I used a ritual while I worked on the lord. We were in his library, and he was at the center of a perfect circle circumscribed with a pentagram, each point with its own candlelight bedecking the room in a cold glow that helped illuminate the manifest glyphs whirling above. It didn’t mean much to Reizenbrahm, the lighting or the pentagram, though the ritual did put him off somewhat. It seemed, however, that my own perception gave the ritual more weight.

“Don’t look directly at the glyphs,” I added, perhaps a touch too late. “It’s probably not good for someone like you.”

He coughed a little and nodded, clearly terrified out of his mind. The kingdom had done a good job indoctrinating him.

I was invoking satanic powers, and though I was no longer a believer, I still couldn’t shake away some of my neurotic aversions to my former religion’s blasphemies and sins. That subconscious feeling of deviance and the whimsy associated with being a black magician gave my Biological Manipulation much more force.

Using my own body as a reference for what healthy and youthful tissue should look like, I set out to correct most of Reizenbrahm’s most glaring issues. High Power kept him up and going, but he was still in his seventies, feeling the repercussions of a warrior’s lifestyle. Weak bone integrity, muscular degeneration and joint issues were first to go. Afterwards, I addressed his ocular degeneration and rehydrated his intervertebral discs and other cartilage while removing as much indigestible waste matter as I could.

In the end, I felt like a poor student slapping together a barely passable project, or a mechanic ‘fixing’ a car by circumventing the underlying issues instead of fixing them directly. This obviously wouldn’t last.

I told him as much when I finally finished him up.

He jumped on his feet from his supine position, moving like a man half his age. It was mildly flattering to see the result of my work, but my words did not penetrate. “You’ve done a good job, Reza,” he said almost breathlessly, looking at his hands, clenching his fists, likely marvelling over the lack of aches, even the ones he had gotten used to.

I… pitied him. He would have it all taken away from him much faster than before. I would give it a year before he was back to his normal state; much too little time to treasure youth. I would likely come up with a solution to revert him entirely by then, but in the interim, he would have to come face to face with his mortality once again.

But he could handle it. He chose this, and knew the risks.

“There is a case over there,” he gestured absently, still engrossed with flexing his various muscles and posing in different ways. They looked like weapon forms, now that I paid attention. I looked towards the case. It had been there since we entered, and I waited to check it until my job was done.

I opened the chest with one hand, Farhaan always on my other, and peered into it. With my newly augmented vision, it was clear to see: a bonesaw.

It looked like a short saw, built only to cut thin pieces of lumber, had a shiny silver gleam of steel and razor-sharp serrated edges. I picked it up and consciously held it away from my son, looking around it to try to mask my disappointment.

“It’s a Royal Treasure,” he told me. His hands were on his hips as he explained. “Nirla’s Amputator,” he casually explained.

The phrase ‘Royal Treasure’ evoked something in my memory. Stories of the heroes of Aellian history that I had read about over the past weeks. The Overlord of the Woods, carrier of the Wizened Staff, could command forests with naught but his will, the Sceptre of Malice that the king of Aellia always wielded, an instrument that could emit waves of fear, and the Golden Wings, worn by the Arsh Seilema of Dhul Arsha, granting him flight.

They were magic-imbued objects that carried no risk of Chaotic Immersion to its wielder, and according to the history books, were quite rare. For every ten thousand soldier was at least one Royal Treasure, and though they sounded like the property of the ruling class, they were only called this because anyone with such an instrument had the potential to take over a country.

So of course, the states of today made sure that those that wielded a Royal Treasure were almost exclusively either royalty or those beholden to royalty. Plundering a Royal Treasure from anyone not fitting that description and giving it to the king as an offering could see one handsomely rewarded with more money than they knew how to spend. It was an understandable sacrifice anyhow; money was valuable but power could open more doors.

Reizenbrahm understood then, why I looked at him with such an impressed expression.

“Spoils of war,” he laughed. “I may only come from a long line of judges, but I regaled you about my adventures in the western seas. I have almost a dozen such weapons to my name, but most high-ranking nobles only have one or two. I just never had anyone I could trust to use them.”

Instead of it being reassuring that he could share such sensitive information with me, it only made me more conscious of what he had over me. That said, I had stakes in his success.

“But you trust me,” I replied, looking the bonesaw over.

“I trust that the charm inlaid into the treasure will either allow you to find a way to make more of them, or will help you in your pursuits. Preferably the former, which is the service I will ask of you. Find a way to make more.” he said. “That said, I don’t demand that you succeed. This will be a gift from me to you. Feel free to dismantle it if that helps you understand it any better than the greatest craftsmen on Allmother.”

Understandable. It was, after all, a regretful fact that a Royal Treasure could not be invented. One could be cultivated by being instrumental objects in several legendary feats, so most Royal Treasures only ever tended to be normal weapons.

A Royal Treasure that was a non-combat instrument, however? They worked miracles at the cost of combat prowess. The bonesaw was likely not a weapon, but I was skeptical about its charm being anything else than a way to cut people up more effectively. Likely, a war medic saved countless lives with it, enough to send droves of men home, if not whole then at least alive.

And it whispered that to me. Life was all that mattered in the end. There was magic in life, regardless of disability or injury. Eating good food, and if that wasn’t possible, seeing great sights, and if that wasn’t possible, hearing amazing music, but if you could do none of that, the warmth of a loving family that would care for you would still be there. After all, you are a hero. You took this injury for your country, and now your work is done.

I regained my wits and almost smiled as I turned it around to see the engravings of Nirla. It was a good treasure, cultivated by someone with enough empathy to at least encourage their patients every time they operated.

I looked up at him and with a content nod, looked over at the many different books I still hadn’t finished reading. “Allow me some time with your tomes.”

He left the library promptly, a spring to his step.

000

Weeks had passed, and I hadn’t come close to figuring out the inner workings of Nirla’s Amputator. The bonesaw remained intact of course as I pored through as many books as I could on the subject. Reizenbrahm’s resources were great, but I found them lacking in scientific grit. Sure, a couple of people felt the need to question how legends could empower weapons, but many writers on the subject were content with writing down the capabilities of the greatest Royal Treasures on the planet.

Nirla’s Amputator could painlessly cut through a limb and create healthy skin on the stump, eliminating the risk of bleeding out. It was one hundred percent an instrument of saving lives. A skilled enough user could perform amputations mid-combat and treat the instrument as a weapon for war, but the lack of pain in their target would make fighting a chore.

My search for a madness-negating glyph fell through entirely as well. The closest thing to success I could find was a way to spoof the ‘veil’ that covered my mind whenever I was aware of the starscape of spells. The veil itself was a fluid and dynamic screen, but since I lacked the specific glyph that fastened the fluid veil to my mind, I could only attach it to a spell ponderously, and avoid a smidgeon of Chaotic Immersion.

Of course, I immediately got the idea to store this fluid somehow, but there was no vessel that could actually hold it. I was leery of following this thread of research as well, as the act of gathering this fluid was already fairly intense on Chaotic Immersion.

I was convinced to continue because of the presence of Royal Treasures. They had a way to trap magic into mundane materials, so who was to say that I couldn’t do the same deliberately.

I figured out pretty quickly that biological items were more receptive towards forced storage of magic. Stuff like wood and plants could hold them much more easily than metallic rods and swords. Thus, I set to whittling myself a staff, and I opened my pouch of payments in order to test out precious metals and gems. After all, gems were a common enough payment method for the Gem-Eyed nobility of Aellia.

Gold, as I expected, did nothing, and neither did any of the other gems, except for a single tiny diamond.

I hypothesized that since diamonds were carbon-based, and likely came from the decomposed bodies of living matter, they were still qualified to hold magic.

But that tiny diamond held almost half the magic that my staff could, and it couldn’t possibly weigh more than a ten thousandth of the staff.

Alas, I needed a bigger diamond.

I pored through the starscape of spells, looking for one that could create diamonds for myself. I obviously found none, so I searched for any cluster that could grant me two very simple spells: heat and pressure. To my luck, I found them. They were elementary ways to manipulate matter, so I wasn’t very surprised that someone had shared a spell like that anyway.

I could generate enough heat using the pressure spell alone, but the heat spell would help me regulate the heat and manipulate the crystalline structures much easier. The spell gave me marginal control over heated objects, hence the free range of manipulation.

I was very likely not to find a diamond big enough for my purposes, and attaching dozens of tiny ones at the end of the stick would make it more difficult to draw in the magic for spells. I needed a single large crystal for maximal efficiency, and since it didn’t exist, I needed to make one.

I was in the library before I knew it, a couple of lumps of coal that I found in some chute in a sack. I sketched out a pentagram, placed the candles on the right places, and placed the lumps directly in the middle.

Then, I manifested the glyphs, humming lowly while I did. I could feel the ritual ratcheting in power, the glyphs glowing brighter as I acted out the stereotypical role of a witch.

I needed more energy.

“I invoke the forces of hell,” a hell I didn’t believe in. “And entreat the devil to my side. Let us dine on the corpse of God.” I bit my lower lip to stop myself from laughing. I was never that big on theatre and it showed. The glyphs were beginning to blaze brightly however.

That was, it seemed, more than enough deviance and devilry to give me all the power that I needed. Multi-casting hadn’t been beyond me now for quite a while, but despite my heightened attributes, the intensity of my non-Biomagic spells left much to be desired. As such, I needed as much power as I could muster.

Optimized Magic Manipulation in full blast, I proceeded to levitate the lumps of coal with omnidirectional pressure. They pulverized underneath the pressure, becoming one solid mass of black.

I cast my mind back to the starscape and found an already labeled cluster known as earth magic, with a foundational spell known as ‘Purify Mineral’ that I spent my last precious spell point on. Why anyone had the idea to make such a spell, I didn’t know or care, but it was beyond useful. Coal couldn’t become a diamond because it still had too many impurities.

When I used Purify Mineral, the pulverized lump decreased to almost half its size, becoming as big as Reizenbrahm’s fist. I only upped the pressure from there, reducing it to the size of my fist before introducing heat into the equation.

It took… an embarrassingly long time for any sort of difference to occur. An hour maybe, by my estimates. I managed to slowly ramp up both heat and pressure to an amazing extent by then, snowballing the effect over and over again. By the time two hours had passed, I had likely managed to rack up just shy of one million pounds per square inch of pressure on that tiny, glassy ball of carbon, and fifteen hundred degrees celsius of heat suffusing its every inch.

I almost lost focus when Farhaan started crying. I could just barely manage to cast a Satiation spell on him without letting go of my current task, but fortunately that was enough to stop him from wailing more. It had been a close call.

When the final layer was finished crystallizing. I let the temperature drop and the pressure ease, gently lowering it back down to the ground. Though it was the hardest material on earth, that didn’t make it shatter-proof. Indeed, it was quite fragile, and I would have to treat this priceless natural treasure with care lest it break on me.

It looked like an oversized golf ball actually, with hundreds of tiny facets that shone beautifully with the surrounding candles. Perfectly circular as well, except for the jaggy facets, it was the size of a tennis ball and was completely transparent considering the lack of impurities. It was undoubtedly a thing of beauty.

“You’re finally finished?”

I swung my head towards where Reizenbrahm stood. He blinked away the spots in his eyes. His ability to see heat likely didn’t play well with what he witnessed. “Word to the wise,” he just said. “Don’t deal with extremely hot things in a room filled with precious books.”

“I had it under control,” I said. “But your concern is noted.”

“Is that… glass?” He asked. “Or did you make…?”

“Yes,” I said. “I did.”

“Can you… make more?” He asked.

“It will push back research on expanding your life expectancy,” I said honestly. “I created this to be an aid for myself, and…”

I pushed the fluid magic straight into it. The orb sucked it in rapidly and I could barely keep up with its greed. A small core of green manifested in the center, and the larger it grew, the slower it took in fluid magic, until that core grew to nearly the size of the orb itself, at which point, any more fluid magic fed into it would only leak away and rejoin the atmosphere.

“Purge Poison,” I said towards the ground. The evocation didn’t need words, but the mnemonic helped speed up the mental process. A wisp of green shot out from the orb and struck the floor. Zero Chaotic Immersion.

All I had to do was channel my intent into the gem and it did the rest.

I had done it.

Well, almost, really. There was no guarantee that someone wouldn’t go mad attempting the thing I had just done. Both making the diamond and manipulating fluid magic into the orb in the first place.

That said, a single tiny diamond was likely enough to contain quite a few spells. From what I could tell, it could likely hold enough magic to cast a dozen Purge Life spells. They were, however, prohibitively expensive, meaning only the ruling class could ever raise capable mages.

Entirely unacceptable. If I gave up on chasing after a better solution now, I would be consigning the working class to constant tyranny with very little chance of ever rising up. The disparity in levels was already bad enough as it was, but magic would irrevocably widen that gap.

“A major success, I take it,” he asked.

I took a moment to remember that, and found myself smiling now. It wasn’t the success I had wanted, but it was a major step forward. “Indeed.” I would try inducing fluid magic on body-parts next, to see if it could be stored internally. I had held off on dangerous self-experimentation until I would hit my first major success, so I would have more tools at hand to lessen any risks. Now, I felt ready.

“Good,” he replied. “You can pretend that your madness is actually a charm from that orb and pose it as a Royal Treasure. Good job. Though it was not exactly what I wanted, I will reward you accordingly once you explain to me what it is.” The thought to do that hadn’t immediately cross my mind, but the more I mulled it over, the more I liked the idea. For the time being at least. “Though I did come here for another reason. We will talk about your discovery later. For now, it is best that you come upstairs.”

“Why?” I asked as I put the glowing green diamond orb or Focus into the sooty sack I had brought the coal in with.

He puffed his chest proudly. “My heir has arrived.”