Cat With a Raygun

As soon as Joe started casting Harvest on the frost dragon his spell gained 3 entire levels, likely due to the amount of manachlorian energy such a powerful creature holds, even in death. It seemed like his harvests were getting more efficient. He could grab a lot of very useful dragon parts as well as make a few nice magical and non-magical products from the dragon.

Results of Harvest spell:

5 kilos frost dragon jerky

50 frost dragon steaks (raw)

20 kilos frost dragon scales

20 kilos frost dragon hide (cured)

10 liters dragon blood

1 frost gland

1 dragon heart

1 dragon brain

2 dragon eyes

20 dragon teeth

20 dragon claws

2 dragon horn longknives

1 Dragon Leather Chest of Preservation

1 Dragon Bone Sword of Frosted Strikes

1 Dragon Scale Mail of Cold Resistance

Joe looked at all the products that he got out of his Harvest spell. Jars, packages, bundles, weapons, armor, and eggs all arranged together where the dragon's body used to be.

“Wait a sec. Those three eggs weren't on my list,” Joe quickly pointed out to his friends.

Tess rushed over and said, “I guess it was a she and she was gravid.” She started casting a spell over each egg individually, checking her Guidebook with each one.

“My Animal Status spell has long since improved to Creature Status so it also works on monsters. Two of these eggs are dead, but this last one is alive.”

“Huh,” was all Joe could say to that.

“Can we raise a dragon, Ma?” Gymmie asked.

Eleanor answered that, “I've heard some people raise monsters from birth to be defenders or transports, but you'd need a way to communicate with it effectively. Monsters aren't usually intelligent enough to understand speech.”

“I can actually do that,” Joe answered. “I have a translation ability and during the fight with momma dragon it ranked up to its final strength and now I can understand and talk to monsters.”

“Bad thing gone, we go now?” Joe heard one of the horses say as Malcolm gently rubbed its head to calm it.

“And animals, too, I guess,” Joe added.

“A powerful Mage in command of a dragon. You'd be a figure out of legends,” Malcolm said.

It turns out the chest was very useful for storing a lot of the other dragon products, the perishable ones. It worked like the Preservation spell, except that it applied to anything placed inside the container at any time. All the raw meat, the blood, and the organs could fit inside.

The sword he designed specifically for Melanie. It was the same style as the sword she currently used. She reluctantly took it.

“Hey, don't get too hung up on making your own sword. How cool will it be to attack creatures with opposing elements? Fire and ice together tearing them apart.”

Melanie smiled at that thought, “Yeah, that does sound cool. But I'm definitely still going to make my own armor.”

Joe held up his hands in defeat, “Not going to fight you on that. I think I can probably sell this armor next time I get to Trenos if our mayor doesn't want it.”

Joe checked out his Harvest spell's description to see what new properties it got for its level 10 upgrade.

Harvest (Level 10). This spell allows the caster to target a fresh corpse of any non-CWEST species. The ambient magic in their body, directed by the spell from the caster, will collect potentially useful materials and package them in a convenient form. Processed items can also be created via an advanced CWEST interface. Additional mana can be fed into the spell to create items with magical properties. The corpse itself will then dissolve.

Any enchantments or alchemical products created by this spell will be added to the caster's known recipes.

Mana Cost: 10 per casting (base), variable costs for magical item creation.

Joe checked his Recipes tab and sure enough, Preservation, Frosted Strikes, and Cold Resistance were now in there. He already had ideas to make the equivalent of refrigerators for Rust's Edge's residents.

Joe looked at all the dragon parts he had produced. He didn't want them out visible for everyone to see when they got to Lefpool, but the wagons were already pretty well packed. Adding more would burden the horses. Joe decided to go cut another tree down to make a new wagon. Joe grabbed his boar bone axe and teleported far enough away that the tree he chose couldn't fall and hit the caravan.

It didn't take too long, and Joe got another level in Logging. He brought a wagon back and loaded it up with the new stuff. Inside the wagon he also had two new Chests of Preservation, made from the felled tree as well. Eleanor suggested that they bring the dead eggs as well, as they might still find uses for them, so they went into one of the new chests.

They were able to find some more swamplings before they left the swamp area, so Joe was able to get the recipe for the Speed Potion he'd been harvesting from them on his original trip to Trenos, along with more adrenal glands from the others to be part of that now known recipe.

In the evenings Joe started to make some more sketches of the refrigerators he wanted to design for Rust's Edge. When he opened up the “recipe” for the enchantment he was able to see the pattern of manachlorian energy. It's like every application of the energy was a non-physical circuit, the shape of which determined the result of the magic. Creating the circuitry as a physical pattern as he had done in his raygun was a way to ensure he got the result he wanted even without a recipe in his Guidebook.

Joe wanted to create cabinets that provided both chilling and preservation effects. It seemed like a waste to make them out of metal when wood was so much more plentiful. Of course, he had no experience with carpentry. He could learn, it's not like he was short on skill slots, of course, but he wondered if there was another way to produce the outcome he wanted without imbuing the cabinet directly himself.

By the time they got to Lefpool Joe had figured out the solution to his problem. The enchantment on his raygun strengthens any lightning magic that goes into it, but that's not what the circuitry itself does. The circuitry will accept any manachlorian input and transform it into a lightning output. He confirmed by having Malcolm try to use the raygun by channeling his own stamina into the plate on the grip. It took a little warm up, but Malcolm was able to fire a beam of lightning all on his own with it. Joe confirmed with Read Aura that the enchantment did not activate, it was a natural reaction of the magisteel circuit Joe had created.

That means that Joe can make magisteel circuits on the inside of an already created wooden cabinet, or even work with Malcolm to incorporate the circuits while the cabinet is being made, and then use an external device to power the circuits. Like a manachlorian battery. He made several sketches and designs until he found one that he really liked. His Schematic Drafting skill went up to 3.

Joe realized that he could design a collection circuit so that manachlorian energy could be extracted from the environment directly into the cabinet design he was making, but his eventual plans were to design a lot of items to go in people's homes, and that many things together might interfere with each other if they were all trying to draw on the same manachlorian energy at once.

Just designing these accrued work experience and Joe was able to level up his Arcane Gadgeteer profession to level 2. It gave him +1 to all of his stats, an extra +1 to Agility, and then 2 unassigned points which he put into Intelligence as usual.

Joe sold the extra wooden chest of Preservation to the tavern in Lefpool for 500 gold. Everyone enjoyed having real beds again for a night. Joe checked his other training gains and saw that he had leveled his Punching and Kicking both to 7, Endurance to 13, Defense to 11, Portering to 14, and Heat Tolerance to 7. For his spells he got Deflection Field to 9, Cold Snap to 8, Minor Levitation to 9, Backtrack to 8, and Blind, Animal Status, and Torchlight all up to 2.

Two days out from Lefpool Joe decided it was finally time to tell everyone about where they would be settling. Now that there was no chance for them to accidentally let rumors slip while in another town, Rust's Edge would be safe if he told them.

As they made camp that evening, Joe gathered everyone together. “Okay, we're not going to pass through any more towns until we get to your new home, so I feel it's finally safe to share some details with you all. Have any of you heard of magisteel?”