The Lone Wanderer

Carving the final stroke into the enchantment, Percy scanned the whole thing once more, verifying he hadn’t made a mistake. Well… not a visible one, at least…

‘It’s good, I think.’

The heat rune he’d just drawn was affixed with a whopping five control runes. That was more than the enchantments on his old cauldron had, allowing him to adjust the temperature of his brews with even greater precision. That was the plan, anyway.

But he still had to check that the enchantment worked as intended.

Pouring some mana into the rune, he observed it with bated breath. At first, the enchantment lit up like it was supposed to, releasing some heat. A great start. Playing with the control runes, Percy then began to cycle through the 32 intensity levels, to ensure that everything was in order.

Sadly, it wasn’t meant to be.

About halfway through, the enchantment flared even more brightly for an instant, before frying itself. If that wasn’t enough, it even sent a deep crack through the reinforced mana, ruining a bunch of other runes in the process.

‘Another twenty minutes down the drain…’

He sighed.

Advancing his runecrafting skill to this level had taken him ages. It had already been about a month since Micky entered the Valley, placing Percy under a lot of pressure. After all, the crow had already lost over a year of core purification, and he’d likely lose another one, at the very least. Probably more.

Suffice to say, Percy hadn’t dared to relax for a second longer than necessary, doing everything he could to get some Aurora Dew to his familiar as soon as possible. If he was honest with himself, mastering such complex enchantments so quickly was nothing short of impressive. But it still wasn’t good enough in his eyes.

‘Oh well… It would’ve been so much worse if I hadn’t thought of that trick…’

The cauldron Percy was trying to craft was quite a complicated piece of magiscript. He wanted to attach five heating enchantments, five rotation enchantments, five pressure enchantments, five concealment enchantments and one self-repair.

And that was only for each half of the finished cauldron!

Once assembled, it would contain 42 of them! On top of that, other than the self-repairs, they each had to be fitted with five control runes, meaning that Percy had originally needed to draw a total of 204 runes on the whole thing!

Obviously, this was quite the ambitious undertaking. While Percy had improved enough to carve these intricate enchantments, he wasn’t very good at it. Each attempt took him about twenty minutes, and he only succeeded about once every five tries.

Unfortunately, that wouldn’t cut it.

Whenever he failed even once, it meant the entire half of the cauldron would go to waste. He’d have to destroy it and start over, until he managed to draw all 21 enchantments correctly on the first try. With such a low success rate, doing that would have taken a ridiculous amount of time. Time that Micky didn’t have.

One solution had been to just get better at drawing the runes, but that wasn’t very feasible. Improving his success rate got harder the more complex the enchantments were, and he would need to improve a lot to overcome the compounding effect of his failure rate. That was why he’d turned to a different, arguably more novel solution.

The self-repair enchantment.

Percy had always planned to outfit the cauldron with those, so that he could maintain the construct with ease. If he didn’t, he’d have to replace the whole thing every few days, which wasn’t something he was willing to consider.

However, the self-repair enchantments couldn’t really help him during the crafting process. At least, not in their simplest form. As early as back when he was forging the latest iteration of his armour, Percy had discovered that the self-repair enchantment had to be added last. If not, the memory runes would store an incomplete blueprint of the object. That meant that the enchantment would then try to restore his construct to an earlier form, erasing any additional runes he carved afterwards.

Luckily, Percy had thought of a way to bypass this issue:

To equip the self-repair enchantment with a control rune of its own. That way, he could turn it off and on again, to essentially reset the stored blueprint in the memory rune.

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Now, he could safely carve the controlled self-repair enchantment before all the other runes, rather than after, and he could take advantage of it to erase only his failures, while preserving his successes.

Whenever he made a mistake, he could just use the enchantment to restore the cauldron to its previous stored blueprint. Whenever he succeeded, he could reset the blueprint instead, adding another enchantment into its memory. Essentially, Percy could create checkpoints of his progress, completely eliminating the compounding nature of his error rate.

‘In hindsight, it’s not exactly the most ground-breaking idea. I’m sure somebody must have thought of it.’

Percy didn’t recall seeing any mention of this in the books he’d read. Then again, he hadn’t read that many of them to begin with. Chances are, he had merely reinvented the wheel.

Still, that didn’t take away from his achievement in his eyes.

Grinning, he spun the half-spherical construct in his hands, soon finding the controlled self-repair rune. Luckily, the cracks hadn’t reached that one. Activating it, he watched the cauldron repair itself rapidly, both the cracks and the dysfunctional enchantment soon erased, as if they’d never been there.

Next, he gathered some more mana to his fingers, before beginning another attempt…

***

Percy screwed the two halves of the cauldron together until he heard a satisfying click. They were nearly identical, except that the top half had a small hole in the middle, so that he could pour the ingredients into the cauldron.

Taking two more objects from his spatial seal, he attached them to the cauldron. The first was his Spiritforged Effigy: the small bust of a crow’s head that he used to generate teal powder.

Placing it into the hole at the top of the cauldron, he twisted it until it latched into place. There wasn’t any practical purpose for this: he’d just made the hole the right shape so that he could use the Effigy as a lid, thinking that it would make for a nice little decoration.

The other object was a tripod, also forged out of his reinforced mana, equipped with self-repair enchantments of its own. Placing the spherical cauldron on it, he set it on the ground in front of him, taking a few seconds to marvel at his creation.

Then, he activated the enchantments again, one at a time, to ensure he hadn’t made any mistakes. The heat, pressure and rotation runes themselves weren’t that different from the ones his old cauldron had, but the concealment runes were a new addition.

He’d tested them in isolation, of course, yet he still hadn’t fully shaken off his worry that they might not work as intended.

Dropping a teal dagger inside the cauldron, he willed it to float in the middle of the sphere. Next, he turned the cauldron itself invisible, looking at the dagger with his eyes. The weapon was visible in the regular part of his vision, but the cauldron fully obscured it in his Soul Vision and Mana Sense, looking like a glowing orb of Orange and silver.

Pouring some mana into the concealment runes, Percy soon caused everything to turn invisible in his sixth and seventh senses: both the cauldron and the dagger inside it.

But he wasn’t too distraught about that, having expected it.

Next, he played a little with the controls, dialling the effect of the concealment runes down, until the dagger turned visible again at about a quarter of the enchantment’s intensity. The dagger was faint and blurry at first, so he kept going.

Its details grew clearer and clearer, though Percy had to stop at some point, once the walls of the cauldron began to reappear in his vision.

‘Alright, I think 5 parts out of 32 give me the best view.’

It wasn’t perfect, since he could only see the dagger about 90% as clearly as he could in his old cauldron, as that wasn’t made of mana. Still, the old cauldron was opaque, completely obscuring the regular part of his vision.

All things considered, the new cauldron was a net improvement, allowing him to discern more information overall.

Even better, he was confident he could improve upon this in the future too. Perhaps, adding a sixth or seventh control rune to the enchantments would let him fine-tune them with greater precision. Learning to make the walls of the cauldron thinner without compromising its structural integrity would further reduce the interference.

‘Still, it’s more than good enough for now. Definitely an upgrade.’

Taking his old cauldron out of his spatial seal, Percy placed the two side-by-side.

Other than the obvious difference in their shapes, the new cauldron was a little wider, its diameter about one-and-a-half times larger. This, along with the fact that he could fill it to the brim now meant he could brew a lot more at once.

Filling the old cauldron with water and emptying it into the new one, he soon confirmed once more that its volume was exactly five times greater.

Finally, the runes decorating its surface were a lot denser. This was inevitable, since he’d not only added more control runes to all the enchantments, but he’d increased the number of enchantments too. The old cauldron was equipped with only three heating enchantments, and just as many pressure and rotation enchantments. Meanwhile, the new cauldron had ten of each type. If that wasn’t enough, Percy had added the concealment and self-repair enchantments that hadn’t been there before.

Sure, the surface area of the new cauldron was greater, and the Vault’s runes were much more compact, but Percy had drawn on every square inch, to ensure he could apply all their effects as uniformly as possible to his concoctions.

Examining the fruit of his labour, Percy couldn’t help but crack a grin.

There was plenty more he needed to do, of course. He had yet to actually master the scaling principle. On top of that, he’d have to meet the quota they’d promised Alexander before the man gave them the secondary ingredients he needed for the elixirs.

And before he dove into alchemy, there was one more little thing he’d promised to do for his companions.

But all of that could wait a few minutes.

Right now, he wanted to take a moment to enjoy his achievement, reading the inevitable notification.

[Congratulations! Your spell has evolved: Spiritforged Effigy: Refined -> Spiritforged Cauldron: Refined!]