It was mid morning for Laurence. He knew he only had six hours to work on the artifacts that his group would need for their journey, but he had so much to do. The wrappings and armour he could do on the road, and likelihood was he would find better materials to work with as they climbed. He had long since run out of the orik leather, and he only had a small amount of maelstrom snake skin, bone and muscle left to use. The rest had been used or traded off for a variety of materials in the hope that one of them would inspire Laurence into working out what his Manifestation would be.

In the process he had made all his clothes out of Saint tier materials, and had managed to bulk up his defenses considerably. His old armour was strong, but that was all it was. It was also flawed in its design, as it used itself as a battery to repair any damage it took. Eventually the leather would no longer have been able to support itself and collapsed. In the end he had come to the conclusion that the way to fix this was either a super fine gemstone thread that was structured like chainmail and micrometres thick, or a pocket dimension that was built to house a battery. Unfortunately pocket dimensions were not very stable, so Laurence had to use the former method, which was more resource intensive.

He sold a ten metre square of snakeskin to a very surprised tailor in order to get enough shards to buy any of the Saint tier gemstones that had been on offer at the jewelers in central Spirit. The cheapest one, a piece of Argosan onyx the size of Laurence’s fist, was twenty platinum shards. The gemstone was worth a hundred times more than Rosie’s Demise had been when it had been made, and that was cheapest one Laurence had seen. Laurence had to sell a fifth of the snake to afford to make the clothes that he wore, bone muscle and all, and even after that there was nothing left over. He knew that if he sold the clothes at an auction house he could probably get ten or twenty times what he had paid for them, but the clothes were the ones he wore, not ones he had made to make money.

His target today was to make everyone a set of rings. One would be for storage, one as an escape route, and one for a last ditch attempt at killing or maiming an enemy. He did not need any of them, but he knew that his friends were not as comfortable with their strength as him. In front of him, on the cold stone table were three bars of frozen heart copper about three fingers wide and a finger long, fifteen small pieces of Argosan onyx, and a small bowl filled with burnt dragon gold. If any one of his friends saw what the materials for the rings were they would have spat out blood. Any one of the materials he had in front of him could keep a rich family running for a decade, and the total value of the items on the table was no less than forty platinum shards, or rather four billion stone shards.

Taking one of the bars of metal, Laurence summoned his hammer and began to work away at the blue tinted copper. With each strike, he bent and warped the metal until it was thin and malleable, then he looked at its deepest parts for impurities or fractures with his truesight. With each fracture Laurence found within the molecular structure of the metal he would meld it together with nearby complete meshes and then move on, while with each impurity he would isolate it and incinerate it with his inner flame.

After he had completed his purification of the metal, he moved on to the gemstones. They were all roughly the same size, but for Laurence’s ribs they needed to be exactly the same size, else his workload would increase by five times. He ordered the gems by size, and then began stripping them away until they were all identical to his truesight, then split them into three groups of five. The waste material he took and held in his hand, focusing for a moment before fusing it all together into one new gem about twice the size of any single gemstone that he had just cut.

Lining the gems up with the first bar of metal, he split it into five parts and began working each thin strip into the shape of the ring he was intending to make. He inserted the gem into the soft metal ring and began reshaping it with his fingers and his mana, until the setting was perfectly flush on the shank, the body of the ring itself. He checked the first gem once more before performing the process four more times.

Once he had set the gem in the shank of the ring, he began working on the filigree. The filigree was important because that would be what designated the use of the ring, but the more complex the ability, the more numerous the glyphs would have to be. After a moment's thought he sank his mind into the makeup of the ring and began writing. Each glyph he drew with his mind, infinitesimally small to the point where it was invisible to the naked eye, made up another larger glyph that was one of the six major glyphs that represented the Books. One glyph for the space to hold anything they need, for Order, one glyph for a way to save themselves, for Life, and one for a last ditch offensive blow, for Destruction. He had long since planned out the rings, but only now was he finally letting the glyphs come to fruition. There would be thousands, hundreds of thousands of glyphs that would make up the single glyph on the ring. In the end, to do the first ring it took him twenty minutes of solid work, even though the moment he thought the glyph it would appear on the ring.

When it was done, and the glyph of Order was inscribed onto the ring, he began pouring the burnt dragon gold into the rivulet made by the filigree and then watched as the gold began hardening. Burnt dragon gold was a special material, beyond all other it was important because it allowed for the power in the gemstone to restore itself with the energy of the world, which mean that not only would the gemstone be a much more stable battery, but also it would never reach the point where the battery itself would drain power from the rest of the object's essence. It was something that Laurence had retrospectively had to add to a lot of his tools to make sure that they would never collapse when he needed them. Fortunately for him, Inklight would repair itself using the light from the surroundings, so he had one less tool to worry about.

After the metal began hardening over the filigree, Laurence began working on the other rings. The first three took over an hour to make, but the last twelve took two hours in total. It was a lot simpler for him to make the rings once the glyphs had been inscribed once before. Rather than copy them hand by hand he just had to copy them from one ring to the next. It was actually something that he enjoyed doing.

Finally, he had to apply the three prepared arrays on each kind of rings. The first was a stability array, to lock the dimensions of the storage ring. The second was a boosting array, applied to the offensive ring and defensive ring to buff them both up, compounding and increasing their strengths to the point where they would be usable against even a Heaven ranked challenger or member of the clans. The third array was the only one that was applied to all three kinds of rings. It was what was known as a life binding array, which would never allow the ring to leave the possession of the person it was bound to. If the ring was removed by another person it would return to the owner in some way within minutes. It was the array applied to most valuable heirlooms, and one of the most complicated arrays that an arrayist could create.

Like clockwork, Laurence placed each array symbol into the ring and connected them together, until everything was bound either through material, or mana, to the battery in the setting of the rings. They were complete, so he grabbed a cloth and just polished them until they shined. You could do a lot with mana, create forms and hard tools in midair, but for some reason anything created with the substance would end up looking slightly unnatural. the edges would be too sharp or the flat would be too flat. There was something unsettling about it, so to get around this, Laurence would get a cloth and some sandpaper and just scratch up the rings with sandpaper, then buff them until they shone and were smoother with the cloth and polish.

After four hours, Laurence was finally finished with making the rings. Each one was a masterpiece by anyone else’s standards, but he knew that he could do better. These rings were by no means his magnum opus. They were by no means his manifestation.

Within the Book of Creation there was a set of rings that could be created as a manifestation, they would allow you to manipulate the elements as you pleased and were made by an ancient member of the Hephaistia clan to woo a woman from the Zephyr clan. It had not succeeded, and the man had later committed suicide as he could not bear to live without the woman who had become his muse for ascension, but they were well known treasures. Any set of rings would inevitably get compared to the rings in question, the Williamshold Set. Five rings, the first four to control each of the four elements, and the fifth to control them all in concert. The rings on their own would allow a person to excel in their understanding of the elements, but together they would have complete mastery. Laurence had thought about the Williamshold Set when he had created the rings in front of him, but he knew that whatever his manifestation was, it would not be that.

He put the rings away in five simple cloth bags that he had prepared the previous day and gathered them together. It was time for him to meet his friends and continue their journey. They would be prepared for anything, and if they were not, then he would make something that would allow them to be.