, Charisma). Base cost: 3
Enchant Magic (very rare): Add Magic Attribute. Base cost: 4
Enchant Spirit (ultra-rare): Add Spiritual Attributes (Ego, Luck, Soul). Base cost: 5
Enchant Skill (rare): Add Skill bonus. Base cost: 2.
Enchant Weapon (rare): Add attack and damage to weapons. Base cost: 2
Enchant Defense (rare): Add defense to items. Base cost: 2.
Enchant Armor (rare): Add damage reduction to armors. Base cost: 1.
Enchant Resistance (rare): Add elental resistance to items. Base cost: 2.
Those were the basic enchantnts. Leveling the Skill gave a minor reduction to the base cost. At my capped level, it was 4.5%. Each had a base cost, and I could add them at specific levels. The level, squared, tis the base cost was the point value of the enchantnt. A copper ring that gave 3 to HP would cost nine points. My maximum HP would jump by 8,500 points after all the modifiers. The best copper and quartz shards ring I crafted so far had twelve points of capacity. That enchantnt would cost ninety thousand Exp and nine thousand MP.
I needed more than three days to make copper rings to make up for that cost. A normal enchanter without the tis-thirty multiplier, three months. The MP cost was negligible for . But it was easy to see why bigger bonuses ramped up to be prohibitive soon enough.
All that would be paid upfront. Then I would attempt the enchantnt.
Create Enchantnt (rare): Imbue an item with an enchantnt. Rate of success is (Rank x Willpower x Luck) / ( 50 * Point Cost) * 1%
And now cos the icing on the cake. My Willpower was 21, my Luck 110. My Skill rank, as usual without a fusion, was stuck at Novice 9. I had a 46.2% chance of success if I tried making an enchantnt costing nine points. Not really, because I had to add the bonus from my Skill rank in {Enchant Resource}. The final chance was 50.7%. The odds were a bit more than one in two and I had a godly awful amount of Luck.
Fortunately, mixing different enchantnts tipped that balance. A ring that gave 2 to Endurance and 1 HP would cost the sa nine points and it would improve the chance to 55.2%. For an item with two enchantnts and a Master Enchanter with one hundred points in all relevant traits, they could reach 100% success with an enchantnt worth 400 points. 10 Willpower, 10 MP, for example.
Which wasn't too much. That was one reason Sariandi didn't add a Status bonus to Queen Alloralla's enchanted gear.
I almost regretted picking the Enchanter Profession. Almost.
I had to build up a series of enchantnts that improved my chances, mainly giving bonuses to my enchanting skills and relevant attributes. MY twelve-point ring was going to be the guinea pig. I scribbled the stats and a funny na on a scrap of parchnt.
Rosie's ring of "Please Make Enchanting Easier"
1 to Willpower - 3 points
1 to Luck - 5 points
1 to Create Enchantnt- 2 Points
1 to Enchant ntal - 2 Points
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Estimated chance of success: 52.65%
I banged my head on the workbench after I finished doing the math. Going big at once wasn't going to work, no way I'm wasting my masterpiece on such poor odds. I needed to make smaller enchantnts first. I started with the main Skill. After so back-and-forth with my calculations, I found that the best bet was a ring that gave 1 to both Willpower and {Create Enchantnt}. That had a success rate of 92.16%. I held the feldspar-copper ring with five points and paid fifty thousand Exp.
You enchanted {Ring of 1 Willpower 1 Create Enchantnt}.
Your Wild Enchant Skill granted the Ring a 1 to Dexterity.
Oh. Yes. I forgot. I was a [Fae Enchanter]. That ranked-up profession added a plethora of fun and unpredictable effects on my enchantnts. It could also subtract but with a very reduced chance because it was entirely based on luck. It also ant that the resonance of the items was completely randomized too.
Wild Enchant (very rare): Add a random trait to an item as it is enchanted, at the average level of the other effects. Subtracts one random trait. Chances are ( Rank x Luck / 100 )% to add, and (35 - (Rank x Luck / 80))% to subtract.
It was currently at 10% to add and 23% to subtract. It would hurt more than help but I intended to fix it with so rings.
I donned my new ring and saw the stats go up. The odds of making the twelve-point ring rose up to 58.4%. I created another ring with 1 Willpower, 1 Luck, and 1 Create Enchantnt. 62%, it worked. Wild Enchant did nothing. I put it and resonance didn't cause a problem.
I kept enchanting rings, putting aside those that didn't work or had resonance problems when I felt the cramps. A quick check showed that I'd bled a bit. One could think I was already used to it but no. I forgot. It was my second ever in this run, and elves don't have periods. After a change of clothes, I thought about how the world lacked feminine products. There were towels to use but they weren't disposable and got squishy and sticky after used. Without that 3-liter absorption power one sees on TV ads, I was at a loss. Diva cups or tampons weren't invented yet.
Or were they?
I wiggled my fingers and started to pour fae silk out of them. I wove the thinnest strands I could make in the fuzzball pattern, with lots of small loops that would make it fluffy and absorbent. I kept adding and making a spiral shape, looping a strand here and there to keep it tightly confined and in a cylindrical shape with a trailing string. To test, I soaked it in a cup of water. Satisfied, prepared to put it inside . Then I paused.
I rembered, don't these things have an applicator? I lathed a wooden dowel then drilled a hole in it. With the spell-song, I fixed the imperfections, rounded the tip, then gave it a good polish. Finally, I hardened it with heat. Another thinner dowel as a plunger to push the tampon out. It was super awkward and it scratched a bit where it shouldn't scratch. Maybe I shouldn't have gone in dry. Well, a lesson for another day.
Then as if she was protesting against the scratches, the mother of all cramps hit. I crumpled, cursing. I thought about shifting but then I rembered I had the tampon inside . Shouldn't {Pain Resistance} work on that! Ahoy, System! Do your freaking job.
I lost a day and a half of work. But my product was biodegradable and recyclable. I didn't even need to take it out. I just sent my pseudopods inside to eat the silk and blood before I put in a new one with lube. Gross, but practical.
A week, several failures, three dozen rings ruined, and a few million Exp burned later, I had a full set of rings with bonuses to boost my enchanting. Plus six to the main values including {Wild Enchant}, which brought my odds of ssing up way down. I had 17% of going up and 8.3% of going down. Like in that MMO I burned a lifeti grinding Arathi Basin rep, enchanters had a few perks for themselves. There were two Skills in the [Fae Enchanter] that made not regret picking this Profession.
Resonance Shift (very rare): When you equip a newly enchanted item, you have a (Rank - Number of items with the sa trait) x Luck x 0.1% reduced chance of having resonance conflicts.
Resonance Dampener (very rare): When a resonance conflict happens, you delay the reaction by Rank seconds.
I moved from rings to amulets. They could be used as brooches, pendants, or even earrings. They also had a bigger surface for the inscriptions and could accept more polished gemstones. I kept making them out of copper because the next tal, silver, was twenty tis as expensive. I might be wealthy but I wanted this business to be self-sufficient. The lump of useless copper from my failures kept growing. That copper would take years to soak enough magic to be enchantable again.
Worse, so of it made their way back to the slter and mixed with good copper. I had an incident that week when I had to reject a shipnt of stock ingots because they were tainted with this inert material.
Making the amulets took longer than the rings. While I had fewer items with superior quality to enchant, all of them had so enchanting potential. My crafting Skills had already reached the low cap of my curses and now I had to rely on organic growth without the System's assistance. It was ten tis slower at least.
Nenandil, who took to watching work as if it were the latest season of the Witcher on Netflix, watched my frustrations and asked, "Why don't you break that curse?"
"Too expensive, even if I have a racial perk to halve the cost to lift them off of now. I don't have enough MP and I don't want to throw my perks away. I needed to raise my Magic Attribute because I'm going against the Attribute score of a deity."
She fluttered in front of and made a serious face.
"If you need more Attributes, why don't you pick a Class? You've been holding out for too long, I think."
I didn't have an answer for that. I looked at my list of available Classes. My eyes were drawn to the bottom, the rarest ones. I laugh-groaned at the sight of [Null & Void], now highlighted in gold. I could walk a path of power but that was not what I wanted for Rosewise. I wanted a quiet life, as close to normal as possible. Even so, I discarded all the common and uncommon Classes. The crafting Classes wouldn't help . Truly, there were perks to speed up my production but I wasn't worried about it.
Sothing to combat curses? Accumulate MP? I had an opportunity of reaching a very high level this ti with the Dungeon right there. I skimd over the huge list. it only grew because I qualified for more and more Classes as my abilities broadened.
One entry spoke to .
Mystic Sorcerer (ultra-rare) - Wielding both magical and spiritual powers, the Mystic Sorcerer is physically frail but becos an unraveler of secrets.
Yeah. And as usual, the System didn't give the numbers unless I selected it. A good thing for a future patch, Wyxnos. Let people make inford decisions, dammit. It is almost like you want them to fail. Yeah. Let's go. I can't even YOLO this.
You beca a Mystic Sorceress. You gain:
1 Attribute point per level.
1 Magic every odd level
1 Soul every odd level.
1 Charisma, Willpower, Mind, Ego, and Luck, alternating every level.
1 ( 1) HP per level.
8 ( 2) MP per level
8 ( 2) HP per level
4 ( 3) Skill Points per level.
1 perk every even level.
You gained the perk: Sorcery (uncommon): You rely on willpower and imagination to weave magic instead of carefully researched formulae. With Sorcery, you can create any effect you can imagine but the spell's paraters are not optimized, including the MP cost and effectiveness.
I had MP to waste, that wasn't a problem. But my HP... Bloody hell. I beca a paper cannnon.
I applied the one million Exp I had in reserve. I told you enchanting was expensive. It brought to level fourteen. I used the freebie Attribute points to cap Magic, Soul, and Luck. My unmodified Status looked like this.
Rosewise Honorcoin (level 44)
Species: Ghostsight Eleon (rank 1) level 10
Class: Mystic Sorcerer 14
Professions Soul Enchanter (rank 1) 9 / Fae Jeweller (rank 1) 9
Strength 16 / 26 - Dexterity 24 / 34 - Endurance 19 / 29
Mind 23 / 31 - Willpower 23 / 31 - Charisma 23 /31
Magic 120
Ego 112 / 120 - Luck 120 - Soul 120
HP 619,542
MP 3,647,616
SP 1,426,320
It also had the side effect of making all my enchanting WAY EASIER. I cringed and called a dumbass. Like the flea in a circus, I was too used to life with lower Attribute caps.
Shaking my head, I opened the perk list. The [Mystic Sorceress] had affinities for almost everything. Blood magic, Healing, Necromancy, Illusion, Transmutation, Contractual Magic (mostly slavery), Divination, several kinds of divine magic I couldn't use anyway. Even demonology.
I could summon so demons to harvest their cores. That's how the big boys get cores for their enchantnts and other magical activities. Yeah, right. Not going down that path.
Scanning the list, I found sothing I wanted. Making up my mind, I invested in seven magical perks.
Countermalediction (very rare): You understand how to unravel curses and can design spells and rituals to fight against a specific curse.
Ritual Magic Affinity (very rare): Your rituals are stronger and less prone to failure.
Healing Magic Affinity (rare): You heal for 50% more and can cure a broader range of maladies.
Familiar Spellcasting (rare): You can cast spells originating from your familiar's location.
Familiar Defense (very rare): While your familiar is within Magic ters from you, it takes 30% less damage.
Familiar Shielding (very rare): While your familiar is within Magic ters from you, 50% of the damage it takes is subtracted from your MP pool.
Share MP (rare): You and your familiar can share MP as long the donor is willing and has more than 20% of its maximum.
"Now you can help remove those curses, Nenandil!" I grinned while she read the Perk's description.
I had Skill Points. On a whim, I put all the Enchant [trait] Skills to rge with them. I could purchase them back with future levels which I would get soon enough after I leveled my Class to the sa level as my species' levels.
{Combine Skills} active. 10 Skills and 98 Skill Points used.
You gained the Enchant Success Rate Up (very rare) Skill. Increase the success rate of all enchanting attempts by Rank x 0.5%.
Your Skill level is Journeyman 42.
The flat 21% bonus would be great to offset the penalties for a large enchantnt.
I resud working. I was about to call it a night when soone banged on my door. I opened and found that rude adventurer Malcolm I've t in the guild.
"Malcolm. I wasn't expecting you," I said.
"Neither . There's trouble at the guild. Georg told to fetch you. Cedric and his party... it is better if you see for yourself."
I felt a cold shiver. Their return was overdue by a week. "Are they dead?"
He grimaced and shook his head. "Not all of them. But they might as well wish to be. Co, let's go."
I stepped outside and dropped a boulder by the door.
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