In total, Kaldalis got eleven consecutive quests, each one walking him through the process of crafting a charm step-by-step. Each one also rewarded him with two skill points, getting him twenty-two points basically for free. Combined with the fractional points he got from each charm, his skill at the end of that run had reached level thirty-one.

As he worked, he had gained a number of little system messages about his progress. When he reached skill level five, he gained the option to select a single statistic that wouldn’t roll onto the item he was crafting.

This explained a lot, from his perspective. The materials used seemed to have no effect on the attributes, and this notification confirmed that it was random outside of this newly-gained ability.

He gained another instance of it at level eleven, letting him pick two stats to exclude, and right when he hit level thirty-one, he gained the ability to exclude three stats.

This indicated exactly how powerful charmcrafting could become. Kaldalis was used to acquiring gear almost entirely randomly without any control over its attributes. The idea that he could get the exact affinities he wanted for a specific fight was more than a little bonkers. He tried to imagine the damage he could output if he had matching affinities on every charm in line with his weapon’s damage type.

Kaldalis didn’t know the exact math running behind the scenes, but he knew equipping just one matching charm had given him a noteworthy boost. Having every charm match was potentially immense.

He also gained, at level twenty, a chance of a craft coming out as a ‘high quality.’ He didn’t know what that would mean, and it seemed he was unlikely to find out. The odds were dependent on his skill, and his skill was still very low.

There was, however, an opportunity to test other aspects of crafting. As his skill increased, the charms he crafted were higher item level, which matched with his progress. At skill level five, he started crafting level two charms. When he dinged level ten, they went up to level three. But, if he focused and thought about the lower level charms when crafting subsequent ones, he could force them to be lower level. The opposite wasn’t true, however. Thinking about higher level charms revealed that he couldn’t avoid the upper boundary. It meant that when he hit level thirty, he could craft level six charms for Reno and SeventyEight, but he would need to get the skill up to current to be able to craft at-level gear for himself.

After finishing the quests, skilling up slowed down significantly. It seemed like the higher his skill got, the skill gain per craft got lower and lower. He knew it would be a real grind, though, so it wasn’t really a surprise. But as going through the motions of crafting grew more familiar, he was able to look around and acknowledge his surroundings.

In the time they’d been crafting, more people had filtered in, choosing this to be a better use of time than running out into the jungle in this weather. Though more than a few of them were soaked through with mud caked onto their boots - or up to their knees.

“So how are we doing?” Kaldalis asked SeventyEight, once he could finally look up.

“Oh, we’re fine,” SeventyEight said with a smile, looking up from her forge. She was obviously working on some kind of plate armor rather than a weapon. “I’ve learned a lot from this.”

“Yeah, me, too,” Kaldalis said as he chipped away at another fist-sized stone, making a base for his next charm. “I actually feel really stupid for not picking this up earlier.”

“Deytambos has been very helpful,” SeventyEight said as she pulled the metal plate from the forge, red-hot, and started hammering at it. “He helped me figure out what’s going on with the affinities.”

“Just being neighborly,” the Vathon next to her said with a smile as he sanded down a wooden block to serve as a handle for a dagger. “I’d have been twice as helpful if I knew you were here with Captain Heroism.”

Kaldalis recognized Deytambos. He was an alpha player who had accompanied Kaldalis’s team as they’d made their assault on the syncoresi den.

It was no wonder that the man was a font of valuable information.

“Oh, cool. I haven’t been paying attention myself,” Kaldalis said as he finished chipping down his charm base and moved on to the bit of grizzled dragon claw that was his next accent item. “What did you learn?”

“Status ailments,” SeventyEight said as she hammered the metal plate into a curved shape, obviously for a thigh piece. “When I was getting my weapon quests done, I was seeing words I’ve never seen applied to a weapon attribute before.”

“I have to admit, I haven’t seen too many of them myself. What have you got?”

“Well, a bunch of random shit.” SeventyEight laughed. “I don’t have any control over what’s on the item, so I have like five weapons with Seal on it.”

“What does Seal do?”

“It’s weird and useless,” Deytambos said, putting down the dagger they were working on to pick up its unfinished twin to start sanding that down. “It locks abilities categorized as ‘extraordinary’ abilities. A bunch of us went around testing it back in the Baimer zones. We couldn’t find a damn thing it stopped. Maybe boss specials, but then you’re using a Seal weapon the whole dungeon. The only other thing it does is reduce healing received by the ‘sealed’ target.”

“That sounds pretty devastating if a monster had it,” Kaldalis said, fitting his grizzled dragon claw inlay into the stone base item before moving on to his kismeleon bones. “Considering how many close shaves I’ve gotten, making healing less effective could be the end of me.”

“Even with a boss monster with it, Seal is so weak it’s only mildly annoying,” Deytambos said dismissively. “Take my word for it as a healer. You shouldn’t worry about it.”

Kaldalis thought that was the setup for a punchline if he’d ever heard one.

He hoped when it came, he wasn’t the one getting punched.

“So, what else have you got, Ess?”

SeventyEight went through a few of the other weapons she’d made, and Deytembos provided the useful information, sticking around even after finishing the daggers he’d made. Kaldalis had already known about Gust, Poison, and Burn, but Slow and Sleep were new to him.

He worried what it might mean if a monster could just knock him out cold with sleep in the middle of a fight, or that a slow effect might cut off his ability to evade damage, leading to calamity.

“If you’re that concerned,” Deytambos said, noticing the horrified expression on Kaldalis’s face, “just craft fortitude charms. It affects all your debuff affinities with just one stat.”

Kaldalis groaned and looked at the charm in his hand. “I should have been working on grinding this from day one, then.” He grumbled wordlessly before carving another bone band, fastening it to his latest charm. “I need like twenty more skill points to get to making stuff at-level for myself.”

“The second-best time is now,” Deytambos said with a laugh. “I should get moving, though. The weather’s cleared up and the mud is starting to dry. Everyone who didn’t get their dailies done ought to be getting back on task now.”

“That’s our call, huh?” Reno said, stepping away from her workstation immediately. “We should get back to it.”

SeventyEight laughed at that. “You don’t waste any time, do you?”

“I’m bored out of my skull over here,” Reno whined, waving her hand dismissively back towards the alchemy station. “The cooking was great. I love cooking. Great fun. Alchemy is fucking bullshit.”

Before she could explain, SeventyEight turned to Kaldalis. “You coming?”

“Mm… You two go on ahead without me. I want to try and hit level forty-five before I call it.”

“You think we’ll be okay without you?” SeventyEight looked a bit uncomfortable.

“Yeah, I’m not worried,” Kaldalis said, gesturing towards the door where Deytambos had left. “If the weather is just clearing up now, everyone should be starting to make their way out. You’ll have plenty of help.”

“If you’re not worried,” Reno said, “then I’m not worried. Gives us a chance to catch up without you running along ahead of us.”

SeventyEight brightened with a smile. “Now that makes sense to me. Let’s get moving while the rush is going on, then.”

The pair headed out, and Kaldalis focused on sprinting through a few more charms. Without the quests, his skill was only inching upwards.

When he’d started, his skill increases per charm had been in the range of 0.5 to 0.8 of a point per craft. Now they were between 0.2 to 0.5. He feared how much that would escalate as he approached his current skill cap.

Just the same, it was only a dozen more charms before he reached his self-imposed goal of forty-five charmcrafting skill. His output was at level eight now, meaning it wouldn’t be too long before he could match the level of his current gear - and then only a stretch longer before he was making himself actual upgrades.

He pushed away from the bench at long last and stretched his back. It popped in a way that made his eyes cross. He hadn’t realized quite how many hours he’d been there, and his joints creaked quietly as he arched his spine. He suffered a brief moment of disorientation as they continued down past where he’d expected, popping in his tail as well. He shook his head and rubbed his eyes as well, recognizing how long he’d been squinting through a magnifying glass at his work.

“That was,” Kaldalis said at last, “the worst kind of adventure. I feel like I just did a shift back at the office.”

“Nothing to it but to do it,” a Bhogad grumbled from the station behind him. “Can’t have the craft levelled without levelling the craft.”

Kaldalis couldn’t argue with that logic, but just the same he had to take a break from it. He left the room of workshops and emerged blearily into the daylight again. Immediate regrets. He blinked at the unexpected sunlight.

“Jesus,” Kaldalis cursed, raising a hand to shield his eyes. “What happened to the fucking storm?”

“Kal!” a familiar voice called. “I was just looking for you!”

“Ah, speak of the storm, and she comes right to you,” he said, waving at the small blurry figure moving towards him. “What’s going on?”

“There was a landslide!” Myrin chirped cheerfully. She hopped up and socked him in the arm as soon as she got to him. “Up in the forest where we were a few days ago, right where the trees start to thin.”

“That makes sense,” Kaldalis said, stepping clear of the entry stairs to the workshop. “There’s not a lot of undergrowth on this island to hold the dirt in place. A good hard rain like that will get us a lot of landslides, I think.”

“There’s more, though,” Myrin continued, waving over to Balrim, who was making his way towards them at a more reasonable pace than Myrin’s rush had been. “There was something under all that mud.”

“Alright,” Kaldalis said, giving a nod to Balrim as the Talsar joined them. “What did it uncover?”

“Someone was out there this morning,” Balrim said, pointing up at the forest, and gently herding Kaldalis and Myrin in that direction. “They saw stone blocks. Evenly-cut. He thought it was free resources for construction, but was spooked off by the monsters in the area. But I think we know better.”

Kaldalis stared blankly at his friend when he didn’t elaborate. “Humor me. What do we know?” Kaldalis asked, trying to read Balrim’s enigmatic expression. “What is it?”

“Lataxinan ruins,” Balrim said, holding up one clawed finger, “making it the next stop on our exploration tour of Nos Meles.”