System Architect - Ch 120

Testing the curved enchantment was more difficult than I had thought it would be. Using metal was out—simply because I did not have the requisite skill to make the bowl out of metal to the degree of perfection I needed. A wooden bowl was easier to find and would be relatively easy to carve into—especially with all the extra practice in recent days.

The skill fractals in my mind were mostly-flat. Figuring out how to impose that onto a curved surface was not easy. Eventually, Sebastian had the idea of projecting it down onto the wood with light and marking it while the light was there. That allowed me to do the carving. Checking the carving against the original was no longer possible since they did not match.

When the carving was done, I filled the voids with copper wire before sanding it and finishing it. Pushing mana into the bowl, I had the same issue as with the empty engraved metal. With a lot of mana, I could get a few drops to form. Problem was that the bowl was no longer efficient. The reason I wanted it shaped like a bowl was obvious—it was the perfect shape for collecting the water it made.

Now that I knew a bent fractal was a bust, I was wary of enchanting clothing since they wouldn’t remain static. I imagined that being hit by an attack would be a stressful experience if the armor I wore would shrug it off sometimes and other times act like a wet tissue! It was a chance I couldn’t take. The only way to enchant armor was going to be by adding a small, solid disk with the enchantment into the fabric or attached to the leather of the armor.

The same was true of most weapons. A sword bent when it was used, even if it wasn’t much. This was true even moreso for bows and other ranged weapons. All of this was predicated on being able to make small fractals that worked like the big ones. That was what I worked on next.

Making the fractal a little smaller was relatively easy. Making it a lot smaller was a real challenge. The fractals I’d been making were about six inches across. Halving that was doable with the tools I had. But to make the enchantments I had in mind actually work? The fractals would need to be an inch across or less—preferably under half an inch.

When I compared the the half-sized fractal with the full-sized one, the smaller one was marginally slower in making water. On the positive side, the efficiency was comparable between the two. The slower working made sense, in a way. The smaller fractal had smaller channels for the mana to flow, so there was a limitation from that. Perhaps it could be improved with better materials and techniques, bit that wasn’t the point of the exercise.

To make a smaller fractal took a specialized tool. While I could possibly make it work with a magnifying glass and a lot of skill, that wasn’t going to work with the timeline I had in mind. There wasn’t enough time for me to get that skilled before I had to kick off the apocalypse. Grandpa Joe wouldn’t make it that long!

The tool that I found was one that had been used for a long time for exactly this kind of purpose. When using the stylus on one side, the other side would mirror my movements but at a much reduced scale. It was a modified version of a writing tool called a pantograph that allowed me to reduce my movements to an eighth of what they normally were. Which meant that when I engraved a three-inch disk, the other end would be engraving one that was three-eighths of an inch across—exactly what I needed!

The tool was fiddly as hell. Engraving the small piece took twice the time as the big one since I had to rotate the cutting head to make the cuts as I needed them to be done. After a week of painstaking work in my workshop, Chris helped me fill the minute engraving with lead and polish it up.

When placed at the bottom of a bowl, I fed mana into it. The water came very slowly. But it did come. Instead of a few seconds, it took almost a minute to fill the bowl with water. The efficiency was markedly less than the three-inch one I’d used as a template. Not nearly as bad as the curved one had been—but it wasn’t awesome, either.

I collected myself and looked over my notes. I could make enchantments small enough to fit on weapons and not get in the way. There were two problems facing me. One I could resolve easily enough. The other was a major sticking point—especially for armor enchantments.

Although I remembered the fractals from previous lives somewhat, they weren’t fresh enough in my mind to be useful. In order to get enchantments I’d want on weapons and armor, I would need to unlock skills. Once unlocked, I’d be able to see the fractals inside my spirit and copy them into reality.

The other problem was the one I didn’t have an answer for. How could I make an enchantment that was powered by something—or someone—other than the user. Whether that was a battery of mana or something else that would power an enchantment passively. This was necessary for any defensive enchantment. Focusing on one or two things was normal. But if all of my equipment was enchanted, there was no way I could focus on every ring, sock, or hat I was wearing all at the same time!

To go along with the problem around making the enchantment permanently on, I surmised I might need to connect enchantments together to make them work. For example, the terrible efficiency of the tiny Create Water enchantment might be mitigated somewhat if there were several of them all connected to work together—if such a thing were possible, of course. The same would be true of a power source or any more complex enchantment that used different spell fractals together to produce one effect—like sensing that the armor is about to take an impact and strengthening it so the enchantment doesn’t waste power.

Finally, I hadn’t tested the difference between how leveling affected the enchantments. Specifically, when a skill was leveled, the fractal changed slightly each time. When it went up a tier, the change was more significant. If I enchanted using a higher-level skill fractal, what would happen?

It turned out that when using a higher leveled Create Water, the efficiency improved proportional to the level. More water was created in less time as well, though that effect was less significant of a change than the efficiency. All of this was important to know, of course. But actually using it would come later, after I learned how to forge a weapon!

--------

I was back hammering with Sebastian once my tests were done. It wasn’t as if I’d stopped completely. But—with my focus on figuring out more about enchantments—I was still making nails several weeks after I should have moved onto something else.

“Today, you’re going to make a knife,” he said.

“How am I going to do that?” I asked.

“Glad you asked! You might assume that you’re going to pound it out with the hammer. It’s true, you will. But not all of it. There are some modern shortcuts that’ll make the process quicker, easier, and give a better end product. You’ll start with this bar of steel, cut it to shape, and finish it with the hammer.”

He handed me to bar of steel. It was about a foot long and a couple inches wide.

“I have a knife template you can trace,” he said. “Then I’ll show you how to cut the parts away.”

With a marker, I traced the template he gave me onto the steel bar. The process from there was very similar to what I had learned in woodworking: use a saw to cut away the unwanted bits. The main difference was the type of saw. Instead of a typical metal saw, I used a coping saw, which had a much smaller—and tougher—saw blade.

It was not a quick process. Faster than grinding or forging for sure, but not quick by any means. When I had the knife roughly shaped, I showed Sebastian. He brought me to the forge to begin shaping the blade and tang.

“This is not much different than making the nails,” he said. “Your aim is to give the knife a gentle bevel from the top towards the bottom. This means you will want to hit it evenly on both sides to get that wedge shape as even as you can. Don’t worry about the cutting edge too much. That will be ground down to a fine edge later—which will fix any small imperfections.”

“Alright,” I said. “And I just leave the top be?”

“That’s the easiest way. It won’t change much, but it might look off if you don’t bring the bevel all the way up. As for the tang, it’s in the right shape in general. Maybe a bit too thick. Making it a smidge thinner—and wider—is a good thing. Then some holes and and a handle. But that’s for when you finish the blade profile.”

I heated the knife in the forge. When it was ready to work, I pulled it out and hammered it into shape. As the knife was something I hadn’t made before, there were a lot of things I struggled with. It was one thing to make a four-sided taper over a short distance. It was another thing entirely to carry a consistent bevel the entire length of the blade. I did the best I could, but I wasn’t happy with the results.

“It looks like shit,” I told Sebastian.

“Eh, it’s not bad for a first try,” he said with a laugh. “Mine was worse. You just need more practice. Let’s finish it up so you have a good idea of the rest of the steps.”

He showed me how to grind the knife so that it would be sharp. The edge was left dull for the time being as there was one more step to do before sharpening it. He had me head the knife and quench it before heating it again to a lower temperature and letting it cool slowly. I understood that doing the process was rearranging the crystals in the metal to make the knife the right combination of hard and soft so that it would hold an edge while also not shattering if hit too hard.

Once the blade was done, I fitted a wooden handle to it. It was secured to the tang using rivets. Only then was I able to sharpen the blade and consider it finished. Despite its rather ugly appearance, it was functional. It could cut and still hold an edge better than most knives I’d spent far too much money on in the past.

“Not bad for a first try,” Chris told me. “Definitely better than Sebastian’s first try. Did he tell you how badly that went? It looked worse than a dog squatting to—”

“We get it, Chris,” Sebastian laughed. “It was pretty bad.”

“Well, I’ll keep working to get better,” I said. “These will make good test beds for enchanting, I think. I don’t want to try something new on a weapon I intend to use!”