Chương 43: Blood and Gold

Enzo held the cork between his thumb and forefinger, turning it slowly while he threaded the gold wire through the last of the four notches he'd cut into its sides. The wire was fine-gauge, and packing it into the narrow channel to ensure it would maintain a seal required steady work. The bottle had been his mother's. Perfume, a floral scent that clung to the glass no matter how many times he'd rinsed it. Small enough to grasp in his palm, but made of thick glass that wouldn't break easily.

Inside, blood had replaced perfume. His own. Drawn with a kitchen knife and a steady hand after everything else had failed. The idea had been Sumi's. He'd spent days trying every material in the box, with more brought to him each day. Bone. Leather. Paper. Wood. Rocks. Fabrics. Rubber. Candle wax. Ceramic. Antler. Horn. Seashells. Metals. Glass. Even a chunk of beeswax someone had contributed. Arcane mana accepted any medium for storage.

It was inefficient, slow, and demonstrably preferred living hosts, but it seeped into everything. As long as the enchantment held and the material was large enough, arcane mana could be compressed and layered. However, once compressed, many materials eroded from within. Paper and fabric, leather and wax. The more malleable the material, the less effectively it held mana at higher density, and the faster it broke down. That was just the beginning, though.

He finished pressing the last wire in, carefully tucked the loose ends, then gently slipped the cork back into the bottle. He needed the gold to deform under the pressure, working with the cork to form the seal, but without the gold breaking anywhere. Enzo held the bottle up and examined it carefully. The internal ends of the wire reached halfway down into the bottle, resting comfortably in the blood even when shaken. That's why this enchantment required gold as its base.

While he wasn't exactly sure of the interaction, having performed no witchcraft before, he suspected silver wire sitting in blood would corrode. Perhaps it wouldn't matter in the short term, but he didn't want to find out. Gold was exceptionally unreactive. It was also highly biocompatible, according to Sumi. He twisted and shaped the external ends of the wire into the rest of the enchantment.

Once the circuit was closed, he closed his eyes and wove the mana threads, layering them along with the intent that they form a dual-purpose enchantment, drawing in ambient mana while also converting it. The enchantment settled into place, and the magic cycle began. He set the bottle down with the other completed pieces and leaned back. Typed mana was picky. Where arcane moved through everything, typed mana required specialized materials.

It demanded some sort of abstract, symbolic, or sympathetic relationship between what the mana was and the vessel meant to contain it. Perhaps it was the fundamental reason that affinities existed. Enzo sighed. It was more likely he was just reaching for logical explanations for magical shenanigans. Six completed storage mediums sat at the end of his workbench.

Each one glowed with a different color, some brighter than others, as ambient mana filtered in through the gathering enchantments, converted through the layer of intent, and settled into storage. Red flickered erratically inside a piece of rough almandine garnet, roughly two inches long. Blue pulsed within a large cut topaz. A rough green tourmaline glowed steadily. Citrine flickered yellow, less stable than the others, the wind mana restless even while stored.

The gems had been easy to figure out once he realized colors formed a sympathetic connection for some mana types. Fire, water, earth, and wind. The others had been more difficult. A short length of dense, fossilized wood carried a warm green glow from within its grain. Life mana. It was happy with bone, too, but bone didn't store it as well as the fossilized wood did. And now the bottle. He watched as the faintest pink hue appeared in the blood, gently sloshing back and forth, though nothing was touching it.

Body mana. The enchantments solved the affinity problem. They did not solve the timing problem. The mana had to be drawn into his reservoirs before wielding it, and that remained true for both casting and circulating. It was time-consuming and had no place in combat. Having a second reservoir was an advantage there. He dedicated a portion of both to storing mana types he couldn't convert. Each storage medium would refill passively, and he could top up from them whenever it was safe.

Enzo was certain there were more types. But between needing to experiment with the intent and concept layering with the enchantment, and the material rejection, his time was better spent using what he now had access to. Starting simple. He stood up and faced the center of the room. Sword. The last time he'd built one, it had been crude and desperate. Six arcane threads shaped in seconds because Sumi was dying and nothing else would cut fast enough. He could still feel the vibration of it passing through bone.

Enzo took a breath. Let it go. Then reached for his reserves. The central thread came first. Arcane. He drew it from his mind and shaped it into a straight line, roughly two feet long, hovering vertically in the air in front of him. This was the spine. Flexibility and structural coherence. The part that kept the blade from snapping on impact the way a rigid crystal construct might. A second arcane thread formed the crossguard, a short horizontal bar intersecting the spine near the base.

It added lateral stability and marked the transition from blade to grip. He held the threads in place with a fraction of his focus. Now came the hard part. Enzo reached for the metal mana in his heart reservoir. Drew it to his fingertip and focused on the point of emergence. Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon. The dense bead appeared. Heavy, but requiring almost no effort to maintain. He committed.

Pushed with the deliberate, unwavering pressure he'd learned three days ago at this same bench. The metal yielded, stretching upward along one side of the arcane spine in a slow, grinding arc. Each increment required its own act of will. There was no flowing, no guiding, no encouraging. Every fraction of the edge had to be hammered into existence. He shaped it as it went. The concept of sharpness layered into every part of the curve. An edge that would hold, that would bite, that would sever.

Not the raw desperate intent of the rift, where 'sharp enough' was the only requirement. This time, he gave the metal the idea of a blade's temper. The moment heat, carbon, and quench turned soft steel into something that could take and hold an edge. The thread curved from the base of the crossguard to the tip of the spine, tapering as it went. When it locked into place, it looked like a single dark line running the length of the blade, dense and faintly luminous with a grey sheen. It had taken nearly a minute.

In combat, that would get him killed. He engaged Geometric Replication. The adaptation copied the completed metal edge, mirrored it, and placed the duplicate along the opposite side of the spine. What had taken him a minute of focused effort appeared in a fraction of a second, identical in every detail. Four threads. Two arcane, two metal. The blade hung in the air, balanced on its central spine, both edges catching the light from the window with a faint metallic gleam. The grip was last.

In the rift, he'd thrown together two rough threads and called them a hilt because time was measured in the spread of venom through Sumi's hand. He shaped three arcane threads with a slight inward curve to each, wrapping them around the base of the spine below the crossguard. They overlapped, forming something that would sit in a palm without sliding, with enough space between them for fingers to find purchase. Seven threads total. Two types of mana.

A blade that looked less like a child's drawing and more like a weapon someone had actually designed. He released the spell form. The sword materialized in his outstretched hand with a weight that settled into his grip differently than the first one had. The core of the blade was still the shimmering purple of arcane, but the metal edges were visible as darker lines running from crossguard to tip. When he rotated the blade to catch the light, the edge looked sharper than anything he could have ground by hand.

Enzo turned it slowly, testing the balance. He adjusted his fingers on the hilt, where the arcane had taken on a texture that answered his desire for a proper grip. Then he held it still and looked at it for a long moment. The last time he'd held one of these, he'd used it to sever his friend's hand. He cut off the mana draining from his reserves to maintain the spell. The sword scattered into fading motes of purple and dark grey. Better. Significantly better. But the construction time was a problem.

Metal threads couldn't be rushed, and even with Geometric Replication handling the second edge, the first one alone took longer than manually constructing a full Power Bolt. He'd need to practice until the hammering became instinct rather than effort. The same way every graver stroke had started slow and deliberate before years of repetition made it automatic. Enzo ignored the new notification. There was more to be done. Spear was next. The original was barely a spell.

A rigid thread that punched outward from his palm. He wanted something he could actually hold. The image came from one of the old martial arts films Kenzo's mother had made them sit through as kids. Long-shafted weapons with leaf-shaped blades. A sword required you to be close. A spear let you choose not to be. He built a seven-foot arcane shaft, wound two metal threads in opposing spirals around it, then added a leaf-shaped metal spearhead at the tip. He released the form, and the spear materialized.

The weight caught him by surprise, and the spearhead thumped against the ground. The shaft flexed slightly when he raised it, swinging it gently from side to side. He gave it an experimental thrust, then dismissed it. One more. He'd never swung a maul in his life, but the concept was simple. Mass and momentum. Where the sword cut and the spear pierced, this was meant to break. He reversed the mana for the design.

A metal core for the shaft gave it rigidity, while arcane threads wrapped around it added bulk without the cost of shaping more metal. The head was dense metal over an arcane core. He released the form and caught it with both hands, prepared for the weight this time. His knee wasn't. The head pulled downward, and he gritted his teeth against the sudden pressure. He adjusted his grip and hefted it twice. It was a heavy, brutal weapon. And completely impractical for someone with a bad leg.

But the goal wasn't the maul itself. Enzo dismissed it and pulled up his accumulated notifications.

— Mana Sense (Level 13) → Mana Sense (Level 14) Mana Control (Level 12) → Mana Control (Level 13) Mana Absorption (Level 14) → Mana Absorption (Level 15) Spell Forms (Level 12) → Spell Forms (Level 14) Attunement (Level 11) → Attunement (Level 12) Enchanting (Level 6) → Enchanting (Level 8) Mana Circulation (Level 2) → Mana Circulation (Level 4) Cultivation (Level 1) → Cultivation (Level 2) Sword (Level 1) → Sword (Level 2) Spear (Level 5) → Spear (Level 6) — Enchantment Codified: Convert Mana Description: Converts ambient mana into a specified type during the storage process.

Conversion type is determined by the intent layer. Requires a compatible storage medium. — Spell Codified: Maul (Level 1) Type: Arcane / Metal Description: Creates a heavy blunt weapon of condensed mana designed for crushing impact. — Notification The Universal Training Guide has detected multiple spells with shared structural, conceptual, and functional overlap.

Spells detected: Sword (Level 2), Spear (Level 6), Maul (Level 1) Common classification: Weapon Manifestation These spells share a common base intent, use overlapping construction methods, and differ primarily in form and application. The Universal Training Guide supports merging overlapping spells into a single combined spell. Combined spells retain individual invocations as variants. Proficiency is recalculated based on aggregate experience across all merged spells.

Future variants developed under the same classification will be added automatically. Merge detected spells? — Perfect. When the Guide had merged Val's techniques on the bridge, he'd suspected it would be possible for spells once some measure of overlap or accumulation occurred. He wasn't sure how it would handle spell upgrades when the time came, but that was just another reason to test the feature now, on less complex spells, before he started building type variations of Bolt. Fire Bolt immediately came to mind.

Because real wizards definitely could throw balls of fire around. He selected 'Yes.' — Conjure: Weapon (Level 4) Type: Variable (Arcane / Metal) Invocations: Sword, Spear, Maul Description: Manifests a weapon of condensed mana. Form, composition, and properties are determined by the selected invocation and the mana types used during construction. Additional invocations are recorded as they are developed.

Note: Spell name modifiers (prefixes and suffixes) become available as the caster develops specialized variants within a spell classification. — A knock at the door pulled him away from the notifications.

"Enzo, you got a minute?" Matt's voice. Muffled through the wood, but tense. Enzo sat back down and spun the chair to face the door.

"Come in. It's open." Matt stepped inside and stopped. He hadn't been in Enzo's room in years. It had changed a lot since then, though most of the change had happened in the past few weeks. His eyes moved across the room. Took in the packed bookshelf. The walls covered in pinned notes, spell diagrams, and color-coded threads cross-referencing them. The workbench with its tools and materials and a row of glowing stones. Then his gaze landed on the small glass bottle, the blood inside gently sloshing.

He shook his head and turned back to Enzo.

"We've got a problem." Enzo sighed.