Eager to get large level infusion, Lloyd began wracking his brain for ideas on what to do next. He currently had no need for any more armour pieces and wasn’t entirely sure if making weapons was part of his professions leveling criteria. Eventually Lloyd decided the best thing to do, would be what had awarded his profession in the first place.

  He pulled off all his armour and put it on the table and started reading a book he had ended up quitting previously. The book was titled ‘magic circles, arrays, and runic inscriptions’ it was much more complicated than anything else he had read, full of hundreds of pictures of different patterns containing magical power.

  The different patterns weren’t very intuitive as the pages were labelled very scarcely, and with limited information. Skipping ahead of all the different ‘arrays’, Lloyd reached the section detailing different runes. He droned over the endless diagrams, trying his best to understand the underlying concepts hidden within their simple designs.

  After reading through the entire section of the book detailing runes, Lloyd felt ready to continue. He grabbed his knife and began carving out intricate patterns all across the front of his chestplate. All of the patterns were linked to the three runes of protection, hardness, and lightning. Just like the runes in the book, these simple designs also seemed to contain a deeper truth to them.

  With the designs engraved onto the armour, this just left one step before his chestplate was once again completed. He slid the knife across his palm, the blood flowing freely down his arm, he drenched his hand in the red liquid and began to trace the patterns. He dug in his finger covering every visible part of the patterns, not a single millimetre could remain unstained or else this step would be a failure.

  Once the whole of the inscription was completed, Lloyd stepped back and observed as the design began to glow with a cerulean lustre. Small crackles of electricity spat out from the pattern, burning brighter until it suddenly vanished, once more leaving the chestplate a piece of shiny leather armour.

  This was not something he expected, as the books hadn’t described anything like this happening, but perhaps it was just routine for the craft. It wasn’t odd that the armour was glowing, but from what the books the light should have been a dull red, not the extremely bright blue. The books had also mentioned nothing about the energy he’d seen running along the engravings. If it was just the runes expressing themselves that would have made sense, but then why hadn’t he sensed any signs of hardness or protection from the lights?

  Perhaps this was a question that would remain unanswered for a long time, as if the library couldn’t tell him, then he might have to wait until he escaped the tutorial to find out. Not that it really mattered, as long as the inscriptions worked, he was happy.

  Piece by piece, Lloyd scrawled intricate patterns across all his different armour pieces, infusing them with the truths of their runes. His greaves with speed and his boot with agility, but the one constant was the inclusion of the rune of lightning. this was here to synchronize the armour with his class, making it work with him more effectively.

  For his work, Lloyd had been rewarded with the first of his profession levels.

  status

  Name: Lloyd Tethys

  Race: Human (F) – lvl 8

  Class: lightning mage – lvl 13

  Profession: bestial craftsman – lvl 4

  Health points (HP) 236/250

  Mana points (MP) 310/322

  Stamina points (SP) 168/177

  Stats

  Strength – 78

  Agility – 60

  Endurance – 51

  Toughness – 41

  Vitality – 80

  Perception – 68

  Intelligence – 109

  Wisdom – 84

  Willpower – 66

  Free points – 8

  Just a few hours of engraving his armour had put Lloyd from completely lopsided into mental stats, to having strength as his third highest stat. this meant that he could invest his free points more like a mage, no longer having to dump all his points into his physical stats.

  Now that he could invest his free points into intelligence and wisdom, he would have a lot more mana and be able to replenish it faster. This meant he could use his skills more freely no longer relying on infighting as much. Lloyd tested out his new strength, lifting the anvil he’d used previously with far more ease than before.

  Lloyd had some fun messing around with his new stats before focussing again. He had quickly gained a large influx of useful stats, but if he suddenly left the dungeon now, the massive miscus would still absolutely slaughter him. He had made all the armour that he needed, and there were no additional steps he needed to complete. All he could do to improve now was to improve his methods, refining how he put together every part of the armour.

  What Lloyd had neglected to do the first time he read through the different books was follow the procedure to use the high quality methods as he was too inexperienced. On second though he probably should have learnt the easier methods and then moved onto the higher quality ones for his armour.

  As much as Lloyd liked the armour he’d spent the last week of his life creating, he had no way to redo the creation process and would thus have to make a new set. To start, he went to the cold room as he had begun to do every morning, and once the creature was deposited he had exactly what he wanted.

  It was a defensively oriented, bulky lizard with thick hide and no annoying osteoderms in the middle of the leather. He went across the whole beast, taking anything of value, this included the hide, some of its bones, and its heart -which was not fun to dig out of its chest-. Covered head to toe in blood, Lloyd stumbled out of the room struggling to carry all of his new materials.

  To start off, Lloyd began making the bonding agent the better way, this began with creating the bone dust properly, instead of just grinding them down on the stone wheel. Putting the beast’s femur onto the table, Lloyd began carving in convoluted patterns with a chisel and hammer just as the guidebook showed.

  After an several hours of carving incredibly detailed inscriptions wrapping their way around a set of runes that were foreign to him. When Lloyd finally finished the engravings, he could enact the last step of the process to creating the bone powder. Now that the bone was properly prepared, all it took was a simple mana infusion and the bone turned to a fine powder with the consistency of flour.

  With this much less crude method, the grains would be far finer soaking into the leather easier and making the solution more effective. For the next step of the process, Lloyd would have to do something that while not time intensive, would take a long time to figure out the process.

  He grabbed another bone chiselling a rune into the centre and then scrawling inscriptions around it. He then began infusing the engravings with mana, slowly the bone absorbed the energies, glowing with blue light as the mana spread across the rune. Once the inscriptions were glowing, Lloyd sprinkled a thin layer of bone dust over the rune and held it up in preparation.

  Lloyd pulled out his knife once more as he readied himself for the next step, he slit open his palm once more, letting blood spill from the scar that had began to form. His hand shot forward, and the glowing rune sunk through the bone and floated out the other side toward the beast heart he had sitting on the table.

  Unfortunately, this step was not as easy as it looked. Once the floating rune left the bone surface it would try to dissipate, dissolving into the atmosphere, to stop this you had to mentally influence the rune so that it would stay together. One might think that you could just hold the bone next to the heart, but if the energy didn’t get compressed by the mental force for a sufficient amount of time it wouldn’t be solid enough to imprint the rune upon the heart.

  This being the first time he tried to do this, Lloyd hadn’t known what to expect and as he’d expected he was unable to hold the rune together the first time. Or the second, or the third… but on the fourteenth try he finally managed to keep the rune solidified for long enough. This wasn’t through lack of mana control, as he had initially been worried about, but lack of mental energy, or just holding the bone too close.

  If he held the bone to close, then the rune simply wouldn’t leave a mark, uselessly dissipating upon impacting the heart. On the other hand, if he held the bone to far away, then he would start to get a throbbing headache, or zone out. The book said this was due to running out of mental energy, a resource pool not listed on one’s status screen.

  You could supposedly improve this pool by investing points in willpower, but this seemed to differ between individuals and races, with humans usually not being affected by it. Luckily enough, Lloyd discovered he was an exception, as after dumping his six free points into the stat he had finally succeeded.

  He had managed to hold the rune together long enough for it to impact the heart while at a sufficient density. This was the correct way of using a catalyst -the bone- to infuse the blood with mana instead of doing it directly from his hands which would taint the liquid. Now that the blood had received a mana infusion, Lloyd sliced open the heart with his knife and let the contents flow into a bowl he had prepared while waiting for his mental energy to recover.

  The bowl was made from a stone which he had pulled off of a fish monster a few days prior. The outside of the stone was detailed in runes that were specified in the book, these were to help fuse the materials and keep them pure. When he mixed the blood with the bone dust, Lloyd started infusing the bowl with mana, the runes he had carved in the outside glowed a radiant green.

  Unlike his glowing chestplate, this was normal, and actually the correct colour for what he was doing. The energy Lloyd channelled into the bowl, slithered its way through the inscriptions, and the liquid in the centre began to rotate counterclockwise at an unnaturally even pace.

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  Soon enough, the materials within the bowl had formed an oily red solution. Now all he had to do was wait. In the training room, Lloyd had found some barrels meant to be used for archery practice, which he had promptly stolen for this exact purpose.

  Over the next few days, Lloyd waited for the blood and bone mixture to properly combine -a process that could only be sped up with chronomancy, according to the books- while he worked on preparing for the next step of the process.

  What he had to do next was create a talisman to properly tan the leather with mana. His crude method of channelling mana while rubbing his hand over the leather worked well enough but could not properly achieve what a talisman did.

  The talisman the book showed how to make had appeared simple at first but had only gotten more and more absurd as he read on. Interlocking layers of different materials, with such tiny inscriptions he wasn’t even sure he could make them without investing in his perception stat so he could see small enough.

  Even a slight miscalculation would result in hours of wasted time as it made the inscriptions lose their meaning by having energy go to the wrong place. This led to Lloyd having hundreds of discarded sheets of tree bark, stone, and leather strewn across the numerous benches of the guildhall.

  At this point, he had already been in the dungeon for two weeks, yet it felt so much shorter, as he barely needed to sleep anymore, and he was constantly working on something. By now he had finished all but one components of the talisman, having improved greatly after finishing the first piece on the third day.

  Finishing the final piece of the puzzle, Lloyd slotted together the different components and pressed them together. The different pieces all clicked into place, finally completing the intricate energy pathways the talisman used to tan the leather.

  The fact that such a simple task required so complicated an object seemed absolutely ridiculous, yet he couldn’t say he disliked the process. Slowly following hundreds of pages of instructions to eventually create a working product just felt satisfying, especially in the way everything literally fell into place when he put the pieces together.

  Now that the talisman was complete, the only reasonable thing to do would be test it out. He ran the smooth rocklike talisman across a sheet of lizard hide, and the once supple leather gained a firmness that was almost as strong without a bonding agent as his old armour after three to four coatings. The talisman was undeniably superior.

  The leather was extremely hard, yet still flexible, incredibly hard to pierce yet easy to bend and manipulate. Now that he had his working talisman, he just needed to finish off the bonding agent before he could begin treating the leather.

  Lloyd walked over to the barrel he was storing the mixture in, making sure that all of the runes he had on the sides were correct. Next Lloyd began infusing the barrel with mana, the liquid inside began to bubble aggressively, before it started rising.

  The red liquid that had initially only reached a foot above the bottom of the barrel was quickly rising to be over five feet deep. This sudden influx of liquid was caused by the runes on the side of the barrel which had caused water to appear and combine with the bonding agent already inside.

  Now Lloyd grabbed a few sheets of leather that he had already ran over with his talisman and slid them into the barrel. Normally the liquid should be left to age like wine for a few weeks, if not months or years, but he simply didn’t have the time for that at the moment. What he couldn’t ignore was the leathers need to soak in the liquid.

  Lloyd left the leather to soak in the barrel for around a day before he returned to remove them. He pulled the leather from the barrel, watching as they absorbed the liquid at an alarming rate. The five sheets of leather were only a fraction of the total supply he had after skinning the creature, but he had only grabbed what he would need for his armour.

  After a day in the barrel, Lloyd could already see a huge difference to when he had first put it in. while his old armour had been far easier to make, and likely also to mass produce cheaply, this leather was incomparably higher quality. Once he ran the talisman across the surface, the leather began to darken, once more becoming harder as it absorbed the mana.

  While this step only took a few minutes, it was still one of, if not the most important parts of the process, giving the leather its robust structure. Once the leather had been treated with a mana infusion it was then put back into the barrel for a second dose of the bonding agent.

  This process was repeated one more time, before the barrel’s contents began to weaken in potency. This issue would be alleviated with time, as the bonding agent would propagate like yeast if left alone, returning to a potent mixture. The propagation was the main reason you were meant to leave the mixture in a barrel as it would become extremely pure and valuable, if it was left for long enough.

  While it would probably be best to wait and give the leather as many coatings as it could absorb, he would begin to receive diminishing returns for huge increases in time invested. Because of this, Lloyd thought it wisest to leave it at three treatments and start working on actually putting the armour together.

  This part of the process was basically the only bit which didn’t see any changes, staying pretty much the same as before. This made Lloyds job much easier, as he didn’t have to learn anything new or experiment, he just put all the pieces together to form a chestplate.

  The chestplate came out good, but not great, as only practice could improve his method there. Lloyd experimented with it, giving it basic durability tests and feeling how fighting in it would feel. The armour was almost contradictive of itself, being incredibly hard upon impact, yet extremely flexible when he wore it. This quality was unnatural, almost reminding him of a non Newtonian fluid, but it was beneficial, nonetheless.

  With the armours structure complete, Lloyd only had one thing left to do. With the armours new durability, Lloyd found his knife too weak to cut through the leather, having to rely on the chisel to engrave his new chestplate.

  Lloyd carved in the runes with expert precision, following the patterns set out by the book and incorporating his own details where he felt they were needed. The inscriptions snaked around the chestplate, an interconnecting web containing the truths of hardness, protection and lightning.

  Most of the process to make his new armour had been changed completely from the crude methods he had used originally. One thing that hadn’t changed however, was the runes he incorporated into the armour. Every one of the runes he incorporated were useful for that specific armour piece, and while he had considered changing them, there was really no reason to.

  After mentally confirming with himself that these were the runes that would be best suited for his chestplate, Lloyd began the soul binding process. A slice of a knife, and blood began to pour from his palm, opening up the scar that had began to form from this macabre part of the process.

  A bloody handprint on the front of his armour and a connection began to form between the armour and his soul, intrinsically connecting them until the chestplate was destroyed. Just as last time, the inexplicable blue glow began emanating from the inscriptions, echoing the lightning affinity like subliminal messaging.

  The armour was far superior to his first chestplate, now almost certainly able to absorb at least a few direct hits if something like the giant miscus were to catch him off guard. A few stabs with his spear, and Lloyd wasn’t even sure if plasma bolt would be able to do any meaningful damage just yet.

  While inspecting his new chestplate, Lloyd saw that he had suddenly gotten a few system notifications.

  Stormy leather chestplate (Common)

  A sturdy leather chestplate created by a burgeoning craftsman, due to the runic infusions this armour piece has received the wearer will receive extra protection against lightning and piercing attacks.

  (Enchantments, self repair, Soulbound)

  The description of Lloyds new chestplate was seemingly far less impressive than his last creation, seeing as it lacked any unique skills, only being Soulbound and having the ability reform itself from energy. This was distinctly different from the other chestplate that had a skill akin to a camouflage ability.

  Despite the seemingly lacklustre abilities of his new chestplate was the only downside it seemed to have, but this could easily be overlooked by its sheer durability. Thankfully Lloyd was well compensated for his craft in the form of a few more levels.

  Level up available.

  You have reached lvl 5 in your profession.

  …

  Level up available.

  You have reached lvl 7 in your profession.

  Profession skills available

  Before Lloyd went to choose his first profession skill, he was distracted by something he hadn’t noticed before. When he had first gotten his profession after finishing his original armour set, he had been to intrigued to notice the title he’d gotten. Or more aptly, the title he’d upgraded.

  [Common crafter] – successfully craft a common item while below level 10, a symbol of a future expert. As simple as it may seem, not many can achieve such a thing while so early along on their path. + 5 all stats

  This was a big surprise to him, but perhaps it shouldn’t have been, it did make sense that as long as you made progressively higher levelled items as you became stronger yourself that you would keep receiving titles of increasing quality.

  The fact that he even got the title was lucky, as he had just reached level 10 in his race as of his latest craft, getting a total of twenty levels between his class and profession. That would have locked him out of getting this title and possibly all of the ones sequential to it. That would suck, since by how much common crafter increased in power from lesser crafter the next upgrade would have to be a good one.

  There was also the chance that the pattern of quintupling would continue going to 25, then 125, then 625, and so on, though he found this notion unlikely. But nonetheless it was a good that he had gotten it in time, as even if +5 to all stats wasn’t a lot, it was still a good level or two worth of stat points that he could have missed out on.

  Lloyd pushed this out of his mind, focusing on the current matter as he moved his attention to his latest skill selection.

  [Runic comprehension (Inferior)] – when focusing on a rune of complexity around your understanding, you will gain insight into how it influences energy and effects infused mana. Allows the user to better understand how a rune connects to its inscriptions, giving you a better idea of where things need to be added or removed.

  [Bestial tools (Common)] – any tools made from the same beast as the material you are working will have heightened efficacy, the lingering connection of the beast and the tools allowing them to have greater influence compared to just another random tool. Be it a hammers weight, a knife sharpness, or a talismans energy conductivity, it will have its effect strengthened as long as it’s working the beast it was made from.

  [Energetic inscriptions (Common)] – instead of having to rely on a tool and its limited precision, carve out the truths with your mana instead. Let your energy shine truth upon your works instilling them with their full potential.

  This was new. For both of his previous skill selections, Lloyd had been given a choice between five unique skills, but this time he only got three. Apparently this usually coincided with lacking proficiency in the field, but Lloyd felt that this wasn’t the case. He felt like this was a byproduct of his very narrow path so far, the fact that he had done so little to get this far since gaining his profession not giving him many options when it came to skill choices.

  Now one might think that if his path being too narrow had caused him to only get three choices here, when he had done jack shit besides kill some weak ass compies to reach level five and still gotten five choices for his class. The answer? System bullshit. As a way to more smoothly introduce the multiverses many races to the system, it simply gave them all five skill choices to push them along.

  It seemed that since one already had to be rather skilled to get a profession in the first place, the system figured that you shouldn’t need help for your skill selections. And if you could only get a couple of useless low tier skills, then tough shit. Luckily for Lloyd, he didn’t have to worry about this as skills were actually decent.

  He had two commons and one inferior, and the inferior one wasn’t even bad, it was just a general use skill to help with engraving runes. This wasn’t a bad skill, it was just to simplistic for it to be worth calling it a common one. The ones that were common were even better, actually being useful ones, he couldn’t really do himself, unlike the shitty filler skills his class had been offering him.

  For one bestial tools, it made the crafting process easier if your tools were made from the same creature as your material. This certainly had its use cases, for example, if he had to harvest a large amount of materials from a titanic beast, then this would be great since it would speed up a long, time intensive process.

  The downside of this skill was that for the average, smaller scales crafts, wouldn’t take very long and only needed tools for a few parts of the process making it more of a hassle that it was worth. While the times when a skill like this would be needed would likely happen eventually, he didn’t see him facing any titanic adversaries for a long while yet, making it hard to justify taking it.

  His final option seemed a bit more promising, energetic inscriptions. The effects of this skill were something he’d tried to do something similar to before. When he first tried to engrave the properly treated leather with his knife for the first time and found it too hard to cut, he had attempted to burn in the inscriptions with mana.

  This had left the leather with nothing but odd patterns of hardened hide, forcing him to discard the piece since he would have wait almost a week before the bonding agent was strong enough to fix this mistake. After this Lloyd had made a smart choice, and used the slightly unwieldy, but much more effective chisel to carve out the inscriptions.

  The idea of having the ability to precisely erode the materials to create minute and detailed inscriptions was very alluring, as precision was one of the main things his inscriptions were missing. Energetic inscriptions was also a good choice because inscribing was a part of the process much more prevalent than carving the carcasses of giant beasts.

  As a result of all these reasons, Lloyd decided to go with energetic inscriptions, his very first profession skill.