The next day Ben went to the shop while Thera focused on training her earth magic. There were too many things he wanted to work on and not enough time to do it all, but since this was regularly his day off to hunt anyway he had the benefit of not needing to help out too much, instead focusing on using the tools around for his own purposes.

First and foremost what he wanted to improve came down to the church of Myriad itself, his coat. There were a variety of ways he wanted to enchant it to try and improve it now that he’d grown more comfortable with his skills and knowledge, having leveled up a few times since he first made it, with defense being the biggest target to improve.

When he first heard that the church would be strengthened by its believers, it seemed he’d overestimated by just how much. Any enhancement it would get would come from the number of believers and years of giving their belief, meaning that for the time being it was still weak, but at least would improve as time went on and more people joined the faith. Still, that also meant he’d have to improve it a bit himself to enhance its effects.

With that in mind, he went to his library and pulled out his rings, choosing the perfect ones to suit his needs. Selecting the same armor, shield, and defense enhancement rings he’d used for Thera’s brace, as well as sturdy, and barrier magic, he slid the rings onto his already crowded fingers as he got to work.

The important part was what method he would use to place them. While he was more experienced with weaving his enchantments, the method of blending that Myriad’s race used might have been unusually suited for the task seeing as how it was being put on the church. Both methods had their positives and negatives, but even more important was the fact that he didn’t need to choose one or the other, instead taking both to make something greater.

The first task was figuring out just how he intended to arrange them and split the skills into two groups. The first would use armor enhancement as its base since it should be able to be applied to a coat in an almost completely unaltered form given the fact that the skill applied to leather armor as well. To that though he had to take the aspects of both shield enhancement and defense enhancement that would be able to complement it and blend them all together.

From there he went to focus on what was left. With barrier magic as the base, he blended it with not only the properties of sturdy, but also his magic resistances, each of them but light and life, just in case he ever needed to be healed while wearing the thing.

Once that was done and he had the blended mana created, each filled with the properties they would need to enhance the base one to what he considered its current maximum potential, he stretched them out, weaving them not just with each other and the coat itself, but also with an enchanting spell, activation condition.

While he hadn’t used too many enchanting spells since he gained access to any skill he could get his hands on, this one was arguably the most valuable for an enchanter to learn, making it so that either specific effects or entire enchantments wouldn’t activate without cause. In this case, he’d designed the enchantment so that a thin layer of the barrier magic wouldn’t deploy around the coat unless the armor enhancement picked up any form of impact, but when it did it would be instantaneous. While hypothetically it might have been better to have it always active if the coat could support the mana cost, if any attack was fast enough to get through before the barrier went up, the enchants would be powerless to stop it anyway and he would likely become a fine red mist.

As he was putting on the finishing touches he was feeling particularly proud as he looked at what he’d created. Such a thing would have been all but impossible if he still only had a single mind available to him, and he couldn’t deny the value that came with his mental skills, even if their improvement did tend to make his thoughts feel crowded. To push his mind to the limit, arranging skills and their aspects, blending what he needed and weaving it all into something functional, he couldn’t have imagined something better as his new and improved coat was completed.

“Oh I am having such a good week,” He muttered to himself with a smile before calling out to his god. “Hey Myriad, what do you think?”

“I’m making you a new one, it’s fine,” He told his god before running off to his teacher. “Hey Falk, I made some improvements, what do you think?”

The yeti took it, looking it over in his hands. “I gotta say, this technique your god’s teaching you is something. Might have to try and incorporate some of it in my own work. The enchantment’s good, if you ever get the chance to remake it with even just fourth or fifth-level skills then I don’t think you’d have too much to worry about while you wear it. Of course, your face and legs are still pretty exposed.”

“True, I’ll work on that a bit too. Most of the skills are ones Sonya’s asked Pelenia to try and get for me anyway so hopefully she has some good news, and if I’m going to be in Anailia anyway I might as well pick up a higher copy of barrier magic.”

“Ha, then I’ll keep my eye out for whatever you make when you come back,” Falk said before getting back to his own work.

Hmm, I really should try to think of a way to keep my exposed bits a bit more protected. I could probably make some pants out of a good enough material to be able to hold their enchantments without breaking, but the mana cost is a whole other issue. That isn’t even mentioning my head.

There was always something. Some other project to work on, some challenge to overcome, and deciding which would be next was never easy. But there was no real rush, and as much fun as it would be to focus on crafting a new and exciting item or creating a better enchantment, he decided to his next task of the day to focus on something a little more humble, but at the same time having the potential to revolutionize his work. He was going to solve his mana problem.

He wanted to keep creating bigger and better enchantments, but the issue came down to powering them after. While he was already seeing great advances to his total mana pool as a result of sleeping with the mana-sucking ring he’d made, it wasn’t enough to do anything truly great, meaning he’d need to rely on either slowly filling items with mana that had been made from materials that could store it well with minimal loss, or use magic materials that would continue to suck mana from the environment to use.

The first option would be significantly cheaper to produce, though Ben didn’t exactly need to be concerned about that now that his patent was paying off, though the second option had its problems too. Magic materials weren’t easy to find on the public market, and even though he was directly connected to the people in control of that supply, he worried his crafting as a whole would suffer if he tried to brute-force his creations using expensive items all of the time instead of finding different solutions to his work. With that in mind, he thought he’d found the most elegant of solutions, taking inspiration from his home world. The creation of a battery.

Well, he was pretty sure it wouldn’t technically qualify as a battery, but he didn’t know what other name to call it. The idea was simple, get a small piece of a white or rainbow mana crystal, probably shaping it to be about the size and shape of a triple-A for convenience as well as consistency, and setting it properly so that mana within would be extracted. From there, instead of permanently binding it to the tool like mana crystals typically were, he’d create a divot within the ones he was making where it could be inserted.

While this wasn’t the sort of thing he could sell in the shop, the materials making it far outside the price range of their typical clientele, it was the perfect solution for his personal use, and one he planned on exploring immediately, the only question becoming just what to make to test it with.