"Oh, man. This is honestly way better than I was expecting." Caeden laughed. He was riding high off the success of his first truly original piece of ethersmithing. "I really hope the CI isn't shit; otherwise, this was all pointless."

During the process of actually forging this new glove-type independent infuser, which was not an elegant name by any means, Caeden had been so focused on actually getting the thing to work that he hadn't been very focused on making something with a good Crystal Integrity. The main factors that determined the CI of an infused object were how much ether it contained and how stable that ether was.

Technically, every infused object would slowly bleed out the ether in it over time, losing its magical properties. Resonance was the main method of stabilizing the ether and making sure the infusion lasted as long as possible. The more ether in an object, the higher the difficulty of forming a solid resonance. That's why just shoving ether into something wasn't a good idea. Technically you could make something that had amazing, powerful effects, but it would only last a few weeks.

Among ethersmiths, any work that would lose all ether in ten years or less was considered an absolute failure. A high stability could make an infusion last centuries, even millennia. The knives Caeden had made to pass the head smith's test had been far below his normal capabilities, and his resonance had been flawless. At a minimum, those knives would be shooting fire for tens of thousands of years. The ether loss was so negligible that Caeden wasn't sure of a solid time frame.

Grading infusions was not Caeden's best skill as an ethersmith, so he decided to find head smith Mike and ask him to take a look. He could do it himself, but Caeden wanted an accurate estimate for his first original work. With that in mind, he grabbed the glove sections and went looking.

Unsurprisingly, Mike was in one of the smithy's working. Caeden stood back, waiting patiently for the head smith to reach a stopping point in his workflow. He was working on a solid armor chest piece, doing the work of shaping it while adding solid ether to increase its defense. That would be an incredibly hard to penetrate piece of armor, going by the amount of ether Mike was hammering into it.

"What do you want, kiddo?" Mike glanced up from his work, lifting the piece with a set of tongs and maneuvering it back into the forge.

"I made a new type of ether and a new infused work to go with it. I was wondering if you could grade it." Caeden offered up the glove pieces.

"Hmm," Mike pulled out his jeweler's spectacles, peering closely at the two pieces. "What were you thinking here, kid? These are already rendered. YOu can't sew the two halves together like this! It'll ruin the infusion." He looked at Caeden with disappointment.

"A friend of mine has the Stitch shroud," Caeden explained.

"Ah." Mike looked slightly embarrassed. "Yes, that makes sense. Very useful for cloth works. I'll grade it. If it's at or above 500 CI, I'll upgrade your rank to advanced."

Mike peered at the glove for several long minutes, occasionally glancing up at Caeden before returning to the pieces of cloth. "What are you playing at, kid?"

"I don't know what you mean?" What had he done wrong?

"This isn't advanced-level work; this is master level! The Crystal Integrity is over a thousand, easy!" Mike shook his head. "Admittedly, the stability is only average for master rank, maybe a two thousand years worth, but the ether content is impressive. Plus, this is such a novel infusion. What refining did you do to get to this?"

Caeden walked Mike through his process, explaining his plans and difficulties. The conversation was nearly an hour long, with Mike asking several questions as to Caeden's thought process during both his refining and resonance. They had in-depth discussions about technique and how Caeden's process could have been improved. "Wonderful. Well, your knowledge and application are absolutely at master rank. Only eighteen. It's not a record, but it's damn close. If you reach grandmaster rank in the next five years, you'll be the youngest one in the history of the Central Authority. Admittedly, our record isn't as good as the Lands of the Fire King, but that's a huge achievement."

"I had no idea." Caeden shook his head. "All I really did up to this point was make plant affinity plow heads for the Dromar."

"Did you now? As an unaccredited ethersmith?" Mike's whole disposition shifted. "I remember you mentioning working for the Dromar, but it slipped my mind at the time."

"Yes, I did. For a little over three years." Caeden nodded, "Is that a problem?"

"Not for you, not at all." Mike smiled. There was an edge to his look that Caedeen found chilling, "Ethersmiths are allowed to ply their trade with whoever they want so long as they don't claim accreditation from the Smith's Union that they don't have. Families, on the other hand, are bound by law to declare what works they buy from unaffiliated smiths to the Union. It's supposed to make sure those works are valued properly, and even unaffiliated ethersmiths are compensated according to industry standards. After all, if unaffiliated smiths could be paid less for the same work as a Union smith, it would undermine the value of everyone's work."

Mike slipped into a lecture unbidden, reminding Caeden of their first meeting. He had guessed at the time that the head smith would be much more comfortable teaching than testing. If the ease with which he slipped into educating Caeden was an indication, he was right.

"Which means the Dromar was likely using you as unregulated, illegal labor. How much were they paying you?" Mike continued.

"They subsidized my entire smithy and all ether and materials for commissioned pieces, as well as twenty pounds of grain per project. The type of grain was determined by what was currently being harvested." Caeden rattled off. He had been working under the same deal for three years. He knew the terms by heart.

Mike's jaw dropped, his mouth hanging open. "You can't be serious."

"That's what they offered, and I took it. It worked for me. No one in the village used money, so I just bartered for anything else I needed using the grain." Caeden shrugged.

"I'd need to grade the work you did, but that is literally around one ten-thousandth the value of the work you were doing. By law, materials for commissioned works are to be provided by the commissioner, so that wasn't even them paying, that was just them not breaking even more laws than they already were." Mike shook his head, letting out a disbelieving laugh. "They had a master rank smith tucked away, and they had you make plow heads. Insanity. The Union is going to eat them alive. I swear, they're going to get sanctioned for the next hundred years. They won't be able to buy a fucking toilet." Mike continued to laugh to himself.

"Well, if we're all good, I still have another project to finish tonight," Caeden said awkwardly. The head smith was making him uncomfortable. He never held any real animosity for the Dromar, even after Lily told him how much they were technically mistreating him. The idea that they would be punished for upholding a deal that he actually agreed to and enjoyed simply because it wasn't good enough for other ethersmiths felt dirty. He almost felt like he was betraying a business partner, even if they were only receiving the proper consequences for their actions.

"Yeah, yeah. Go ahead, kid. Don't let me hold you up. I'd love to see what else you're working on. Another new creation?" Mike was back to smiling openly, the angry edge to him dissipating.

"Sort of. More of a twist on an existing infusion." Caeden hedged. He didn't want to reveal his next project just in case it amounted to nothing, which was perfectly likely.

"Alright, bring it by, and I'll grade it when you're done." Mike waved him off.

Caeden headed back to his own forge, fully intent on his next plan. What he wanted to do now was actually much easier in theory compared to what he had just done. Chill vein was made of two mostly incompatible ether types joining up. A mental ether like mind loss combined with an elemental ether like ice was challenging to create without some sort of common ground intermediary. He only really managed to through brute force. This next one was much more compatible.

Caeden was still going to be using the same ivory bamboo he had already made, so he had nothing more to do in that department. Instead, he had two sets of ether refining to go through. The first was simple. He took damage, weak, and solid ether and put them in the evaporator. Once the gasses were good and mixed, he added small crystals of combination ether just like last time. He was left with brittle ether. Evaporation was honestly the easiest way to make new ether, but some types simply would not play well in an evaporator or wouldn't take on a gaseous form at all.

His next step, unfortunately, ran into a roadblock. Caeden needed growth ether, but Forge One didn't have any on stock for whatever reason. That meant Caeden would have to make some manually. This was one of those tedious, time-consuming processes that Caeden had been glad to avoid up to this point. He pulled out a centrifuge from the workbench and inserted a fist-sized chunk of plant ether into the middle.

The centrifuge was modular, with the ability to add and remove arms according to the ethersmith's needs. Each arm had a mesh at the entrance with different sized holes. When the centrifuge started to spin, a heating element would turn on under the plant ether in the middle. The structure of the internal section forced any particles that flowed off the slowly evaporating crystal to flow over the various mess entrances to the arms from smallest mesh to largest. This caused the plant ether to separate into its constituent parts. For his purposes, Caeden used a basic formation that would net him growth, life, and nutrient ether in three arms.

He set that to spin, and now it was time to wait. That chunk would take over an hour to refine. Centrifuge separation was easy but incredibly slow. In the meantime, Caeden decided to go about making a bunch of companies of the fire knives he had made earlier. They were easy to make while also being useful to pretty much anyone.

An hour later, the centrifuge wound down, a bit earlier than Caeden was expecting. Opening up the barns, he now had a chunk of growth ether the size of a golf ball. He was going to need more than that, unfortunately. He set the centrifuge up with another chunk of plant ether. In the meantime, he could begin working on the last phase of ether refining he needed for Lily's other glove. For that, he pulled out a set of three enclosed glass flasks with stoppers in them. He filled one with brittle ether, one with growth ether, and one with ice ether. The three flasks were connected to a fourth flask by glass hoses. Then he set burners under each flask with ether, all adjusted to that ether's melting point.

The ether in each melted at roughly the same time and began flowing down the tubes toward the final flask. This was when Caeden used Sharp to wrap around a small glass stirring stick he had placed inside the enclosed flask and remotely stirred the contents. The swirling color slowly mixed, resolving into one uniform state. It was a pearly grey with heavy dark blue cracks.

Frost break. This was the new ether Caeden had wanted. Any inanimate material that came into contact with an object infused with this would have icy frost start growing over it, causing the material to become increasingly fragile over time.

The next three hours were boring, with Caeden making knives while waiting for the centrifuge to refine more growth ether. Finally, he had enough to finish. The final steps of this piece were much easier. Caeden got the forge going with a hefty dose of cold ether added on. Frost break had essentially no rejection with the water ether already in the ivory bamboo, and the cold flames only made that interaction smother. He once again used raiment of the king for resonance, having a wonderfully relaxed time compared to the stressful nightmare of chill vein.

The rendering process for the two halves of Lily's right-hand glove went exactly the same as the left, with another barrel destroyed. Caeden was late to IP training with his friends at this point, so he ran by Mike, getting a similar appraisal to the first. Frost break was more stable but ultimately had less ether, so it evened out. Both gloves were a little over one thousand CI, far and away Caeden's best work to date.

He actually ran, both gloves in hand, back to the Core Seat. he even used Physical Enhancement, running at absurd, superhuman speeds to get across campus in only a few minutes. He was desperately excited to show Lily what he had made. In theory, he had just vastly increased her combat prowess in a way that enhanced her current combat style.

Upon arriving at the Core Seat, Caeden immediately headed for the IP rooms where his friends would all be training together. The elevator dinged, and he was there. The first room on the right was basically their group's second home since they were up here every single night. He scanned his school ID to get in, seeing everyone hard at work.

"I" m done! It worked! It's even better than expected!" Caeden shouted, grinning goofily. He was still giddy from his twin successes. Immediately, all action in the room stopped. "Erik, come over here and stitch these together properly."

Caeden waved about the two sets of half gloves. Erik smirked at him but wordlessly took the glove parts, effortlessly combining them into their intended, complete form. Erik now held two elbow-length gloves. Both had swirling patterns running over their surface, culminating in small dots at the fingertips and in the palm. The left one was a deep navy blue with swirls of white and blue speckled with tiny flecks of purple. The right glove was a sky blue with swirls of shiny grey run through with dark blue cracks. Caeden wasn't sure how fashionable they would be, but in his eyes, they were beautiful.

"Cool." Lily had followed up behind Erik along with Cat. "You refused to explain exactly what they would do since you said you were guessing. Care to enlighten us?"

Caeden spent the next few minutes walking the group through the abilities of the paired gloves. "...So the basic idea is to use frost break to crack armor and then use chill vein to poison them. Pretty good, right?"

Everyone was staring at Caeden like he had grown a second head that screamed death threats. "...Dude, that's scary. What else have you come up with?" Erik started.

Caeden shrugged, "Everyone we're up against isn't playing fair. The only way to win against cheaters is to get them kicked out of the game, which we can't do, or cheat even more outrageously. These two are a lethal combination with Lily's whole setup. She should be able to deal with most people now. The stupid amount of ice ether in these will nullify most fire-based shrouds, so what happened last ranking day won't repeat itself."

"I noticed how you didn't answer my question about other ideas. Are they all this broken?" Erik continued.

"Maybe don't worry about that right now," Caeden suggested.

"I'm pretty worried about it."