Chapter 26 : Defective prototype

Nikolaï had kept practising Minor Elementium Filter and now he was trying it out on a new project. He had prepared a prototype made of wood and wax. It was shaped like a medallion and once Nikolaï checked that his design worked he was going to make metal versions of it.

He had un-originally called his project : Meditation Medallion. The point was to stack filters above each other in order to isolate one elementium by pushing away the others. The area of effect was going to be limited, smaller than what an Attraction Stone could do but it was made to be worn. Nikolaï had thought about a locket to have the effect targeted on the chest of the one who would wear it.

There were all kinds of meditation techniques and ways to gather elementium. Most of the beginner’s methods had in common to have the same point of absorption, the rib cage. Even if it was small, it would be beneficial to have the area near the “absorption point” filtered from the elementiums having the higher risks to poison you.

Nikolaï actual meditation technique was to use treads of Ether from his hands to gather elementium. It was a bit more advance than using the rib cage but it wasn’t more powerful. He was doing this because he needed to select the elementium to stabilize before absorbing the neutral elementium. Gathering through hands gave better control and most Aspirants switched to it to train and reinforce the flux in it. Hands were where they created the canvas on which they project spell sigils so it made sense to improve it on any occasion.

Under the influence of the Trance potion, Nikolaï hadn’t bothered using his hands specifically. He had simply gathered energy from all around him and stabilized it inside or just absorbed it. The potion had made that possible because it had temporarily enhanced his capacities. Potions were not miraculous, the more effects they had the more issues they could cause. That’s why Nikolaï didn’t order a second Trance potion. If he took one now he would maybe not put his health in grave danger but the positive effects of the potion would be minimal.

In a year he could use one again, or one which was similar to it. Some very high potions could only be taken every ten years, they required preparation and treatment before and after. There were all kinds of classifications that Alchemists needed to know before selling their products.

The time Aspirant Soreco had required an interview with Nikolaï, many of her questions had been to make sure he could use the potion safely.

Anyway, Nikolaï had always considered potions as a one time option for his progress. A boost in his development. Meditation was the most sustainable way to improve. It wasn’t just his personal opinion, after all, there were more compounds developed to help meditation than ones that aimed at skipping it.

The medallions Nikolaï was going to create would not help someone like him a lot, with low affinity. However, someone with a high affinity could be very interested. Their meditation sessions would require less focus even if they produced the same results.

Every similar talisman would be sold easily and at a good price.

***

Several tries later, Nikolaï was looking at the ceiling, his hands behind his head, trying to think. The prototype didn’t work.

Nikolaï had understood that it wasn’t the execution but the design itself which was the issue. No matter how good he could be, a one-knot glyph could only endure a small number of stacks.

To isolate one elementium Nikolaï had to “fuse” four filters on the attach-glyph. It was too much and after his tries, Nikolaï believed that it couldn’t do more than two.

Nikolaï was thinking about different solutions and how feasible they were. Unfortunately, the best idea he got was the one he couldn’t do. When Nikolaï started this project he had considered the exposure.

Orsana assistants had no more eyes in his room but that didn’t mean they weren’t still watching over him. When Nikolaï started again with his Forgerune activity he was careful at hiding his true level. If he hadn’t needed the money he would even have avoided creating more pouches.

The medallions were a bit more advanced but once again the possible money was too good. He had calculated a ratio of benefits versus risks and finally went for it. If he was modifying his initial design it was a different story. Arcanist Amos was a Forgerune too, a more experienced one who could probably find out how the medallion worked by dismantling it. If she found something too advanced it would raise a lot of red flags against Nikolaï and he still wanted to keep a low profile.

He continued to balance the pros and the cons for an hour before coming to a decision. The upgrade felt too dangerous but he wasn’t abandoning the project. He was going to use only one filter on the locket. Rather than having a medallion that isolated one elementium, it was going to push away one.

It would not sell as much but every Aspirant who had a specific affinity had one which was opposed. One that could poison them faster than any other. Having a way to be sheltered from it would be beneficial, especially for people with a specific affinity. The higher it was, the lower the others were.

Nikolaï had made up his mind and started to work on its new design. He would try the next day but wanted to take the time to create it on paper first. Using just one filter gave him more freedom to enhance that filter without risking limiting the others, a problem he had in his initial design.

In the middle of the afternoon, Nikolaï went to the library and spent the rest of the day there. He did some research and found a book about canvas and how to cast spells with one hand. The book didn’t have a plain and simple method but contained all kinds of exercises aiming to improve one capacity.

Nikolaï knew it wasn’t tomorrow that he was going to be able to cast with one hand, it was a skill that required time and constant effort. Which was why he applied himself regularly, investing in the future.

***

The next morning, Nikolaï was trying to cast a new spell Solar Clock. It was a tier 0 spell particularly hard to learn but Nikolaï was patient and thorough. He was reading the spellbook carefully, not just the instruction but the way the spell was meant to be interpreted.

The spell didn’t measure time like a mechanical clock but used the sun as a reference point to determine what time of the day it was. When cast correctly the spell would create a quadrilateral inside a circle. Each corner represented four positions of the sun : dawn, zenith, dusk and nadir. On the circle would appear a light showing to the caster where they were on the cycle.

The spell was very accurate, the shape of the quadrilateral was even affected by the seasons and the geographic position of the caster but the display of its dial could only permit an estimation of the time. Moreover, even if the zenith of the sun was technically noon, the official time wasn’t exactly the same as the one from the spell.

Only during the equinoxes, the two could be perfectly synchronised but the official time was dictated by mechanical constructs, not by spells capable of capturing the sun position. If it was, then no clocks would have the same time.

The Bright Continent had 3 time zones : Central, West and East. A day was 25 hours and every time zone had an hour and a half difference. The 3 zones were large and so many regions next to the Central one often used the two times, calling them the Fair time and the East or West time (depending on which part of the continent they were in).

The Central time zone was measured defined by the Empire capital : The Fair City. The Tower of Dzürkül, even if it was very far south of the capital, was in the same time zone. Nikolaï native region was slightly above Dzürkül but way more to the east, in this East time zone.

Anyway, even if Solar Clock was not perfectly in sync with the official time it was still a very useful spell. Nikolaï loved the idea of being able to tell the time better than a tool but it wasn’t the only reason he picked it. Solar Clock belonged to the Order Arcane, the arcane that dealt with Time elementium and Nikolaï wanted to learn more about it.

When someone started to study arcane, one of the first things they learn was how many elementium existed. The answer was 5 : Fire, Water, Earth, Metal and Air. Neutral elementium wasn’t considered one because despite being called an elementium it was a temporary state.

“There are only 5 elementiums” was true, but incomplete. The proper sentence should be : “There are only 5 real elementiums”. Arcanists knew that beyond the reality of what you could perceive was something else, something that you couldn’t “touch” but was here.

The first Arcanist who had verbalized this concept had called it the “principle of decay”. Before him and his experiments, the majority of the arcanist community believed that the amount of elementium in the world was finite. It was constantly moving and rearranging itself but from a global point of view, the amount of each elementium stayed the same in the world.

Of course, this hypothesis was never hardly proved because nobody was able to make measurements on this scale. It relied on the fact that when using a spell the energy in it was not destroyed but redistributed. It was what created the effect of a spell.

The hypothesis remained unchallenged for a long time, mostly because it was a consideration that only preoccupied the scholars of the community and the more advanced Arcanist.

One day, an Expert Arcanist published a new theory. He had worked on a new kind of elementium bath. A perfectly sealed room. While making tests he had realised that every time elementium was reused in his prototype, it was losing some of its “qualities”.

Leaning on similar tests the Expert advanced the idea that the amount of elementium wasn’t finite but constantly replaced. And like matter, energy decayed.

After decades of debate and research, the Arcanist community improved the theory and replace the “principle of decay” with what was now called the Time elementium. It was not a real elementium but a virtual one that was contained in every other.

Nikolaï had a lot of trouble understanding exactly what it meant. From what he had understood Time elementium was an invisible characteristic, something that bound each elementium together. When elementium reached its maximal decay new elementium was created somewhere as if it had made space for it. Time elementium was what maintained this balance, what connected everything. If it didn’t there would be entropy. Nikolaï didn’t know what it meant, but he had read it and it sounded bad.

Once the existence of Time elementium had been established it didn’t immediately change things. An arcane had been created for it but it had been considered a sub-studies of Mystical Arcane at that time. Spells able to extract information from Time elementium (like Solar Clock) appeared but it wasn’t a big revolution.

Things change when some Arcanists started bending Time elementium rather than just “reading” it. Those became legends capable of crossing immense distances in the blink of an eye or carrying a castle in their pocket. Many of those legends had been amplified but they always relied on some truth.

Order Arcane became its own thing. An Arcane like any other even if its spells were disparate. There was a world between a spell using Time Elementium as a source of information and a spell bending it. Order Arcane didn’t have mid-tier spells. Some low-tier and more intricated versions of them but their points were always to use Time Elementium as a reference point. The other kinds of spells were only very high-tier, the kind impossible for Arcanist under 5th Circle, at least !

Nikolaï took a break from the spellbook and let his mind wander. Maybe there would be a time when his eye would help him decipher the mystery of Time. Every child had dreamt at least once of being one of those legendary Arcanists.

There were so many reasons why most Arcanists, even ones from the 6th Circle, never became capable of such prowess but Nikolaï didn’t care. He was looking for motivation whatever it was, and a bit of daydreaming never killed anyone.

With this renewed focus he dived back into the book and, after some fails, successfully cast the spell. The dial was hovering above his hands and Nikolaï used the book to be sure he was reading the spell correctly.

He spent some time trying to improve its cast before stopping for the day. Even if he wanted to he could spend all his time on spell practice. Luckily he was also excited by what was coming next.

After a light lunch, Nikolaï started to work on his new medallions. This time it worked and by the end of the day, he had made 4 of them.

He was pretty satisfied with himself and resisted the temptation of selling them immediately. He took out a piece of paper and started to plan how to schedule the disposal of his stock. He was still labelled as an amateur so he needed to let enough time pass between each delivery to keep up the appearance. If he started to produce more valuable talismans the least he could do was to pretend that it was hard for him to create them.

In the evening Nikolaï had made a calendar of delivery and put it next to the one for spell practice. He couldn’t refrain from smiling. He had finally found a way to provide for himself.

At least as long as he was in the Tower. Having access to a population of Arcanist and (most importantly) Aspirant assured he could find buyers for what he could create. Outside the Tower, the demand for lesser talismans would be very low if not inexistent. Right now it didn’t preoccupy Nikolaï. He had been so obsessed with a way to sustain his progress in the Tower that the idea of after hadn’t really resonated with him.

They were worries for another day and not important enough to ruin his smile.