Two and a half weeks passed as things became rather routine after Christina's class change, since there was nothing to do but grind skills and try to teach the kids how to grind theirs. My furnace worked perfectly but there was a weird refusal of the metal itself to behave, I melted ten copper coins in it, poured it into a mould, and when I broke it open it looked fine and it cooled okay, but as soon as I touched the new copper ring it warped into unusability. Only thing I could think of was I was so low level in smithing that I wasn't even allowed to attempt jewelry so the system caused a negative proficiency effect. So I added that to my skill grind, making copper nails a few at a time to boost my smithing skill, hopefully the level twenty-five bonus was all it took but it still annoyed me.

Several other skills clearly hit level twenty-four and refused to go up any more, magic sense, magic feedback resistance, compress earth, and harden stone. Unlike level forty-nine of dirt control it wasn't a matter of using them in a weird enough way to unlock the mastery, it was obviously a class restriction, I wasn't allowed to master a skill that wasn't part of my class. I still tested them all each day in case something changed but so far they were stuck. With those stuck I was able to set them to the side and juggle other things instead, like getting back into enchanting practice, would have loved to have a copper ring to use with it but dirt and stone still worked well enough.

Along with enchanting came trying to learn the rune language of enchantments having one rune already known made learning others easier. For example I finally got the ring of magic power fully understood and it effectively translated to "cycle mana increase wearer Int", only effectively because the actual grammar made no sense at all and was more like concepts strung together haphazardly. With that I started trying to translate the other items I could make as well the ones the scout guy had and see if they had any sort of traps, even accidental ones. The necklace was just a ball of energy to me, I could barely see the lines on the outer most layer but there were several layers to it. The bag on the other hand was a lot easier since it only had a few lines in a parallel ring around the opening in it. Still, that would take a while and I didn't want to focus too hard on it.

New soldiers were assigned to Christina instead of other soldiers, they ended up slightly more skilled but none of them could get the second combat style even with a celestial on hand to allow for tough love during training. The celestials being born had the most training put on them, scraping up just a handful of levels in MFR so I could reach into them after they were adults and fill them with mana. Once every few days I pulled the one I had first worked with off the rotation and woke her back up so we could grind together with training methods that involved hurting myself so she could heal them, like hitting things so hard it breaks the skin, or more burning. She eventually got to level three, non combat classes seemed really slow to level, or maybe it was because she wasn't using her second spell at all.

The workers finished the stairs and I helped harden the stone so it would last before they started digging out a big tunnel network with the stairs at the center. Eventually one of the tunnels had a room attached to the side that Victoria was moved into, it was deeper in and thus more protective, I also moved her various training supplies down with her. Being deeper in made her feel better, like she had a weird case of agoraphobia so being further from the open made her feel safer, which was a useful instinct for a queen. Also, all these kids managed to get us to level five, but there wasn't anything important, all the good stuff seemed to happen at even levels. The last thing of note over this time was I stared at a berry bush for several hours as it built a mana cage, interesting but ultimately useless.

Victoria had just laid her fiftieth egg, it wasn't an inherent milestone, but that was what her buildup trait had been asking for to do anything.

She activated it after the workers had secured the eggs and described what it said now, "it is giving me options, I can apply it to an egg I had started growing inside me in the last hour, or I can use it before growing one to make an.... incarnation egg? Um, dictionary says incarnation is ether the physical form of a god or one of several lifetimes, so a god egg or a lifetime egg? Probably not god egg since the trait applies a bonus, but what could a lifetime egg mean?"

That was interesting, "it sounds like it can let someone have another chance, I doubt it will work on people that are already dead, since their souls have already moved on, but no real way to tell unless you make one, and you have to ask if you want to risk it being something too odd to use at the moment."

She thought it over for a few minutes before deciding "no, even if it could resurrect the dead I don't want test it yet, it kind of scares me to think about it doing that. The first option to give the bonus to someone new is more appealing to me, I hope that doesn't make me sound like a coward."

I laughed at the idea, "no, that doesn't make you a coward, it is a weird thing that you know nothing about with power over death, being scared of it is perfectly reasonable."

After we got her eggs ready she attached the trait's power to a worker, watching with magic sense I saw it instantly flare up a lot brighter than her sister's egg right next to her. Victoria was slightly dizzy from how much energy it was suddenly absorbing, the Int I was giving her through the stat link being the reason why she was only slightly dizzy from the rush instead of possibly passing out like a celestial. Luckily it only lasted a little bit, afterwards it was just drawing strongly on her mana instead of being a vacuum. Still, the draw was strong enough that doing anything magic related while carrying that egg would be a bad idea. Will get at least one more level before the thing charges again so it will be less difficult to deal with.

Two days later I was confident I could make the boot enchantment, it would be a little weird and probably unusable from not being leather or metal but I wasn't planning to wear them just read them. The instructions show both of them being made at the same time of the same material so they have equal strength or else one foot could go faster then the other and trip you up. With a wave of my hand a pair of clay boots formed, after a bunch of practice I was able to pull particular materials from the dirt without needing a filter. The hard part of this was sending the magic streams in different directions at the same time, left boot's burning stream moving clockwise while right boot's was counterclockwise. Only a handful of failures from the awkwardness of moving in two different directions at the same time.

Once finished I put my hands inside them to activate their effect, and it drew on physical energy instead of mana, in spite of the fact the path was carved using mana. Reading it properly would have been hard if it wasn't for the fact I already had a counter set up just because it made it easier to read even the mana using ones. Because they were clay the mana burned parts had hardened so I could force away the rest of the clay leaving me with two thin wiggly rings. Then I use more clay to make two duplicates of each and place them above and below like when made the intelligence ring. Finally I place them on the ground sideways and made dirt fall straight through them, causing the shape to appear on the ground, by rolling the rings as I added dirt it unfolded them into readable format.

Now let's see what you have to say... okay I see cycle and increase which made sense, the new runes were still annoying to memorize but with context clues it was easier. Since I knew what it did I knew one rune had to mean physical energy and another related to speed. I spotted physical energy soon enough but instead of speed it was more like motive force, so it makes your feet push hard instead of amping speed, it also had decrease air resistance. So in all boots of speed generates an effect of "cycle physical energy to increase force and decrease air resistance", which would indeed result in being able to move faster but it was such an odd way of wording things.

Annoyingly the last thing, the gloves, needed you to be able to handle five lines at once, which was a problem because I could only do four. It was obvious enchanting was a high wis class due to the need for multitasking while combat mages needed high Int for more raw power in their attacks. Is the downside of all ten base stats, I bet people that join the enchanter guild have like sixteen wis to start with so they could handle multiple mana threads even with only one level in the actual enchanting skill. At least I should be capable of doing that eventually even if I stall out at twenty-four, like the rest of my side skills, by just having a high enough class level to compensate.

After that I could read a bit more of the bag, which I held a bit away with a dirt platform. There were two issues with reading it, that it has four lines instead of three, at least four is actually possible to read while one line is basically impossible, without any masteries at any rate. It was also the fact it was a leather bag, a flexible material, so making sure the lines were oriented correctly and aligned with the reverse side properly added an extra layer of difficulty. With some twisting I eventually managed to find a starting point, the 'increase' rune, four lines causes the rune to be superimposed on top of itself slightly offset, for example a W imposed on itself would look like a VVV, which makes it harder by needing to figure out which part is a repeat, and I can't exactly cover up one line with mana sense.

Over two days examination eventually got me a rune set that allowed it switch between airborne mana and person bound mana based on how much it needed. This explained why it seemed empty, it was most likely some kind of bag of holding and it needed a higher energy level to actually open the hole while the passive mode can just maintain the link so it doesn't get severed or spill out everywhere. That is only a segment though, still no conclusive evidence ether direction on it having a trap the makes it implode if someone other than the guy I took it from uses it. I had to stop once Victoria laid the new batch of eggs, the enhanced worker egg was very odd, in a good way, the casing had a sheen to it, like it was made of translucent silver instead of just shiny. I was very interested in exactly what other changes she would get besides a fancy egg.