Blacksmith vs. the System

After helping Rebecca and Jessica kill the boss, which, amusingly, had no impact on their ongoing spat, I wanted to return to my research.

Unfortunately, life got in the way. Terry made a comment about how the arrival of the boss monster was just perfect for my daily walk around the city. I wished that I could miss his sarcasm as he said it, but the combination of Wisdom and Perception made it impossible.

Worse, he had a point, one that I knew. My daily walks around the city, visiting the walls and streets alike, were an important part of the morale. They were just annoying. A small part of it was about my role as the King, which, at this point, was clearly no longer just a temporary title I would hold until I could get an alliance with one of the cities under something close to fair terms.

The name of my latest class was a clue that was hard to misinterpret. It also suggested a potential future conflict with the cities, but that wasn't the annoying part. I just knew that, even as a king, the most help I could provide in the long term was behind closed doors, exploring the System and magic alike.

Unfortunately, I didn't need anyone else to tell me that, to talk about long-term benefits, we first needed to stay here. The memory of the old guard cadre rebelling because I had neglected them was still fresh in my mind.

The last thing I needed was a repeat.

Knowing that, I spent several hours visiting both the walls, and several districts that had already been filled with the new arrivals before the construction finished. There was one silver lining. Unlike a politician before Cataclysm making public visits, there was no need to vet the area I was visiting or arrange covert protection, which reduced the time required significantly.

Such measures were useless when I was still the strongest combatant in town, a title I held even before my latest class upgrade.

Naturally, I still had several guards with me every trip, but they were there to add a regal weight to my presence rather than any functional assistance.

"Finally," I celebrated once I returned to the privacy of my study, and prepared to study the crystal once more, to figure out how to properly turn it into a proper mana storage, ideally even discovering a way so that every piece shouldn't have to be crafted by hand by an Intelligence-Mage.

I started using my skills on the material. Previously, I avoided testing the validity of a computational approach in conjunction with Intelligence. Now that it proved to work, I could once again embrace the benefits of the bastardized approach.

No matter how much it still hurts my ingrained sensibilities.

I started simple, by using Runic Forge and Runic Harmonizer. I expected Runic Forge to work better, but Runic Harmonizer surprised me, especially once I etched a set of runes on a piece of crystal first before applying Runic Harmonizer.

Just like its old, base form, Repair, Runic Harmonizer worked best on a medium it could recognize. And, a crystal surface was clearly better than my other trick of repairing the imaginary gaps between skill runes floating in the air.

Even then, deciphering the information provided by the skill was far from trivial. It skipped all the reasoning and gave me the ideal solution, one that only got more intricate once the skill tapped into Wisdom, Intelligence, and Perception at the same time.

Confusing didn't even begin to describe what was going on with the feedback. Luckily, while Intelligence and Wisdom made the skill output more complicated, they also helped me to decipher the end result. More importantly, I still had my previous day's hard work, and the distillation of Spencer and his team's research.

It had two benefits. One, focusing on the Runic Harmonizer meant that it rose quickly, which was always beneficial. While my two class skills always had quite an overlap from day one, the insights they provided were still different enough to make their presence vital.

[Rune Harmonizer (Mythic) 5 -> 102]

The second benefit was that the feedback from the skill, when combined with my previous study, finally gave me an understanding of the crystal.

A cursory understanding, merely a beginning stage, but that was still a huge leap compared to treating it as a rock that was somehow reactive to Nurture.

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First, it wasn't a living organism. Strictly speaking, it shouldn't strictly be called an organism, magical or otherwise. Spencer's initial assessment of it resembling a prion was more accurate than I had expected.

The term prion comes from the name, proteinaceous infectious particle, and it functions by deforming the structure of the other proteins, creating copies of itself; an existence that makes viruses look like complex organisms.

Technically speaking, the crystal itself was the prion part. The real semi-living entity was the energy that lived on the object, something akin to a magical parasite, and the creation of the crystalline entity was just the side effect while it fed on mana.

It was also why, after a rapid freeze-heat cycle, the crystal turned inert yet stayed strong.

As for the source of the carbon that defined the core of its crystalline structure, it was simple. It was pulled out of the air. Then, similar to other living structures, the flexibility of carbon molecules allowed other elements, mostly nitrogen, to bond, creating the crystal.

It was also what threw me first about the semi-living part of the crystal, as carbon and nitrogen were the cornerstones of organic chemistry. But, that living part was invisible energy that fed on Health and Mana alike, while the material part was inert.

However, while I could identify the distinction, I failed to separate it from the crystal. The moment I cut its connection with the crystal, the energy immediately dissipated.

I turned my attention to measuring its other qualities.

"I could see it being a huge problem in a more mana-rich location," I said while I examined the crystal for its reactivity. Just like plants, using Nurture hastened their growth, but even without it, they would grow and spread. Only, not as fast.

Though, even with that quality, it wouldn't ruin a mana-rich location. It would be a problem less like a dangerous explosion, more in the vein of black mold or bed bug infestation. Annoying, yet manageable.

What annoyed me was its other qualities. In particular, it's fragility. Once turned inert, the carbon-nitrogen crystal was very fragile, its light, airy structure proving too much to hold without the support of its energy parasite.

The study buzzed with a low hum as I subjected the crystal to many different operations, trying to find a way to strengthen it. Well, strengthen it in scale. I could simply imbue it with strength with the assistance of my Wisdom, but if I were willing to create it by hand, I could simply use metal for that purpose.

No, the whole point of the crystal was to find a scalable method. I even tried to use the same energy in combination with available metals, hoping to copy it, but that turned out to be a big flop. The energy simply didn't react with metal.

I started considering whether to compile the notes into a coherent set and send them back to Rebecca and Spencer, hoping that one of them would figure out a way to strengthen it on a larger scale. "Now, I understand the frustration of people trying to work with graphene," I muttered.

Back when I still worked with the government, I interacted with many other scientists on confidential projects, and one of the most stressed groups was the people trying to develop a better alternative to traditional silicon chips that were used in every computer. But, the fragility of nano-layered graphite structures meant that every single experiment was a maddening slog —

"Damn it," I suddenly gasped, cutting my own thoughts as the inspiration struck, triggered by my memories. I had tried to use the parasite energy on metals, but that wasn't the best option, was it?

No, that honor went to silicon.

From a chemical perspective, silicon and carbon could be considered among the most similar elements on the periodic table, at least from a very specific point of view. Silicon was right below carbon, with the same number of free electrons, both primarily creating covalent bonds with a range of other elements.

The similarities and differences between the two elements had been widely explored in many different disciplines, but for my current experiment, only two qualities mattered. First, both materials created the same type of molecular bonds, creating both long polymers and crystalline structures.

Second, testing my theory was simple. First, I put the crystal in a mixture of sand and tried to trigger it. It did not work. However, that didn't mean it was not a viable path. The crystal might not form with silica under natural conditions, which might be due to the availability of carbon for stronger bonding. I just needed an isolated space with next to no oxygen and carbon.

Well, a simple process when one had magic to handle a lot of steps that would have otherwise required very complicated industrial equipment. Getting silicon was easy. Just grab some sand, heat it while blasting it with air, the oxygen binding the carbon mixed into the structure, leaving mostly pure silicon behind.

Getting nitrogen from the air was equally easy with all the magical methods I had. A simple pump, filling a metal box with air, then using magic to cool it down. Once the temperature reached below minus one hundred and eighty-three, the oxygen turned liquid, leaving only nitrogen behind.

Then, let both materials return to room temperature in a sealed box, add a small piece of active crystal, and blast it with Health and Mana.

The whole process took merely five minutes after conception, and that was without hurrying up.

The result, a solid piece of crystal that stayed stable after being exposed to air, maintained a much greater strength even after destroying the energy that triggered its growth, one that resisted both adverse temperatures and direct damage much better than its carbon counterpart.

It still needed to be tested both by me, and the others, but I had a feeling I had just found the perfect material for my task. I grabbed a pen and started filling in the experiment report, a big smile on my face.

It was good to revolutionize what passed for material science without practically plagiarizing my own skills.

Progress.