62: Secret Test
Eris kept her heart in her throat while she watched the gentle rise and fall of Bailey’s chest from across the workshop. She wasn’t entirely sure if Pravala could perceive through any of her bonded targets while the Summoner was asleep, or even if the woman was actually sleeping at the current moment, so it was best to be safe. Because of that, Eris positioned her stool on the other side of one of the workbenches.
Since there was no ‘daytime’ or ‘nighttime’ in an underground prison, the workshop remained illuminated at all times by the lightstone crystals affixed into the walls. To accommodate the need for sleep, however, Eris had installed woven shrouds that hung over the crystals and effectively acted as curtains that could be drawn shut to stifle the light being cast into the room. Since every crystal was curtained off, the room had only a minimal amount of residual illumination- just enough for Eris to see what she was doing, and for her to watch and make sure that Bailey remained fast asleep.
She could only thank the dead gods that Elmas slept in a small side room in Pravala’s ‘palace’. While the ex-Abjurist did sleep in the workshop at the beginning of their time in the prison, mostly out of a need for Bailey to keep an eye on Elmas’s impalement wound, Elmas insisted on moving out after no more than three days past their arrival. As for the reasoning?
“I have no problem with you two gathering Desire- I’ve seen you do it enough,” Elmas had said. “However, it’s really hard to sleep when you two are eating each other out every single night, and apparently have no reservations about being quiet.”
As embarrassing as that was, it was probably for the best. After all, the chances of Eris being able to sneak in some secret crafting while that woman was present were slim to none.
Eris movements, while still much faster because of the ridiculous efficiency of the crafting trance, were slow and calculated to ensure as little noise was made as possible. Even so, the gentle sound of the rasp filing sawdust from a piece of scrap wood made Eris wince and stare at the flat-chested blonde almost constantly. However, she never woke. A few times, she even seemed to pull the blanket a little tighter around her and snored just a teeny bit.
At least it let Eris do what she needed to do. Just very slowly.
The wood dust was piling gently on the table, adding onto the residual amount that was left over after the mess of a crafting-marathon yesterday. Once the pile was a little bit larger than Eris’s closed fist, she stopped and scooched over to the shelf containing more scrap material. There were several cut segments and small logs of the dense ironwood, in varying states of preparation. Some were completely de-barked and ready for carving, some still had that dark grey, metallic surface texture of the rough bark, and some even had a few flimsy branches with the dark, almost brown-yet-still-healthy leaves.
Eris went to those pieces, carefully and quietly plucking every leaf from every branch she could find before walking back to the table.
Unfortunately, Eris’s mortar and pestle wasn’t actually made by her. Unlike the rest of her tools, she hadn’t actually used the mortar to the point that it broke and subsequently needed to make a new one. Not something Eris would think she needed to do- at least before Novice Artificer evolved to Adept Artificer and now provided a ridiculous three-hundred and seventy-five percent Quality bonus that was doubled if Eris used tools only made by her.
That meant the process was slowed down even more as Eris quietly started grinding the leaves between a homemade rasp and a homemade chisel, mulching the material and turning it into as much of a paste as she could manage. It didn’t need to be completely perfect- in fact some chunkiness would probably be better. Therefore, when the leaves were turned into a chunky brown goo and her hands were covered in the stuff, she scooped up a decent portion of the sawdust and worked to mix the two together.
The ultra-dense ironwood was flammable, burning very slowly albeit surprisingly easily. Since it also burned at very high temperatures, it was fantastic for use in cooking or forging, with one log pretty much being enough for any individual situation while also giving off almost zero smoke whatsoever. However, for this, Eris didn’t want the wood to burn efficiently. She didn’t want it to burn hot. She needed to reduce it down to dust so that it burned far, far faster than normal. Then, she needed to slow it right back down.
When mixing in that dust with the moist, ground-up leaves, it made a gritty paste that was decidedly uncomfortable to work with. Still, Eris kept massaging the two materials, working them together as much as she could. The moist leaves would make it significantly harder for the sawdust to actually burn properly, which would normally be something people wanted to avoid. After all, something trying to burn but really struggling meant colder flames and lots of smoke.
This time, that was exactly what Eris was aiming for.
In order to make sure that the mixture gave off as much smoke as possible, Eris held the gritty mass in one hand while reaching into a small jar with the other to carefully scoop a fingerful of fish oil she’d rendered a while back. Even if this kingdom didn’t actually need lanterns because of the lightstone crystals, fire was always helpful and rendered animal fat burned very, very nicely.
Just like with the leaf paste into the sawdust, Eris gingerly started saturating the mixture with oil- being very careful with how much she was adding. Too much oil and it would be too easy to burn, properly catching fire instead of smoldering. Too little and it wouldn’t burn at all.
Once she felt an instinctive nudge in her heart telling her that it was probably at the best point, Eris held the gooey, oily mess in her hand and scraped it into a small, fist-sized wooden half-sphere with a large hollow carved in the middle and a few holes of varying sizes throughout. At this point, Eris started letting the strings of pink Artificer light drape from her fingertips and wrap around the construction. While as much of the kinda-flammable-kinda-not material was crammed into the glowing sphere as she could manage, Eris focused her attention inwards.
Enhanced Crafting Points {Passive} {Evolution 1} {Level 4}
You have {125} Crafting Points, which you may spend on certain abilities while in the process of crafting. When beginning a new craft, current number of Crafting Points resets to {125}. For every 5 Crafting Points spent on a single ability during a craft, you gain {4} additional Crafting Points that can be spent on any other ability.
Excellence {Active} {Evolution 1} {Level 2}
For each Crafting Point spent on Excellence, the Potency of the craft is increased by {100%}. This bonus is increased by {200%} when 50% or less of your total Crafting Points are spent on this ability.
Unbroken {Active} {Evolution 1} {Level 4}
For each Crafting Point spent on Unbroken, the Durability of the craft is increased by {200%}. Consumable crafts, such as potions or food, have their Duration increased instead. When used on crafted armour, Unbroken also increases the Potency of the craft by {100%} for each Crafting Point spent.
She’d already worked out the math in her head. Kind of. As insane as getting almost twice as many CP was because of the evolution that Enhanced Crafting Points had, the fact that Excellence had a hard limit as to how many CP it could take before becoming less effective meant that things were no longer as simple as dumping all of her CP into a single skill and calling it a done deal- especially if she wanted as many points into Excellence as possible in order to squeeze out every bit of power she could. That, however, raised a very concerning question.
The question of whether the fifty-percent-or-less requirement of Excellence applied to her normal limit of one hundred and twenty-five CP, or whether it applied to all the CP she put on an item, including the extra points given by the skill itself and any extra she put on using Mana and Artificer’s Grace.
If it was the former, then the abrupt gap between skill progression and level progression would be abundantly clear, because she would actively need to waste a significant amount of CP. After all, Eris wouldn’t be able to put any more than sixty-two CP into Excellence before that absolutely ridiculous two-hundred-percent bonus per point stopped working. However, because Enhanced Crafting Points gave her four extra CP for every five she spent, but only usable on the other of her two skills, it meant that even if she spent all one hundred and twenty-five on Unbroken, she’d have to willingly not use thirty-eight of the extra one-hundred CP given, just so that Excellence could keep its secondary buff. After all, she didn’t have a third ability to spend that extra CP on, which meant those points would have to be given up entirely.
Thankfully, there was a gut feeling- an almost instinctive tug in her heart that told her it was the latter. That it calculated her total CP after all the CP had been spent. That meant she wouldn’t need to actively throw away valuable points and still have that oh-so-valuable bonus.
As for the point distribution itself, it was fairly simple, and even worked exactly the way Eris imagined it would. As she experimentally dipped out five CP while focusing on Excellence and mushing semi-flammable goo into the wooden shell, she could almost feel a tickling in her skull as a new well of resource made itself known. Sure enough, pulling on that seemed to block her out from Excellence in a way Eris couldn’t quite describe. Instead, she could only let that energy flow into the other of her CP skills. Meanwhile, she couldn’t see the numbers directly, but they were so present and forefront in her mind that they were all but visible.
Excellence: 5
Unbroken: 4
Eris held for a single moment, then poured out five CP into Unbroken, with the extra four going into Excellence. As expected, both of the mental values for each of the skills in her head went up to nine, while her pool of CP left to spend dropped another five to one hundred and fifteen.
With the first-time-jitters officially calming down while also confirming how she assumed the skill worked, Eris wasted no more time and started pumping the numbers.
Every ten CP spent, with five points in either of her skills, resulted in each skill actually getting nine points because of the bonus. Therefore, it was very easy for Eris to keep the values completely even. Twenty CP spent meant eighteen CP in either skill. Thirty CP meant twenty-seven. Then thirty-six. Then fourty-five. And so on.
By the time that Eris had spent a hundred and twenty of her one-twenty-five CP, both Excellence and Unbroken had accumulated one hundred and eight CP each. The last five points were then stuffed into Unbroken, in turn granting four to the ever-necessary Excellence, turning their values to one hundred thirteen, and one hundred twelve respectively. Thankfully, adding in Artificer’s Grace didn’t make anything more complicated, since a full capacity of the recharging Mana equated almost perfectly to ten more CP. Five in each plus the resulting bonus then brought the values to one hundred twenty-two and one hundred twenty-one.
Despite the pink strings draping over her hands and getting visually more tangled with each movement, there was no restriction of any kind as Eris gently affixed a blade of flint on the inside of the wooden half-sphere; right beside one of the numerous holes poked through the material. Then, as she aligned the top half of the sphere to set it in place and secure it, she placed a small steel gear with sharpened teeth right up against the flint, nestling it into a specially-carved groove in the wooden shell. Several rods poked through the sides of the gear for different points of contact, on which Eris tightly wound a string with the end dangling about two inches out from the hole in the sphere.
As the top half of the ball was affixed and glued into place while pink light tightened to strangle the craft, Eris went over the numbers in her head to get an idea of the bonuses she would be getting.
This craft was obviously not a form of armour, so the secondary part of Unbroken didn’t apply. However, having the consumable’s duration be increased by two hundred percent per point, with a hundred and twenty-two points meant that this creation was now going to supposedly last twenty-four thousand, four hundred percent longer than a nonmagical version. Almost two hundred and fifty times as long. The Potency, though, that almost made Eris wince at the math.
With the secondary effect kicking in because less than half of her total CP was spent on it, that meant Excellence was giving a three hundred percent Potency bonus per point, with a hundred and twenty-one points.
Thirty-six thousand, three hundred percent.
Three hundred and sixty-three times stronger than a nonmagical version.
And that wasn’t even the full extent of the bonuses; Eris still needed to account for Adept Artificer.
Adept Artificer {Passive} {Evolution 1} {Level 4}
You have a natural talent for crafting. Any product you craft gains a {375%} bonus to its Quality, applied after all other bonuses. This bonus is doubled when crafting items using only equipment made by you.
Since the three hundred seventy-five percent boost was applied after all other bonuses, that meant it served as almost a four-times multiplier to the power she’d already figured out. Add onto the fact that bonus was doubled because Eris made sure to only use the tools she made, then the already-insane levels of power from just her CP was getting multiplied by seven and a half.
One thousand, eight hundred and thirty times the duration of a mundane version.
Two thousand, seven hundred and twenty-two-point-five times the power.
When the pink strings faded from view, Eris had to place the creation down and sit back on her stool for a moment to try and put it into perspective.
Everything she’d been making with Pravala up to this point had been done with twenty CP and a twenty-percent bonus for both Perfection and Resilience. Four hundred percent bonus for either Durability or Potency if she went all-in on one of the skills. Granted, having Pravala boost even the non-evolved version of Novice Artificer to level ninety-four meant a two thousand three hundred and fifty percent bonus to the Quality, added as a multiplier. In other words, a twenty-three-and-a-half times boost after CP compared to the seven-and-a-half times that Eris had now. However, the absolutely colossal increase in CP power and efficiency more than made up the difference.
If Eris’s quick math was right, on her own before the power boost, she was making items about five times stronger than nonmagical variants- something completely unheard of for a second-level crafter. With Pravala’s boost, her items then became approximately ninety-four times as powerful as mundane versions- equivalent to if not exceeding the power of creations from some of the most powerful crafters in the Syndicate.
And now, on her own, she was managing items that were almost four times stronger than that.
At level two.
Eris let out a quiet sigh and fixed her eyes on the creation in front of her. Something so simple, yet was now the pinnacle of raw, potent capability in terms of Syndicate counterparts.
Smoke Bomb
Durability: 100%
An impromptu device designed to produce large quantities of obscuring smoke, affixed with a pulled igniter. Imbued with the essence of Lust. Created by Eris Kadell. Made from ironwood, ironwood leaves, fish oil, flint, steel, and leather twine.
Additional effect: Blissful Censure
Whenever a creature achieves orgasm while inside smoke created by the Smoke Bomb, all other creatures within the smoke achieve orgasm as well.
Well, not every random Lust enchantment could perfectly align with the intended use. At least the bomb was good enough without it to do what Eris needed it for.
Eris shrugged, gently tucked the bomb underneath a number of marble chunks on one of the shelves to hide it from view, then gently padded over to a bucket of water to wash the tree-pulp and fish oil from her hands. If Bailey woke up while Eris crawled back into bed, it would be a lot harder to make a convincing lie about getting up to pee when she smelled like a fish salad.
Ugh, as soon as they didn’t have to deal with a crazy Summoner potentially listening in on every single word, Eris never wanted to lie to Bailey again.