Burnout Reincarnation [SLOW BURN COZY 'MAGIC CRAFTING' KINGDOM BUILDING PROGRESSION] (LitRPG elements) [3 arcs done!]

Winter in Granavale Manor passed faster than it usually did.

The snow covered Granavale County like a thick sheet. On Earth, the snows had gotten thinner and thinner as the weather changed. But here, before the touch of industrialization, the snow layered upon the world as a silencing blanket.

But the Manor was busy, loud, and rambunctious.

"What the Hell do you think you're doing!" shouted Beatrice Blackstone, Archmund Granavale's cousin on his mother's side, as she ducked beneath a swinging quarterstaff.

"You won't stand a chance in the Dungeon if you can't deal with a tiny surprise," said Rory Redmont, another local noble., wielder of the staff.

"Hmmm. Surely there's a more effective way for you to train," said Gelias Greenroot, fiddling with a wooden puzzle as he walked past them.

Archmund Granavale rolled his eyes. The quarterstaff had barely been moving. Beatrice was just inclined to melodrama.

Over the winter, the sons and daughter of the lesser noble houses of Agraria Duchy had come to train in House Granavale. Their parents had saw the advanced combat abilities of Archmund Granavale and panicked, hoping for their children to similarly attain such abilities.

When spring came, they would enter Granavale Dungeon, which had stayed mercifully quiet. There, they would kill the ghosts of the vengeful dead and take their magic for their own. The magic Princess Angelina Grace Marca Prima Omnio had cast remained effective, keeping the Dungeon as quiet as the winter snow.

And why had he agreed to do this?

Because as it stood, if he was to run away to the beaches of Salamar, he'd have to live like a peasant. He wanted to be so rich it didn't matter anymore, or so magically powerful that nothing in the world, be it Emperor or Saintess, could bother him. And until he got to that point, well —

There was an old saying in his past life: "your network is your net worth."

He hated that saying, but it wasn't altogether false.

And if he couldn't pal around with the Princess directly, because she was busy doing princess things, other nobles were the next best.

And spring was fast approaching. The white snows were less deep; the skies less gray; the winds less biting.

They had made good use of this time. Through cajoling and intimidation, impressing upon them just how much further he was than them, he'd convinced them to try his techniques for self-enhancement. He'd also hammered the idea of SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, reasonable, time-bound) goals into their heads.

Beatrice, his cousin, was the biggest issue from a discipline standpoint because fundamentally they were alike. That meant that at heart she was extraordinarily lazy, especially since she lacked the looming fear of inevitable death and failure. Rather, she seemed to be motivated by a mysterious and unexplainable inferiority complex, which he couldn't relate to in any way, shape, or form.

And yet she was the easiest to play, because she responded easiest to trivial childlike taunts.

Her Gem was a family heirloom, passed down from her father. Archmund's grandfather on his mother's side. Apparently, it was fine to use the Gems Attuned to other people if they were your family or close relatives, especially if they were dead. The magic was similar enough that it made it easier to learn, in fact.

(Peasants who used Gemgear didn't get this luxury. The legal right to use Gem died with them, even if enough of the magic still lingered to animate the gear, and the Gem was "mulched" or recomposited for the use of the noble house that owned them.)

Her Gem was an onyx tetrahedron. It gave her the power to blind targets. At home, she'd mostly used it to sneak around Blackstone Manor, for petty pranks and dodging her minders.

The base of her power was the complete opposite of Archmund's own.

It was also "nonphysical" — the powers it granted her made no sense in the context of the laws of physics.

His Gem was heat and light. Electromagnetic radiation manipulation. But hers was the absence of light, the manipulation of darkness.

There was no such thing as a darkness wave in scientific paradigms, not really, only the absence of light — or perhaps a ray set in perfect destructive interference, offset so perfectly as to nullify another beam of light. And yet she had the power of darkness.

It was perplexing and frustrating. He'd made great leaps and bounds by applying his knowledge of fundamental physics from another world, yet here was a power that existed outside of that framework. And yet both worked.

Either way, he had to get her up to his level. He had to get all of them up there.

Over the course of the winter, Beatrice honed her power so she could blind more than one target at once with a [Multi-Blind] technique. That led to her being able to cast a [Fog of Darkness] over a whole room, though it got weaker in bigger rooms and dispersed in a strong wind. And by the end of the winter, she'd developed a [Shadow Cloak] power, that sheathed her very form in darkness and protected her from blunt objects and attacks.

As far as weapons went, she used a simple dagger of hardened steel. Fairly weak, as far as blades went. Took far more skill — mundane skill — to jab at weak points and kill opponents. Wholly alien to Gemstone magic — which was the point.

Rory, of course, had his Gemstone Quarterstaff.

Out of the heat of battle, Archmund had obvious questions. Didn't using Gemgear warp your personality? It gave you a "class", like a classical RPG class. But Rory had shrugged and laughed it off.

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Sure, maybe the Gemstone Quarterstaff would doom him to a life of being a strong, stand-up guy, who always gave a kind word and stood up for his friends. Was that so bad?

Good men might not do so well in the world of cutthroat politics, but if they made enough friends who could scratch their back or catch them when they fell, they'd land on their feet.

Archmund couldn't see the appeal. It seemed rather sick, honestly, dooming a child to a life of being a decent person in exchange for power and security. What sort of sick fuck would do that to a whole family lineage?

So Rory had a head-start compared to his other peers, and Archmund welcomed the opportunity to learn exactly what his abilities were.

Rory had already come in with four Skills. He had one Skill with two names depending on the context, [Calming Speech/Inspire], and it gave him the power to soothe the emotions of his allies.

Any magic that could manipulate the mind was immensely powerful.

He also had a [Block] skill, which strengthened his body and drew attacks to his staff when he used it. It reduced the damage caused to him by attacks, though Archmund genuinely wondered if it made him more physically durable or if it altered the strings of fate so attacks were less likely to hurt him as badly. When he sparred with Rory, he could feel a strange weight in his sword arm. Or maybe he was imagining it.

And if necessary, Rory could spin his staff so quickly it blurred into a translucent disk, a [Shielding Spin] that blocked arrows and presumably other projectiles. That protection, almost surely, was a knot in the weave of fate.

When they fought together against the Hundred-Eyed Centaur, that foul and wretched beast that had amalgamated before Granavale Dungeon, Rory had broken through and attained a new Skill: [Taunt]. It combined his subtle mind-magics with his defensive capabilities to draw the attention of any opponents that faced him. It worked best on Monsters, but even Archmund couldn't help but be drawn to his erupting power. The other boy was strong enough that he had a Bodily Barrier almost from strength and durability alone.

All told, Rory was surprisingly close to Archmund's power level. Archmund had no secret insights to teach him, no techniques that he didn't have an analogue for. All he could do now was spar and get stronger.

If he wasn't already Awakened, he was very close.

Gelias was an elf, so his grasp of magic was completely outside of the paradigm Archmund knew.

While elves could use Gems, they could also resonate their own magic through other objects. Gelias and his kin could channel their magic through wood, which meant he was a wood elf.

Gelias's most prized possession was a bow that had been passed down his family for generations. It had been polished and mystically enhanced over centuries so that it was as hard and durable as stone.

Yet it was still wood, and it held the memories of wood. All objects held memories of their past battles and glories and wielders, and by channeling his magic, Gelias could tap into that rich well of tradition and become an avatar of his family's history.

But he was still limited by his own youth and his own lack of magical reservoir. He had some forbidden secret elven techniques that helped him deepen his magic, which he categorically refused to share with any of them.

But by the end of the winter, he'd shown them his Skills:

[Fly Straight My Arrow], which flew precisely, able to hit a bulls-eye in every practice shot.

[Let A Thousand Arrows Fly], which shot almost twenty arrows in quick succession. The name highly exaggerated the effect compared to the laconic and straightforward names of Archmund's Skills. Archmund didn't know whether Gelias's Skill names reflected the nature of elven magic or something about Gelias's nature. Gelias certainly didn't seem predisposed to melodrama.

[The Winds Bear The Arrow], which shot both an arrow and a blast of wind, propelling the arrow at supersonic speeds. If the arrow didn't kill, the gust of wind just might.

Archmund didn't think of the elven magics as cheating or anything. But he wondered about the theological implications.

Gemstone Gear echoed with the desires and memories of the dead. But mundane objects could also carry those memories. This spoke to the fundamentally animist nature of the world, suggested that the dead weren't fully cast to Heaven or Hell, but that some part of them lingered, sealed within the objects they'd loved.

He was starting to get the sense that all of his peers had formally been given Gems before or in the same time frames as him, and it was only through a stroke of miraculous luck that he'd made substantial progress with his own.

Mary had also trained with her Gemstone Handfan. She had her skill [Begone], but she'd also developed the Skill [Hands Off!], which caused physical blows up to a certain strength to slide right off of her.

He'd tried to help her test just how much she could take, but he'd had to stop.

She was having issues controlling the power well, because it seemed to shut off at the most inopportune times. Just in time for them to end up in awkward situations. Which he was sure she was doing on purpose. He ended up having Beatrice try to handle it, but after two or three fights it genuinely seemed like they were trying to kill each other.

It would be most convenient if he could plug their powers into his Gemstone Tablet somehow.

But he suspected that would require being closer to them than he ever wanted to be. He was only able to view his own stats because the Gemstone Tablet was infused with magic, the energy of his soul.

And finally, there were his own capabilities.

He'd developed less than he would've liked over the past winter. He'd spent so much time developing his companions that most of his own practice had become largely theoretical. The one thing he'd unlocked was the ability to read descriptions of his Skills in his Gemstone Tablet, but those descriptions were often... more poetic than useful.

That was a common refrain, both in this life and the last. He'd made progress, but oftentimes it was invisible to him.

There was an old science fiction story from earth where all species except for humans had discovered the secret to faster-than-light travel. But because FTL travel was so unintuitive, so illogical compared to the usual paradigm of science, humanity's scientific development had jumped leaps and bounds beyond all other species, giving them a huge advantage.

His Infrared Lance was like FTL travel from that story. It was too good at killing things.

And judging from what he knew from magic, his next major skill breakthrough would only come when he was in a pinch point of stress.

As always, he was spread thin.

What else was new?