The Factory Must Grow - [Book 1: The System Must Live]

"Come on, let me go," Alyssa protested. "I have things I need to do."

Oliver didn't think it was that serious of a complaint, considering how easy it would be for her to simply... get up and walk away. But Clark had her lying down on her front, clothes draped over her lower half to preserve some degree of modesty, as he worked to [Unblemish] the remaining bruises running along her torso.

"It is important that I regularly treat you," Clark steadfastly repeated.

"But why," she asked.

"I am uncertain," their healer energetically responded, "But it is obvious that I did not adequately heal you last time considering the ways in which you were complaining when you returned. Truly, you are fortunate the injury wasn't far worse, from my understanding."

Alyssa grumbled, kicking her feet against the rocks and triggering small sparks as she did so. She'd been doing that for a little while, but Oliver couldn't figure out how. That was very clearly a Fire-based spell, but Alyssa didn't have one of those.

[Appraise]

That she'd gained a level was cool, but didn't really explain enough. Delving into her skills list didn't help either - [Ignite] was the only skill even possibly related, but that very much only worked on Woody substances. It couldn't create little sparks on Earth. Yeah, she'd clearly been experimenting with the skill, but 'conflagrate' sounded more like an attack variant of [Ignite] than anything that could be responsible for this.

"How are you doing that?" he eventually asked. "Oh, also you got a level."

"I did? Oh, sweet," Alyssa stiffened, then relaxed back into Clark's healing. She kept kicking her feet even more vigorously, now producing much more distinct sparks.

"And?" Oliver asked.

"And what?"

"How are you doing that?" he repeated, a little more stiffly this time.

"Doing what?"

"The sparks! The fire! Is it related to your ⟨Conflagrate⟩ and if so how are you lighting clay on fire with a Wood-based skill?"

"Oh. Oh huh. I didn't realize it was working." After a few more agonizing moments of not answering, Alyssa finally decided to answer a very basic question. "That's ⟨Conflagrate⟩, yeah. Specifically what happens when I combine it with basic [Leafstep] instead of ⟨Springlaunch⟩, apparently."

"You were able to use [Ignite] to modify the output of another one of your skills? One that isn't a meta-skill?"

"Yes."

"That's..." Oliver thought for a moment, "I mean, I guess I can see how that would work?"

"Ooh, the great System Archmage doesn't know about combos?"

"Hey! It's not like you can learn everything ever about the System in just normal schooling!" he protested, "Hells, we don't even know everything about the System, and besides, I understood how it could work once I thought about it."

Oliver pouted for a moment, "Oh yeah, and my degree focused more on how it's made rather than all of the tricks people pull with it. But also yes, I know about combos. I just... forgot."

"Calm down wizzy," Alyssa responded. "It's okay if you don't know something. We can't all be perfect."

Oliver ignored the barb, "So you effectively changed your [Leafstep] into... what would that be?"

Alyssa shrugged, "Dunno. You're the walking encyclopedia for our group. My job is to run really fast and hit things."

Oliver's eyes lit up. He had forgotten about that! He'd gotten so used to not having access to information, that all of his normal habits had faded. But he really should have been taking far more advantage of his latest level-up, the one he'd assigned to Mind and had been used to take his Encyclopedia Systema addon.

It only gave him access to the single largest repository of knowledge that humanity had ever produced, after all. Just the biggest possible game-changer that could exist when trying to rebuild literally everything. Class and skill information, blueprints and history, chymical - which was to say, both chemical and alchemical - formulae, instructions on how to make practically everything... it wasn't perfect, but it was nonetheless sublime.

No more stumbling around blindly in the dark. Sure, it wasn't always correct, wasn't always comprehensive, wasn't always the most effective routes, and it wouldn't always be applicable, but it gave him a ludicrous advantage compared to what he had literally the week before. Even if he had only been able to download a somewhat pared-down version into his soul... still great. He was going to stop disparaging the Empire's greatest encyclopedia now.

He set aside the piece of metal he'd been using as a thinking aid and spun his fingers in the basic spells needed to manipulate his [Status], calling up the relevant tool. He could have gone for a more seamless thought or gesture-type integration, but the spells were trivial, and [Appraise] would naturally integrate with the Encyclopedia in just a couple more levels anyway. Also, it would have cost him some optimization. Probably not a full point-equivalent of Aura, but not nothing.

Let's see... quick search for Fire/Force/Air skills, narrow down to movement... that's a lot. Okay, but they're mostly flight-based. Definitely isn't [Wings of the Phoenix] or [Jetboot Rockets]. Oh, this sounds promising.

"I'm going to guess [Firewalk]," he commented, reading out the description and some of the subsequent notes on its subskills and design contributors... only to sheepishly stop when he realized that it wasn't relevant to Alyssa's unofficial hack workaround for it.

"That is quite neat," Clark commented, kneading his fingertips into Alyssa's back in a bit of a painful-looking way. "And you downloaded the entire internet into your head? Wow."

"No... not the entire internet," Oliver said with a sigh, "Just moderate-confidence Encyclopedia Systema, so anything that has a source attributed to it, meaning that it's probably all going to be true. It also doesn't come with any non-text media, but I can annotate it with my own multimedia notes as that becomes relevant."

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

"That is still pretty cool, though."

"So I'm not cool?" Alyssa cut in.

"Well, obviously. But that had already been established. Oliver is also cool."

"Hmmm," Alyssa raised her chin in a very intentional way. "Are you almost done now?"

"I am getting roughly as worn out as I was aiming for, yes."

"Great, because I want to actually get to my jobs before Henrietta gets back and I wind up in trouble. So turn around, I'm going to get dressed."

It was incredible how quickly some aspects of modern life slipped away when not in active use. If someone had told him before their Expedition started that Oliver would forget to use the Encyclopedia Systema when he had access to it, he simply wouldn't have believed them.

But, other aspects of modern life, he would never forget and was very, very happy to get back.

Oliver carefully moved his hand in a circle, the glowing lines on it pulsing in time with his magic as he directed his newly-made bracket. It was rather crude as such things went, with the appearance of a metal bar bent ninety degrees, but like most tools form was far, far less important than function.

And oh, how it functioned.

With his [Scrollcast] at level fifteen, Oliver's ability to manipulate the Tapestry was... well, still inferior to what he'd previously been used to, but it was sufficient to cast most basic spells. Because of how the skill worked, he still needed a pattern to base it off, but he was able to tweak that pattern in increasingly significant ways. He could even integrate two distinct sources into a single compound spell again!

Eventually, he'd be able to combine enough simple enchantments in a single use of the skill that he could cast effectively arbitrary spells... but he didn't have a spellbook nor the materials to make one, so there were multiple hurdles to that particular milestone.

Of more immediate use to him was the way in which he could split up the output of his casting across multiple targets. Though he was still nominally limited to casting a single spell at a time - he'd need ⟨Twincast⟩ for that, and getting that would require a dedicated artificing project he didn't have the time or incentive for at the moment - there were workarounds for that limitation.

The one he used most often was ⟨Use Artifact⟩. With that single subskill, Oliver could completely bypass a ton of the normal casting-work required for activating enchantments such as their force-pillows and mattresses, the System node, or his placement bracket. It did require a bit more buildout than the simple reference enchantments he could otherwise utilize for [Scrollcast] assuming he wanted them to survive the process and actually be useful, but at his current skill level he could directly power devices, and thanks to his Cohesion-enhanced mana control, he could even vary how much power he was delivering. Combined, he could directly activate and power enchantments, then vary how much power he was delivering as he used them.

Which, for a properly built placement bracket, was all that was required.

A boulder sat near the edge of the Spire, a large chunk of rock easily twice Oliver's height, fairly well-situated in its place but not actually affixed to the stone. And Oliver had a single bracket pushing into it hard enough that the iron was actually deforming slightly as it dug into the stone. The bracket had two Force enchantments, one on each side of the corner, each one capable of little more than conjuring Force. But when combined, and with a bit of a deft touch, that translated into two-dimensional movement requiring nothing more than a bit of practice and enough mana to make it happen.

It had taken Oliver a bit of time to figure out how to actually make the things, but he'd eventually settled on a combination of the force-pillows and the copper fire ring. The former mostly for the elemental reference, and the latter because of its conjuration capabilities. Conjuring Force was trickier than conjuring Fire, though not by that much. Of course, using that conjured Force could be tricky, because most things wanted to move in specific ways rather than simply moving in a random direction, whereas for Fire and Light that didn't matter as much.

Fire, Light, and Force were the three easiest elements to conjure, and mostly in that order. From there, it grew increasingly hard, with the likes of Sound, Shadow and Lightning being far easier to conjure than Illusion or Passion, which were themselves way easier than Steam or Air... and that wasn't even getting to Earth or Metal, or the actually hard ones like Bread, Name, or Pest. Some elements, like Primal, had never been successfully conjured despite some truly impressive efforts.

Where was he?

Ah right, Force conjuration.

Because he wasn't using the placement brackets in an enclosed space, he didn't need to worry about phlogiston buildup, and he didn't even need to make sure that it was always working! So, ultimately, the main core of the enchantment was just designed to grab as much Force mana from the surroundings as possible - and there was always at least some - and concentrate it in a consistent way. Because conjured Force was simply movement, that would also cause the artifact to move, hopefully in a reproducible way.

He'd tried making it self-balancing, but that had... not worked out well. And reminded Oliver why testing of new artifacts designed to move with tremendous amounts of force should be done on the far side of, if not blast shields, at the very least a wall. He hadn't gotten hurt, but it had been close. So, he focused on making it always misbehave in the same way, figuring that he could compensate with enough practice.

It helped that he was working with everything on a 'bare metal' level, in more way than one. The artifact itself was literally bare-metal in that he was having to directly imprint his glyphs onto the metal with a chisel and hammer, and it was no more or less than its raw function.

His enchantment was bare-metal in that it wasn't designed for any kind of efficiency, didn't have any of the normal framing that would be required to make it work in any other situation, and was simply designed to conjure as much Force as it could. It had a kind of elegance in that, but also looked incomplete as a result, like a lightbulb without a base.

He was working with bare-metal magic in that he was simply performing conjuration, which had a solid claim to being the most fundamental form of magic. It was definitely the easiest to understand, which for Oliver may as well have been the same thing.

All magic worked on a sort of balance between material existence and the Tapestry, a push and pull between the twin layers of reality. Where there was water, elemental Water mana accumulated or was created. And where there was Water mana, then so too would physical water would either accumulate or be conjured there.

It wasn't exactly that simple in practice, for myriad reasons, but 'the material and the magical will seek to stay in balance,' was semi-sarcastically called the first law of magic for a reason. And with Force as one of the easiest elements to conjure, it was still pretty simple. Most of the difficulty lay with ensuring that the motion conjured by his enchantment was organized and working with itself rather than against itself... which Technology was quite good at accomplishing, so he hadn't had to deal with even a single prototype trying to tear itself apart or vibrating in place.

All combined, the placement brackets were about as basic as they got, to the point that ⟨Use Artifact⟩ wasn't technically sufficient to get them working on their own. If he wanted them to move, he needed to use not only his magic but also physically move his body, because it used the physical motion that accompanied the sweep of his hand as a kind of 'seed' that it could then follow in a much more powerful form, modulated by how much strength he was feeding the enchantment. The more mana he fed it, the greater the Force it could exert, in either strength or speed.

Which, when it came to why the boulder he was testing it on wasn't moving, seemed to be the problem. He had a grand total of zero Power, and while as an Archmage he wouldn't say that his natural capabilities were lacking... it was lacking the kind of raw magical might he'd need to move an enormous boulder with a hand tool. He could fine-tune how much he was giving the thing no problem, because control was a part of Cohesion, but there was still an upper limit to how much mana he could really apply to any problem. Granted, with only one Capacity he wouldn't be able to sustain any kind of boosted-maximum limit very long.

But, like any good wizard, he supposed that he did have something of a workaround.

[Order Mana]

CRACK

"Whoahnboundgods!"

Splash

The absolute surge of mana that had accompanied the skill activation, as not only was his own feed of mana towards the bracket enhanced, but so too was the Force conjuration itself. The combined result had been over in the blink of an eye, as the bracket tore itself apart by pushing itself like a missile into the side of the stone and cracked the enormous rock into a bunch of different pieces. Those pieces were then caught in the currents of Force that [Order Mana] had created, and been launched off the side of the Spire, where they'd sent up a substantial plume of water.

Oliver got to his feet as the sudden commotion subsided, chest heaving as he tried to catch his breath. A glance at his hand confirmed that it was shaking from surprise, and the magimorphic lines were pulsing randomly in varying shades of bluish purple.

That... whoa. He really needed to remember to do more testing when he wasn't in the potential line of fire for explosions. If that had backfired in some way, rather than strictly firing along the line he'd been directing the boulder in, it could have been real bad. He did at least have other placement brackets - he'd made four of them, because that was a good number for when you needed stability - and so he could easily enough [Cogniprint] the enchantment over to make more next time he heated up the forge.

"I'm okay!" he remembered to call out, in case anyone had overheard him.

Oliver staggered his way back to his workshop, dropping with a grunt onto one of the stools there, and flicking his eyes around the messy area. Piles of sand and small nuggets of iron were littered everywhere, as was clay in varying stages of construction and even firing. His Staff of the New World was leaning against the wall near the Universal Refinery, which-

The notification popped up as he glanced at the device for the first time in about an hour. That one was thanks to Autonomous Divination, which let him script some basic divinations directly into his System to be done at certain points. It wasn't anything too sophisticated, but it worked great in lieu of status monitors, indicator lights, or gauges.

Thanks to the Multimedia Notes addon, he could actually make it appear as though it were one of those things directly, but the text-based versions worked just fine for right now and he didn't really want to muck around with GUIs quite yet. Eventually though...

With a sweep of his arm and a quick ⟨Use Artifact⟩, Oliver called another one of his placement brackets to hand, which he studied more intently. He was pretty sure the last one had just been overloaded in multiple ways, but before he made a bunch more of these things it was smart to double-check that there wasn't some flaw that had shown up explosively.

It was good to make sure things that weren't supposed to blow up didn't. And Oliver wasn't about to be making explosives.

At some point, he became aware that Jacob had been standing near the entrance to the workshop. As soon as Oliver looked at him, the man started speaking. "Smith. I shall need your assistance in creating some defenses. Are you actively working on anything important at this moment?"

Then again, maybe he would be.