The Runic Artist

Nate strolled across the market square back towards the Oaken Ring. Frick seemed to sense his irritation and chose to pretend to walk instead of ride on his shoulder. There would be no letting it fester this time. They were going to have a long chat about the Spirit’s past and potentially, his future.

It was true that he’d become an assistant, just as the System had denoted with the name of the reward. Frick saved time by doing the rote work while Nate got to design and plan his runes. He also helped by acting as a lookout. He’d shown his worth in combat, having effectively saved Nate’s life. Just the memory of him sitting there passively in the grass, patiently waiting for Galen to come and kill him sent a shiver down his spine.

That was what Frick had done so far. Even if he couldn’t use Nate’s skills at the same potency Nate could, he had proved invaluable and Nate would give him the benefit of the doubt this time. Which meant questions needed to be answered and secrets needed to be revealed. It was going to come down to honesty, which included Frick admitting what he didn’t know. A wrong answer given confidently was worse because Nate knew so little and so could be easily misled. He didn’t have the time to research every little thing himself. Not if he wanted to make sure both he and Kiri were ready for the Tournament.

Entering the Oaken Ring he gave Valeria a polite nod before making his way up to his room. It was still morning so he had the whole day ahead of him and he wasn’t going to waste it. He sat down by the window in his suite so he could enjoy some sunlight while he worked. Frick slid into the seat across from him and Nate took a moment to glance at him.

“Frick, I need you to go back to the market and buy me some wood,” he said, pointing at the chest with all his valuables in it as he placed the key down on the table.

Frick took the meaning, grabbing the key and going to get some coins to pay for it.

Quickly cutting out a piece of paper he handed it to Frick, “I need ten pieces of wood this size and a finger width thick.”

Frick nodded and hurriedly left, the Spirit’s - now corporeal - blue feet slapping the floor as he fled the room. Nate watched him go before glancing at his once again locked chest. He was still annoyed to find out that all his wealth didn’t amount to much in the grand scheme. He was decently rich out here in the countryside, on the edge of nowhere. In the Capital he suspected it might’ve paid for a decent house, but he doubted it would have afforded him a Villa within which to wile away his days experimenting with runes and making art.

He did recognise he could just make materials with Conceptual Material and sell them to make what was likely a considerable profit, but he was leery of doing so. If the ability to do so was as rare as he suspected, he might end up chained to a table somewhere, doomed to spend the rest of his days making materials for someone more powerful than himself. He had some ideas to get around that problem. But that was future Nate’s problem. Present Nate needed to reverse engineer the Enchanted Mana Gathering Array.

The wood he’d sent Frick to get wasn’t actually what he intended to use for the final product. The blueprints he’d been shown had suggested a specific kind of metal to be used in the construction. The metal had been called manerium. It didn’t take a genius to figure out why they called it that. It most likely meant the metal either conducted mana better than other metals, or more likely, attracted mana better than other metals. If Nate ever got a hold of the metal, he was going to test a hypothesis that manerium had a predisposition towards forming crystalline lattices within its structure that resembled at least one of the Sigils for mana.

His approach to the array was going to be a bit different. He was no metalworker, so once he had his design finalised he would pay a blacksmith, or he supposed he might need an artisan, to make his design out of a more common metal. Then he’d use his Conceptual Material just a little to give the metal a mana affinity and raise the quality to Epic. He was definitely not going to raise the affinity to the extent he had his wand as he didn’t want Luc asking too many questions if he overperformed. That was the same reason he wasn’t going to make the array Legendary. If Aisling thought Luc was trustworthy enough to share his Class rarity with then maybe that would change, but for now, minimum requirements were the name of the game.

Activating Runic Creation, he spun up a single flat plane of energy for the first rune. Something that had been readily apparent when comparing most of his own runes with the Enchanted Array, was the ability to control activation and deactivation in a simpler way. He’d mostly defaulted to just using a Mana Exclusion rune to keep his runes from activating unnecessarily. That worked fairly well when the runes needed to be controlled after being activated. He’d done that liberally with his Intent. But that didn’t help for runes you wanted to be able to turn on or off and then leave alone. His own Mana Gathering runes were a great example. He hadn’t bothered with a Mana Exclusion rune, so the things were just permanently active.

That worked here in the countryside, but what about in the Capital? Did they have rules about who could have such things active and when? He supposed Luc could just keep whatever Array Nate designed in his own spatial storage to prevent such issues, but that felt like a bit of an excuse not to put some effort into designing the Array properly.

The Enchanting Array had an on and off switch, though they had been called active and inactive in the blueprint. The methodology was similar to what he was already doing, to an extent. The difference was they used two Mana Exclusion Enchantments in tandem with a size difference between the two gems. The inactive Enchantment one was the larger of the two, and designed to prevent mana from touching the Array inlet points and the active Enchantment. The active Enchantment was a significantly smaller gem and looked like the only thing it excluded mana from, was the inactive Enchantment.

Without his Imbue Intent, he would’ve had to get very clever to try and solve the problem of making sure the active ‘rune’ in his design was still fed mana while it was turned on. He was unsure if the gem size was necessary in Enchanting or just a way to reduce the number of Intents they needed to use, as he was sure now they had a similar Skill. That said, his Skill was Legendary.

Would a Rare, or worse, an Uncommon Skill, have as many Intents to spend on controlling the outcome? He doubted it. That made his on and off switch ultimately simple. He’d use the same premise but his would be shaped and controlled by his Imbue Intent. The best part was that this would mean he could make it so ambient mana would still have access to the inactive rune so the Runic Array wouldn’t turn ‘on’ unless it was directly interfered with, such as someone activating it.

As he finished his initial design for the switches Frick returned, the inn staff who usually ran his baths beside him carrying a leather satchel.

Frick looked at him apologetically, “Couldn’t carry them up the stairs, Boss man.”

“That’s fine,” he replied, gesturing for the man to leave the satchel by the door. As soon as he was gone Nate motioned for Frick to bring him a piece of wood. Once the design was imprinted in the wood courtesy of Runic Creation, he started on the next step in his design plan. A box. He intended to make a Mana Gathering Array in the form of a cube, with the sum total of the mana being concentrated into the very centre of the box. He expected the final design would be about twenty centimetres a side. More than enough for thirty or so mana gems to be put inside at once.

He worked with Runic Creation, modifying and toying with the basic runic structure, an attempt to see if he could improve on his own existing design.

Glancing at Frick as he did so he broached the opening topic, “Frick, can we have an honest conversation?”

The little goblin Familiar climbed up into the seat across from him and gulped before nodding.

“I’m going to ask you a lot of questions, Frick. Be honest with me, even if you think I won’t like the answer. If you can’t do that, even though you’ve been incredibly useful, it would probably be better that we part ways, alright?”

Another nod was all he got in response, though Nate thought he could see trepidation in the way the Spirit sat in the seat.

“How many Masters have you had prior to me?” asked Nate.

“Two, kind of,” replied Frick, looking down at the floor.

“Tell me about them?”

“I was traded to an Enchanter by, I suppose what you’d call, a noble. Not quite the same as a noble, but the same sort of idea. Those were my two previous Masters,” Frick explained, clearly struggling.

“Not quite the same, how?”

Frick paused as if thinking hard then smiled in excitement, “Like a Shaman. I took that from your mind. The noble was more like a Shaman from your world. A spiritual leader.”

“And he traded you? You can do that? How and why?” Nate quickly fired questions at his Familiar.

“He did Boss, traded me to some middling Enchanter for a new staff after he’d had me for less than a day. The how was a System Contract. The why…” Frick trailed off in silence for a moment, blue eyes drifting back to the floor. “He said he didn’t want such a lowly and weak Spirit. Said his summoning must’ve gone awry. He said many unkind things.”

Nate nodded slowly.

“So you got traded to this Enchanter. Were you with him for long?” Nate asked.

“No. He umm, he died two weeks later and the contract was severed,” Frick responded.

“What killed him?” Nate said, leaning back as he let Runic Creation lapse. This was getting interesting and deserved his full attention.

“The Shaman, Boss. Came back and killed him for ‘shoddy work’. The two weeks though, well, he mostly spent them in a brothel celebrating his ‘good fortune’,” Frick just shook his head, blue ears flapping as he did so.

“That explains a lot. But if you’ve spent so little time as a Familiar, how did you know anything about Dungeons at all? You pointed me at the Bonus Challenge. And what about Classes and Stats?”

“That’s two different questions with two different answers, Boss man. So for Dungeons, the same way I learned the word ‘Shaman’ just now. I picked their brains. Didn’t get long with the Shaman, or noble, or whatever you want to call him, Boss man. But I managed to glean a little before he traded me,” Frick explained, sitting forward as he began waving his clawed blue hands around as he spoke. “That’s how I knew about Bonus Challenges. One of a few things I got out of him. The Enchanter seemed to think Dungeons were one and done. Sorry about that, Boss.”

Nate shrugged, “It’s no big deal. Doesn’t change much really. Might make my ability to find them useful if we’re able to find some of the higher rarity Dungeons. That’s for the future though. You said it was two different questions. What about the second question? What about Classes and Stats?”

“Oh, that’s easy, Boss. I know about them because I have them,” Frick replied, staring at Nate.

“Come again? I’ve identified you. I’ve looked at you with Eyes of the Runic Artist. I’ve never seen a Class. I’ve never seen anything like a Mana Reserve. You’re like a bottomless hole for mana,” he retorted in confusion.

“This isn’t my body, Boss. That’s still in the Spirit Realm. The Familiar Contract lets me project across to the Physical Realm. It’s why I can’t get too far from you. I mean I could, but I would just dissipate then have to reform myself. It’s also why I can’t die. Can exhaust me though,” Frick explained.

“Exhausted? Because of interference in your…what…Spiritual Energy?” Nate asked, waving his hands at Frick’s form.

“Exactly, Boss man! I mean I will just regenerate it on the other side, but it’s not instant. But the contract keeps me tethered here.”

“And the mana?” Nate began to ask then leaned back, a thought having occurred to him. “I am levelling you. That’s what the mana is for, right?”

“Right,” Frick responded.

“Why do you need me for that?” Nate asked in confusion.

“Because, Boss, there is almost no mana in the Spiritual Realm,” Frick replied quickly.

Nate looked up at the ceiling in thought, “The Shaman, he called you a ‘lowly’ and ‘weak’ Spirit. Why?”

Frick cringed at the words but after moving his feet around awkwardly spoke, “Because I am a young Spirit. I haven’t existed for long. I am a low level and have less Soul Energy. That’s what I think they call it, Boss. Not Spiritual Energy.”

Nate leaned forward, curious now, “Three questions. One, why would that be an issue for the Shaman? Two, why would the System give you to me then as a Rare reward? Three, if I am levelling you, does that mean you will gain other abilities as you get stronger?”

Frick sighed, “I’ll start at three, Boss. Yes, I will gain Skills as I level. Some of my Skills will let me use my own Soul Energy which means I can use them here, in this form. That’s why I was an issue for the Shaman. I could offer very little to him. The System gave me to you because you were a low level. More powerful Spirit, bigger drain on your mana. You didn’t have the Mana Reserve for someone stronger.”

“So, you can use Soul Energy to do things? Like Skill things? It’s not just some passive energy?”

“Nah, Boss. It’s quite powerful for some things. Not sure how you’d use it in the Physical Realm though. We mostly use it in direct contests of will in the Spiritual Realm,” Frick said.

Nate grinned from ear to ear, “Can you use it in Runes?”

Frick shrugged in response but Nate was already wondering if the strange energy that made up Frick, that he’d seen in Kiri and every other person, could be manipulated with runes. What might that look like? With a sigh he calmed down. He was getting distracted. He’d run out of questions for now. That meant it was time to get back to work on this Array. Tomorrow, he would start his training with Luc. He was already wondering what that would look like? How was the Arcane Riftwalker going to help him?