It had been about one and a half months since Thera’s birthday and Ben was laying in bed, wide-eyed despite the time of night and struggling with a question. How to train the areas he was falling behind the most in.

Ignoring agility since he had no bonuses to it, he wanted to train his mana and vitality attributes more. Both could be improved by spending either mana or life force, but any way he could think to go about it wasn’t desirable. Mana didn’t seem like it should be too bad given that his recovery rate was so high, but he would spend all day working on different enchantments when he wasn’t focusing on his crafting and even if he put his all into powering them, he hadn't seen much benefit.

As for vitality, he’d gotten to enjoy some pretty severe beatings in order to get a skill that would hopefully help him keep more of it in a fight, but it was no substitute for a bigger vitality pool as a whole. The only issue with training that was he’d need to lose vitality regularly in order to improve his growth, and he wasn’t big on the idea of frequent beatings to make it happen.

So what could he do? Ideas swam around his head and only one stood out as being exceptionally terrible, while at the same time being the most viable if he didn’t want it to take time out of his more important training, time that went towards what he would consider his core skills.

Damn it, this is going to suck. He thought to himself as he quietly got up and dressed before making his way to the shop.

When he got to the shop he started heating up the forge before he removed a few materials he was going to need from his bag, namely deathstone and moribusal. Two materials that once went into a weapon that his teacher described as savage would be going into a tool he’d be making to try and train himself, he was pretty sure there was some irony there but he wasn’t sure if he could see it at the moment as the thought of what a crazy idea this was filled his mind.

Still, he pressed on. He had a bit of processed moribusal left from making Will’s gauntlet and cut a square centimeter of it, placing it on the table with his hand on top of it for a few seconds while looking at his card to determine the rate of mana loss. Even that small amount was far more than he needed as he saw the numbers drop on his card and he kept shaving it down, taking care that none of the slivers got away from him, until the value on his status didn’t change.

From there, things took a turn for the truly dangerous as he repeated with the deathstone. He was even more cautious with that metal than the last, knowing it would be a dumb way for someone to find his body in the morning if all of his vitality had been sucked out from mishandling it, and he was sure his god would be screaming at him if Myriad had been watching, but he tried to ignore both of those facts and instead focused on figuring out how the stones volume affected its vitality absorption rate.

Once that was done and he got a piece big enough to do its job without killing him he got to work. He heated up a small strip of steel and shaped it so it would be just slightly too large to fit on his pinky finger, all the while melting down the few slivers of the other metals he’d gathered.

He carefully coated the inside of the ring with the particularly dangerous alloy and watched it from the side as it cooled before cleaning up his mess, taking extra care to ensure he didn’t lose track of anything that might be a danger to his teacher, or worse, a customer, before he carefully picked up his creation by the safe outer rim and looked at it admiringly.

You know, if I made it so this couldn’t be taken off for as long as it was able to suck vitality, I’m pretty sure this would qualify as a cursed tool.

But this small item wasn’t something he ever intended to use on anyone else. No, he’d be putting it on himself, and forgetting the small bit of hesitation he was feeling slid it onto his pinky finger.

He was immediately aware of its presence. Unlike the numerous other rings on his hands, this one had a notably unpleasant feeling to it, and he didn’t doubt for a moment that it came from the slow draw of his internal energies.

He was taking his life into his hands doing something stupid like this so he had to be sure it worked. That meant that instead of doing something productive with the next few hours, he sat down and stared at his card, wanting to be sure there wasn’t a steady decay in his attributes, and like that, he watched and waited.

“Boy, what in the infinite hells are you doing!” His teacher yelled as soon as he got in and saw what Ben was staring at.

“Oh hey Falk, just testing a new magic tool on myself. Since it would be a bit dangerous if I didn’t make it right I figured I should observe it for a little bit to be on the safe side, but my attribute decay is slightly less than my regen rates so I should be fine.”

The yeti could only shake his head. “What, you makin’ torture tools now?”

“No, I just figured that since I have bonuses to my vitality and mana I should make something that would let me train them a bit. It’s not like it matters how I use them, so I figured having it forcibly sucked out of me should be fine.”

“Only crazy people think like that,” His teacher told him, pinching the bridge of his nose as he held out his hand. “Let me see if you’re gonna get yourself killed wearing that.”

He obediently handed it and his card over when Falk asked for them as he looked at both, hemming and hawing before finally returning the items.

“Well you won’t be killing yourself with it, but I can’t say it’ll be fun to wear. Just what put that crazy idea in your head?”

“It actually came from my intense desire to not die,” He explained. “Even if I have defense enhancement now, my vitality is way lower than I’d like and I can’t train it without using it, not to mention the fact that I’ve fallen into mana exhaustion way too many times for someone who doesn’t have a magic skill. It got me thinking about how I could train them and how other attributes are trained. For strength or agility, some people might use a weighted vest or something like it, I just figured this would be my equivalent.”

Falk seemed like he wanted to argue, but ended up just sighing. “Alright, I see what you’re saying, even if it is all sorts of dumb. Just do one thing for me, only wear it while you’re sleeping. It shouldn’t matter if your attributes are being sucked out of you then, but it wouldn’t be good to make a habit of wearing it. Imagine you wear it on a hunt and you’re attacked, or you forget to take it off after some strenuous enchanting. If you ever go into mana exhaustion wearing that then who knows how long it would take you to wake up?”

Those were all very good points his sleep-deprived mind hadn’t considered so he slipped it back off and put it in his pocket. He wouldn’t be having a restful sleep with it on, but he’d manage.

“Putting aside those masochist tendencies, how's the order looking?”

A few days before, a customer had come in looking to have a spear and shield made to match his specific size requirements, and the job went to Ben. A majority of the time when someone wanted a new weapon or armor they would get something that had been made in advance and either take it as is or have some adjustments made to fit it to the customer’s needs for a small fee on top of the item price. Custom-made items were a different beast. Since they’d be put together from scratch they were more expensive from the get go, and since Ben had been given the responsibility this time he’d wanted to make the best ones he could.

“I finished up both yesterday, I just need to add the enchantments today.”

“Hmm, well bring them out so I can have a look before you head off to your little library.”

Ben smiled. That so-called library was his current pride and joy, not to mention helping him get his job experience at an altogether ridiculous rate, but he’d get to enjoy it soon. He grabbed the items for Falk and his teacher gave them both a look over.

He was silent for a few moments, staring at both shield and spear intensely before giving the good news. “Congrats boy, you made it to mid-uncommon for both. You just might make your goal today.”

“Woo! Just you watch Falk, I’m feeling it!” Mid-uncommon might seem a bit underwhelming to be so excited for, especially when he’d made it to ultra-rare before, but this was different. In the past, a lot of what probably pushed his items so high was both the expensive materials they’d been made of, as well as the complex enchantments placed on top of them. These were different, being made of common metals enhanced with low-rank animal bones and still waiting to be enchanted, that meant the current rank of the item was entirely due to his skill and technique in making them. It was a reflection of his true growth as a craftsman.

“Yeah yeah, go get it done before the end of the day, I’m not waiting around to evaluate them and I want both ready for the customer for the morning.”

Ben knew his teacher wasn’t being too serious solely for the fact that it wouldn’t take him an entire day to enchant them, at most it would be a few hours if he was being extra choosy on what skills to use, and he took the items to the back room where he kept his library.

It wasn’t filled with books like the name might suggest, instead it was a collection of organized boxes, each one split into a ten by ten grid, and each section contained a single ring, with a skill name and level written beneath it. More so than getting defense enhancement, having the chance to copy each and every one of Zandale’s skills had been the biggest boon to him, to the extent that he would have been happy not getting a single skill if it meant he could access all of this, and in the time since his collection had only grown.

Despite all the benefits they provided, Zandale’s skills had one major drawback. They were all at most level three due to the fact that he never dedicated much time to actively training them unless a particularly good opportunity came along, like it did with Falk as everyone waited for him to be treated, and a few exceptions ended up at even lower levels than they should have. Since Ben could currently copy skills from a person to the fifth level and copy an enchantment to the fourth, that meant he wasn’t able to enchant with them to his full potential, which resulted in a separate system being put in place in the shop at his request.

When the works Ben made sold, he would get the profit for it, minus the material cost and the part of it that went to his teacher for both hosting them in the shop as well as taking the time to train him. The thing was, he didn’t really need the money at this point. His time in Anailia had gained him far more than he’d ever expected and he could be set for years if he needed to, so a system had been set up at the shop he could take advantage of.

The way it worked was simple. There was a book at the front of the shop that any customer could flip through with a full list of all of the skills and their levels he currently had rings for. If anyone had a skill he was missing, or else a skill at a higher level but less than his current limit of five, they would get a fixed amount of money off their purchase. At the end of each week, Falk would add up how much customers had saved versus how much Ben had made. If Ben made more it would be rolled over to the next week, but if customers saved more then Ben would pay the difference to his teacher.

There were plenty of people who wouldn’t take the option, preferring to keep their skills private, but more would at least give it a look. After all, what was revealing a skill or two in the name of some savings? It only got a few takers so far, but word was getting around and the adventurers especially were curious, saving a bit of money translated to having more to buy better equipment with, a fact they all knew could be lifesaving.

After taking a few days to organize them he had each box labeled and split up in a way that would make it easy to find and he was glad he took the time, it made grabbing all of the skills he wanted to use for both the spear and shield all the quicker.

He tried to stick to Falk's golden rule of not enchanting in a way that could hamper the user’s personal skill growth, though that could occasionally be tough since he didn’t always know the customs skills if they were determined enough to keep every one of them private. It was a safe assumption that he couldn’t make use of spear wielder or shield wielder for sure, but otherwise he would be able to at least limit the potential negative effects relying on enchantments could have by using partial enchantments, only taking a very specific effect of a skill to use instead of the whole thing, meaning the weapon’s user wouldn’t be delayed in advancing their own abilities by much if they were to use his tools.

Bearing all of that in mind he got to work, starting with the spear. While spear wielder was a no-go, he could take the piercing properties of knife, push dagger, pin, and dart wielder from it and add the sharpening property of sword, ax, and scythe wielder, while at the same time matching it with blade enhancement which had similar effects to a greater degree. While he couldn’t just keep adding effects from the same one skill again and again and expect anything but a minor boost, he could take similar effects from different skills and weave them together into a cohesive whole to get significantly more power.

After that, he used both earth magic, as well as the skills sturdy and weapon strengthening as a means to prevent the spear from breaking in a fight and moved on to the next item, the shield.

This one was a bit more straightforward. He couldn’t use shield wielder of course, but by selectively taking defensive properties from armor enhancement, defense enhancement, gauntlet wielder, sturdy, and earth magic he was confident that as long as the item had a bit of mana running through it the shield would hold up, and to finish it off he added his resistances to it, at least he tried to the best he could. He was still only able to place ninety percent of his potential resistance on it and the only reason he didn’t have to lower it down a bit just to manage how much had already gone into it was because there was no real reason to add the life or light resistances.

Even though both items were enchanted with mostly low-level skills, through technique and application they turned into powerful magic tools that Ben would be confident to have his name attached to as their creator but knew there was still room to improve. There were plenty of skills he didn’t touch when making these solely due to the fact that he didn’t understand them enough to know what properties the skill carried. As he learned more he’d be able to become even more efficient with his enchanting, pushing the mana cost down to its limits while increasing the functionality.

Looking down at both items he’d made he couldn’t help but smile, he was going to have some fun.