Chapter 324: Old lady
The thump of blood pounding in Arwin’s ears mixed with the rush of magic pouring through his body. Sweat rolled down his back and soaked into his shirt as he gritted his teeth, drawing on a mixture of strength from the Infernal Armory and Reya.
They’d been trying to find a way to get Reya’s soul imprinted into an item for… well, Arwin wasn’t actually sure how long it had been. Using magic from the Infernal Armory helped alleviate a lot of the stress on him and Reya alike, but it had definitely been at least a few hours.
He wouldn’t go so far to say that their efforts had been worthless. It had taken Arwin more time than he’d thought to get used to actually working with Reya’s power. He’d thought it would have been just as easy to work with as Lillia’s, but apparently not everyone’s magic functioned the same.
That made a certain amount of sense in hindsight. It still hadn’t stopped Arwin from spending nearly an hour just finding out how to direct Reya’s power without completely losing his grip on it.
And that had just been the first step. They’d had to pause for a short while so Reya could recover her strength before they got back to work — and then the hard bit had started.
There was a subtle but painfully important difference between using someone else’s magic to empower himself and trying to put their power directly into an item. Arwin had done the former several times together with Lillia.
It worked great at empowering an item and establishing a better connection between it and its intended wielder, but that wasn’t his goal right now.
Arwin was looking to imprint Reya’s soul upon the metal. He needed more than just the magic. He needed what made that magic up to be preserved. And, unfortunately for him, that bit was painfully fragile. He couldn’t control Reya’s magic with his own without accidentally crushing it down into pure energy that would give her a stronger connection to the item but fail to imprint her soul upon it.
No matter what Arwin tried, Reya’s magic did not just go right into metal like his did. Even when he completely gave up on all the more advanced techniques he’d learned in recent times and just tried letting the Mesh do everything so he just get something to start from, her magic still stubbornly refused to enter anything on its own.