“Do not consider that to be wealth which is hoarded away, for how is it better than sand gathered from the nearest heap? Nor that which comes in from men who groan at their taxes: for the gold that is wrung from tears is of base alloy and black.”

-Apollonius Of Tyana

“I live in the angle of a leaden wall, into whose composition was poured a little alloy of bell-metal. Often, in the repose of my mid-day, there reaches my ears a confused tintinnabulum from without. It is the noise of my contemporaries.”

-Henry David Thoreau

==Caden==

I hadn’t only been working on teleportation, though it was my most significant accomplishment with emblems. Another shard had been busy with everything else that I had learned.

I had been holding off on absorbing the small enchanted stones given to me by Zidaun a few days back. Mainly because I had taken the time to analyze them and still felt like something was missing.

They were made of a single rune, with a tiny bit of subscript describing exactly how that rune should take effect. One type produced heat, and I had several of those. And I had a single one that produced light.

However, either enchantments worked differently in some way, or there wasn’t enough information to make it run as it did.

I had watched Zidaun and his party turn these off and on, but there was no trigger. There was no mana accumulation rune either, but since I could pour mana into them manually, I assumed others could probably do the same.

I hadn’t seen anyone do that with their enchantments, but since I provided plenty of light and heat, they hadn’t needed to either. They would eventually deal with some dark environments, but that would come later.

I had hoped to learn more from leveling up, but it hadn’t happened. They were so simple that I felt like I understood the rune on them completely. However that rune didn’t make sense in context.

So I took the time to absorb one.

There was something there, but a single one left it hazy.

So I absorbed another.

It snapped into place.

I hadn’t worked with enchantments at all until now, but I could see how they were made.

Instructions were placed into them at the time of their creation. That included an instruction for when they were supposed to turn off and on.

An array of options appeared in my head. They could turn on and off in response to almost anything, as long as you knew the right command. Light level, temperature, proximity, people in general, a specific person, verbal commands, switches, internal power levels, the list of possibilities went on and on.

The only instruction I learned was how to specify a response to a verbal command, because that was how these ones had been made.

That information also made it clear that something else was interpreting all of this. I had already been fairly sure, but the level of complexity of the commands did not get anywhere close to what was needed. Computers had needed vast amounts of training to learn how to respond to voices for the most basic things. And computers still had trouble understanding what a person was. So, for this system to simply take in a command and then be able to distinguish people wasn’t possible, unless much more was going on in another system behind the scenes.

And that made sense. The system that I used for my status screens seemed very simple at times, but it was correctly interpreting my thoughts and actions in real time. And it was even personalizing my specific interactions with the system. Not to mention it created new material when it ran into something it had never seen before.

All of my messages were in English. And I had gotten my first notification only a short time after arriving in this world. So it figured out my language in that time. Whatever was running the system needed to be vastly complicated. Assuming, of course, that it wasn’t simply part of how this universe worked. I couldn’t know for sure.

Regardless, the knowledge of the ritual was good to have, but essentially useless.

I needed to move and talk to enact it, in addition to moving mana in a certain way. Unfortunately my avatar was no more able to move mana than my core.

I could move mana using my aura, but it lacked the cohesiveness I had seen when Tam was working. I suspected that I was missing at least one skill, but more likely two.

The first skill was just to make and move mana in a specific manner for spell casting. I suspected that there was a specific spell related to the ritual as well. There could even be more skills related to specific parts of the ritual. A skill for chanting, another for waving around the arms, another to move the mana to the correct place, perhaps there was even another language skill for chanting.

I didn’t have a verbal component to the language of magic. It was possible that it didn’t have one and each language made up names for each symbol related to what they did. However, I had part of a chant in my head now. It wasn’t any language I spoke, but I understood what parts of it meant. It felt very familiar to the structure of the runic language.

So it was possible that I was actually missing the verbal half of the language.

My avatar might be able to qualify for doing the gestures and chant, if I gained what else I needed. Hell, for all I knew, I might be able to make a statue wave its arms and chant. That might qualify too.

I had no use for the remaining enchantments. I knew the runic components already.

I absorbed the ones that remained

Small details of the chant and motions clarified in my mind. Subtle motions and intonations that would make the ritual more efficient went into my mind. And from the light rune I received a slight variation of the chant.

I could tell that a different person had made it. They had made it slightly more efficiently than the heat runes in most ways, though I could see ways to join the two methods to be better than either was on its own.

Maybe once I could speak to people I could start an enchanting school. All I would need was an example of their work to tell them what they needed to do better. Which was funny, since I wasn’t capable of doing it myself.

Those that can’t do, teach.

I snorted; I was literally the embodiment of that phrase.

I had learned something immediately useful from this, however. If I used folerth to conduct the mana in conjunction with a switch, activation rune, and a mana accumulator, I could create a new type of light. This type, like the one made by the dungeon, would run off of ambient mana. After doing some testing, I had realized that mana crystal lights did as well, but they were far more efficient than what the dungeon generated normally.

I would need to test what the emblem lights were like. So I started to do that. Even if they proved to be less efficient than my original dungeon lights, I had places I would use this new type. I could make some very precise adjustments with the runic subtext. I could make a light dimmer or brighter, change the color, specify a cone of light, even make it cycle through different colors. I didn’t know the full commands for that last one yet, but I could see enough to know it could be done.

Just getting a very precise cone or beam of light would be useful enough on its own. I had needed to make very powerful lights and use mirrors to direct the light when I wanted that effect before now. The mana crystals were great for most lights, but their efficiency declined when making things very bright, because the crystal started to go opaque as well. So light from back portions of the crystal had a harder time reaching the front to shine out. And even with mirrors the center of the crystal couldn’t get light out. I made my crystals hollow to compensate, but it didn’t scale up as well as I liked.

Getting very precise colors was even better. I could, and did, mix and match colors by altering and combining colored crystals. However, the light started out white, so I was inevitably losing part of the brightness there, and very specific shades could be difficult. I was lucky, since I could precisely recreate any shade I had made or found, but even so, it wasn’t perfect.

I had a feeling that, if I was careful enough, I could use the emblems to specify exactly the wavelength of light that I needed. Not in a numerical way, but in an analog manner, slowly learning the exact tuning needed. Fortunately, I should be able to save and apply those exact changes by absorbing them as well. If I needed to manually recreate everything, it would take me forever.

I was glad I didn’t only generate randomly too though. There were options to make a random dungeon floor, and I had tried it.

They were awful, and boring.

A random assortment of connected rooms and hallways, filled with monsters. All the monsters were about the same level of difficulty, borrowed from the monsters I had available. There was little variety anywhere, and the rooms did not seem to fit with each other. The ceilings were of mismatched heights, the doorways were the same style for the same hallway, but turn a corner and the next one would all be different.

I had walked through it in my avatar, and everything felt wrong. It felt like a machine had designed it. A machine that had no idea it was supposed to be consistent. I could have fixed it, but I could do better myself, so I didn’t bother. I had just removed it and decided to make my own. I still used the randomization functions, but I made sure to give very clear directions for what I wanted. And after that was done I went in and personalized the details.

After testing out the emblems I discovered that they were operating at a level that was very similar to the mana crystal. They were lightly less efficient for a generic white light. However, for any kind of color, or for anything intensely bright, they were much more efficient.

I made a few of the models I would need and put corrections into the dungeon. My countless tiny colored stars in the starlight grotto would be replaced by emblems, though the white ones I left alone. I set the instructions to replace them one at a time. With the very small amount of mana I had available it would take most of a night. However, the lights in the grotto would be more efficient after that. Also the old mana crystals would be put into storage to be placed elsewhere. For the moment, I was trying to be as efficient as possible.

I had messed around with the folerth alloys earlier.

The ones using silver and gold were easy enough to make. The fastest alloy was a fifty percent mix of both gold and folerth. The speed declined back to the baseline for folerth as the percentage of gold in the mix declined. The speed of the mana transfer didn’t increase after the gold rose above fifty percent. And, at any amount above fifty percent, the metal started to heat up. At fifty-five percent the metal started to heat up and then glow when it was used continuously. I let it run to see what would happen, and it exploded when the metal got hot enough to deform.

If I didn’t have a much more efficient heat rune already, I could have used this to heat something up. I suspected that if I placed it underwater, the water would keep it cool enough to keep functioning.

A similar thing happened with the silver. Fifty percent was the cutoff again. The speed of the mana transfer slowed to almost nothing at fifty percent silver. Above that level of silver and the metal started to heat while it was in use.

I tried adding in additives to see what would happen. Any significant amount of additives and the rune would simply explode, sending hot metal shrapnel everywhere. I could add in 0.1% of something that wasn’t folerth or one of the other metals, by volume, before the rune would explode. The additions didn’t add to the performance of the rune.

I tried electrum to see what would happen. I started with a fifty-fifty mix of silver and gold combined with an equal amount of folerth. It created something odd. It would absorb mana up to a certain point and then push all that mana through at once. It was a capacitor.

I messed with the different ratios to see what I would get. After some experiments I discovered how it worked. Folerth determined how much mana the capacitor would take, gold determined how fast mana would fill the capacitor, while silver determined the time between discharges.

I wasn’t quite like an electrical capacitor, since it would discharge whether it got to a threshold level of mana accumulation or not. It would also stop absorbing once it reached the maximum amount of mana it could hold. If I used a large amount of folerth, it was entirely possible to have an alloy that would always discharge well before it could achieve its maximum storage. And this alloy let me go as low as twenty percent folerth before it started to heat up and have issues. So it acted less like a capacitor and more like a repeating timer in some ways.

I only had a few other pure materials that I could combine with folerth. Iron and folerth simply exploded. Sulfur and folerth didn’t just explode, it produced a yellowy metal that produced a large hot and fiery explosion as soon as mana started to run through it. It stank of brimstone as well.

Chlorine made the folerth very brittle, and it didn’t so much explode as crack into thousands of tiny pieces with the barest amount of mana.

All the elements I had access to reacted in similar ways, except for one.

Copper and folerth were strange. When a concentrated stream of mana entered an alloy of the two, ambient mana pushed away from the alloy. The speed of the mana inside the alloy didn’t change, but ambient mana avoided it. If the ambient mana collector was nearby, then the rune would flash on and off as it used up its mana without being able to refresh it, and then absorbed more when mana stopped flowing through the copper alloy.

I could use this to store mana in a container lined with copper-folerth alloy, but I already had plenty of ways to store mana. Maybe I could use it repel spells?

I was still working on combining folerth with mana crystals. I knew that they could combine somehow, but I didn’t know how. Simply lining the exterior of a mana crystal with folerth wasn’t enough. Using thin sheets of each material in alternating leaves didn’t work either. Nor did powdered mana crystal inside folerth. Tiny specks of folerth inside a mana crystal worked no better.

The problem was that unlike a metal alloy, I couldn’t just create a pattern with specific percentages of each. The mana crystal was more complex with a very specific molecular structure. And I couldn’t just combine the two haphazardly.

I could take the structure from a mana crystal and impose it on folerth, so the metal was aligned in the same pattern, but that just produced structurally weak folerth. It had no other special properties.

It was entirely possible that a standard enchanter would hand the job of combining them off to a master smith. Actually…

I might be able to do something with that.