Chương 522: Chapter 524: A Craftsman’s Quest

Felix felt a thrum of anticipation and nervousness beating in his chest as he darted into the trees. This was the first time the group really needed him like this. He had done useful things for the others before, of course - he was still proud of the {Brand of Miria}, for example. But this was the first time he was going into a potentially dangerous situation without any backup from his friends, while their lives hung in the balance.

If he messed this up, his friends might get sent back to the Market right afterwards - and he might join them, soon enough. Every single action they had taken in this world so far might come to naught. The idea of being useful to his friends was exciting, but Felix was also a bit nervous that he might mess up. What they were doing was risky this time. He nearly stumbled into a quicksand pit, and shook his head, as he barely managed to force his center of gravity backwards at the last second. He needed to focus.

If he kept worrying about what they were trying, he wouldn't even survive long enough to reach his destination. He squinted at the ground in front of him. He could still make out the quicksand pits and fog banks when he was paying careful attention to his surroundings, but as he moved through the forest, he still felt as if it were watching him. Part of him knew he was being silly. Miria hadn't seen any evidence of some kind of soul within the forest itself - according to her, the forest was quite ordinary.

Even so, every single step felt like it might be his last. <How are you guys holding up? > asked Felix. He needed something to break the tension a little bit. Talking with the others and getting a status update would help him with that. It would also inform him if he needed to rush things a bit, even if the risks would be greater. <Things are a bit troublesome over here. The water is creating some kind of dampening effect on the metal impact these guys usually exert on us.

However, it's a bit more limited in effect than I would like. Even I'm starting to feel a bit of an urge to just charge at the mist and keep swinging until it dies. Which is absurd, because I'm not even a melee fighter, > said Miria. <Right now we're trying some emergency measures, in hopes that one of them will work. > <Covering my eyes and blocking my ears has helped a lot. I have no idea how to convey that information to the people who aren't using communication bracelets, though, > said Sallia.

<Whatever magic they use to drive us into a frenzy, I suspect we need to sense them in order for it to work. > Felix felt a small amount of relief at Sallia's words. At the very least, it sounded like his friends had found some kind of countermeasure against the mental influence of the fog banks. Since Miria had already reported that the enemy couldn't directly attack them with summons while they were in the water, it seemed that his friends were safe. For now.

Felix slowed down a bit, to make sure that he didn't die a pointless death. As much as he still wanted to dash forward at full speed, getting himself killed wouldn't help his friends. Miria and the others started to send him constant status updates as they got the other members of the group blindfolded and deaf, then held hands and started slowly making their way in a counterclockwise circle around the island's coast.

Felix thought that the entire image seemed completely absurd - willingly blinding and deafening yourself when you knew that enemies were lurking in the shadows beside you sounded terrifying. However, based on what they could find with their senses, as well as Miria's use of soul-sight to occasionally peek through the blindfold, it was working well enough. In the following hours, not a single member of their team died, while Felix continued scuttling through the forest.

After several hours of travel, during which he got constant updates from his friends, Felix made his way to the valley. Just like Miria and the others had described, Felix saw a giant cyclone of fog, constantly spinning around the center of the valley. He smiled. At least he hadn't gotten lost. That would have been the most humiliating way to mess up. He scanned the valley, and realized that there was a wrinkle in their plan. The valley wasn't completely empty.

There were still about fifty fog bank monsters in the valley - although they were scattered, and didn't seem very responsive to his presence. He suspected that they were probably younger fog banks. Unfortunately, he had no way to check, since he didn't have Miria's soul sight, and there weren't many physical differences between the adult and baby fog banks. Even though they were probably young, weak fog banks, there were still over fifty of them - and they were right in the area where Felix needed to be.

They were blocking his access to the cyclone. Fortunately, Felix had his own ideas for how to get through this obstacle. He might not be as good at fighting as the others, but when he had enough preparation time, he could do just as much - or even more - than his friends. He grinned, and took out his {Liquid Metal Core}. The group still hadn't figured out exactly how the fog monsters detected them yet, but Felix had a sneaking suspicion that it was based on essence.

After all, the fog monsters seemed to emanate waves of essence at each other and then respond as if they were communicating, according to Miria. It stood to reason that the fog monsters probably had some kind of ears that 'detected' essence, or something of the sort. That meant very little for the combat group, since it wasn't like someone could just stop having essence in their body. However, it meant that Felix had an idea for dealing with the fog banks in the valley.

He took out his {Craftsman's Hammer}, and tapped ten times on his {Liquid Metal Core}. Item: Craftsman's Hammer Effects: Whenever this hammer hits an item, it will leave a 'craftsman's mark' upon the item. Each mark makes the item slightly more malleable to other alterations in its shape, form, and essence. The item will 'shift' to fit the user's desired outcome, but the influence each can exert is limited. Only ten marks can be maintained at once, and each will fade after ten minutes have passed.

(any object, material, or item can have multiple craftsman's marks on it). Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon. Maintenance cost - 14. 9 Achievement per reconstruction. After that, he used his alteration essence and his magic to reshape the {Liquid Metal Core} into a small bell, with two wings attached to it. Through his understanding of metal, it wasn't very hard to get a shape that would make constant ringing sounds.

Then, Felix began to play with the sounds that the bell would make when he launched it. He used enchantments to make the sound less physical in nature, and more essence-based. He made it louder, and louder, and louder, until this thing would blast the metaphorical ears off of the fog banks - at least, until it ran out of energy. Which wouldn't take long, but it should be enough to buy him some time.

Finally, he attached two silver, glittering wings onto his little bell, and used a bit more enchanting magic to make the bell capable of flight. With the help of the {Craftsman's Hammer}, as well as his own control over metal, Felix could keep the bell running in circles for at least half an hour - which should make it nearly impossible to ignore, and also distract the fog banks like nothing else. Then, Felix used his essence to launch the {Liquid Metal Core} into the air.

The bell-shaped sound bomb sailed through the air, blasting globs of essence into the air like soundwaves at a pace that should be absolutely deafening for any creature that had real sensory organs for essence. To Felix, he couldn't detect anything unless he focused his essence senses on it - but he suspected it wouldn't be the same for the fog banks. It worked like a charm. The final group of fog monsters reacted immediately to the bell, like bears that had been drenched in oil and then lit on fire.

They dove straight for the object, while emitting waves of essence at it. Felix had no idea whether they were complaining about the noise, or telling the object to stop, or just trying to create some fog minions to rip apart the annoying object. Either way, it was doing its job. Right when the first fog monster nearly reached the bell, it jerked to the side, and then began flying in a new, random direction.

Every single time one of the monsters nearly caught it, the bell would start flying in a different direction, making its movements erratic and unpredictable. After a few moments of observation, Felix realized that his bell was even better at avoiding being 'caught' than he had expected. He had originally thought he would need to help it out from time to time using his metal control - but evidently, he had thought too much. The bell was pretty good at fleeing from dense sources of fog, at least.

Of course, a bit part of the reason the fog banks couldn't catch the object was because they had no physical bodies. That meant their only way to shut off the annoying device was to spawn minions and then have those minions catch the annoying object. However, those minions weren't very fast, which made the whole task nearly hopeless from the beginning. The fifty remaining fog banks constantly chased after the bell, completely unaware of Felix's presence.

He spent a few minutes observing, just to make sure things would work the way he hoped they would, and then dashed into the valley. After a few minutes of jogging, Felix found himself right in front of the cyclone that Miria and the others had seen previously. He reached out to the cyclone with his hammer, and then reached for a bottle that he had requisitioned from the village supplies before he had left. This bottle was special, in that it wasn't made out of glass at all.

Instead, it was made out of the exact same wood that the village had used to make the swords that could kill the fog monsters. Felix hit the bottle with his hammer ten times, creating ten new craftsman's Marks, and then stuck the bottle, along with his hand, directly into the cyclone. It felt like sticking his hand into a vat of acid. Felix gritted his teeth, as he felt a strange sensation ravage his flesh, nerves, and skin.

he suspected that his hand wasn't going to work right after this - which wasn't a real problem, because Miria could just heal it up. He kept the bottle right in the middle of the cyclone, as he activated his newest, and most relevant Feat. It was one he had taken when he reached level 70, during some assisted levelling after the threat of the fog banks had made themselves obvious to the rest of the village.

Cloud Catcher (Level 70 Feat) Effect: This Feat can, at a great mana cost, allow you to seal a large amount of fog into an object, granting it new and unique properties. Originally, he had taken this Feat in order to start making use of the fog cores the village had been acquiring from the deceased fog monsters.

It had not provided the combat utilities he had been hoping for, unfortunately - while the weapons and items he infused fog into could get all sorts of useful properties, none of them had proven useful against the fog banks in particular. They would have been great for an assassin who wanted an invisible blade that pierced through armor by literally phasing through it - but neither of these properties were particularly useful against the monsters of this island. Now, the Feat had a completely different use.

The cyclone had a huge density of fog within it - and a great deal of that fog was also mixed with water from the ocean of souls. Not only was it a fantastic crafting material - but Felix was willing to bet that if he just 'sealed' a huge portion of the cyclone inside of his new bottle, it would totally screw up the process for new fog monsters being born.

Even better, since the fog monsters had been so enraged by the group's presence near the cyclone when they chased Miria, and the others, Felix planned to use some of his new fog to create a distraction and save Miria and the others. He felt his mana reserves start to bottom out, and the pain from having his hands corroded started to overwhelm his reason. Finally, he pulled the fog-catching bottle back out, and grinned, despite the pain.

True to his suspicions, the bottle now had a great deal of glowing, partially-liquified fog inside of it. He wasn't quite sure what the effects of this substance would be if he made a weapon out of it - but he was eager to find out. He glanced at the Cyclone itself, and them smiled. True to his predictions, it had shrunk in size very noticeably. About a quarter of the fog, water from the ocean of souls, and essence in the cyclone had disappeared in just a few minutes.

He wasn't sure whether it would recover or not - but even if it did, it should take a while. If they did this regularly, they could control the birth of new fog clouds, which would fix the situation for the settlement. He turned back to the fog banks. They still hadn't noticed his intrusion. He began to run back towards the edge of the valley. Then, to Felix's surprise, he felt a ripple of essence wash through the entire island.

It was like someone had just rung a massive bell, and the sound had rippled through everything in their surroundings - but it was made purely of essence. <What the heck was that? > asked Miria. Felix swallowed. While the first few steps of the plan had gone well, a new variable had appeared. He had no idea what that ripple of essence was, but he had a sneaking suspicion that something on the island had just changed - perhaps permanently.