Andrew woke up feeling better. He was getting more accustomed to sleeping on rough ground now, and the faint stiffness was welcome compared to the throbbing of his wounds from last night. He headed to the riverbank and unwound his bandages, then rinsed them in the river and set them aside to dry. He washed the crusted blood away from the arrow wounds he had taken the day before and when he picked off the scabs he found fresh pink skin beneath.

Thank god for passive healing. I bet those arrow wounds would have gotten pretty nasty and infected if this was still earth.

He pulled out the strips of wood he had weighed down to soak overnight. They were bloated with absorbed liquid but significantly more flexible now. He laid them out across his stone table to dry hoping that the process would have the effect he was hoping for. He then gathered up his bandages and laid them out near the forge to dry.

I should probably be boiling the water I use to wash my bandages anyways. That’s a thing right? Might get a medicine or triage skill or something out of it. Though is there really any reason to have one of those in this world? A good nights rest seems to clear some pretty major issues right up. How does disease work here? I'm not sure I want to find out.

Oh well, focus.

Need to build the rest of this armor, test some runes on it, get it on and assembled. Priorities.

Andrew started up his forge and began work on basic bracers for his forearms and biceps. The forearm bracers would extend from his wrists to cover a little bit of his elbow with some material removed from the inside to maintain flexibility. The bicep armor was simpler, a tube of metal that wrapped most of the way around his arm with a gap that would allow him to put it on, secured with punched holes and wooden bindings.

He spent most of the morning getting the bracers right, and had to melt down both a forearm brace and a bicep brace when he made irrecoverable mistakes. Even the pieces he was satisfied with needed to be reheated and adjusted several times to fit perfectly.

[Blacksmithing lvl 3-4]

[+1 Strength for performing physical labor that pushes your limits]

[+1 Intelligence for pushing the limits of your mana control]

He jumped straight into working on the leg guards, only pausing to drink from the river and chew on day old boar steak reheated by the heat of the nearby forge. It was disgusting enough to make him miss the dried meat and he threw himself into the work to distract himself from the poor meal.

Reheated boar char steaks make can't be healthy, though I guess high Vit will push right through some slightly off steak. It cleaned up arrow wounds well enough, fantasy health recovery should be plenty against food poisoning. Hopefully.

The leg guards reached from his knees to his ankles, with space left open in the back to allow his knee full flexibility. He had to melt these down three times, as he heavily messed up the sizing twice, and forgot to factor in his boots on the third.

It was well past noon by the time he got started on the plates that would make up his armored skirt. Or kilt, whatever. This would be the most difficult part of the project despite being made up of mostly just flat plates of metal. They had to be the correct size to all link together nicely, and he didn't have a leather skirt to mount them on. They would have to all connect through wooden bindings. He would have to overlap parts of the plate in order to protect the wooden bindings, otherwise a good hit to the legs could dislodge half his skirt. Kilt. Whatever.

He ended up just making a bunch of uniform plates, and a lot of extras in case one or the other fit better. He realized early into the planning process for this iron kilt that the weight would be an issue. A belt wasn't exactly going to cut it, especially if he was moving rapidly. He took a brief break from forging to cut some extra long strips of wood from the board and begin to soak those. He planned on making a kind of harness/suspender system. He wasn't sure how it would turn out, but it might help keep the chest armor in place as well.

[Blacksmithing lvl 4-5]

[+1 Strength for performing physical labor that pushes your limits]

[+1 Vitality for pushing the limits of your physical endurance]

[+1 Dexterity for performing precision labor]

[+1 Intelligence for pushing the limits of your mana control]

By the time he finished all the plates for the skirt and laid them out to cool the sun was beginning to set.

Turns out blacksmithing like this is pretty decent for the attribute gains. It requires strength and dexterity for the forging, and I can burn as much mana as I've got running that furnace all day. Push myself all day and I can even get a point of Vitality. Good shit.

He collected his wood strips from the river and laid them out between his forge and campfire this time. He hoped that the combined heat would be enough to help them dry quicker. He then grabbed the strips that had already dried and began assembling the straps that would hold his armor together. He threaded them through the holes he punched in the armor, using a quick pulse of empower item to bind them in a closed loop and increase their durability. He made far more straps than he would need, and practiced putting the whole set on, empowering it shut and taking it off again a couple times. If he cut the loops in the right place he could even re-seal the armor using the same loop, though he didn't plan on making a habit out of it. Re-empowering the same piece of wood cost more mana each time he did it, and he suspected the connection became weaker as well.

The metal had retained its red shine attributed to the fire-infused metal and he hoped that it wouldn't mess with the runic circles he was planning on inscribing the plate with. It was also warm to the touch, which he also attributed to the fire mana infusion.

He empowered each piece of armor. Pushing as much mana as he could into each. He had to rest a couple times, but his mana pool and regeneration speed were increasing quite quickly.

You will become more durable. You will conform to my body. You will hold large amounts of mana and take on the properties of mana infused within. You will become more durable.

The metal took on a similar glassy reflectiveness that the other empowered items had. The red shine was more apparent now, and it was slightly heavier. Nothing compared to earth infusion, but noticeable.

Next up, circle inscription. A circle of Earth mana infusion for durability. A circle of air mana infusion for decreased weight. A circle of water mana infusion to reduce a potential increase in flammability, just in case. Might also help with flexibility. I'll have to test out infusion ratios, but I should be able to power each circle individually.

He kept the furnace and firepit going throughout the evening to keep warm and provide light as he worked on inscribing the runic circles on the metal. He settled for basic mana gathering circles, as he wanted the mana's effects to be distributed throughout the entire piece.

When he finished inscribing runes on the chestplate he infused them in order. Fifteen points to earth mana, stopping when the metal started to darken and warp. Five points to water, it lost it's warm properties and he didn't want to deal with the potential of constant dampness. It was also getting quite heavy. At twenty points of air he stopped. He wanted to make the plate as light as possible, but the mana flow began to slow and he could feel some kind of building resistance, so he decided to play it safe. He could now see a muddy multicolored kaleidoscope of color in each reflection off the armor. It was more muted than before, probably influenced by the earth and water mana, though he couldn't be sure.

It should be a lot stronger than it was originally now anyways, and I even managed to lighten it slightly from the original, though most of the air mana went into counteracting the earth. Looks like a balance of 1/2 air, 1/8 water, 3/8 earth mana will work pretty well for now. I can't imagine the smaller pieces of metal will be able to hold as much mana, so I'll have to go slowly to infuse those.

Oh shit. Just realized how much work its going to be to infuse the skirt. Knew I should've just tried to make metal pants. Damn. Oh well.

He had inscribed the circles on the inside of the chest plate and would do the same for the backplate, but the rest would have to be inscribed on the outside. Carving a runic circle on the inside of a tube was beyond him at this point.

He worked late into the night to finish inscribing circles on his backplate, bracers, arm guards, and leg guards. He empowered each based on the ratio he used on his chestplate and by the time he finished was thoroughly exhausted. The extra strips he soaked for his kilt suspenders were dry now though, so that was a plus.

[+1 Intelligence for pushing the limits of your mana control]

[+1 Intelligence for pushing the limits of your man a control]

[+1 Wisdom for sustaining constant mana control]

[Rune Inscription lvl 3-4]

[Mana Inscription lvl 4-5]

[+ 1 Intelligence for pushing the limits of your mana control]

[+ 1 Dexterity for performing precise labor]

I'll have to leave inscribing and charging the kilt for tomorrow. This project took a little longer than I thought it would. Oh well, goblins will still be there when I come back tomorrow. I'll have to hunt too anyways.

Maybe I should try to make a stew or something. Keep it cooking all night. Don't need to preserve the food if you never stop cooking it after all. I'll have to throw making a bowl on the to do list for tomorrow. I don't think I'll trust those steaks to last another night, no matter how many I have sitting around. Wasteful, but there's a limit to trusting my vitality and I really don't want to be heavily ill out here.

He pumped all his remaining mana into the forge and threw another couple branches on the firepit before settling down to sleep.

He got right back to it the next morning, inscribing each of the plates with tiny circles. On some he had to only inscribe earth attribute circles and underpower them to avoid increasing weight too much. There simply wasn't enough room on the small plates for all of them to hold full three circle inscriptions. Even when he had the thought to nest the circles inside of one another, which thankfully had no impact on their effectiveness or qualities.

[+ 1 Dexterity for performing precise labor]

[+ 1 Intelligence for pushing the limits of your mana control]

Inscription took up most of his morning, and it was a little past noon when he finished empowering and assembling the entire kilt. He quickly set himself to assembling the entire suit of armor. Shin guards first, then kilt, chestpiece, then arm guards and bracers. Each piece was strapped over the oversized shirt and pants he still wore, now wrapped tight to his body by the armor, and overflowing into all the joints in-between. It was quite the look. Even with the air mana it felt heavy. He practiced running laps around the confines of his little valley and swinging both his hammer and his spear around to get a feel for the reduced flexibility.

Not sure how long I would last in this thing if I didn't have all my upgraded stats. Don’t know how any of those knights did it back in the day. Though this armor is probably a fair bit thicker than anything they dealt with. My smithing skills could use some work, especially in the aesthetics department.

Alright I'm ready. Time to head out.

Fully equipped.

This is it.

Gotta find me another boar.

Yep, not time for goblins yet, I'm hungry. Haven't eaten all morning and I'm not about to chance a two day old boar steak. Plus I'll get a little practical experience in the armor.

It didn't take him long to find the boar, and this time he didn't bother with a binding circle. The boar charged him and it's tusks skidded right off his chest armor as it impaled itself on his extended spear. They both went to the ground. Andrew rolled over and pushed the twitching boar off himself. Then stood and pulled the spear out. The boar stopped twitching and the spear was mercifully unbroken.

This is definitely not how hunting is supposed to go. Anyone on earth who claimed to hunt by tanking a boar head on would've sounded like an absolute maniac, but here I am I guess.

He deposited the boar by the river near his crevice and gutted it outside this time. The skin turned out a little better, and he laid it out next to the other he had collected. He took each steak he managed to cut from the boar and cooked it, though he didn't really plan on eating all of it. He had learned a lot from his messy attempts at processing the last boar and there was far too much for him to consume in a day, or even two.

He remembered his previous thought of a stew, and hammered out a quick bowl as his boar steaks cooked. It looked like hell. The deep rounded curve of a big bowl was almost impossible to hammer out evenly. It was lumpy and rough and only hinted at a spherical construction. Oh well, it would hold water at least.

He made a quick metal stand for the pot, but stopped there.

I'd have to take down that entire hot-rock meat cooking station to put this pot over the fire. Wonder if I could just heat the whole pot with fire mana instead? Would that do something funky to the food? One way to find out.

He grabbed his chisel and carved a fire rune circle in the bottom of the cookpot, then filled it with water. He set it on the stand, and empowered the entire thing to retain mana for as long as possible. He then threw some diced cubes of boar meat in there and pumped a bunch of mana into the circle. The water quickly started boiling. Hopefully that will just cook for a while, or forever, whatever. He polished off one of the boar steaks and was halfway through another.

One of these boars is enough food for like, a small town to have a good meal. This is just getting wasteful.

He managed to cook three more boar steaks, which were ultimately probably going to just go to waste, as he wanted to experiment with the stew.

I should look for some wild carrots, onions, potatoes, something to put in this stew. Right now its mainly pig water. It would help a lot if I knew what any of that looked like. Never gardened or foraged a day in my life.

He kept his armor on the entire time to get used to wearing it, but it was already past time for him to head to goblin territory. It would be mostly dark by the time he got there and after his last ambush he didn't want to waltz through lit up with a torch on his second encounter, even with the armor. He finally took it off and laid it out on a table.

I'll just have to head out to gain levels tomorrow.

He decided to do his best to forge a helmet instead. It would be good protection and the last piece of armor he was missing from his set. His flailing attempt to hammer out a round caldron demonstrated pretty solidly that he would need something round to hammer the metal against to get the right shape. He heated several ingots and hammered them together, then heated more. He wanted to get a reasonably sized ball of iron, and it took more metal than he had expected.

The resulting half sphere was uneven, but workable. While he was letting it cool he hammered out a thin sheet of metal to form the base of his helm. The metal forming ball wasn't quite as cool as he'd have liked by the time he was finished drawing out the sheet, so he decided to experiment around with his rune circles a little.

He headed outside the crevice to scratch large rune circles in the open dirt outside of his crevice. Between the edge of the cliff and the start of the forest there was open ground littered with stones which he cleared out of the way. He used his long wooden charging staff to carve the circles.

The first one he tested was a big earth mana condenser. He formed it by creating a earth gathering circle in a dirt clearing outside of his crevice. He then surrounded it with a earth binding circle, using earth runes with binding circle connectors. He powered both circles and watched, trying to sense a change in the air. It had been easy with the fire mana circle, the air just got noticeably hotter, and more on fire. It had taken nearly two hundred mana to start a fire with a circle this big though.

At fifty mana invested the earth below the circle began to darken. The rocky earth began to merge, nearby rocks fusing together.

At one hundred larger gaps were beginning to fill, the whole surface was turning a uniform dark grey.

At one fifty the earth had melded into mostly unbroken stone, little bumps jutting out here and there where rocks had poked up beyond ground level. He could see a distortion in the air now as well. Looking through the circle, the air inside was faintly darker than everything around it, as if seen through a thin shadowy filter.

At two hundred a little spire of stone began to climb upwards from the center of the circle into the air.

At two fifty the little spire of stone had grown to a half inch thick at the top and close to three inches at the bottom. He continued to pump mana into it

At three hundred the spire seemed to cap out at half a foot risen out of the ground, though the base continued to widen. A mound of stone now sat in the center of the circle, with a small spire rising from the top. He stopped pouring mana in at that point, not wanting to completely empty his reserves.

Weird. So extra concentrated earth mana just makes stone, and fills the gaps in stone. Guess that makes sense with how it was transforming the wood boards into a stonelike texture, and it just made the rocks I transcribed the circle onto more dense.

The ground within the circle was now uniform in height and a dark grey, distinctly offset from the earth around it. The air was also still darkly tinted within the circle.

I want to mess around with that rock, but I also don't really want to just walk into that. Who knows what that concentrated bubble of mana will do to my body.

He wandered back to his camp, grabbed a couple boar steaks and headed back to the circle. A little bit of the mana had faded, but the circle was still quite visibly saturated.

He tossed a steak in. It landed on the stone with a meaty slap, and a thin layer of rock began to crust over it. He watched as the steak was completely encrusted with rock over the course of ten minutes, soon becoming little more than a tiny mound of stone joining the one in the center. The mana concentration in the air seemed to be visibly reduced though, the air became a little more transparent.

Yep, definitely not going to walk into that. That's a big ol hazard right there. I really don't want to find out if that stone layer will form up inside my lungs or whatever, could be positively hellish even if it’s a tiny layer.

He moved a little distance away and started to work on his next experimental circle. Same setup, just replacing the earth runes with air runes instead. He began to power mana into these circles as well.

At fifty there wasn't much change within the circle at all.

At one hundred it seemed like the gaps between each rock had grown slightly, but he couldn’t be sure. All the dirt in the circle looked slightly paler, as if oversaturated.

Not much more changed until two hundred and fifty, by this time there definitely was a larger gap between the now pale stones. A leaf fell from above and slowed when it reached just inside the bubble of air mana. It quickly turned a pale green and floated there for a moment before a slight breeze picked it up and carried it upwards off into the forest.

At three hundred he stopped again. The air within had developed a thin white film, though it was significantly harder to make out than the earth mana's effects at any stage. The gaps in the rocks were more pronounced and the stone was paler, but that was about it.

Well that looks a lot less impactful than earth mana was. Should toss something in just to be safe though.

[+1 Intelligence for pushing the limits of your mana control]

He picked up the other boar steak leftover from testing the earth circle and tossed it in. It quickly grew pale in color, and little drops of blood started to pool from the top of the steak and float up and out of it, misting into the air until it gained a vague red haze and swirling along to display the patterns of the wind around him.

Super gross, kinda interesting, but also, super gross. I guess the blood gets infused separately and isn't heavy enough in the first place to stay down. Theoretically that means enough air mana could make that steak float. Wild.

Alright next test.

He headed back through the crevice and grabbed a stick. He set it in the campfire until it was burning and returned to the rune circle. He stood a good fifteen feet back and tossed the burning stick into the circle. The flame had mostly gone out by the time it reached the circle but it's glowing embers made it in and instantly a bright light filled his vision.

[Fire Resistance Skill Created]

[+1 Vitality for creating a Resistance skill]

[Scavenger's Resilience lvl 2-3]

Fifteen feet was not far enough.

His whole body hurt. It felt like he had a bad sunburn all across the front of his body. His back was pressed up against a tree and felt like one massive bruise. He felt a rather thick lump already mostly formed on the back of his head.

Shit that wasn't nearly far enough. That air mana packs a lot more punch than I was thinking.

Idiot.

That was like three hundred points of condensed mana.

No shit it's going to explode.

Damnit Andrew.

Really should've made that helmet first too.

Ow. Fuck.

He had to rub the blood crusting over his eyelids away before he could crack them open and take in the damage around him. He was propped up against a tree ten feet from where he had been standing before. The circle was just a charred black divot in the ground. Several of the trees closer to the explosion had uniform burns in the direction of the divot. The ground was littered with snapped branches and there were little fires scattered throughout the destruction, burning up the dried leaves on the ground. Luckily he was not burning.

Shit shit shit, gotta put those fires out. Forest fire bad, explosion bad, Andrew Idiot.

He peeled himself up and off of the tree. He could still move, though it felt like his skin was cracking as he experimentally flexed his arms. There was a sharp pain in his chest and breathing was a little difficult, but he could breathe, and he could move. He stood on shaky legs and hobbled his way over to each of the little fires burning in the clearing. They were small enough that he could just stomp them out. It still took him about ten minutes to hobble from fire to fire. Stomping them out.

Fucking ouch.

Probably only able to walk this off due to that pain resistance skill. Certainly not finishing the helmet tonight. Shit.

The earth rune circle had also been destroyed by the explosion, the little spire had snapped off, though the mound below had survived. All the mana had dispersed.

He hobbled his way through the crevice and with a heroic effort, pushed the wood barrier back into place.

Don’t want to get caught unaware like this.

He threw an already cooked boar steak on the hot rock to warm and sat on the edge of his sleeping pallet.

Everything hurt.

HP: 58/400

Yeah, that seems about right. Not my brightest moment. Well, actually it might've literally been my brightest moment, but it was fucking stupid either way. Five levels less and that would've killed me outright. I'll have to figure out a better way to set those off. That’s a hell of a weapon if I can make it work for me, and I suppose I finally figured out how to get a proper fireball going. It was just a little less controlled than I had thought. Burnt right through my empowered shirt and everything.

Shit, whatever, helmet tomorrow. I'm going to bed.

And so he did, stripping his tattered clothing and changing into a fresh set of pants before stretching out on his pallet and drifting off to sleep to the pleasant smell of burning boar steak.