Chapter forty

For the next few days I made stock for the store and generally saw how things were going , then I left the day to day running of the store to my employees with Lidia as manager. Now that I was financially solvent , I could focus on more important projects.

The project I decided to focus on was something for my enchantment implants.

Most of the enchantments I have made so far are very simple point and activate types, which actually makes them very limited. A mage might not have as much power as me, but as their magic is tied together with their imagination it makes them way more versatile than me, this was one of the problems I wanted to fix with my implants.

The only thing I own that has features that allow me to use my imagination was my storage ring and I didn't even enchant that myself, I used an empowerment ritual to do it so I don't even know what the rune used for intent control was.

The solution I came up for this was to dismantle the ritual to find the runes. An empowerment ritual is basically a way for a mage to enchant certain runes into an object ,so the rune I wanted was in the circle. The problem was because the mana needed to flow smoothly through the ritual for it to succeed, the ritual has to be streamlined as possible and that means I couldn't see were one rune ends and another begins, so I had to slowly research the ritual circle and to do that I had to go back to the automatic ritual machine I left underground in the burrows.

I traveled outside of the city limits to get free of the barrier and teleported directly into my second basement were the ARM resides. Because of the magically enchanted beams and columns the second basement hadn't collapsed when the rest of the house fell on top of it. The air was a little stale but a simple 'pure' and 'wind' runes fixed that problem. The ARM seemed to be in perfect working order so I started working immediately.

Five hours later I was ready to rip my hair out in frustration. After doing multiple experiments with different variations on the circle I found out unless a circle is anything but perfect it would probably not activate, and the times that it did activate the results were so random that it was pointless to make comparisons and isolate runes.

In the end I was so frustrated by the illogical nature of the circle that I did something drastic and probably stupid.

I used my god sight to look at it.

Suddenly the world came to a halt. I can't explain how I knew the difference but there was suddenly a stillness there that was unnatural, its the little things you feel but never notice, the little sounds you hear but never listened to, they suddenly were conspicuous in their absence.

The moment seemed to last an eternity, but then I felt what could only be described as a mental shit whip as my mind was suddenly flooded with all the information about the circle, its past , its future, possible alternative versions of the circle. I was suddenly flooded with information and just as quickly I forgot everything I learned, I was adrift in a sea of information and I was drowning. Then I heard a booming voice,

"Focus John, you need to remember what you are looking for."

It was like I was thrown a life boat in the giant sea and just like that I was no longer drowning. I focused on the question that I wanted answered 'what is the rune that gives the ring intent control?'. And shining there as if it was waiting for me all along was a twisty looking rune with elaborate flourishes, after I desperately grabbed on to the rune , suddenly there was only darkness and I passed out.