Chronicles of the True Wizard

Once he was done eating, he pulled out and opened the Enchanting Basics book.

It is very odd that everything I have encountered has been in or spoken English. There has to be some sort of System fuckery there.

Felix was surprised to find that the book appeared to be hand written. He suspected the book was duplicated by The System or a skill, but it had definitely been transcribed by hand originally. Luckily, master enchanters had impeccable penmanship through a combination of their ridiculous dexterity and their continuous practice drawing out enchantments.

Though it was impeccable, their were stylistic differences which made it easy to see where the original manuscript had been modified, even if the text had been shifted around through magic. Felix often found himself confused until he read the annotation by the Edelis enchanting department which clarified things dramatically.

Reading the book, it seemed like the original intention was for the reader to have a lot of enchanting experience and apprenticeship. Likely performing the most basic tasks, the equivalent of getting coffee, for the master enchanter they would pick up on customs, traditions and terms. When they would finally be given the original version of this book, he suspected they would have understood it much better than he did.

The enchanting department also needed a textbook for their students. They modified a book they knew had quality content to provide a glossary, appendix and annotations. The glossary clarified some of the terms enchanters had coined for their craft. The appendix held diagrams and visual representations of things to make them easier to understand. The annotations helped clarify esoteric concepts and generally confusing sentences and paragraphs.

Even with all the help provided by the Edelis enchanting department though, Felix still struggled to understand some of the concepts. He often had to reread many of the chapters and sections and still felt like he didn't have a great grasp of some things. The issue wasn't that the concepts were difficult to understand, it was that Felix thought the book was poorly written. It was entirely grammatically correct, it was just not concise at all.

There were tangents all over the place that didn't seem to have any relation to the chapter they were contained inside of. There were also a lot of random theories that connected to some higher level concepts that were sometimes written in the appendix as: "ignore".

There was an annotation at the start of the book that explained, the more advanced concepts couldn't be described because that would likely increase the rarity and grade of the book. That was also why it couldn't show any actual completed enchantments in the book. They showed the base components of enchantments but nothing more. Everything else was loosely referred to but even descriptions were avoided.

This would probably be a lot easier to understand if I could actually enchant something.

The chapters he understood the best were the enchantment combining section. There were chapters on sharing the mana between multiple enchantments, laying out the enchantments and specific patterns that could be followed. They relied on a lot of concepts from earlier in the book that he hadn't quite fully grasped but, he had just worked on doing exactly that so it made the concepts a lot less abstract. He even suspected he could majorly improve his attempt at replicating the example sword's enchantments were he to try again.

Felix wanted to practice enchanting more and he knew one of the rooms attached to the rest room was an enchanting room, but he didn't have any materials. He had a handful of items in his inventory he could try enchanting, but he didn't want to accidentally ruin them. He thought about enchanting the arrows one by one, but decided he would wait until he had some more experience so he would get more value out of the enchanting.

Felix stowed the book and headed out to continue his sweep of the labyrinth around the rest room. He encountered a similar room to the last one with five breastplates, four enchanted and one plain one with an empty pedestal on the far side. Felix assumed he had to combine the enchantments together onto the plain breastplate.

Enchanting a breast plate was easier in the sense that it had better surfaces to work on, but it was much harder in the sense that it was bigger. The enchantments had to all be balanced with each other and there were many more enchantment nodes needed to create a coherent effect.

The book had labeled the nodes as something else with a difficult to pronounce word that Felix didn't bother remembering. The most basic of enchantments consisted of a source, channel and nodes. The source retrieved mana in some way, either from the wielder, a battery or ambient. There were more complicated sources like the target for a sword or inline buffers, conversion of some energy sources into mana and other wild things, but none of them were detailed in the book.

The channel was the highway that delivered mana to the nodes, which contained the effects. The channels had different shapes to help distribute mana evenly as well as ways of splitting mana out to different nodes and keep them properly fed. There were also shapes to combine mana evenly into a single channel. Things only got much more complicated from there when multiple sources need to be split and combined to deliver the correct amount of mana to each node or mana had to be balanced.

The nodes were the effects, simple as that. They consume mana to do something, usually converting mana to some form of energy. The complexity was introduced when the nodes needed to be combined to perform effects that individual nodes couldn't accomplish alone, not to mention sometimes they interfered with each-other. It also complicated the channels because an enchanter had to contend with nodes consuming mana from the channels, like when the toilet is flushed making the shower water scalding hot. The channels needed to be able to keep up with the nodes and balance the mana delivered to them at all times.

Felix placed his best attempt on the pedestal and it flashed white, green then blue, the same as last time. A chest appeared once again and Felix opened it to reveal about a hundred identical wooden daggers.

Ding You have gained a level in [E - Special] Arcane Engineer

[E - Common] Training Dagger

A blunt wooden dagger intended for training purposes.

I knew these dungeons gave a ton of materials, but still, this seems like a lot. The last puzzle dungeon I was in had over a thousand green rooms, that would be more daggers than I have time to enchant. Hopefully it doesn't just give me more materials than I could ever use.

The next room Felix found surprised him. He expected more enchanting but instead found a table with a quill and a single sheet of paper. On the paper there was an incomplete spell form diagram. Felix examined it and added a few simple lines to complete the diagram to the best of his knowledge before the diagram glowed once. A chest appeared and Felix opened it to reveal a single folded sheet of paper.

[E - Uncommon] Enchantment Node

This piece of paper details a single enchantment node.

Huh. I wonder if I had accepted and remembered that stupid word from the book if it would have been named differently. It seems like The System modifies everything to better fit our understanding of them. I wonder if that's just for the tutorial or if that will always be a thing. It's probably based on intention I would assume. If you want to be understood you will be, it doesn't make sense for it to decode ciphers automatically if something is written in code. Unless it does, that would kind of suck. I'm sure people would come up with some other way of hiding things in that case.

Felix unfolded the piece of paper and saw a drawing of some kind of symbol that vaguely reminded him of the durability node, though he wasn't quite sure why.

Felix moved on to the next room and found another enchanting room. In this one there was a damaged enchantment on one greave in a set. He had to fix the enchantment by modifying it to work around the large gash that had broken it. The enchantment had to function the exact same way so that the greaves still functioned as a pair effectively. He was rewarded with another folded node.

The next room was a spell form room where he had to modify a spell form to replicate the effect being demonstrated, which was a simple push. The room was trivial for Felix who just felt the example spell and drew it into the sheet perfectly. There were a lot more lines missing from the starting spell form than he had expected. He was rewarded with 20,000 Tutorial Credits.

Felix managed to run through almost 40 rooms before he decided to sleep for the night, netting himself 2 profession levels. He managed to find more Training Daggers along with Training Bucklers and Bows as well as 2 channels, 2 sources, and 3 nodes. From the spell form rooms, he found something new. He was rewarded with blank spell scrolls. They allowed him to use an enchanting quill to etch a spell form onto them for a single cast, which was entirely useless to Felix though he imagined incredibly valuable for most. He also found many spell components, though some he knew and the rest he couldn't identify. He was hoping to find a spell form primer, but wasn't so lucky.

Felix slept in the rest room and drank some of the fruity slushy drink from his flask. The next day he decided to try and apply some of the concepts from a section in his enchanting book. He settled on the channels chapter of enchantment. Yesterday, he looted a simple braid channel and a load balancer. The load balancer was not a channel in and of itself, but it was a useful component for channels to function, ensuring that the inputs were distributed evenly amongst the outputs.

In his previous attempts, Felix had varied the size of the nodes along the blade to accommodate the amount of mana being pulled into them. This was a functional solution, but it had flaws. From reading the enchanting book, Felix learned that making the node smaller tended to make it less stable which meant varying the size of the nodes was not the ideal solution. Felix thought it might be based on dexterity, that small nodes were more prone to flaws and required a higher dexterity to work. A minor flaw on a normal sized node was much bigger relative to the size of a miniaturized node.

Felix practiced different enchantments with different nodes on bows as they were the longest item he had, meaning the braided channel and balancers would have the greatest effect on them. He also decided to design some enchantment layouts that he didn't think were ideal by any means, but would maximize the need for balancers and better channels on the bucklers. He enchanted 50 bucklers and 25 bows before he was satisfied.

After that he decided to go and explore a few more rooms before sleeping again. He wasn't particularly tired as he was only keeping up his standard mind and nervous system energy buffs rather than buffing his body to run around. At this point, Felix constantly had the mind and nervous system buffs going along with some of his senses which kept his dexterity, agility, perception and intelligence buffed by about 45%. Felix's goal was to get the effects to at least 50%. It had been steadily growing as he used his energy, but he still felt like there was something missing. With the steady growth, whether or not something was missing at all, Felix should hit his goal in a week or so.

Felix managed to knock out another 10 rooms before deciding to head back to sleep. He found a channel splitter and merger as well as an ambient source, which he already knew from analyzing existing complete enchantments. This ambient mana source was slightly different but he had no idea what the differences between the two, he now knew, were. He also found 4 spell components whose purpose was a complete mystery along with another 30 or so spell scrolls. Felix went to sleep rather disappointed with his meager loot. He was happy for the marginal increases, but he really wanted some kind of direction on spell forms so he could work on that as well.

Ding You have gained 2 levels in [E - Special] Arcane Engineer

Felix woke up some time later, starting his day with the mystery fruity drink from his flask and the replenished feast from the table in the room. Felix decided, over his lavish breakfast, to just explore as many rooms as he could until he either found a book for spell forms or three days had passed. He didn't want to waste time fumbling in the dark with spell forms if he was just going to get a book for it eventually. He also wanted to work on it during this dungeon so he would have some new spells to play with in case the next dungeon was a combat dungeon.

If he didn't get a book or something like it after three days, he was just going to have to figure it out himself. He had managed to gain 9 levels in his profession, which meant his mana had finally crossed the 10k mark at some point. The milestone felt bigger to Felix than it actually meant. There was no specific benefit to 10k, it just felt good to see the big number and it was a massive difference when compared to where he started. Of course, his mana was being doubled by the Amulet of the Wild, so he didn't technically have 10k mana yet as the amulet would eventually be replaced. Still, seeing the number was satisfying in it's own right.

He hadn't managed to find the blue room yet and also hadn't found the test room yet, at least he didn't think so. It was possible he did find the blue room and just performed poorly, but he was choosing to believe he hadn't found it yet as none of the rooms had stood out as particularly difficult. . . . . .