The young dark elf figured that transmutation was a major part of the craft of alchemy, but he never thought that it was an actual sub-class with its own skill-line. Either way, he succeeded in scavenging the trashed daggers and fusing its materials back together. Gaining an increase to his spirit attribute was the icing on the cake that only furthered his interest in the possibilities in this time consuming new craft.

His next experiment was to throw both the leather sheet and the bronze bar into the third transmutation circle in hopes of creating an ordinary bronze dagger, but his vision blurred for a moment as a sudden pain and intense nausea ran through his body. The flickering golden words in the air were an unwelcome sign to him as well.

{You have suffered a backlash from a failed transmutation creation process.}

{Your transmutation alchemy skill-line is too low to create ‘ordinary’ quality items.}

Regis pinched his nose bridge in frustration as he breathed in deeply.

“What’s wrong?” Bray asked as he looked at the young dark elf’s pained face.

“It’s just a small backlash. Apparently, I can only fuse scraps into waste quality materials ant those into ordinary ones, but I can’t use the ordinary materials I’ve made to create an actual ordinary item because my crafting skill is too low.”

“From what I’ve heard, magic has its own rules like everything else. Just rest a bit and try again with easier goals in mind. There’s no reason to rush, just take your time and you’ll master your craft like everyone else.”

“You’re right.” Regis sighed as he decided to replenish his arcana through meditation.

After a short meditation session he grabbed the worst gambeson from his loot pile and threw it into the salvaging magic circle. A few moments later the usual lightshow faded as a small handful of bronze scraps, several strips of leather and a pair of larger leather sheets returned to him from the transmutation circle. He identified the large sheets, to see if they were defective in any way.

{Coarse leather sheet}

{Item rarity: common}

{Item quality: waste}

{Crafting material}

The leather sheets were roughly the size of his torso, but they were coarse and dry. It was obvious that they were the worst quality leather one could use for crafting. Seeing that everything was pretty much as he expected, he decided to spend the next hour recycling the damaged armour pieces and weapons which he fused into complete pieces.

With most of his loot salvaged, Regis turned his attention towards another problem. He had a lot in his head. A lot of compressed knowledge wanted to break onto the surface, but he had no chance to retain but a fraction of it. With no other choice as he lacked a journal of his own, Regis grabbed a few dry coal pieces from beside the campfire and huddled next to the wall behind the crates.

Using his staff as a light source, he began to scribble partial and complete runes on the wall with a small summary of their meaning. He scribbled on like a madman wanting to vent his thoughts and he only stopped when Bray patted his shoulder.

“The soup is ready,” the grey haired elder said. “Come and eat before you drop like a sack of flour.”

“Already? I’ve barely… shit.” Regis stuttered a curse as he looked at the wall as a larger picture.

“You’ve been at it for almost an hour, lad. Clear your head for a bit or you’ll have a bad time. Come, the soup will do you good.”

“Thanks.” The youth accepted the small bowl of steaming soup, finishing it off in but a minute.

With his head cleared and the pesky cramped knowledge loosened, Regis returned to the wall to take a better look at it. For all intents and purposes, it looked like a hastily scribbled dictionary of a foreign language. Most of the symbols on the wall were partial runes that would be the equal of pronouns and verbs with a few adjectives.

The complete runes like the rune of fire held the place of nouns in the language, but it all felt rather simplistic with the end result being primitive sentences. His jumbled collection of memories held a short list to work with. His current resources comprised of: arcana, atop, bind, bolt, cast, change, durable/durability, edge/sharpen, fire, focus, forward, hand, I, imbue, object, reduce, shape, shift, weapon, weight and with.

With these things cleared up for him, he now understood the actual meaning of the enchantments he placed on his sunstone staff and a bit more. The rune of durability for example was a single symbol with the exact meaning of durability. Regis wanted to argue that it would have been more realistic to create the rune by lining up the pieces into the sentence ‘I imbue object with durability’, but he was too new into the art of enchanting to argue against its workings.

He played with the runes in his mind, shuffling them around to create a simple sentence he could use for his next experiment. ‘I cast fire atop hand.’ He put the partial and complete runes in order, but other than feeling his arcana stir for a moment, nothing else happened. With no visible result, Regis searched through the still jumbled knowledge and memories, realising that he was doing it the wrong way. He had to weave the spell into existence the same way he did with enchantments before.

After a deep breath, Regis slowly channelled his arcana into his right palm as he envisioned a set of small circles connected by lines, just like when enchanting. The small symbols took up their place inside the circles in chronological order with each of them having a slightly smaller circle than the one before. Slowly, a whole sentence was formed. He then began to channel his arcana along the lines connecting them one after the other.

Mere seconds later he saw small glowing symbols appear above his open hand, forming a palm sized magic circle before being pulled together by an invisible force. As the runes struck each other, they burst into flames that spread atop his hand, covering it like a burning glove. Regis could feel the warmth of the fire, but it didn’t hurt him. Golden words flared up in his vision as the Hearth chose to inform him about the results of his experiment.

{You have successfully re-created the ‘runic scorching touch’ spell.}

{You have gained the ‘spell weaving’ skill-line.}

{Your spirit got permanently increased by 1.}

‘Spell weaving, huh?’ He mused as the golden words faded away. Curious to see the damage it could cause, he reached out and grabbed one of the small branches bray kept to fuel his campfire. The twig began to burn as soon as he grabbed it and it was soon reduced to a charred mess.

“What did you do?” The elderly fellow stared at his magic show with a baffled expression.

“During last night’s battle, I came across an inheritance that taught me something called runebound spell weaving. It’s a fancy way of saying that I should now be able to use runes to cast spells as well as the usual chants.”

“Fascinating,” Bray circled around the youth, staring at the fire on his hand that soon went out. “But remember what I’ve told you before. The people trapped in Hunor don’t want anything to do with magic, so don’t go around waving at them with your hands on fire. Keep such spells for your battles.”

“I know,’ Regis rolled his eyes slightly. “It was only an experiment anyways. Runic magic seems to have a lot of potential, but I only know a few runes, so I don’t have much to work with. Figured, I’d try to widen my arsenal before the night.”

“Just try not to hurt yourself, or me for that matter. Why don’t you move over to the tunnel entrance, just to be safe?” The elderly man pointed towards the tunnel Regis first arrived from.

The young dark elf had to agree with Bray on the matter. He was already feeling the effect of the Landwaker fruit fading and it would have been bad if he had accidently hurt the old man while practicing. After moving to a safe distance, he began to combine his collection of runes into anything useful. His idea about the modified durability spell proved to be a bust as nothing happened to the piece of cloth he touched while holding one of the bronze bars.

Moving on, he tried to alter his scorching touch spell by replacing the fire rune with the arcana one, but nothing happened as the spell simply fumed out some magic essence into the air before vanishing. The next actual success was when he created a chain of runes forming the ‘I cast arcana bolt forward’ sentence.

Dark blue runes lit up one after the other in his palm as a chestnut sized projectile formed in the air. The compacted arcana then shot forward at his command, hitting the wall. There was no glowing message from the Heart this time, but it was still an obvious success. After a short meditation, he switched the rune of arcana with the fire one and the end result was a small, pale fire bolt that flew forward just as fast as its predecessor.

Right as he finished casting the spell when a strong dizziness and tiredness hit him like a truck. Regis barely had the strength to crawl over to the mill sack laid out on the ground behind the crates of Bray’s camp. He fell asleep without a word as soon as he lay down. When he woke up hours later, the sunlight was flowing down from the grates above, proving that it was well into the day.

“How long was I out?” He asked from the grey haired elder that was sitting beside the fire with a calm and distant expression.

“What?” Bray asked back, snapping out of his reverie as he finally noticed the young dark elf sitting not far from him.

“I was just curious about the time.”

“Oh,” the old man sighed. “You couldn’t have slept more than four hours. You should get some more rest while you can, lad.”

“I wish I could, but there’s a lot to do. My old gear got torn up, so I recycled it, but I still got to fix up my new replacement.” Regis explained as he took off his bloodied and stabbed shirt, laying it out on the cleaner part of the floor.

He then put the separate pieces of the dusk-blade set beside it and searched through the dead earth manipulator’s journal for the right spell. Lesser mend worked the same way as his healing, except seeing flesh and skin fuse together, he watched with rapt attention as time itself seemed to go in reverse.

The hole on his new chest armour where the knife cut through a leather strap slowly fused back into one, torn off leather scales growing out of his pauldrons and tasset piece by piece. Even the blood vanished from his linen shirt as the severed threads pulled together, just as the dark woollen cloak’s torn edge renewed itself. It was a marvellous thing to watch, but once he was done with that, his gaze returned to the wall with the runic scribbles. He quickly donned his new kit, put on his satchel and grabbed his faithful magic staff before heading towards the stone stairs.

“What’s the hurry, lad?” Bray turned towards the dark elf as he was leaving.

“I need to go to join the corpse duty guys.”

“What for? Haven’t you seen enough last night?”

“I need to get some actual spell weaving practice in before the night, but I can only do that outside the city walls. I’ll be back shortly.” The young dark elf explained as he left the sewers.

Regis closed the secret door behind himself and hurried over to the west gate. As he approached the open gate, he could see dozens of people dragging away corpses outside. He walked closer to the gate, but the soldiers on each side of the entrance raised their hands.

“Halt! The city lord sent orders not to let people out of the city. The area outside is dangerous and filled with corpses that could cause sickness. Please turn back!”

“I was sent here by the spell weavers’ guild to join the defenders to keep those blight rats away from the corpse haulers for a while,” Regis lied with a straight face as he raised his palm that had small flames dancing on it. “So, do you want me to tell Salvador and Galen that you’ve stopped me from carrying out their order, or will you let me help you folks while doing my task?”

“Go ahead,” one of the guards said after a small gulp. “The rest of the guards are already out there. Just don’t bother them if you don’t have to.”

“Sure.” The young dark elf nodded as he left through the gate.

Once outside, he was greeted by the stench of burnt flesh and smoke as he saw large piles of bodies that were burning on both sides of the gate. Dozens of tired refugees were still dragging the remaining corpses of last night’s battle towards the pyres while others tried to strip the dead from anything worth re-using or selling.

This was the first time Regis had an actual look at the battleground during the day. Judging from the broken soil that reached a bit over a hundred and twenty meters outwards before the first small stump could be seen, this strip of land might have been used to farm some crops once. Now it was dotted with corpses and black blood. Regis took a shallow breath before heading towards the edge of the forest.

From the edge of the farming land another twenty meters wide territory was stripped of trees that were likely used in the building of the ramparts in front of the city walls. A few people wearing ragged armour stood at the edge of the stump dotted field, ready to fight anything that came out from the forest.

As the young man walked closer to the forest, some of the warriors looked at the suddenly appeared dark elf with raised eyebrows while others gripped their weapons tighter. Regis didn’t stop until he reached the closest tree, touching its bark with his fingers, staring at the plants of the thicket with a small smile.

“What in Irmeg’s name is that bastard doing?” One of them asked aloud even though he was less than ten meters away from him.

“In these past few days I’ve been sleeping in Hunor during the day,” Regis spoke after a moment of stillness. “Then I’ve fought the fallen during the night. Is it wrong of me that I hate being cooped up between those stone walls? Getting some fresh air sometimes can do a lot of good.”

“If you want fresh air, then go to the port! This isn’t a place for you to frolic around!” One of the more arrogant mercenaries spoke up with a sarcastic smirk on his face.

“And who’s going to stop me from it,” Regis turned around and slowly walked up to the surprised mercenary. “I’ve been killing undead abominations for days and you think that I’ll waste my chance to get a breather, just because of you?”

He stared the man in the eyes as his arcane intimidation skill activated on its own. The rest of the people only saw him stepping in front of the man with his voice raised before the mercenary fell on his knees shaking.

“What are you?” The man mumbled as he pissed himself on the ground with dozens of eyes on him.

“I’m a neophyte sent out by the guild to practice my aim on a few blight rats. They knew I needed some fresh air and that it would boost the morale if an actual spell weaver comes to look at how things are going. Do any of you have a problem with that?” Regis stuck to his convenient lie.

“No!” They answered in unison.

“Good. I’ll be over there,” he pointed at an unguarded area of the clearing. “I’ll kill any blight rats or whatever comes out from that side, at least until I’ve got my share of practice. Have a nice day!”

Regis walked away with a spring in his steps, half expecting the people to run after him with pitchforks in hands, but it looked like Bray was right. People feared spell weavers as much as they needed them. He barely walked a hundred steps before a wolf sized rat jumped out from the bushes. It stared at the young dark elf with its red eyes as it growled at him.

“Come on then,” he began to form a runic arcana bolt spell in his hand. “Let’s see just how effective these spells really are!”