“We way out leveled those bandits, but that will not always be the case. I’ve got to make this work Kelly,” Sam thought, as he sat down in his workroom. Sam looked over all the supplies and materials on his desk as he liked to do while thinking, “Now that the power issue has been figured out…I hope. I need to work on the enchantment issues. I really don’t want to keep carving enchantments directly into my body. Not only is it painful, but it is slow, and the detail of the runes would be too limited for the legacy enchantments.”

Sam turned on the burners for several steel cauldrons he was heating up. In one cauldron he placed some gold shavings, in another he placed mana-imbued steel shavings, in another he placed some of his own blood, and in the last he placed shavings from a monster core.

Sam thought to himself, “All this stuff was stupid expensive. I really hope this works. I only have enough left for seven or eight experiments.” As the metal in each of the cauldrons was melting, Sam tried to push mana into each one as much as possible, and he kept doing this until the metals were completely melted, and then continued to push and fuse his mana into the liquid metal until it finally resisted his attempts to pump any more into it.

Sam then added the steel to the gold and continued to stir and push mana into the mixture. He could get a little more mana into the mix, but not much. He then added the steel and gold mixture to the melted monster-core shavings, and this mixture seemed a little more receptive to his mana, but again, not much. Then Sam poured his own blood into the mixture and pushed a touch more mana into the swirling mass of liquid. Last, he reached over and poured some regular ink into the mix.

He continued to stir the mixture and pump and compress the mana in as much as he could. While the mixture was still hot, he continued to stir, and when it cooled down just enough, he poured his “mana ink” into an iron jar and sealed it. Sam placed the jar into an enchanted “shaker” that he created for the purpose of trying to keep the mixture from separating or hardening. While the mixture was shaking, he then grabbed an enchanted machine “pen” he created to work like the tattoo needles that artists used on Earth.

Sam double-checked the pen-drawn enchantment on his arm that he was going to trace with the “tattoo pen.” “OK, everything looks good, all I need to do now is put the most expensive ‘ink’ on the planet into my homemade tattoo pen, and make magic,” Sam smiled to himself.

He could only tattoo his arm a little at a time, if he put too much mana ink into the tattoo pen hopper, it would start to thicken and clog up the needle. Sam would tattoo his enchantment a little bit, then reload some of the mana ink, tattoo some more, and so on.

Sam swore to himself, “Dammit, the tattoo looks beautiful, but I think the metal is poisoning me.” He didn’t want to heal his entire arm and destroy his tattoo, so instead of using one of his healing charms, he manually cast his minor mend spell and tried to focus on just healing the poison.

“Shit, if I have to fight off poison every time, I’m not sure if the tattoo would even be better than just carving into my body,” Sam mumbled in frustration as he was working on the poison effect. It was slow going and thank god it wasn’t some really fast-acting venom, but eventually after several hours, he was able to cure the metal poisoning. “Hey! I didn’t know you could alter your body to be resistant to poison!” Sam said excitedly, after he received a system message.

System Message == You have gained metal poisoning defense

Sam realized with a start that he’d leveled up his minor mend spell while curing the metal poisoning. That was something to consider: maybe he shouldn’t rely so heavily on enchantments. His mind raced through a dozen scenarios before he dismissed the idea. What was a minor spell compared to the mana powerhouses that were his enchantments?

Another part of him pointed out that if he didn’t use his spells, they’d never get more powerful. “What’s to stop me from hacking spells like I hack enchantments?” Sam said aloud, and that made him sit back for a moment.

He stared at the cauldrons around him and the tattoo pen. “That idea will have to wait.”

Sam felt the conductivity of the tattoo-enchantment, but was worried about how resilient it would be after he pumped mana through it. “Please don’t be a one-shot stupid expensive tattoo enchantment,” Sam prayed as he pumped just a little mana into his forearm and aimed his palm at some trash in the corner.

Sam could feel the breeze leave his palm as it blew the trash across the workroom. “My arm has been tempered from my practice and mana use, but that burned more than it should have. The conductivity of the tattoo materials also made a much more powerful spell out of the small amount of mana I used. Interesting…what if I… wait, stay focused,” Sam ordered himself, as he lowered his arm to inspect the tattoo before dunking it in a bucket of water.