Chapter Twenty-Three

I’ve got the Power

Dev savored the flavor of the tomes of magic. If the process of absorption hadn’t been instantaneous an outside observer would have said that he chewed his food very slowly. It had been eye-opening. The book that Toot had gotten for him earlier had been full of spells, but he hadn’t been given a method of understanding the way they worked. That meant that he could replicate them, or give them to his minions, but he would never be able to tie them to objects or even unbind them from them as well. He’d been stymied. If he didn’t know how the spells worked he couldn’t increase their power or alter them for his needs.

The first book on lower-tier spells that had come from Curios Goods though, had given him enough of an explanation. Magic differed from Mana in a lot of ways. Magic, so far as scholars knew, was a remnant of an older universe whose space the current universe occupied. It was a sort of background radiation; completely harmless and innocuous unless it was given focus. Once it was paid attention it became volatile, limited only by the imagination of the user and their manipulative skills.

Magic worked by focus. Some people, such as wizards, employed components in order to manipulate that mysterious energy. Mages needed only finger motions to control the magic, and magicians required hand gestures and components to employ it. What they were all really doing was taking that power and shaping it into spells. The vast majority of what they did was about focus and intent. Gestures and spell components, Dev realized, were just ways to channel that intent.

That didn’t mean they weren’t necessary. Dev himself could not just wish for something to happen and it would then occur. He needed to bind the magic in a way it would do what he wanted it to do.

His attention shifted over to the sword that had the sharpness spell and a spell of constant repair laid upon it. After learning what he had it seemed sloppy. Why had two separate spells been needed when they could have combined them into one? He looked very closely at the magic’s matrix. The hardness magic was tied into a knot, an elaborate one to be sure, but it was just a knot nonetheless. He realized that the loop expressed the caster’s intention and was represented by a symbol formed by the knot that represented repair in the form of a spanner. After he knew what to look for Dev could see it clearly. It was attached to the sword by multiple loops that formed a rectangle around the sword to an untrained eye.

The sharpness spell was completely different. It was constructed like puzzle pieces that interlocked with a singular piece at the center that looked like a straight razor. They formed a long three-dimensional triangular shape that ran the length of the blade with the length of the pyramidal design running along the edge of the blade and the base resting along the dull part of the sword.

The razor design served as a lynchpin, or possibly more accurately a key-stone, that held the enchantment together. One enchantment needed unspooled and the other worked loose like a brick in a wall. Naturally, Dev would need to retie the enchantment on other objects and so he had to be certain that he understood how the magic was bound together and connected to the objects he wanted to use them on.

The next thing he looked at was the ring of healing that Toot had brought him. He needed a healing spell, his plan to gather blood depended on it. He had already formed a diamond the size of an ogre’s fist. If he could apply a working healing spell on it then he was finally in business and would be leveling up in no time.

The healing magic differed from the other enchantments significantly. The ring was looped with what looked like a network of arteries that connected to a beating heart. The heart rested over the top of the ring while the arteries spiraled around the ring’s band. The simulated blood vessels flowed with arcane energy just as blood would have flowed through the real things.

Interesting, Dev thought, each magic seems to correspond to its real-world equivalent. The healing magic was really body magic, and he reckoned that each spell that was body-based correlated to what it did to the body. A good example would be a strength spell. He imagined that it would look like a muscle, with striated threads of flesh covering the object enchanted or would surround an individual with until the spell expired. He wasn’t certain, but he didn’t believe that humanoids or animals could carry permanent spells as objects could.

Dev’s task was to figure out how to unspool the magic, duplicate it, and then bind it back to objects that he recreated. Having a building that repaired itself or resisted damage would be invaluable. All he would need to do was design a board that carried the sword’s enchantment. He also wanted to add that fire enchantment spell to his buildings as well, but that would come after he figured out his most pressing need. That healing spell had to be applied to his diamond. Once he achieved that task he could focus on the buildings.

He wanted to open the shops that he and Toot had discussed since that would allow him to gather more meshes, skins, and item designs. The diamond was the key to achieving that goal. That would make his acquisition of all three forms of energy possible and once he achieved that he wouldn’t have anything holding him back other than his own ambition.

Dev examined the ring and formed a mental imprint of the design. Before he wasn’t strong enough to just make a duplicate of the sword, but he had a copy of it on file. Once he knew what he was doing and was able to construct he would be able to make the blade as easily as he made coins, with a difference in mana costs. He didn’t know how he could expend mana and create an item connected with magic, but it was enough to know that it worked. He imagined that the magic, being a background radiation was just something he could connect with and replicate as mages did. He would dwell on that later. As it was, he needed to figure out how to get blood for the blood god.