If money go before, all ways do lie open.”

—Ford, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Act 2 Scene 2, William Shakespeare

==POV: Caden==

Since I was capable of replicating a working copy, there was no need to keep the original gate around anymore.

I started the process of dissolving it, carefully absorbing the entire structure at the same time. It slowly melted away, excess mana I couldn’t absorb flooded into the ambient mana that constantly flowed everywhere through my dungeon.

After only a few minutes, as the entire structure of the sewer door shimmered intensely, it suddenly vanished. In its place knowledge crept into my mind.

The knowledge built on what I already knew. I saw how the subtext added to the runes influenced the results. The ambient mana rune was tuned to intake a certain level. The rune I had thought meant strength more closely meant stability, stasis, inertia. Small bits of knowledge filled in gaps, or made corrections to my assumptions.

By the time the process was done I understood much more about how that emblem had fit together. For now, based on my greater understanding, I was going to call it a fortification emblem.

I believed I was right to learn as much as possible before I absorbed it. I had received a more comprehensive picture of the entire emblem. I still didn’t understand everything, but I wouldn’t be surprised if novice enchanters copied down existing designs before they learned how to make everything work on their own.

I didn’t really need to worry about materials though. I could experiment as much as I wanted. And I had gained enough knowledge of the subtext to mess with the fairly crude modifications that had been on the sewer gate until I understood them better.

I examined Tam’s work again, using my core’s superior eyesight. Nope, still mostly gibberish to me. I knew enough to know that it was extremely advanced gibberish, but that didn’t help me all that much. I did see something in the beam rune that I felt I should understand, but I would need to look at it later.

For now, after I examined it again, I was going to absorb the teleportation cylinder as well.

I examined the cylinder, as well as the hollow copy I had made, holding up both in from of my core. I rotated them in sync with each other, studying the three dimensional patterns as well as the pattern placed on the curve of the tube. I could tell what the teleportation rune was using as a target now. There was a particular section of lines and curves that was added on. They were not subtext, instead they were the code showing it what to search for. It would look for marks that were identical and teleport the contents there.

And… yes, there.

Another section specifically excluded the cylinder from the search. Right… don’t want the teleport to find the symbol on the cylinder and teleport the paper back inside. There was not enough mana here to search the world, or even very far. I was missing something about how this functioned. Hmm… might be able to use that exclusion rune for some defenses, tell it to ignore monsters, etc...

I continued to study the cylinder for a time, but it still had pieces I didn’t understand. That was okay, I wasn’t expecting to master emblems all at once. Patience was key.

Still, I had the opportunity to learn more directly.

Before I tried absorbing the cylinder, I absorbed the cube I had made with a copy of the fortification emblem. It absorbed quite quickly, apparently being made from my mana and the ambient mana that I had “attuned” with my presence allowed for that. Nothing happened after I absorbed it.

I was hoping that it would tell me even more about the pattern, but I wasn’t surprised that I couldn’t absorb my own work to learn more. While the system was often very literal in its requirements, I had yet to find an outright exploit that could be used to cheat.

Since that wasn’t going to let me learn more, I focused on absorbing the teleportation tube. It absorbed much quicker than any other emblem I had done, other than the one I made myself. However, most of the mana that had infused it before was gone. I wasn’t sure if it would even let me learn anything with much of the framework degraded.

After a few moments the tube vanished and knowledge began to flow once again.

I could see how the teleportation worked now. It didn’t search like I thought it did. Instead it packed up the matter inside and pushed it… out. I wasn’t sure exactly where it went, some place outside of normal space. Before it did that, however, it tagged the package with the symbols. I was only seeing half the delivery system. Somewhere, some other emblem pulled the package back out into real space.

Other little details about the teleportation tube came to me, however, as that happened a notification pinged at my awareness.

Mana Lexicon II is able to upgrade to:

Mana Lexicon III

Proceed:

Yes No

This had happened last time as well.

It was likely going to take a little time, but it was the middle of the night already, so probably best to do it now.

I told it yes.

The world vanished in a blur of symbols. New symbols entered my mind. Some were crisp with meaning while others were blurry approximations. New connections between symbols appeared, as well as how they could be written in three dimensional combinations with others. Subtext wove webs of subtle meaning within runes with tiny additions to their structure.

Then I learned something entirely new. A tilt of a rune here, a line versus a curve there as runes were laid out. New meanings appeared in the positioning of runes. Rather than being a subtext, this was a superscript, composed of the arrangement of the macro components. It too added layers and shades of meaning.

Then different knowledge began to flow into me. I learned the capacity and intensity of mana transmission for different type of materials. Silver allowed for slower transfer, gold for faster, mana crystal held a tiny bit of mana stable before it cracked from the strain. Folerth handled just about anything, but other materials could be used to fill in the gap and jump-start the process. And then… came alloys. Silver and folerth for a permanent slow transmission of mana. Gold and folerth for the reverse. The exact proportions could be used in different ways. Folerth coating and woven into mana crystal could create larger and permanent mana storage that an individual rune or an entire emblem could access.

Details, large and small, poured into my mind, until it abruptly stopped.

The world returned to my awareness with the crisp clarity to which I had become accustomed. Morning had come and Zidaun and his team were already in the sewers.

==POV: Zidaun==

When I returned after speaking to the dungeon, Inda was on watch, but the others had already slipped off to sleep. I went off to my own bed; I didn’t have a watch tonight. Soon enough, it was morning.

Or as close to morning as we could get here in a cavern of eternal night.

Amid the yawns of breakfast, I told them a little about my experience the night before. I had to omit the truth a little, but I told them that after I gave the dungeon the scroll case that it gave me the token worth fifty as well as a choice.

“The sorcerer’s silver was obviously worth more than the dungeon gold, but I have no idea what the cube was worth,” I said.

“It didn’t have any runes on it right?” Inda said.

“Nope,” I said, “just a two inch cube of white glowing crystal. Had quite a bit of mana in it.”

“Probably mana crystal then,” she said. “It isn’t usually that expensive, though a perfect cube in that size might be valuable. Honestly, I’m not sure.”

“Yeah,” I said, “that’s why I took this.”

I held up the little bead.

“What is this even worth, anyway?” I asked.

“Depends on how pure it is,” Inda said. “If it is completely pure, that is worth… a lot. Hundreds of gold.”

Gurek choked on his breakfast a little.

“Any impurities drop the price substantially though. Whether it has a little or a lot of impurities it will need to go through the same expensive process of refinement. Could be worth as little as twenty to thirty gold.”

“No wonder emblems are so damned expensive,” Gurek muttered.

“That and the skill of the inscriber,” Inda said. “Probably most of the cost of a given emblem is from the skill actually, a little bit of folerth will go a long way.”

“Anything that blows up if you make it wrong is expensive,” Firi said with a shrug.

“I don’t know about that,” Gurek said. “It seems like alchemists blow themselves up all the time, but they sell some stuff that is pretty inexpensive.”

“Correction then,” Firi said, “anything that blows up expensive ingredients when made wrong, will be expensive.”

“Still,” Gurek said, “worth a minimum of five gold for each of us. Not going to count on it being worth any more than that. Still… if it is totally pure, I might by a skill-book.

Firi frowned at him.

“I don’t like those, it seems wrong to use them.”

Gurek shrugged, “Wealthy people use them all the time, especially for training up their kids. And it is definitely a good way to learn at least the first level of a skill. Even more if you are lucky. I won’t be able to afford a skill-book beyond level one or two anyway.”

Firi started to respond where Inda beat him to it.

“I’ve actually used one.”

Firi looked at her, startled.

I was actually curious as well, I had never heard her mention it before.

“Why didn’t you mention it before,” Gurek asked.

“You all know my parents have money, but I don’t like to make a big thing of it. They wanted me to marry, but I had already traveled all over with them while they were dungeon delving and gathering their fortune.

“I wasn’t going to marry some noble so we could pay off their debts to gain a title. I had already had too much freedom and I wanted to delve like they had.

“They had been training me in etiquette, dancing, drawing and painting, all the noble pursuits since I was younger. And they never bothered to tell me of their plan. Hardly a surprise that I thought I was going to be just like them when I grew up.

“Anyway, there were arguments, but in the end my stubbornness was great enough that they didn’t want to risk me running away and getting myself killed.

“I was remarkably foolish at the time and didn’t really understand the dangers of dungeons, for all that my parents had been delving my whole life. I might well have run off and ended up dead.

“To make a long story short, they wanted to provide me an advantage, something that might let me get a better adventuring class. So they made a compromise with me.

“So I had to buy the learning skill. I had been studying like a noble for much of my life, so it wasn’t particularly expensive. Five hundred and fifty something… I think? Nothing like the 5000 it starts at without any education. I bought that, and then they let me pick through a number of skill books for what I wanted to learn. They offered advice about the types of classes I might get.

“I didn’t realize it until later, but they were all skills that leaned heavily toward ranged and control. They were still doing their best to keep me alive and away from directly dealing with monsters.

“And so they bought me a skill-book for resistance sense. After training with an instructor for a few months, they let me use it.

“Between the learning skill, and my time with the instructor, I learned it successfully. Obviously with my Resistance Dancer class it upgraded to resistance control.”

“What did it feel like,” Gurek said, “using a skill-book?”

“Strange,” Inda said, her brows drawing down. “I had already learned a decent amount about resistance, and the tiny gradations of it when moving objects. However, it suddenly became a whole new sense. I could feel it from across the room. I could tell whether an object I was going to step on was stable or not. Whether two objects were firmly attached to each other.”

“I still don’t think people should use them,” Firi said. “Though I am glad to have you in the party.”

I interrupted. I could see an argument about to happen.

“Before we get completely derailed, I assume we are still planning to delve today?”

I got the expected positive responses, even if Gurek did mutter about “stinking sewers.”

“Then we had best get a move on. Everybody pack up and head out.”

A few minutes later we were packed up and on our way.