‘All natural materials hold some magical component. Whether the sun in the sky, the earth we walk on, the air we breathe, or even the time we pass through, however, the less physical this form of nature presents itself as, the harder it is to utilise. Additionally, nature is extremely fickle with those who may use its magic, only granting the acceptance to special individuals. We wish to overturn that. Compared to the barely one in ten thousand who are accepted by nature, at least one in ten individuals can use magic in the first place! With varying degrees of talent, that is, and so we found ways to utilise magic ourselves. The crudest form of which is the well-developed field of alchemy, by no means a simple or weak type of magic as its simplicity allows it to integrate so many other fields. But the discovery of alchemy led to a revolution for us, the arcane practitioners, we discovered that all of nature may be our tools to interact with a great source of magic like no other.

The Arcane.’

That was the first real passage of the book, an end to the dead practitioner’s preface and a start of learning how this all truly worked. And while a lot more history, it provided a far clearer description as to what arcane magic truly was, unlike Diavolo’s explanation.

And so, that led to a description of what gemstone magic was, although this time he glanced over the history of its discovery.

Like the prior passage mentioned, ‘all of nature’ became a viable experimental subject for the practitioners, and geology was a huge breadth of research as the myriad gemstones were known about to a rather high degree.

Albeit for jewellery.

However, as random runes were inscribed onto precisely cut gemstones, it was common to see them completely explode into pieces! This was a sign that while the object interacted with the runes, and in turn the Arcane, they’d selected completely wrong ones, and slowly came about a complete runic set for the magic. Although, this was only so easily done because gemstone magic made use of an extraordinarily simple 49 rune alphabet, unlike languages which required thousands of them.

So, gemstone magic very quickly became one of the simpler forms of arcane magic which received a lot of focus. Jewellery wasn’t a new concept, and so it was easiest for those with experience and magical talent to quickly enter this brand new space. But once more, this was history from millennia ago!

Every gemstone held its own property, and this property could only utilise certain elements of magic.

This was an important part, as what allowed any arcane magic to work is the fact that nature and its elements are two separate entities; just as nature and its magic are separated in a special way. Through this differentiation, runes are engraved into the faces of a cut gemstone to grant it elemental effects which lined up with its property.

For simplicities sake, rubies and garnets both have the property of blood and fire, this made them excellent for a host of magics involving those elements. Healing wounds, or controlling blood in an opponent, all the way to summoning great flames which can instantly engulf a figure much like solar magic achieved!

Therefore, the main benefit of gemstone magic couldn’t be clearer. Besides simplicity, it could interact with every element! This universal nature only made it even more desirable.

Unfortunately, the owner claimed that its craft began to wane as other accessory crafting magics grew in popularity. These magics were generally stronger than the limit of gemstone magic too, a simple fault of its tiny alphabet and the physical limitations of gemstones. Big gems can be used to create even stronger effects, but that means a way to socket them is always necessary. To say the least, the only way to socket a fist-sized diamond is on the head of a staff or crown. Perhaps a special socket in a breastplate worked as well.

Nonetheless, arcane magic is still that in the end. And so, that presented him with the first mission of this tower.

Produce a hexagonal diamond made of stone, ideally granite. This shape very closely mimicked a common shape of gemstones which could be easily used in a pendant, and required relatively high precision to create.

Without a doubt, he really couldn’t do it without some proper lighting and decided to focus on just reading the introductory book in front of him to learn the process better. There was also a matter of runes, but the test explicitly didn’t ask for such a thing as it often took months for an untrained individual to engrave such things without breaking the medium.

It was also around here, that he scrounged through the various wooden compartments and chests around the room, finding all manners of gemstones and minerals in them which seemed vaguely recognisable on Earth. Nothing appeared obviously magical.

However, it was quite a surprised when he found one chest utterly filled with regular blocks of granite, a perfect size to grip in his palm, and a simple note on top in yellowed and even browned paper. It simply read, ‘To a hopeful apprentice, use these to avoid wasting talent on gathering stone.’

Perhaps a final gift from the former owner to ease the progress of a new arcane practitioner. With the cuboid stone blocks tightly packed in the chest, he saw at least 40 in the top layer, and by their width guessed it contained six layers. That gave him at least 240 attempts to make this thing… Hopefully it was enough.

Closing the chest, he left it in the tower as the tool were all required for any future work. Then finished searching the room thoroughly before flipping through the introductory book for more answers to questions he came up with.

One thing which wasn’t explained very well is what about arcane magic was ‘unnatural’, even if the book itself seemed to take itself that way.

And for that, he actually found a random passage about it in between a section describing the elemental match-ups of gemstones with other materials, and the importance of brilliance on a gemstone’s final effect depending on elements.

The fact that these two things were considered ‘introductory’ topics really told him a lot about even such a basic arcane magic.

‘Those accepted will often say that arcane magic is an abuse of nature, although some more moderates simply argue that it is unnatural. Neither are objectively wrong, and I do not wish to confer the morals of such beliefs, but most of us always rationalise that humans themselves abuse nature. There is no wrong in arcane magic, and no apprentice should ever accept that they commit some sort of sin against the world. If nature is picky, then we form a path around it! That is the belief of so many, but it is preferable that any apprentice comes to their own conclusion.’

It took a few moments to realise that this was a considerable open-minded comment from someone who lived in near isolation from the tribes and those who used nature magic. Then again, it was unlikely that most groups truly hated each other when fighting was far too difficult in the first place.

Perhaps if enough tablets to form cities became a common sight then there’d be far more conflict.

“But why is it unnatural? Just because it uses the Arcane instead of the magic of nature itself? Or because it uses the items of nature as a medium for the Arcane…” His thoughts buffered for a few seconds as he came to a realisation, and he couldn’t help but laugh in the workshop room. Then said, “I sound like a fucking crackpot, and I’ve only been here a couple weeks,” but continued his laugh right after.

It wasn’t maniacal or disheartening, but more of a joyous laugh which mocked his situation. Like seeing a relatable yet hilarious joke.

The core concepts of gemstone magic were all pretty simple at least.

Smash pretty rock, write on pretty rock, stick pretty rock in stuff…

An apt summary which gave him another chuckle. Even if the first two steps of that were undoubtedly a massive pain as evident of his struggles in carving a totem. Not even carefully chipping and polishing a small crystal, but a giant hunk of wood which quite literally peeled away, yet he screwed it up.

“Maybe there are potions for dexterity? Finer control would be great around now,” he commented as he read more of the book, trying to take in as much information as possible but with such density he barely got anywhere.

Still, today was an astounding day. He finally found a sort of magic which didn’t depend on nature, but kind of still did, and would likely soon gain access to flames created through solar magic.

What wasn’t there to love?

With that in mind, he took the book with him and walked out of the tower, surprised to see it automatically open as he approached the end of the descending staircase. Additionally, it similarly opened whenever he came from the outside, perhaps signalling that the tower ‘remembered’ him. Either way it made things a hell of a lot easier for the future and he’d try to memorise all the key points of the book before moving onto any real practise.

For example. Say he created a necklace with a silk string, and brass bindings and pendent. What gemstones would synergise, break, or outright fail catastrophically with such a setup?

Well, that was kind of a trick question.

Silk strings and brass interacted negatively when near the Arcane’s power, and any stone of any element would simply cause an instant failure, with the sole exception of peridot which explodes violently in a direct correlation to the number of runes engraved on the gemstone and Arcane power drawn upon. As well as this, it is very likely that the silk will catch fire in this process, in the best cases just scalding your neck. Worst case was death, unsurprisingly.

Mistakes are absolutely intolerably to arcane practitioners.

The simple solution is to pick a metal which are either elementally aligned or… literally elementally aligned. Brass is made of zinc and copper, so the necklace itself must be made of either of those two elements, OR an alloy containing either.

One single damn case, and it was for a type of thread he didn’t even have.

Oh, and it seemed that the design of the thing also began to apply at higher levels but the book glanced over such a complex matter since design is an incredibly tough thing to train. Taking years of dedicated work and understanding of both your craft and art to properly grasp.

But on that note, he set off home with his mind bursting with knowledge but his heart burning to open up just this introductory book and read more.

It contained so much information, but so little at the same time.

Surprisingly, he didn’t spend the rest of the day reading nonstop, but finally grew annoyed enough by the store of meat in his inventory that he made a crude smoker based on what he saw at the village. The design was astoundingly simple, using three sticks as support like a tent, then creating small, tiered platforms with decreasing size up the supports. With these platforms made of sticks too, the gaps between them naturally allowed smoke to pass upwards, from there it could be stored in a crate or something.

This small build required six sticks, nine hemp string, and a hemp rope. Not to mention the last of his original glue stick to help meld together the various small twigs to the triangular edges. Now, just setting up a smoky flame beneath and placing the meat was left, to which he left the thing running for the rest of the day.

At some point the third sun shard completed its formation, although he only checked this around sunset. But before that, he collected the new set of sun slivers whilst thinking of the ideal way to ground them into dust.

An excuse. Really he just wanted to read more about gemstone magic for now.