Mythshaper

While I took my seat in Mum's workshop to practise my rune penmanship, she settled on the other side. She usually did paperwork or worked on designs for her next project, but today, she was redecorating the place.

I would have liked to watch and help out if I could, but she told me I needed to practise my elementary fire rune. Mum didn’t enforce the 10,000-hour rule zealously like the Spell did. She said I could move on to the next elemental script if I engraved the fire rune ten times in a row without making a mistake. As for attempting my hand at creating a fabricator, I knew it was beyond me until I formed my essence seed.

My ability to see essence threads gave me a huge advantage over other novice artisans, but I wasn’t sure how much it helped with essence unification. It had taken Rose eight seasons to form her core, but according to her, two of those seasons were wasted on meditation and training her ability to sense essence, another was spent getting used to the process of unification, and the remaining five were dedicated to igniting her essence seed.

My mind was far beyond my years. Ignoring my unique circumstances, the mastery I had over meditation was rare even among the awakened. Combined with Fractal Soul and my high mental acuity, I had all the resources I needed to sense essence and adapt to unification within a week. Unfortunately, it hadn’t even been a full season since I began training in unification, and so far, my centre had been absorbing the essence greedily without showing any signs of igniting the essence seed.

If I based my timeline on Rose’s ignition, I was looking at a maximum of four more seasons to finally awaken, three earlier than my official communal awakening date.

So why did it still feel slow? I shook my head and completed my fifth script, all taking less than half an hour in total.

Engraving demanded far more attention than those lifeless drills did. It was too repetitive to be more fun than an actual sparring session, but perhaps it would get there when I was finally doing my own designing and artificing.

As I worked on my next engraving, the room’s temperature abruptly shifted, and a refreshing air surfaced. I faltered and turned to see that Mum had installed some kind of fabricator next to the hearth. It wasn’t large, but it looked far more complex than it initially seemed.

A greater probe revealed ley lines of essence veins carved all over the walls surrounding the hearth, extending beyond the room. The engravings covered the entire side of the wall, though most were hidden beneath the surface. Somehow, Mum had managed to engrave the script without needing to slice the wall into parts. It had probably taken her days to finish this project. Perhaps she had begun only after I pointed out how claustrophobic the workshop was.

“Well, that takes care of the ventilation problem,” she said, a bit haggard but with a satisfied smile plastered on her lips.

She had definitely done all this to placate me. Mum wanted me to learn forging, to understand how to craft fabricators. It was clear she wanted to share something she loved, to teach me her craft, but she feared that forcing it on me might make me resent it. In the end, she had decided to make the environment more inviting for me to train.