Chapter 18: Runesmithing
Zephyr started working on the items and very quickly lost himself in the work. He was fully immersed in what he was doing. He didn’t even realize how much he missed this. It was something he did basically every day for the last eight years.
Mistress Alyra had left him to his work, thankfully without any reproval. He’d been unnecessarily cheeky with her, again to his surprise. Over and over again, he kept doing this. Maybe this went to show how much of himself he didn’t know.
He overlaid an activation rune between two stabilization runes, carefully inscribing with precise and steady mana flow from the inscription pen. He pressed carefully to keep the level of output steady.
’In some ways, this is actually like processing a spell model, the focus and steady flow,’ he thought.
’Should I also try infusing my own mana into this?’
"Whoa—" He caught himself quickly, almost breaking the flow as he tried to infuse his own mana into the rune.
’That was way too close, and this is my test too. I shouldn’t be experimenting here.’ He breathed out slowly, locking in.
He continued working. At this point, he could do most things on autopilot, so as he worked, his mind wandered again. He thought back to the spellcasting class and his extremely slow processing. Even just now, there was a clear delay between his intention and the execution in trying to infuse his mana into inscribing. Everything just took an unnecessarily longer time to work.
’Man, I hope it gets better at tier two... At least then, I’d have two mana nodes to work with.’ He had just finished the first item, the bracer. He even replaced some unnecessary runes, added some where there should have been, for better flow. Basically, he’d reworked the whole thing, not just finished it up, and all under an hour. Light work.
He picked up the next item, a metal whip. Now this was harder to work with. The whip itself was narrow and round, so it required a high level of precision.
He started to work on it, focusing as he carefully inscribed.