Chapter 383
While Ra’thala was being questioned and interrogated by the people Matt had assigned to work on the tentatively named ‘Skills for All’ task force, Matt had other things to work on at the guild.
He would much rather help with the skills project than essentially slam his head against the wall, but he so rarely had time to work on his sword that he couldn’t justify putting it off any longer.
The idea had started as part of an idle conversation with Liz when Matt complained that his Talent was making it damn hard to make equipment that could handle his mana, and he almost wished his Tier 25 had helped with that instead of boosting some of his skills and improving his storage.
Liz had jokingly pointed out that his Talent already did give him the perfect material, his mana itself, which had sparked an idea in Matt.
In theory, his work with talismans in the war might have prepared him well for this. He’d flash-created a few basic enchantments by creating some basic links between premade enchantments in such a way that he could customize the results to his needs. He’d tried making talismans entirely out of mana, but that… didn’t really work. Maybe someday he could manage it, but he wasn’t a high enough Tier for it.
But, there was a way he could integrate his experience with talismans into his current quest for a better weapon. Namely, his growth sword. It was already bonded to his spirit, and there was therefore hardly a better way to rapidly iterate on an item that was already attuned to him. He’d hired a high-Tier specialist to modify the enchantment-wiping effect to be a bit more… selective. Now, instead of erasing all the enchantments present in a single mode at once, he could selectively erase parts of an enchantment. His precision was still a little weaker than he would have liked, and it was way more annoying to do a full wipe of an enchantment, but how much it sped up iterative work made it plenty worthwhile.
Of course, the process was fairly involved. He couldn’t just coat the blade in mana crystal and expect it to work. Instead, he’d created a sort of half-sword, with plenty of gaps in both the enchantment and the metal for his mana crystal to fill in both magically and physically. The end result looked almost organic, with fractal branches of crystal and metal twisting around one another, even if the actual function was still somewhat lacking.
He had lofty goals for the sword, that much was true, but right now, he was just trying to pull it up to the same level as his sword’s other modes. The twin enchantments of the blade and mana stone kept fighting each other instead of meshing, and because neither was properly complete without the other, resulted in a barely-functional sword instead of an epically versatile weapon of mass destruction with a perfect backbone of high-power mana conduit that he was looking for.
For what felt like the first time in his life, it wasn’t his control that was lacking. He had spent enough time as they moved through Tier 26 regaining a level of control better than all but a few in the Empire, but he needed far greater precision to perfectly pull off a full integration between weapon and mana crystal. Even Matt’s BPL, the tool at the heart of his current effort, wasn’t enough to pull it off to the standards he needed. It didn’t matter if a talisman’s enchantment was unstable and would burn up within an instant of being activated, that’s what they were designed to do. However, it was substantially worse if Matt’s sword spontaneously melted as soon as he started to use it.