PenguinKills
patreon
Chapter 113 - Formations
🕑 Added 2024-08-21 20:00:07 +0000 UTCWith my plan to finish the last task on my to-do list finalized, the only thing I had to do was make the apparatus.
And by make, I meant learn how to make.
"Uncle Topher, why are you getting mad at books?" Anna's high-pitched voice sounded out from behind me.
"I'm not getting mad at books, Anna," the grinding of teeth and my forced tone betrayed that sentiment.
"It looks like you are," she oh so helpfully corrected.
To make the room that would help Refine my Body, I first needed to learn more about enchanting. I knew the basics and that was bare bones at best. My idea of enchanting was carving a single Rune on a thing and calling it done.
It was amateur. During my study, it said that was one of the first ways of enchantment discovered while also being the most basic.
Being told that I spent days learning to carve Runes and put them on equipment was the most basic hadn't been an ego booster.
With some free time, or time not spent fighting, I was working to fix my deficit of knowledge with as many books as I could buy. Which was a lot.
I had a veritable library surrounding me with piles of books stacked in my lodge. Even though I wasn't living with them, Austin was kind enough to give me his to use for the moment.
While I told Anna I wasn't mad at books, that wasn't entirely true. While I wasn't mad at the books themselves, I was certainly mad at the authors of said books.
Reading them made me feel like they all got together to hold a competition for who could be the most convoluted and confusing while still getting the information across.
It was a nightmare.
The only reason I hadn't given up in frustration was because I was actually learning things. Albeit slowly.
"What is it you need sweetie?" I asked trying to keep my frustration out of my tone and prove her right.
"Uncle Brayden wanted me to tell you that it should work but he's still testing materials." She said while staring up at the ceiling making sure she remembered it right.
"Thank you, tell him I should be able to give him an answer soon," I said back.
She didn't stick around after that and ran off elsewhere. Presumably to deliver my answer but probably stopping somewhere else along the way.
Brayden was in charge of most of the construction along with Vinny while I was in charge of the Runes. They needed to build something strong enough to contain the force of the winds while also keeping it enchantable.
Some materials weren't able to hold enchantments very well while others just made doing so harder.
Brayden had been hounding me trying to figure out how forceful the winds were going to be. Needing to know the details of what was required.
We had estimates from Body Refinement Techniques we bought but nothing definitive as of yet. Which was what I was trying to figure out.
Our first attempt at Body Refining was to pump someone full of poison while layering multiple healing spells over them to help with the process. The poison would break down the body while their vitality would work to put it back together.
The healing spells helped keep the body from dying.
With the wealth of books I bought, we learned there were actual techniques people had written to make the process more uniform. Not quite a step-by-step process, but less free-form.
Body Refining techniques were something a person could use to guide the process along, both speeding it up and changing the desired effect on the outcome.
By free-form, I referred to just pumping someone full of poison and hoping for the best while showering them in healing spells.
Techniques would have the person try and direct the poison around the body in a certain order while also staying conscious. If the person fell unconscious then they weren't able to direct the process anymore diminishing the effect.
Different techniques had different outcomes. Some were better than others but that was mostly subjective. Taking Poison Body Refinement techniques, for example, they varied in the order, intensity and nature of the poison, and method of application.
Intravenous injection, absorbed through the skin, inhaled, ingested, all the different ways poison could enter the body changed the outcome slightly.
The outcomes changed based on which was used and they could sometimes end up drastically different. One poison technique would make the body turn poisons into medicine. Making it so eating them would have a beneficial effect on the body.
One made them get stored in the body to be released later, one made a person able to excrete poison from certain parts of their body. It was more than just becoming immune. Learning the different possibilities was kind of mind-blowing.
While not every effect was possible at the Body of Wood stage, they built up to it for later tiers. Adding on to previous techniques used building on what was already there.
We also learned that healing spells only prolonged the process. Getting healed from an outside source ruined the effect of the Body Refining and made the whole thing take longer.
The body needed to heal on its own while also being inundated with the energy used to destroy it. It would build up a tolerance so to say and would then use that energy while healing to do that.
The process would break down the body with foreign energy, be it wind, poison, or whatnot, and the body would repair itself as best it could.
After the first round of destruction, a trace amount of the energy could be found in the repaired cells. That trace would increase in intensity until the threshold for Body of Wood was met.
While that was a gross generalization of the process, it was the gist.
Healing spells would subvert the healing process and the cells wouldn't get a chance to absorb the needed trace energy leading to them needing to be broken down again.
Healing spells made the whole thing safer and kept the body from shutting down, but it prolonged the suffering. One of the books even used it as a method of torture, pumping the body so full of healing that the process would never be complete.
That had been a cheery read.
Back to my books though.
Runes and formations were both highly technical and complicated subjects. Runes -the language of power- and Formations -stringing Runes together to have a desired effect- were some of the most complicated areas of study in the multiverse.
Its complications came from both breadth and depth. The sheer variety of uses led to the need to have extensive knowledge on the subject while the depth only exacerbated the issue.
When I first learned what Formations were, I confused it with Wards. Wards were a string of Runes combined together to have a desired effect, why did there need to be another word for it?
Turns out, Wards were a specific sub-section of Formations.
So not only did I use the most basic form of creating Wards by using a singular giant rune, I created the most basic form of a sub-section of a much bigger area of Enchanting.
When I first asked one of the Merchants in Tracy's camp to buy all the Runic Enchanting information he could from the store he looked at me funny.
I had to repeat that I wanted all of the information in the store before he understood. He stopped looking at me funny when I dropped a load of wealth on him.
Jonathan was maxed through his profession so I tried to spread the love around. We didn't have any other merchants in our camp- well, merchants that survived- and I wanted to be nice if I could.
No point in letting the experience go to waste. Plus, I didn't feel like searching through the store myself. Sorting the veritable sea of things I could buy sounded like a headache.
I didn't particularly care much about the other people in the camp but it wasn't that hard to seek the man out.
Whether it was a mixture of fear or my intimidating figure, the man didn't ask a lot of questions. I asked for all the Runic Enchanting books in the store and he took me at my word for it.
The mountain of books that spawned left me speechless. There were at least a hundred of the things and they weren't skinny either. It was also a lot more expensive than anticipated.
I essentially dropped a wad of cash on the man to get him moving, I didn't expect him to use it all and thought I would end up receiving some of it back.
That wasn't the case. What I got back was chump change.
Luckily, I was able to ignore most of the books for now since they were on a different subject than what I needed but there was still a lot left about Formations. Those were the ones that I was going through now.
Talismans, Runic Equipment, making Runic Consumables, and all the other subjects could be learned later. Formations were already complicated enough.
Runes put in a certain order had certain outcomes. Providing a different quantity of mana had different effects. Quality, purity, affinity, type of connection. Everything had an effect and needed to be taken into account when creating the formation.
Given that different types of connections were something I didn't know existed, there was a lot to learn.
That didn't even mention the different processes that could be done to change the formation. Merging and splitting power, changing its affinity, altering its flow.
My brain hurt thinking about it.
But if engineering school taught me anything, it was to cram for exams and this was similar.
In college, to pass an exam you didn't need to know every minute detail about a subject, while that would help, it wasn't necessary. As long as you knew enough to get buy, it would be fine.
It was an art I had mastered after 4 years of the place.
The method I used was working backward with the endpoint in mind. There were only certain types of questions that would be asked and as long as I knew how to do those, then I would pass.
There was no need to learn everything, I didn't need to know all of the exceptions, the outliers that didn't follow the rule. As long as I knew the process, it didn't matter.
Brushing up on the common tricks professors might throw was left till after I knew what I was doing.
I channeled that method into what I was doing now. I didn't need to know what all the different connections did, what a Rune did if it was placed before or after another.
I knew what it needed to do at the end, and worked backward from there. For Gale force winds, I needed a combination of Wind Runes and Force Runes strung together to give direction and shape.
The strength of the Wind could be determined by the amount and quality of mana used to power it rather than trying to figure it out Runically.
There were ways to limit the strength of the Formation but that was an extra step to learn I didn't need. I equated them to pressure regulators. Specific ways to make sure the mana quantity moving through the Rune was how it was intended.
While my way would lead to a more complicated activation and could lead to more things going wrong, it was faster for me to learn how to make it.
I would be keeping that fact to myself. Abigail didn't need to know that I was putting this together with magical duct tape and a prayer.
I had to buy a lot of Runes for the process but my value for points plummeted after getting my bloodline. I wasn't sure if I was if I would lose them in a few days so it was better to spend them now while I could.
I had two days to figure this whole thing out and by golly, I would do it. Knowing the amount of profession levels I would get from this wasn't even my biggest motivator.
Comments
Demonlord
Thanks for the chapter π Runic knowledge is crazy complicated and I hope he won't cripple himself with this upcoming "experiment"
