Chương 15: Experimentation

Ivan hissed and pulled the brush away. The half-formed glyph on his skin glowed sickly and then fizzled out, leaving behind a faint red mark and a numb tingle down his fingers.

"Well, that's promising," he muttered.

"Promising how?" Rys asked.

"In that you still have a hand?"

"In that it failed before it exploded," he said.

"Means the ink's too conductive for sloppy work. I was hoping for that, honestly."

"You have very strange hopes, my dear." He flexed his fingers. Sensation was already returning, pins and needles pricking along his knuckles. No permanent damage. Good enough. Normal enchanted ink would have been safer, obviously, but Wyvern blood would make the spell better. In Ivan's head, that made the risk worth it.

"Again," he said. This time he went slower. He let Architecture guide him, watching the mana cling to the brush, then settle into the skin behind it. He adjusted the angle of the line by a fraction of a degree, leaned into the natural flow instead of fighting it. The second pass burned less. The third, less again. [Steady Hand has leveled up!] [Arcane Scribe has reached Level 44.] After a few minutes, a small node sat there on the back of his hand.

It was a simple containment circle woven with a stabilizing cross. It pulsed faintly with his heartbeat.

"Try it," Rys said. Ivan gave her a look.

"Hm, should I? Sure…" He swallowed, fed a small pulse of mana into the node, and held his hand out. Rys raised a hand and brought it down on the back of his hand, hard. The glyph lit up. It felt… odd. A brief pressure radiated across the back of his hand, like someone pressing a flat stone against the skin from the inside. The bones under it hummed. Then it faded.

"Duration's garbage," he said.

"But it held."

"You didn't scream," Rys said.

"Always a good sign." Ren shuffled closer from his bedroll, blinking sleep from his eyes.

"What are you two doing?"

"Self-harm," Ivan answered.

"Productive kind." Rys flicked the boy's ear lightly.

"Ignore him. He is making armor under his skin." Ren's eyes went round.

"Cool."

"Deeply uncool if I mess it up," Ivan said.

"Go back to sleep. If this goes wrong, you'll need to run." Ren didn't move.

"Does it hurt?"

"No," Ivan lied. Rys arched a brow.

"You shouldn't lie to children."

"Shouldn't we? It's a white lie, it'd ease his worries," Ivan argued and she shook her head.

"I disagree. White lies are adorable in a safe world, but in a world like this? Everything is a race. The faster children realize that, the better their odds of survival." Ivan looked at her again. Every now and then, Rys said something that reminded him she was not just flirting and tail jokes. He sighed.

"Yes, Ren. It hurts. But not too much. Not as much as being eaten for sure, so I'm calling it a net positive." Ren considered that, then nodded, very solemn. He retreated back to his blankets but lay facing them, watching through half-closed eyes. Ivan turned his attention back to the little test glyph. He dismissed it mentally, draining the mana. The lines dulled from faintly metallic to simple dark stains. The Skill stayed, waiting.

"That's one node," he muttered.

"For a full-body version, I'd either need a river full of mana or draw it over my heart, where the mana flow is strongest. Which makes the process simply that much riskier..."

"Sounds like suicide to me," Rys said.

"Hey, that's life. But yes, I won't do that," he said.

"It'll take more time, but I'd rather spend extra mana making wider-range glyphs than play with my heart. We have a long journey ahead anyway, so it doesn't hurt." She whistled low.

"You terrify me in new ways every day, young man." He smiled without looking up.

"Terror is free armor." He had to get real busy from now on.

The next few days blurred into travel and pain. The sun and moon were still there, technically, but Ivan kept measuring time by how long his skin burned after each test. Late at night, beside camp, he started again.

"Alright," he muttered.

"New plan."

"Oh?" Rys twirled a strand of hair around her finger, yawning. If she was so sleepy, why was she awake?

"Finally giving up on turning yourself into a walking lattice?"

"Not backing away," he said.

"Refining." He drew a quick sketch in the dirt with the tip of his brush, a crude stick figure with lines at the shoulders, elbows, and hips. Then he tapped each joint in turn.

"Covering every inch is mana-stupid," Ivan said.

"Even if I had the ink and I could draw them, I'd collapse when all of them are flared at the same time from a big impact. But I don't need a full sheet. I need load-bearing points." Rys leaned in, eyes catching the faint light from the glyph-stone, and pinched her fingers close together.

"Explain that as if I did not spend my youth chasing spirits off temple roofs." She didn't even speak like a priestess, well most of the time anyway, so what is she on about?

"Well… Force travels," Ivan said.

"You hit someone here," he poked the little stick-man at the ribs, "and the impact doesn't just live on the surface. It runs along bones, through joints. If I reinforce those key junctions with anchor nodes, I can hijack that travel. Spread the force before it gets concentrated into something that cracks ribs or snaps femurs."

"Wooh! Like… putting better springs to a carriage!" she said slowly.

"That's a smart girl, engineering already," Ivan attempted a joke, making her suddenly scowl and glare at him. He ignored her and drew circles at the sketch's elbows, shoulders, hips, knees, and shins.

"One here on each forearm. One here at the biceps. One at each collarbone. One center chest, one mid-spine. Two in the lower abdomen." Rys's gaze paused on that last part. Her lips curled.

"Two in the lower abdomen," she repeated.

"Protective measures for your future offspring, darling?"

"I like my current configuration," Ivan said.

"I'd rather not test how much acid or blunt force it takes to remodel it." She outright laughed at that.

"Practical and vain. A dangerous combination." Ren piped up from his blankets.

"You should protect it, yeah. My aunty says men get really stupid when that part is hurt!"

"Ren," Rys groaned, pinching the bridge of her nose.

"We talked about boundaries."

"What? It's true." The boy rolled onto his back, tail flicking.

"If Ivan gets hurt there, who's going to teach me runes? I want to learn so that I can send letters to our Gods! Maybe they'd respond if I write them in this world's letters… You can't even write human letters." Rys looked personally offended.

"I can write. I simply choose not to endure watching your squiggles." Ivan bit back a smile.

"See? Ren understands infrastructure."

"Don't drag the child into your madness," she said, though she didn't argue the logic. He wiped the dirt sketch away with his palm.

"Point stands. If I place anchors at major joints and a few strategic places, the mesh can skip along my skeleton instead of coating everything. It'll take longer, because the nodes have to cover more than an inch of range, but that still means less ink, slightly more initial mana, and less chance of accidentally writing 'explode' across my heart."

"Ah, yes, I am glad you remembered your heart," Rys said dryly.

"I was starting to think you forgot you had one." If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

"Very funny."

"So." She pointed at his arm.

"That little circle on your hand is now… what? A prototype? Are you going to remove it?"

"First anchor," he corrected.

"For the forearm. Tomorrow I start on the wrist node properly. Then elbow. Work my way up."

"That sounds like a lot of opportunities to maim yourself."

"That's life." He capped the ink vial, hands steady.

"Besides, we have a long walk to the coast. Might as well multitask." Rys shook her head and stood, dusting off her legs.

"If you start convulsing in your sleep, I am stealing your pack and leaving you here."

"You say the sweetest things, Guuji." She snorted and went to kick Ren's blanket back over his feet. Ivan looked down at his hand one more time. The small dark circle sat there, unassuming. A first nail in the world's coffin, if he did this right. He had to get real busy.

The next month blurred in the slow, annoying way travel did. Every day looked the same until Ivan looked back and realized the distance had piled up behind them. They moved south and a little east, keeping off major roads when they saw them. Once, from a hillcrest, Ivan spotted a caravan far below: proper wagons, armored riders, a Standard he didn't recognize. They went the other way. Most threats were local.

A flock of overgrown crows with steel-hard beaks tried to mob them one dawn and scattered in shrieking pieces under Rys's claws and Ivan's [Chain Lightning] variant. Ren got pecked once and sulked for hours, glaring at every bird they passed as if it personally offended him. Ivan leveled, slowly. Not at the dizzying pace before the Wyvern kill, but steadily. [Human (F) has reached Level 30.] [Inscriber of Principles has reached Level 29.] His numbers climbed. His stats ticked upward.

He didn't chase fights for experience. He calculated. Most mana not spent on monsters went into himself. Each evening, after camp was set and Ren had eaten enough to stop complaining, Ivan sat by the light-rock or a low-burning, carefully warded fire and opened his little wooden case. Wyvern-blood ink. Soot. Crystal dust. A brush that had seen better days. He worked in segments. Forearms first.

The initial anchor on the back of his hand was refined into a proper node, then linked to a matching circle on his inner wrist. That night, a misstroke on the connecting line sent a spike of wrongness up his tendons and locked his fingers into a claw for fifteen minutes. Rys sat nearby, sharpening her claws on a rock, watching him swear under his breath as he forced his hand open with the other.

"Do you perhaps wish to reconsider," she asked sweetly, "and let me put a nice safe fox rune somewhere humiliating instead?"

"I don't need a fox rune on my ass," he grunted.

"I need to not explode when something punches me."

"Bold of you to assume my rune wouldn't solve both problems."

"Tempting," he admitted.

"But no." She had been right about one thing: in some worlds, people like him were considered cursed. She told him stories to fill the silence some nights, half to distract him from the sting of ink and half, he suspected, to remind him of the scale of his stupidity.

"There was a man from a world like those Murim or Wuxia stories you mentioned," she said once, as he traced careful curves around the knob of his elbow.

"He wrote tiger stripes into his muscle. Every tooth pattern and every claw. He dedicated his whole life to it. They say at the end… he could punch through mountain stone."

"Oh!" Ivan was excited.

"Aaandd… They also say his heart stopped at forty because it forgot how to beat if it wasn't punching."

"... You're very encouraging," Ivan said, sweating.

"Another put a fire rune on his tongue," she went on.

"Spoke words that burned. Very dramatic. Died when he sneezed."

"Alright," he said.

"I get it. Install with care."

"Good boy." He raised an eyebrow. Ren often watched, chin on his knees, eyes wide. The boy started copying some of the simpler patterns in dirt again, his little hand much steadier now than when they'd left the caravan ruins. Ivan corrected angles, lengths, and ratios, occasionally tapping his knuckles when Ren rushed.

"Precision is survival," Ivan told him.

"Sloppy work kills more mages than monsters."

"Then how are there so many mages?" Ren asked.

"Good question," Ivan said.

"We should work on fixing that imbalance later." The boy wasn't no Scribe, he just loved copying Ivan every now and then, and Ivan didn't mind. Now that he thought about it, what was Ren's Class anyway? By the time they crossed a shallow river with banks of cracked mud and strange reeds, both his forearms bore matched anchor nodes. From wrist to just below elbow on each side, faint dark sigils lay under the skin, barely visible unless the light hit them at a shallow angle.

The mesh between them was still fragmented, but the basic structure existed. After the forearms, he worked his way across his chest, shoulders, hips, and legs, twisting himself into increasingly stupid positions whenever a node sat near the edge of his reach. The one at the middle of his back was impossible. Ivan drew that node in reverse on a thin scrap of parchment with ordinary soot. Rys pressed the damp pattern against his back and peeled it away, leaving a faint guide over his spine.

Then she took the fine brush and the Wyvern-blood ink. Ivan fed mana into each line while Rys traced the guide and kept [Architecture of Mana] active. He could not see her hand, but the forming construct still opened in his mind from every angle. He stopped her when a curve ran too tight, had her wipe one junction clean before it closed, then talked her through the line again. It took three attempts to get the junction right. Rys complained about his directions through all three, but her hand stayed steady.

When the spine node finally connected to the anchors on his chest and shoulders, a cold line ran across Ivan's back and the structure held. The first real test came courtesy of an ogre. It lumbered out of a copse of trees one grey morning, dragging a snapped tree trunk like a club. Its skin looked like boiled leather, its nose was an insult to noses everywhere, and [Ogre, Level 43] appeared the moment Ivan's [Inspect] pinged it.

"Finally," Rys said, cracking her neck.

"Something with meat on it." She really wants to eat a humanoid? Ivan thought before recalling she was a Foxkin. It wouldn't be too surprising if she'd eaten actual humans before. Oh well…

"Hold," Ivan said. She blinked at him.

"What?"

"Let it hit first." She stared.

"I am not letting a giant throw rock at you for fun."

"Not rock," he said.

"Me." Her ears flattened.

"Absolutely not."

"I need data," Ivan said calmly.

"Right now this is theory. I wrote scaffolding. It works in small doses. I need to see if it holds under something bigger than a dog."

"Use a tree," she snapped.

"A tree doesn't try to cave my ribs in with a club," he said.

"And it's not smart. Monsters are. This is the cleanest chance I'll get. Open ground, single target, no surprises."

"You are the surprise, you stupid bastard," she said.

"You are the surprise to the healer who will wonder why your organs come pre-scrambled!"

"Whoaaa, I wasn't notified that we hired a healer. Where is she?!" Ivan pretended to be shocked, looking around. He turned back to her, expression dry.

"Never mind. We still only have me, a fox with anger issues, and a child." Ren raised his hand.

"I vote with Ivan." Both adults looked at him.

"What?" Ren said, shrugging.

"If it works, he lives longer. If it doesn't… it's faster than the slavers would do." Rys pinched the bridge of her nose again.

"I am poisoning whoever taught you logic." Ivan hid a smile. The ogre had noticed them by now. It bellowed, low and wet, and started forward with the tree-trunk dragging behind it. The ground shuddered a little under its weight. Ivan stepped ahead of the other two and lifted his right arm.

"If this goes badly," he told Rys, "kill it before it swings a second time."

"I will kill you if it goes badly, dear Ivan Marcellion," she muttered.

"Then it."

"Order of operations, got it." The ogre grinned when it saw him alone. Its teeth were yellow and chipped. It hauled the tree-trunk up onto one shoulder with thick fingers and broke into a loping run. [Instinct of the Prey] snapped awake. The warning ran along his spine, and every old habit he had screamed at him to dodge. He didn't. He turned [Lattice Guard] on. A small pulse of mana left his core, just enough to wake the network of anchors.

The nodes on his hands flared first, then his wrists, then the pair at his elbows he had etched only a week ago. The sensation raced up his arms into his shoulders, then down through his chest into the central torso node he had carved just below his sternum. From there, the pattern cascaded. The anchor at his spine woke, tying in. Two lower nodes, newly inscribed just above his pelvis – Rys had hummed very pointedly while he worked on those – joined the song.

The feeling spread down into the thigh nodes, then to the knees, and then to the circles set on his shins. For two heartbeats, his entire skeleton felt like it had been dipped in cold iron. The ogre reached him in the third. It swung the tree-trunk in a wide horizontal arc, putting its weight behind the blow. There was nothing elegant about it. Just mass and speed and bad intentions.

Wood met human body with a crack that would, under normal circumstances, be accompanied by a lot of screaming and the sound of ribs turning into gravel. The lattice pulled at his mana again the instant the club connected, this time hard enough for Ivan to feel the loss. He had not fed it anything beyond the activation pulse. The pattern read the force entering the anchors and drew the amount it needed on its own. This time, the world went muffled instead. Ivan felt the impact, but the pain didn't stay in one place.

The hit spread through him like a deep quake, the first hot flare at his side bleeding away across the lattice of anchors. His shoulder caught part of it, his hip caught more, and his spine shunted the rest down his legs until even his calves thrummed, the shin nodes ringing like struck metal. He slid a few feet in the dirt, boots carving grooves, but he remained upright. HP dropped by a chunk. Not a sliver this time, but not a death sentence either. Pain roared across his nerves, sharp and bright.

His vision swam for a breath. Then the world snapped back into focus. The [Skill] was working properly!! [Living Vellum Slot I Engraved.] [Bound Spell: Lattice Guard.] ▣▣▣▣▣ [Lattice Guard] Instant defensive construct. When activated, it forms a mana-distribution mesh under the skin of the inscribed limb and linked regions. Reduces direct impact damage by spreading force across the lattice. Duration: 2. 4 seconds (bonus +1 second randomly, thanks to the use of Wyvern Fluids). Cost: Small initial cost to activate.

Further mana is drawn automatically in proportion to the force distributed. Failure Condition: If available mana is insufficient, any force the lattice cannot distribute passes through to the body. Warning: Excessive or repeated use may result in bruising, internal bleeding, or structural fatigue. ▣▣▣▣▣ He'd seen the System notification last night, but he couldn't trust the limits just from reading them. Now he understood the problematic part.

The lattice would spend whatever the impact demanded, up to whatever mana he had left. Anything it could not cover still hit his body. The bruises already spreading beneath his shirt were proof that even a successful use did not make him invulnerable. The ogre blinked down at him, confused. Its swing had not had the desired result. The puny human was somehow not a smear on the ground.

"Haah, fuck yeah," Ivan rasped.

"My turn."