Chapter 339
Chapter 339
There exist various professions in the world, from blacksmiths and cooks to artists and hunters. But three of them surpass them all at least a hundred times!
An alchemist is a professional who makes medicine. They produce both general and special medicine: enzymes, transformation medicine, breakthrough medicine, cultivation accelerators, healing medicine, unique bodies, medicine that fulfills the conditions for some unique bodies cultivation. Alchemy is first in order of importance.
Formacist has the skills to create formations. Among them, for example, family formations (passport), hierarchical formations (rank and position at work, school, in the army…), legacy formations (techniques, instructions…), attacking or defensive formations, spatial formations (for storing things in a spatial ring), subjugating, tracking, recording or functional formations (standings, calculators, clocks, vitals, thermometer…), and so on. Formacy is second in order of importance.
An enchanter has skills to enchant inanimate things or matter. Trying to enchant living beings is as ridiculous as trying to set water on fire. Teachers would beat their students to death with a stick on the head for this. The most common and demanded enchantments include strengthening (of armor, weapons, clothing, construction material…), hardening, resistance (to temperatures, elements, pressure…), flavoring (making things sweet, salty, sour…), densification or impenetrability (like the impenetrable, scanning-proof cloth; walls, foundation insulation…), weighting, and even painting. Roughly speaking, an enchantment changes one selective characteristic forever (until another enchantment is applied). Enchanting occupies its rightful third place.
At this point, Kyon had mastered formacy to perfection, thanks to his extensive programming skills from his world. He could be easily called a 0-ranked formacist, a legend among legends, the god of formacy.
As for alchemy, he had mastered only one of the branches – unique body creation. He had yet to study lots of other fields of this discipline. Most importantly, Lovr had invented the Cycle of Creation, before which all the alchemists in the world would kneel. He had defied the basic principles of alchemy and achieved unexpected success.
Kyon cracked his fingers and neck, a sly smile playing on his lips. He was about to repeat his feat. This time, in the field of enchantment. He was hoping to find a loophole and get a huge advantage over anyone else in the whole universe. He wouldn’t give up until he achieved all his goals!
First, Lovr took a look inside his mind, where he had the whole Boston library, and highlighted the main points. The most important element in enchanting was a trigram, a magic circle, the bridge and at the same time the key to a single characteristic. Adding elemental energy (keys) to the trigram would get this characteristic multiplied. For example, when enchanting water for strength, the characteristics of the liquid state would remain unchanged, but the ice would get much stronger. The multiplication factor depends on the type and the level of the enchantment.
There are four levels of enchantment, each of which is more expensive and more difficult to implement, and most importantly, more effective than the previous one: 1 – basic, 2 – advanced, 3 – superior, 4 – master, which hardly ever used. They got their names after the grade of elements required for each level. Only few people can study even the superior grade, let alone the master one! It’s hard to imagine the genius of those enchanters.
For each next level of enchantment, it’s necessary to apply the previous one of the same meaning.
However, the grade of the elements isn’t the essential part of this complex science. It all comes down to the trigram. Basically, there are two steps to create it:
First, it is necessary to draw a perfect trigram. A single flawed bend or line, and the probability of failure is close to one hundred percent. Resources will be wasted, and there is even a risk of a dangerous explosion. It takes many years of practice under the guidance of an experienced teacher to draw a trigram at high accuracy. The apprentice must also learn to work with special tools.
Second, each practitioner has a unique channel way, or the way the energy emerges from the keys, which means that the trigram drawing will be individual for everyone. Fortunately, there are certain rules and patterns for all types of enchantment that help novice enchanters achieve success. Teachers and textbooks also help.
However, the second point wouldn’t present any difficulty for Kyon. After all, he had mastered the grades of elements through a thorough analysis, not through enlightenment (at an intuitive level). Synergy helped him know them at the creator level.
On average, it takes an average talent 2 or 3 years of active practice and learning to reach the 7th rank in enchantment. With a bit of luck, it’s possible to get to the 6th rank in 20-30 years, but it takes extraordinary talent to ever get to the 5th rank. However, there are monsters that reach the 7th rank in a matter of days! Masters from high-ranking empires grab them easily and quickly like a rare chance.
{I wonder how many years will it take me to succeed?} – Kyon’s face assumed a sort of dreamy expression.
With the help of the earth element, he created a perfectly flat metal plate a meter in diameter. Only blacksmiths could reproduce this mold following specific detailed drawing. Then without any tools, he drew a flawless trigram inside it with mathematical precision. The trigram consisted of shallow grooves with nine funnels at the edges and one large in the middle (see the image). The central one was intended for the enchanting item. The nine small ones were meant for the keys (or rings with the keys).
Regardless of the type of enchantment, the ratio of the keys of each element must always be the same. The lack of the necessary amount will lead to an inevitable failure. However, the surplus of the keys will remain intact.
Lovr ground the cloudy green stones (nephrites) into powder, and put it carefully into the grooves. It would conduct the elemental energy.
He placed an equal number of keys of each element in each of the nine funnels. Then he put two granite stones in the center of the trigram. One was twice the size of the other.
{Well, well… All I need is…} – Kyon touched the green powder in the grooves and infused it with pure, earth, and heat elemental energy.
Any enchantment requires three things: 1 – a perfect magic circle, 2 – payment (in the form of the keys), 3 – energy bending. For example, weighting requires pure, earth, and heat energy. The most popular hardening enchantment requires pure, light, and ether energy.
There exist elementary enchantments for beginners that require only two elements, and there are unreasonably complex ones that only a heavenly genius with five elements can realize. Theoretically, there should be enchantments that require six or more elements, and the quality it affects can be completely unpredictable! Fortunately or unfortunately, such experiments are impossible in this reality. They are destined to remain an unknown mystery, a world secret, a subject for writers’ fantasy. Maybe some divine being will realize and test them once.
As soon as the elements permeated the green powder, almost all the keys turned into gaseous iridescent energy that entered the green powder and followed the pattern to the center of the trigram like electricity flowing in wires… The nephrite powder burned bright and gradually disappeared without a trace while two granite stones glowed scarlet light for a second, which meant that the experiment was successful.
{First crack out of the box!} – Kyon could not repress a burst of Homeric laughter. Even if Lovr was on the bright side, his character did not lose its arrogance and self-importance.
If any master-enchanter found out that someone managed to cast an enchantment at the first attempt, he would die of a heart attack or would be disappointed in himself and all his students forever.
Kyon just cast a weighting enchantment of the basic grade. It increased the weight of stones tenfold. An advanced grade enchantment would increase it a hundred times, and a superior grade could increase the weight a thousand times. The Scourge initially weighed about ten kilos, but the basic grade enchantment cast by a Stone enchanter increased to a hundred.
How could the enchanter raise the weight up to 50 kilograms? The answer is simple – he enchanted only half of the sword, which was quite easy to do. Enchanting didn’t work on animate organisms and bypassed elemental energy, that’s why the part of the weapon infused with energy remained intact. This practice had been long known and used everywhere.
Kyon picked up the granite stones. One weighed 4 kilos, the other 2 kilos. As expected, each weighed ten times as much as before. If he had cast an advanced grade enchantment, one stone would weigh 40 kilos, the other 20 kilos. Theoretically, it was possible to enchant an entire mountain, but it would take billions of keys! The more massive the object, the more keys its enchantment requires, and there is no way to bypass this law. For example, Triana weighed about 200 kilograms as a tiger and much less as a human. Her mass was sealed inside the body in the form of energy. It’s the same with inanimate objects, and the hidden mass also comes with a price.
Kyon wondered where he should look for a loophole? Which one? After racking his brain for a bit, he made a decision: {First, I will study enchanting inside out and then I will find a way.} – And he started practicing and experimenting.
5 days flew by.
Kyon was still in the bright state, making impressive progress in enchanting. He didn’t need a tutorial to figure out how to cast certain types of enchantments. He had discovered the deep meaning of this subtle science and understood how it was connected with matter. In fact, he had learned how to cast any enchantment of the advanced (2) grade, and even some of the superior (3) grade. And small wonder. After all, he had the superior grade of earth, light and darkness thanks to the dwarves and the voracious spheres-keys. However, it was going to take him some more time to study the superior grades of the remaining elements that he had taken from the Grands’ legacy.
The nuances of the profession didn’t cease to impress Lovr. Enchantments could affect absolutely any characteristic of matter. Those that required 2-3 elements affected mainly the most primitive characteristics, such as mass, strength, and density. Enchantments that required 4-5 elements affected more subtle characteristics, such as: mass reduction, suppressing or increasing radiation – from spiritual scanning to electromagnetic waves, decreasing or increasing resistance to elements, etc. No one in this world had ever tried to go beyond this. Enchantments that required 6-7 elements interacted with more complex characteristics, like increasing the speed of chemical reactions, metabolism, cell regeneration, changing the consistency, boosting elemental energy (except pure energy). The most interesting enchantments required 8-9 elements at once. They must be only in gods’ and goddesses’ power if they have the right to bend more than 5 elements. The list of enchantments includes resistance to or boosting pure force, the basic element, increasing or decreasing the distance between the atoms (radiation), changing characteristics of the fundamental interaction (annihilation, magnetism, gravity), changing the direction (charge) of the atoms and quarks (antimatter), and even transparency (invisibility) for all types of radiation…
Anyway, those who had banned bending all the nine elements did it for a reason. However, the enchantments that could cause a real apocalypse came with an insane price. For example, there aren’t enough keys on the planet to annihilate a single stone.