An Unbound Soul

I found what I was looking for in the town's clothing shop. I'd never been in there before, since Mum made everything I normally wore, but it turned out they had a small accessory section. Dawnhold wasn't big enough for a dedicated jewellery shop. Or rich enough for expensive jewellery, it turned out; the majority of jewellery on offer was made from steel, which would have been a really weird choice back on Earth. Fortunately, they did have a few high-end pieces made from silver, for which I paid out considerably more than their weight in silver coins. There didn't really seem to be much of a link between silver the metal and silver the denomination of coin.

Silver ring in hand, I returned to my dorm room to experiment. Silver behaved very differently from steel, greedily absorbing any mana I forced into it, but rapidly leaking it back out again. In the end, no matter how hard I tried, I could only reach a steady state, with mana leaking as fast as I could force it in. I wasn't able to contain the mana in the ring at all. Maybe denser ambient mana would help? It was still the morning, so I had plenty of time. I suited up and headed in to the dungeon.

Floor six wasn't the best place for experimentation, given the roving pairs of wolf riders, but it was also the area of densest mana I could safely get to. I'd yet to see any monsters enter the first room, and it wasn't as if I was going to be meditating, so I decided to take the risk and go straight there. Leaning against the wall next to the staircase, where I could keep an eye on all room entrances, I held the ring on my palm and again tried to force in mana.

The denser mana made a difference, and it was getting progressively harder to push more mana in, as if I was reaching some sort of saturation point. Dammit, I could feel how close I was. Just a little more, and I'd... Actually, I had no idea. I would hit some sort of capacity limit, but whether that would result in anything interesting happening, I couldn't guess. For all I knew, the ring would explode like the coin did, making me rather glad I was wearing gauntlets and not holding it bare handed. Perhaps I should put it down and step away, but I wouldn't be able to push so hard from a distance.

My efforts were rudely interrupted by growling, so I activated [Concealment] and looked up to see a pair of wolves and their riders entering the room. Nice of them to announce themselves like that, before they even entered. The riders looked around in confusion, while the wolves glared straight at me, presumably able to smell my position. I slowly reached for my staff so as to not break my stealth effect, but before I could get hold of it, one of the riders collapsed with an arrow sticking out of his eye.

"Well, this is a first. Monsters in the floor's entrance room?"

"Save the chat until after they're dead."

"Sure thing, boss."

I watched a familiar group of dogkin emerge from the staircase, making short work of the wolves. I decided that surprising them mid combat would be a bad idea, so I held my [Concealment] until they were done. Not that it could fool a dogkin nose.

"Right, whoever is hiding over there, come on out."

I popped out of [Concealment] and waved. "Hi, Vyre. You (kill stealer)," I complained, switching to English because I'd never heard of a similar phrase here.

He peered in confusion. "(Kill stealer)? And I should have guessed it was you. Who else would be down here alone?"

"I was about to kill those monsters. Doesn't matter though; I'm not here for monsters today, and they were just in the way, so you're welcome to them."

Hmm... Actually, maybe I could take advantage here. "By the way, what floor were you planning to work today?"

"The eighth. Why?" He signalled to his party, who started tearing out the cores.

"Would you mind if I came with you? This floor is my limit on my own, and I want the denser mana for an experiment."

He huffed. I didn't think he wanted to, but he equally didn't want to turn me down. In the end, his reservations won out. "I don't think it's a good idea. You don't have any experience coordinating with our party, and floor eight is our limit, so we don't have any leeway. I don't want to risk getting you hurt."

That was a reasonable concern. "Fair enough. Safety first."

I waved to them as they set back off, playing with my small amount of silver for a while longer but not managing to make any more headway. Maybe if I smithed it into a ball, so it had less surface area to leak from? In any case, hanging around here wasn't going to help, so I set off to the boss room to leave the dungeon. At least I'd made another ingot of mana infused steel; my staff order had swallowed my whole supply, so I needed a few more to take back to the village for me and Remous to play with.

Returning to the guild, the receptionist informed me that the guild master wished to see me. The most plausible explanation I could think of was that the sales clerk had told him about my steel experiments. Hopefully, there was a life magic spell to cure alcohol poisoning, because he probably needed it after hearing that one...

When I reached his office, I was pleasantly surprised to find a complete lack of bottles on his desk. One obvious item that was on his desk was a silver ingot. Umm... Had he by any chance come to the same conclusion as I had?

"Yo, I see you're not done rampaging yet. Manufacturing higher ranked steel of all things. You explained the chemistry of turning iron into steel, but you said this other world didn't have mana. How'd you come up with this one?"

"Actually, I didn't even know mana infused steel was a thing that existed."

The guild master head-desked. "What? Then why would you even..."

How did I reach this point? All I wanted was to make stat items that didn't suck. "In the runecrafting class I learned that stat jewellery doesn't hold enchantments for long, so I wondered how it differed from ready-made items from dungeons. I had a smith look at my ring, who told me the setting the runes were inscribed into was mythril, or magic silver. That made me wonder if stat items made from mythril would hold their enchantment, but of course I had no mythril. Given the description of 'magic silver', I wondered if mythril could be made by imbuing silver with mana, but I didn't have any silver either. The next time I was in the dungeon, I decided to try forcing mana into the fifth floor's steel ingot on a whim. I wasn't expecting anything in particular to happen."

The guild master waved at me without raising his head from the guild master shaped impression it was resting in. "Well, here's some silver for you. Go and give it a go."

"If it works, wouldn't it be a bit disruptive?"

"That's the whole point of your research institute, isn't it? To change the world?"

"It's not my research institute. I was as surprised as anyone else when Lord Reid announced it."

"What did you think would happen? That after listening to you talking about your technology, everyone would just forget or pretend they never heard it?"

Good question. I don't think I was thinking at all. Anyway, I could save him some time here. "I already tried; I bought myself a silver ring to experiment with after the steel success." I flashed the silver ring as evidence. "It definitely had some sort of mana capacity that I could get close to, but I couldn't fill it up. Someone with a higher skill level, or my skill level deeper in the dungeon might have more luck."

"Deeper in the dungeon? Ah, the ambient mana. Good point. How deep were you?"

"Floor six."

"On your own? No, never mind. Of course you were. Right then, grab that ingot and follow me."

Follow him? Where to? I watched as he walked over to the wall where the massive axe was mounted on display, and lifted it off. Given his class of [Axe Lord], I had a sudden bad feeling about where exactly he was planning to go.

"Are we about to head back into the dungeon, by any chance?"

"What other use would this axe have? It's not exactly suited for chopping wood."

"Why me? Don't you have higher level mages?"

"Who else other than you would take a useless skill like [Greater Mana Control]?"

Umm... Kari, for a start? But okay, it wasn't much of a combat skill, so maybe delvers tended to overlook it? To be fair, I hadn't had any practical use out of it yet other than shifting the weight of my staff, and even that was a happy accident. It seemed like I didn't have much choice, anyway. I followed the dwarf back into the dungeon, where everyone we passed looked at him with astonishment. Was it so rare to see him outside of his office? He must leave at some point, right? He did visit the school... Maybe it was the way he was walking around with an axe bigger than he was?

He kept jogging at a constant pace, without ever consulting a map. He didn't even slow down for bosses or stop to loot chests. Each time he swung his axe, the enemies simply went away, along with significant chunks of the floor and walls. I grabbed the contents of each boss chest myself, running to catch up each time. This was ridiculous. I'd thought we were speed running before, the time when Xander took me to see the last boss, but that had been a mere sedate stroll by comparison. It took a mere half an hour before we reached floor nine.

"Okay, can you slow down a bit now? How are we going to deal with the traps on this floor?"

The guild master grunted, then swung his axe again in the direction of the corridor we were about to step down. There was a roar of wind, followed by a loud crashing as a few centimetres of stone was sheared from the floor and walls and blasted away from us. Then he just kept jogging, as if he hadn't just demolished half the corridor. What the heck?!

He repeated the feat with each new corridor we stepped into. The poor traps didn't have a chance, torn straight out of their hiding places. I guess that was one solution to not being able to see them; destroying absolutely everything. The eight warriors in the ninth floor boss room all went down to a single swing, and we stepped on to floor ten.

"Right, this is as good as it's going to get without leaving Dawnhold, so give it another go."

I took the silver ingot back out of my pack, where I'd managed to clumsily stash it while jogging after the guild master, and concentrated. Given the larger mass of metal, it took longer to fill it, but the ingot shape did seem to reduce the amount of leakage. After a few minutes it seemed to reach saturation, and after closing my eyes and facing away in case it exploded, I gave it one last push. I felt, rather than heard, the shift as the ingot bounced in my hand. Gingerly looking back, it still appeared ingot shaped, and the colour had changed. Success?

Mythril Ingot (Rank 4)

Success! The guild master stared. "Gah. It really worked. Can't say I expected that. Now that damn Grover won't let me hear the end of it. Come on, let's get out of here."

"Hang on a moment, let me do my silver ring too."

The guild master took back the mythril ingot, and I grabbed the ring to put it through the same process. The smaller mass let me go quicker, but the greater surface area to volume made it harder to reach saturation. Despite that, in the end I was successful.

ding

Skill [Greater Mana Control] advanced to level 6

For your research into the nature of materials, [Researcher] awards 2 soul points.

That was the first time a message from [Researcher] actually mentioned doing research. I guess that was a good thing? I was graduating from learning what others already knew to discovering stuff on my own. And what I'd discovered was that what was apparently the scarcest and most valuable material on the planet was actually easy to manufacture by any decent mage. Hopefully, that fact wouldn't mess up the world's economy too much.

"All done. Now we can leave."

The guild master grunted, swung his axe in the direction of a corridor and set off at his usual brisk pace. I chased after him, swiftly arriving at the boss chamber. This one should be interesting...

It wasn't. He swung his axe just once, and the entire goblin army was vaporised. The tougher compressed dungeon stone floor faired a little better than the goblins, but giant boulders of stone were still peeled away from it and thrown across the room, demolishing a couple of columns. Would the teleporter even work after that?

The teleporter glow appeared, along with the chest, so apparently so. The guild master ignored the chest, not to mention me, and stepped into the teleporter. I glanced over at the open door to the core room, but decided I should probably hurry after him. I grabbed the contents of the chest without even checking what they were, then stepped into the teleporter myself.

Well then... I didn't know where [Axe Lord] came in the class tree, but after that display I had a suspicion it was rank four. Even compared to Xander, that was utterly overwhelming. But at least I now had a mythril ring.