Turning in my loot to the adventurers guild was relatively uneventful, netting me a total of 27 gold and change, while holding on to the king class craw’s blades in the hopes I could get a spear made out of them. They were around two meters long, and insanely sharp, so if I could get a spear made out of it, then have it inscribed to add power to my spells, I’d have a very durable, very sharp spear which would still boost my spell damage.

Considering my options, I was disrupted from my musings by the guy at the table talking to me.

“You’re a traveler, right? You should hurry over to the training grounds if you don’t want to miss today’s presentation.”

“Presentation? On what?” I asked.

“Why imbuing of course. Just get there and you’ll find out what I mean.”

Thanking him, but feeling relatively confused, I pulled out the map I had gotten when I first arrived, and headed off to the training grounds. It didn’t take me long to arrive, musing over what to do, when I saw something, or rather someone, that seriously ticked me off. Lily and quite a few of her groupies was sitting down, waiting for the presentation on whatever we were going to learn was going to start.

Grinding my teeth in frustration, but deciding to deal with her later, I took a seat by the rear of the presentation, I wasn’t going to give her more reason to pick a fight with me until I was confident taking on her groupies.

The presentation began with a man with a medium build, looking every bit the average person, brown hair, brown eyes, no noticeable distinguishable features, just very bland, came on to a small stage that was set up.

“Welcome summoned, today we are going to go over something that will become a core part of any warrior’s arsenal, imbuing. Imbuing is the art of adding mana to your weapon in order to make it harder, sharper, and to extend the cutting ability past the length of the blade.”

At this point, the man, who hadn’t given his name, had my full attention. This guy was telling me I could have just been adding mana into my weapon and using ti to cut or stab through things way more easily? I grumbled as I thought of all the wasted opportunity, especially with the molts, whose shell had been quite awkward to pierce with my spear.

“Now imbuing is not so simple as we make it sound, you need to form sigils throughout the weapon with your mana, and this will become extremely hard to do with weapons made of steel, and quite hard with weapons made of iron. If you haven’t focused at all on wisdom, your mana will be lacking, and you’ll be better off simply using a good steel sword, however, ,when it comes to the more rare metals which can conduct mana better, mithril for example, having learned imbuing early will greatly help you.”

At this point I was over my self imposed depression from learning I could have been beating up monsters more efficiently, and had a smile on my face, as a magic warrior, and one who would be avoiding steel weaponry in order to be able to cast spells without interference, this was sounding to good to be true.

“Now I will show you the basic sigil pattern, which is slightly different than rune inscription, you can think of the two as separate branches of the same skill, sigils are actively drawn, while inscriptions are simply powered on and left to do their work.”

The man then proceeded to draw a very large pattern out of mana in the air, which glowed softly in the air, being clearly visible even in the afternoon sun.

“Your goal is to be able to draw this pattern inside your weapon. Unlike spell patterns, this is a more passive kind of enchantment, so it will simply fizzle out if you get it incorrect rather than have explosive results. This pattern specifically is a toughness enchantment, it will make bronze almost as hard as steel depending on how many times you can repeat the pattern within your weapon. Steel will be harder to enchant, but even a single repetition can make it much harder.”

I sighed in happiness, I wasn’t getting an announcement from my grimoire that I had learned a spell pattern, so I was going to have to attempt to draw it until it went into my spell patterns, and not exploding while I did so sounded too good to be true.

I first drew up the pattern, or at least attempted to do so for a while, until I successfully got it down and the pattern went into my grimoire. At this point though, I had a problem. I had always been drawing my spell patterns with the tip of my finger, like writing in the air, but this time I had to draw it inside my spear, which wasn’t going to be possible the way I had been drawing it.

Focusing, I decided to try and control my mana outside my body rather than simply place it in the air to sit there. After maybe thirty minutes, I had finally started to get the hang of moving my mana externally, it wasn’t much different than meditation, and I’d had a massive amount of practice with meditation.

My first attempt to draw up the sigil inside of my poor nearly broken spear was a failure, as expected, but I practiced for a while, and eventually managed to get it right. At this point, I realized that If I could learn to externally control my mana well enough, I could start drawing up spell patterns with just a thought rather than my hand. If I could manage to do that, I would be able to use both hands on my spear, and that would give me much better control in melee fights.

Determining to test my theory, I went over to the targets away from the many people practicing drawing up their sigils within their weapons, and pulled some mana out of my core. Rather than guide it to my fingers and control it like I normally would, I simply pulled it out of me, and started to form the pattern for force bolt.

It seemed to be going well, the pattern was maybe half drawn, when it exploded. Convinced I was on the right track regardless, I attempted to draw it up unsuccessfully for maybe half an hour, and ended up exceedingly frustrated. It seemed to be working until about halfway through, and then it would always explode at that point.

At this point, the bland man from the presentation came over and watched my attempts for a bit, before giving me some advice in a voice which matched his appearance.

“Don’t try to form the sigil all at once, draw it out the way you normally would.”

Deciding that listening to the man was a much better idea than banging my head against the wall like I had been, I slowly drew up the pattern, guiding the mana into the lines that I needed to form the pattern, slowly going line by line rather than attempting to form it all at once.

I was surprised when I had the completed spell pattern in front of me, and instantly released it at one of the targets, overjoyed it had worked. Soon after however, I noticed a problem. While this could come in handy when my arm was incapacitated, it required way too much focus for now to use in an actual battle, and even then it took probably three times as long to draw up the pattern than it took for me to draw up a pattern with my hand.

Shrugging, and determining to practice more in the hopes that I could get it useable in combat, I decided to go back to practicing the sigils in my weapon. It took a while, but eventually I was able to repeat the sigils three times through the length of my weapon. For some reason, the sigils seemed to repulse each other, and forming more in between the three was out of my range for now.

Deciding to test on a target, I took my weapon and stabbed out. I didn’t realize anything different, until I remembered that this was simply a hardening sigil, it didn’t have any effect on sharpness, though it would prevent the weapon getting dulled and chipped as easily, and it would be able to block attacks like the swings of the king class craw which had cut through my armor like it was nothing. At this point I was wondering if I could enhance my armor the same way, only to realize another person had thought to ask before me.

The bland man by this point was back up on stage, and responded to the question quickly. “Yes, you can form this sigil within your armor, though maintaining a sigil within your weapon and armor simultaneously requires an extreme amount of focus, or practice to the point where it becomes automatic.” The man paused a bit before continuing.

“Now it seems everyone here has recorded the sigil in their grimoires, so we shall go on to the next one, and the one most of you will likely focus on. Rather than the defensive oriented sigil of toughness, this sigil enhances the sharpness, and can even be used to extend the range of your blade, cutting further than your reach.”

The man waited for a around half an hour while we all scrambled to practice the new sigil, but it seemed to be taking quite a while for people to get the hang of it I gave a glare at Lily while I waited for the rest of the people to finish. She looked as adorable as usual, a not so perfect cover for her personality. I then turned my attention back to the man who seemed as if he would blend in anywhere as he began to speak again.

“The basic rules for sigils, is they will take up a set amount of mana per second, one mana per two seconds per sigil, and the more sigils you manage to fit within a weapon or piece of armor, the more powerful the enhancement becomes. Once you manage to get five sigils of sharpness in a weapon for example, the reach will extend about a foot from the end of your blade. Be warned however, as this will only act as an extension of your sharpened blade, if you meet someone else who is imbuing their weapon, they will be able to block your weapon without a problem.”

Frowning at the thought of everyone fighting using imbued weaponry, I kept practicing, unable to fit more than three sigils within my weapon, as the man went over how important it was for warriors to begin to meditate and build up a at least a rudimentary mana pool, to at least be able to fight on par with creatures which can naturally imbue their claws or other natural weaponry.

I sat around and practiced as I saw the area slowly start to empty. I snorted, they were going to regret it if they didn’t practice now. If they couldn’t pull it off in a live battle, they were just going to be bait for the monsters who could naturally imbue their own weapons. I spent the rest of the day practicing imbuing, and by the end of the day I could imbue four sigils in my weapon, though I had to take regular breaks whenever I ran out of mana. With four sigils, and my mana pool of 160, I could maintain my four sigils for only eighty seconds excluding my mana regen.

Part way through, I decided that it would be best for me to train to apply the sigils as fast as possible, so I could flip it on and off in an instant to keep my mana high. I wasn’t very successful on that however, it took me a good four seconds to apply my sigils no matter how much I practiced. Deciding to come back to it tomorrow, I headed off to the barracks for some well needed sleep.

In the morning I woke to continued good news, I had gained a point in agility from fighting the king class craw, and a point of wisdom from being successful in reaching my sleep meditation hybrid state. Smiling, I went back off to the training grounds, and continued where I had left off yesterday.

I was just as unsuccessful as I was the previous day in turning my sigils off and on in an instant, but I did become very used to having the sigils on, being able to do it almost unconsciously. Smiling at my success lead to frowning at my failure, but the bouts of meditation while waiting for my mana to regenerate was wonderful in calming me down, and eventually I got to the point I could even hold on to the sigils while meditating, just a constant draw I needed to supply with mana once they were drawn up.

Using my sharpness sigil on the dummies became one of the most amusing things I had seen. My bronze blade on my spear started to chop through the dummies like a hot knife through butter, and I wondered if getting a new spear was even necessary, but thinking of the cracks in the shaft of my spear reminded me I definitely needed to replace it. Deciding to go deal with that now I’d become more comfortable with sigils, I headed out of the training grounds and over to the market district.

I soon arrived at the market district, and soon found a sign showing an anvil and hammer, an obvious sign for a blacksmith and I headed in. When I had gotten in, I saw a man who was the spitting image of Golrag, but with very light brown hair instead of the red that Golrag had sported, with a medium length braided beard, wearing a soot stained leather apron over his clothing, which did little to hide his blocky build.

Deciding to ask if he was a dwarf just to see if he was, I questioned him. “Hey, this may be a stupid question, but are you a dwarf?”

The man stared at me for a bit before replying “Of course I’m a damned dwarf, do you see any humans looking like this!?”

I debated for a moment on whether or not I should mention Golrag, but eventually decided against it. It wasn’t going to be worth a possible argument with someone whose help I wanted. “Never mind, I was actually hoping if you could make a spear of some kind out of these.” I then pulled out the massive, two meter long claws from my magical backpack.

“Not bad kid, those are claws from a king class craw. Yeah, I could make something out of em, but it’ll run you fifteen gold.”

I smiled, that was far less than I had been expecting, and well within my budget. Once I got them it probably wouldn’t be too expensive to have it inscribed, or at least I hoped. I then handed the large claws off to the dwarf before introducing myself.

“Thanks for the help, I’m Rayth, pleasure to do business with you”

The dwarf examined me with a critical eye, before gruffly replying “Kor.”

“How long until the weapon is done by the way?”

“Well I’ll have to cut off a lot of excess, then grind it down to a handle, then fuse the claws with some bronze to hold them together. All in all, give me a week.”

I had no clue what exactly he was planning on doing, but I agreed to come back in a week. In the meantime, I’d just have to hunt and hope my current spear didn’t totally break until I got my new one. Deciding that the best thing to do with my time was spend some time out in real, I logged off.

Taking off my helmet was as disorienting as usual, being in game standing up one second, and the next laying down on my bed just felt odd to me. I know some people handle the transition without any kind of discomfort, but I wasn’t one of those people. Deciding to have a meal, I turned on some music, and sang along off key while I decided to make some waffles.

Two waffles topped with strawberries and bananas later, I was feeling quite satisfied, so I headed off to the bathroom to take care of my needs before crashing on my bed and getting some rest.