42nd Looper [Isekai / Time Loop / LitRPG]

The vials were gone before the end of the day.

Penelope pulled up her menu to look at how much experience she'd earned.

"As far as passives go, that's a decent one." Jeru mused as she walked back down the hall.

A low rumble escaped her stomach before she could respond to him.

"Doesn't surprise me. You haven't eaten since this morning." Jeru clicked his tongue. "You really need to take better care of yourself."

I'll be fine as long as I get something little for dinner. Penelope patted the box she'd put all the enchanted accessories in.

"You should have taken a break hours ago." Jeru pointed at the clock on her menu. "It's already four in the afternoon."

You can tell that I'm fine! Penelope dismissed the menu. I just want to figure out how to make these solutions, and then I'll be able to enchant things myself.

"You also need to learn how to increase the modifier as well as add skills or passives to it." The blue Elf tilted his head. "Even then, you won't have the facilities to do this on the first floor."

Penelope rolled her eyes at him. You're saying that I won't be able to create the equipment?

"Just…" He threw up his hands. "See for yourself."

The door to the office was still wide open. Penelope knocked on the doorframe before she entered the room.

Despite how bare the waiting room was, Cirdor's actual office made train wrecks look organized. Stacks of paper leaned precariously on the cluttered desk, while open books, empty vials, containers with monster parts, and dirty clothes littered the floor. The bookshelves weren't in much better condition, with many of the books stacked in front of the shelves and piles of clutter crammed onto the shelves instead.

This is giving me anxiety. Penelope took a deep breath. I thought everything was digital?

"Digital allows for information to be organized better, but the storage systems can also be corrupted. Plus there are those who see physical copies as a better way of keeping up with information." Jeru shrugged as he floated over the mess. "Though considering he could have converted his walls into screens and organized the information that way, this mess is really just sad."

"If you need to go home for the day, you can come back tomorrow and work on the other part." Cirdor didn't look up from the book in his hands. "I'll call a car for you once I'm done with this section."

"I finished." Penelope patted the box under her arm. "I was hoping you'd show me how to make the elixirs, so I could do this on my own."

Cirdor didn't turn his head as his yellow eyes looked up from the book. "There's no way you could have finished that entire box unless you were just recklessly wasting all those essences."

"I did fail on a couple, but most of them worked." Penelope shifted the box so she could pull off the top. Without a clean space to put the box, she had to hold it in her arm. "I had 139 successes."

"You only failed five times?" Cirdor slammed the book shut and set it on the stack of books in front of him as he stood up. He motioned for her to back up. "There's no way an amateur could enchant things that quickly and have more than half successes."

Penelope backed up into the waiting room and set the box down on the empty desk. "You can count them if you want, but I only failed four times."

"Four failures and 139 successes?" The orange Elf picked up one of the blue rings. "That doesn't add up."

"I had to use one of the elixirs to make a magic circle." Penelope glanced over at Jeru. "That helped me manage my control a lot."

"You utilized a magic circle?" Cirdor wrinkled his brow. "Who taught you that?"

"I've seen the concept theorized on Earth." Penelope looked down at her hands. "My control wasn't the best and regulating how much mana I was putting into the item was difficult to hold back while also drawing it out of myself. Filling a circle with magic, then regulating how much I let out of the circle was a lot easier, as I didn't have to worry about both drawing out mana and trickling it at the same time."

The headmaster tapped on his wristpad, pulling up an image of the lab where Penelope had been working on the desk beside the box. The blue circle was still on the table, though it wasn't glowing anymore now that Penelope wasn't filling it with mana.

"Crude." The orange man sighed as he closed the image. "And wasteful to use an elixir to make it, but I wouldn't have expected a Human to be able to create such a thing in the first place, so it's passable, I guess." He cleared his throat. "I'll have Doran take you back to the Island and he'll pick you up again in the morning." He gestured at the box of items. "I had planned on that taking you all week to get through, so I don't have more elixirs for you to work with, but Nellebrie Nosea is supposed to be here tomorrow to teach the Healers the basics of Alchemy and you can join her and use whatever you make there to enchant more items."

"What about raising the modifier or adding skills to the items?" Penelope took a nervous breath. "None of them have elemental affinities either."

Cirdor sighed. "Of course they don't have elemental affinities." He shook his head. "You need different concoctions for that…" He ducked back into his office and scrounged around for a handful of items, then came back out to the waiting room. "Here, I don't have many of these, but I can show you how to do it on a couple of the items." He gestured at the box. "Grab that and come back to the lab."

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Penelope collected the box and hurried after the orange man. Once they were back in the lab, he ran his fingers over the circle on the table.

"Any Enchanter worth anything should be able to put enchantments on something without having to use a circle as a crutch, but considering you've never had to work on your mana control, this will do…" He sighed. "Though if you insist on using a circle, you're going to need to get better at drawing them." He touched one of the jagged edges. "The smoother the circle, the easier it is to regulate the mana you're channeling. Also, you only did a three-ring circle. The more complicated the circle, the more efficiently you'll be able to control the mana."

"A three-ring is all you need and drawing something like a three-ring inside a four-ring is just overkill for something simple like this." Jeru scoffed. "Granted, if you wanted to do a mass enchantment, you could do something like that, but your control and your focus aren't where they need to be for you to attempt something like that. Having that many levers for a simple enchanting is like using a dozen pulleys to help you move a crate. All you really need is to lean into it, but a couple pulleys will make it a lot easier. After that, you're just spending a lot of time on setup and need a lot of rope."

"I'll work on it." Penelope ignored the ranting Elf in her head.

"Not on my tables, you won't." Cirdor grumbled. "I'm going to have to get rid of this eyesore, but you can use it for the rest of today." He tapped on the top of the box. "We'll get you an enchanter's case that you can keep all your material in and you can put your circle on that."

"Thank you." Penelope nodded.

"It's the least I can do. I can't let you walk around with such crude implements. People will think I'm incapable of teaching." Cirdor pulled the basin back out from the cabinet under the table. He placed one of the blue rings inside the silver basin, then picked up a brown container twice as wide as the vials.

"This is elemental powder. Nellebrie will teach you how to make it, though inside the Dungeon, you'll be stuck with whatever the element of the monsters you're fighting are, so you'll need to stock up before you go down there." He unscrewed the lid, letting the earthy scent waft into the room. "There are also different strengths of the powder and trying to use a Tier One powder on a Tier Zero item is likely to break it." Cirdor offered her the jar. "This is Tier Zero powder, so you can use it."

"How do you have Tier Zero powder if you just got the system?" Penelope took the jar and looked inside. While it smelled like freshly tilled soil, it looked like cocoa powder.

"The system helped label things, but we always had grades." He sighed. "Having the system helped explain to my students why they were only able to craft such low-quality items, but just because we didn't have the system to tell us what the quality and tier were doesn't mean that we didn't already have the items around us."

"Gotcha…" Penelope looked down at the ring. "How do I use this?"

"Pour about a quarter of it into the basin and fill your circle with mana." Cirdor folded his arms. "The elemental affinity will be more difficult to get the ring to absorb. I chose one of the rings that was made out of material that would accept an earth affinity more easily than the others."

"So different materials can hold specific affinities better than others?" Penelope took a deep breath as she filled the circle with mana.

"Yes, but that's a lecture for another day." Cirdor watched her work. "Now, just like with the elixir, you want to infuse the elemental powder with your mana and draw the charged mana into the item. Don't do it too fast or you'll break the item, but don't do it too slow or it won't imprint."

This is more difficult. Penelope closed her eyes as she focused on her task.

"What he didn't tell you was that if this had been light elemental powder, you'd have a lot easier time working with it." Jeru grumbled. "He's testing you to see if you'll fail when given an off element." A little respect crept into his voice. "Though if he wanted to be a royal pain, he would have given you nature powder. That would have been even hard for you to mess with."

Not helping! Penelope shut out the voice in her head. Her control felt clumsy, like trying to tie a knot with swollen fingers, but she was still able to gather up the infused powder and bind it to the item. She opened her eyes to inspect her work.

"Passable." Cirdor picked up the ring. "You could add more elemental powder and do this again and possibly raise the modifier, or you could break the item and be left with nothing." He tossed the ring back in the silver basin and slid a piece of paper under it. "What do you know about spell paper?"

"You mean like the spells that we learn by ripping the page with a spell on it?" Penelope eyed the wording on the paper under the ring.

"Barbaric…" Cirdor grumbled. "But accurate. Lesser beings will use spell paper to give them a spell that they aren't capable of casting on their own. Tearing the page is a way to burn the mechanics for the spell into your memory, but it's also possible to cast the spell simply by running mana through the page."

"Oh." Penelope swallowed as she realized that they hadn't needed to destroy the spell pages that they'd found. Why didn't you tell me that?

"Because you have to keep the spell on your person and to use it with the system, you have to activate the item through your menu." Jeru shrugged. "It's easier to just learn the spell and cast it that way."

"The principle here is the same." Cirdor pointed at the basin. "You need to infuse the page with your mana and then instead of casting the spell, you need to imprint the spell onto the ring." He took a step back. "This is the more difficult part, because if you mess this up, then you could cast the spell."

"What's the spell?" Penelope gathered mana in the circle under the basin.

"Rock Spear." Cirdor leaned against the wall behind her.

"So I can imprint spells I don't know?" Penelope paused before she let any mana into the basin.

"A good Enchanter would be able to imprint any spell they know onto an item without a spell page, but since you don't have that kind of control, we have to do it this way." Cirdor shrugged, disgust leaking into his words. "Lungali Falone will be able to teach you how to make spell pages later on, which will help you give spells you know to other mages."

"That's a later thing." Penelope guessed. "Alright, let's try this…" She poured mana into the page, focusing on keeping the spell confined to the page and transferring it to the ring instead of releasing the spell. Her control wavered, but the page itself began to burn as she channeled the spell into the ring.

"And you destroyed the page." Cirdor grumbled as he walked over and picked up the ring. "But you successfully added the spell to it, so it wasn't a complete loss." He looked over at the small collection of jars and papers he'd put on the table beside the one Penelope was working on. "Let's stop for today before you destroy any more of these. I'll get Lungali to teach you how to copy these before you try this again."

"Okay…" Penelope tried not to let her disappointment show. At least once I learn how to copy the pages, there won't be any fighting over skills anymore.

"You've got to learn how to make spell paper first, but sure, you can hand out skills like candy." Jeru grumbled. "But now you've got a slog to get through just to learn these things."

We already knew it was going to be multiple resets. Penelope left the items on the table as Cirdor led her out of the room. But this is what we've been waiting for. I'm about to be one step closer to saving everyone.