When it came to gemstone magic, he found there were four ‘levels’ of gemstones, so to speak. The simplest tier were basic crystals, these being the common ones found in ore veins and magmatic vents with ease. Things like quartz and amethyst were exceptionally obvious in this group.

After that came the precious gemstones that many knew and loved. Diamonds, emeralds, sapphires, rubies, opals, onyxes, and so on, each with their own elemental alignment seemingly tied to their colour of all things. This indeed meant that a blue or pink diamond had very different elemental alignments than a transparent one, deepening the whole system’s complexity by a layer. Especially if he ever reached a point of artificially creating gemstones…

Then came magical gemstones, these weren’t actually mentioned at length in the book so he couldn’t really say more than ‘they were stronger’.

And lastly, compressing the elements of nature themselves into pure foci. The effect of such a thing in incomparable to any other method, but this was purely theoretical and presented the limit to gemstone magic.

It was why so many transitioned to arcanists when its field of magic was found to be well above gemstone magic, and perhaps it even exceeded the limit of alchemy.

Regardless, he wasn’t even in that first stage.

There was just so much information to go over, it was honestly a bit overwhelming but never did that stop him from reading it all. Although some things led to questions, likely intentionally done by the previous owner due to limited space in this book and not wanting to throw high level knowledge onto an apprentice. Whilst flipping through the book some more to see if he forgot a note, he asked out loud, “I get that the law of addition stops you from just adding loads of synergistic materials together for an impressive effect, but why… Why doesn’t it apply to gemstones as well?”

That was one thing which the book pointed out, and called the addition-multiplicative parity law.

The accessory’s materials could not be increased to produce more effects, but instead different types of gemstones could be combined to produce effects of multiplicative power! However, there was a drawback in this as most materials could only withstand three gemstones at once, which was why a set of materials with ample synergy were required as well to increase this limit.

It quickly became a mind-boggling puzzle in how to both increase the number of materials, create synergised sets of gemstones to amplify one another, and also ensure the accessory remained strong enough to withstand battles…

And then there was the matter on how exactly any of this actually worked. He felt like an engineer all over again, wanting to know why exactly the stress forced in a material were present, but told repeatedly by lecturers that it fell into a domain of applied physics or something related to complex flow dynamics. From there a lack of self-research killed his chances of learning something new.

Long story short, he never did find out why carbon fibre was so varied in material strength.

“I have to stop. It’s been like five hours, and I actually need to try and get stuff done. How much longer for the shard?” He closed the book and packed it away, moving over to the sun channeler but seeing how the sliver had only grown into a large triangular shape like a guitar pick, nothing like the sun shards he obtained.

He needed quite a few more hours still. Then the inventory improvement would come and he’d see what lay beyond this step, it became a rather great excitement to reach the 20th level as soon as possible, seeing what the cube offered him for its completion.

In the meantime he carved more totems. Specifically finishing three more ox totems, all of which were shoddy in quality, to merge them into a poor quality one.

And with so much time left in the day, he prepared another bonfire for the ox ritual but did not dare start it. With full knowledge of what happened after a failure, he had to be sure that merely dipping a hand into fire no longer scared him…

With his oven’s flame roaring with temperatures to melt metal, it belched heat and embers all over with every single swing of the bellows. Just sitting nearby he felt the wave of temperature overwhelm the air and make breathing ever so harder, but it didn’t stop there. A hand slowly reached out and stayed just out of range of the flames.

This was stupid… wasn’t it?

Part of him felt it was right to stop here, that he’d be a bigger idiot for going through with this. But that part of him also felt powerless to stop his will here, not under his control but rather suppressed like a madman’s logical thoughts.

The hand jammed into the oven and felt the searing, burning pains once more. And tears appeared at the corners of his eyes in remembrance of how it felt, but he did not scream.

Instead just pulling his hand out not long after and quelling the flames on his arm.

“I have to just be insane… Am I actually in an asylum now and this is all in my head? Why doesn’t it hurt!” He shouted to the nearby rock that looked passively… Because it was a rock.

He felt the pain, how every muscled ached from inflammation and the burns on his skin scraped against the healthier skin around it or beneath. He felt how every beat of his heart throbbed in his arm intensely, agitating it and giving a dull pain without end…

But it didn’t hurt. He clenched his burnt and charred hand, and while the pain was there he didn’t feel any lack of movement. It would heal soon enough anyway.

Without much ability to focus, he went through the ritual motions in his head and simply lit the bonfire alight without a word. Talking didn’t help with this, especially not talking to a rock of all things. And so, he swung the windchime, making the appropriate movements, and maintained a completely still face even with his injured arm. It didn’t take long for the ritual to reach the final steps, where things finally diverged from the first attempt.

And yet, his face truly was apathetic to the flames. They just didn’t hurt, it was like a friend punching you on the arm. Sure, he could react, but what did that do besides make him look weaker?

Not like those punches hurt much in the first place.

The bonfire in front of him rapidly grew to several times the size, becoming an obelisk of flame which utterly dwarfed him, but not ending there. It exploded, literally. Fire and flames ruptured from the column and covered the environment all around, forming a burning landscape in all directions, the sky itself turned a dull orange as though on fire and the air grew heavier by the second. Breathing brought some discomfort, but he still didn’t find anything about it tough.

And as the temperature rose, it began to feel like those hours left stuck to the floor on fire. Well, almost in the end, in the end he found it too weak to truly compare, and since this fire couldn’t actually damage his body, the only side effect he cared about no longer existed.

After just a couple minutes in the heat, it receded and the flames covering the grassland all snuffed out on their own volition, leaving just him and the pillar of flames. Unlike the flames, it remained at great intensity and height, but from here the rune could be seen. The burnt piece of wood he needed to grab to obtain ‘proof’ of capabilities from this ritual, such a stupid thing that nature required of him.

In les time than he stuck his hand into the oven, it reached into the bonfire and pulled out the rune.

The flame instantly went out.

As he held the blackened rune, he saw all the wood inside the bonfire crumbled into a pile of ash, with the support cage for it all also seeing significant damage. Still, he just threw in several more logs and began the ritual again, a simple thing which only took a few more minutes.

Additionally, he didn’t have to spend a few minutes standing in that annoying heat this time round because he proved himself. Now the ritual just required him to pull out the rune at the end, a relatively annoying but still easily do-able task. With the two runes he easily changed the hemp shirt he made long ago into a heat-resisting shirt, then put it on underneath the brigandine once more. He didn’t feel any difference whilst wearing it normally, but walking close to the smoker revealed that its heat was practically non-existent. In fact, he only felt something when his hand reached nearby and received a red mark from the flames.

Well, heat-resisting was somewhat of an understatement to the effect as it completely removed his ability to feel relatively higher temperatures. Although anything in the hundreds of degrees range was obviously going to injure him.

None of this took enough time to finish the sun shard’s production though, and in the end he had to settle on fixing up his farm for a while instead. For this he harvested some hemp stalks from the base so they’d continue to grow, but simply watered the rest of his crops and left them be.

And lastly, he crafted all the components required for the inventory upgrade. A heart of flowers came first as the easiest, then a second set of hemp trousers as the current pair he wore mattered too much. As a pair of those trousers required six pieces of fabric and one rope, it came to a whopping total of 192 hemp fibres for a new pair.

Fortunately, he had exactly 36 pieces of string, and 84 fibre bundles left over, which added up precisely to the 192 required for the trousers. A surprising thing all round, but it reminded him to quickly change out the dry fibres for wet ones so that he could strip them all sometime tomorrow.

Of course, he did strip one fibre on the spot whilst collecting some more wood pulp by the river for more paper. This allowed him to craft one more dynamite, and then he sat down at the river side to focus on carving once more. A few hours passed as he crafted another serpent rune, and the sun finally began setting for the day, allowing him to assume the shard and slivers were finally finished. Which meant…

Well, that was everything. Being splashed by the huge wave whilst making the serpent rune was another nuisance, but hardly dangerous.

“That’s everything then. I have the ingots, equipment, and now all the magical items. Sucks that I have to give up my sword and shield though.” As the recipe called for the two items, he ignored the requirement of the leather chest piece as the brigandine was objectively better than it even after the damage it took from that sasquatch.

Some hammering easily bent the metal plates back into place, although the weak points from such stresses could be seen. He hoped to replace this armour with some chainmail or plate armour as well, the weight would be absolutely nothing to him.

And those armours are rather flexible by design, he just needed sufficient padding to survive heavy blows.

“Here we go then,” he said to the rock nearby with the cube in hand. The finished sun shard had been replaced with another sliver as he knew it’d be required soon.

Nine items, some of which marked his major achievements in the past week alone… It hurt to lose them all in an instant for such a passive improvement. If it was at least an awesome tool it might have been easier to press down on the grid and complete the craft. Once more, he received a black metal card that the cube gobbled down eagerly. The whole process really raised the question of why it couldn’t directly consume the cards from its storage, but he wasn’t about to question the cube anymore.

Five brand new, empty orbs. If he were to guess how the cards work, he unfortunately couldn’t just craft a dozen of them to get unlimited storage. Like most concepts of ‘upgrades’ it was a one-time thing, and he’d need a different upgrade for more space.

So, what new recipes did he finally get as well?

That’s what the day had been completely focused on, and in a hurry he moved over to the tree and looked at the new layer of them. A few new recipes unlocked, not to mention the branches surrounding this level which provided three directions to move out into. The latter set didn’t really matter until he began sacrificing materials to the cube again, but the actual recipes were quite a bit more useful than that. All three of them to be precise.

The one which he believed to be best came first, a rudimentary treadle, these two wooden wheels were joined together by a leather strip, and then the smaller of the two had a connection to a foot pedal through a rigid rod.

This allowed the small wheel to be spun by repeatedly pressing down on the pedal in a rhythm, as one expected, and then this rotational energy could be maintained in the larger wheel for whatever purpose he desired. Well, he only knew of one very specific use this mechanism held, and it was none else than to make grindstones.

Although it probably had other uses too.

None of the recipes were to make the pedal or wheels though, which meant having to handcraft them. But that didn’t make things less enticing as they allowed him to craft a handsaw and wood planks, both of which would allow him to begin construction of his own furniture. The planks were rather easy to create, just three logs in a column to make six planks.

While the handsaw did require two iron ingots, the rest being wood, glue, and a nail made it rather easy in the end.

But that treadle… So easy to craft yet it represented so much for the next couple days.