Chương 42: Workshop Rules

The Spellforged Magus · Xiphias · 72 chương · ~25 phút đọc · Tạo 05/07/2026

Sumi opened her eyes as the pale green glow around her arm faded. For a moment, nobody spoke. The guest room still smelled faintly of antiseptic from Doc Hadley's last visit. Morning light slipped through the curtains, bright enough to make the bruising beneath Sumi's eyes harder to miss. She sat propped against the headboard with a pillow behind her back and her injured arm resting across her lap. Enzo sat in the chair near the window, cane hooked over one knee. Kenzo stood beside Enzo, arms folded.

Val occupied the end of the bed, picking at a loose thread, one foot tapping against the floor. Signe stood near the dresser. Matt leaned against the doorframe, hands in his pockets. They'd spent the first thirty minutes catching up. Enzo had told them what he'd learned. The origin of the magic genes. His mutation. Restricted affinities and the conversion mechanic. Crystal, metal, and light. He'd answered their questions and deflected the ones he wasn't ready for. Sumi sighed.

"That's probably good enough." Val leaned forward.

"Probably?"

"I'll wait for Doctor Hadley to confirm it." Sumi looked down at her arm, then eased it back onto the blanket.

"But I think the worst of the damage is healed."

"You think?" Sumi gave her a patient look.

"Heal speeds things up, but I still need the doctor to look at it." Val's mouth closed.

"You look exhausted," Kenzo said, studying Sumi's face.

"Shouldn't you feel better after all that healing?" Sumi shook her head.

"My reserves are almost full, but I'm still drained. It's strange. Every cycle of depletion and absorption takes more out of me than the last."

"That's normal, isn't it?" Signe asked.

"You've been healing your arm all morning."

"I don't know. The spells don't mention any cost besides mana. And when we empty our reserves, we feel hungry and fatigued. In theory, absorbing more should solve the problem." She shrugged.

"In practice, every cycle leaves me a little more worn down."

"Like running on empty even after you refuel?" Kenzo asked.

"Something like that." Enzo frowned.

"You think it's the depletion itself? Not the casting?" Sumi considered it.

"I think so. When I deplete my reserves, it feels like more than just losing mana. There's a physical cost. As if my body is now relying on a baseline level of mana just to function normally." Kenzo scratched his jaw.

"Huh. That makes sense. I've been eating way less since I started cultivating, but I don't feel hungry. And then, after a hard training session where I burn through everything, I'm suddenly starving."

"You ate half a pot of stew last night," Val said.

"No training involved."

"That was emotional support stew."

"It was my stew."

"Then I thank you for your stew's support." Signe leaned closer to Sumi.

"How are you holding up? Beyond the mana stuff." Sumi smiled. It was small. The kind of smile meant to reassure everyone else that they didn't need to worry quite so much. Enzo had practiced that one in the mirror after the accident. The version meant for parents, friends, doctors, and anyone else who looked too long at the cane before looking back at his face.

"I'm okay," Sumi said.

"It's going to take some getting used to. But I won't be going on any more adventures for a while." The room went quiet. Signe opened her mouth. Closed it. Looked down at her hands, then back up.

"Sumi, I... I'm sorry. I should have—""Don't." Sumi's voice was gentle but firm.

"It's not your fault, Signe." She looked around the room, her gaze settling on Val for a moment. Val's eyes dropped to the blanket.

"It's not anyone's fault. I volunteered to go. I wanted to help." She paused.

"Besides, we got the children out, and that's what matters." Matt shifted his weight near the doorway, but said nothing. He'd been quiet since arriving, watching the conversation but not taking part. Kenzo broke the silence the way he usually did.

"So what you're saying is, next time we fight a giant snake, you want to sit it out?" Sumi's smile reached her eyes this time.

"Yes, please."

"Noted." He grinned.

"More snake for me." Enzo chuckled. There she was.

Enzo closed the guest room door behind him and made his way upstairs. Back inside his workshop, he stood for a moment and took in the room. Sunlight filtered through the curtains, warming the room. His bookshelf now held dozens of useful titles, though most of them he couldn't imagine needing any time soon. Still, he liked to be prepared. Doubly so in any apocalypse he might find himself in. Murph was out hunting with Pops, so he had the space to himself. Resting on his workbench was a box full of oddities.

He'd put the word out to the Watch that he needed a bunch of stuff. Stuff. Because he didn't know how else to explain his need for a bit of everything to experiment with. Thankfully, Frank had translated his poorly worded request into something more coherent, and the box held nothing weird. He eyed the suspiciously large bone jutting from one corner. Too weird. He pulled up his most recent notifications. — Second Reservoir Detected. Mutated Gene Detected. Class Updated. Mana Capacity Updated. Indicators added.

M, Mind. H, Heart. B, Guide Bonus. Warning: Missing (H) Adaptation for Mana Absorption. Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

That lasted all of three seconds before the word became useless. He needed to learn how to circulate mana properly. Create an actual technique. Test crystal, metal, and light mana in isolation. Then test whether any of his existing spell forms could survive having their threads replaced, modified, or reinforced by one of the new types. He needed to make more shield rings for the Watch. Needed to test Infusion and Empowerment now that he could. Spellforging needed answers too.

The Guide classified it as a discipline, which meant it had to sit somewhere between Enchanting and Infusion. Or above. Then there was Sumi's idea, which the Guide had confirmed. For once. Convert mana during storage. If he could make that work, affinity stopped being a wall and became a supply problem. A difficult supply problem, sure, and one that might draw Eaters to him. But it could be solved with materials and testing. And he'd take his chances, especially if it meant having access to more magic.

Risk was an old friend. He glanced at the box from the Watch again. Metals. Stones. Wood. Bone. Glass. A little bit of everything, because once he solved the conversion problem, he had to figure out which materials best held which types. Enzo really needed a clone spell. He frowned. And though he didn't particularly believe that was possible, it raised another question. Could mana be made permanent? Not just stored. Not temporarily held in place by an enchantment.

Was it possible to shape mana into matter and force it to stay that way? His gaze drifted to the mana crystal sitting beside the snake scale. Right. He needed to experiment with those too. Enzo stared at the workbench for a long moment, surrounded by more impossible problems than any sane person should have been happy to see. Now he just had to pick where to begin. The answer was obvious after a moment's consideration. Workshop rules applied. Test your materials before you build with them.

Enzo sat down, stretched out his leg, and reached for both reservoirs. He started with arcane, just to establish a baseline, drawing and holding it in the air above the workbench. The purple thread flowed where he wanted, stable and obedient. It held the shape he gave it, and would remain as long as he kept hold of it. He released it and reached for crystal next, the same way he always did, by willing a length of thread into the air. The mana resisted, then stuttered and collapsed before it formed. He tried again.

Same result. Enzo frowned. He knew how to thread mana. He'd done it hundreds of times. He tried once more, slowly, paying attention to how the mana felt, what the mana wanted to do, rather than what he was forcing it to do. This time, instead of pulling on a thread, he focused it at the point where the mana emerged and waited. Crystal responded. A tiny structure, faceted and angular, appeared at his fingertip. It was barely visible. Enzo willed it to grow, to become more.

His concentration wavered when he realized he was basically talking to his mana the same way he talked to Murph. Then the crystal stretched upward, each new facet overlapping and extending from the last. He guided the growth carefully, and the structure aligned with his intent. It felt less like shaping or threading and more like gardening. The result wasn't a thread. It was a narrow crystalline structure stretching from his fingertip to a point about six inches from his fingertip.

Pale, translucent, faintly prismatic. And very rigid. When he tried to bend it, it resisted completely, and he could feel that pushing harder would shatter it rather than reshape it. He didn't need to relearn that lesson. Arcane didn't enjoy bending in on itself. Crystal refused to bend at all. Understood. He released it and the crystal broke apart, returning to ambient mana. Interesting. Crystal built upon itself, refusing to be drawn into a form or shaped after the fact.

Just a seeded point and guided growth that, once locked, was committed. Enzo reached for metal next. He repeated the process, focusing on the point of emergence and letting the mana tell him what it wanted. Metal appeared at his fingertip as a dense, dark bead. Heavy. It had a weight to it even though it was smaller than a drop of water. It sat there, refusing to move. He tried guiding it the way he'd guided crystal, but nothing happened. The mana didn't want to grow. It wanted to be shaped.

Enzo pushed at it with intent. A gentle nudge, the way he'd start a new line of engraving. The bead didn't respond. He frowned. That wasn't right. Beginning with a gentle nudge was amateurish. It lacked confidence. He tried again. Pushed harder. Committed to the direction and the final shape the way he'd commit to a complete graver stroke. Without hesitation and just enough pressure to complete the process. The metal yielded. It stretched in the direction of his intent, each increment requiring deliberate force.

It felt like drawing wire through a plate. Resistance, then movement, then resistance again. He had to mentally hammer every fraction of progress. But it held. Where crystal locked rigid and arcane drifted without focus, metal just stayed. It was stubborn. He let his focus on the mana lapse for a moment, and the metal remained exactly where he'd shaped it, hanging in the air.

It still required a steady flow of mana to maintain, but it took almost no effort to keep it from breaking down and returning to the ambient flows. He released it completely, and it faded slowly, reluctantly. Metal mana required commitment. Decisive force, applied with conviction. Hesitation produced nothing. He could already feel how his years at the bench translated. Every engraving stroke, every hammer blow, every deliberate cut with the graver demanded the same thing. You didn't tentatively shape metal.

You struck with purpose or the material won. Light was last. He reached for it expecting resistance and found none. The mana leapt from his reservoir the moment he engaged it. A point of radiance appeared. Tiny and brilliant, suspended above his palm. It cast sharp shadows across the room and lit the walls in a warm white glow that made the candle look dim. It was radiating in every direction. Beautiful, but unfocused. Enzo directed it. Willed it to move. The radiance snapped into a beam.

The omnidirectional glow collapsed into a single bright line that shot across the room and ended where he told it to, stopping a handspan short of the wall. With another thought, the wall lit up the same way it would with a flashlight aimed at it. That wasn't how light worked. He moved his hand. The beam tracked with it, sweeping across the wall in a smooth arc. He pointed at the ceiling. The light followed.

He pulled it back to his hand, and the beam contracted until it hovered just a foot above his palm, a bright bar of solid luminance. Light was fast, weightless, and directional. And it stopped where he told it to, which broke every rule of optics and physics he'd ever learned. But mana wasn't light. It was magic behaving like light while apparently ignoring the inconvenient parts. He released it and the beam winked out of existence instantly. No fade, no dimming afterglow. Just gone. Enzo leaned back in his chair.

Three types. Three completely different behaviors. Crystal grew. Metal yielded to force. Light moved. None of them behaved like arcane, which meant none of his existing spell forms would work by simply swapping one thread of mana for another type. He'd need to build new forms, or find smarter ways to integrate the new types alongside arcane rather than directly replacing it. That meant more experimentation. More problems to solve. But it would need to wait a little longer.

Unlocking and understanding Empowerment and Infusion came next, followed by creating Enchantments to convert mana into the types he couldn't naturally produce. Only once he had access to all the types they knew about should he dedicate his efforts fully to developing new spells. And techniques. Then he grinned. Magic was amazing. He picked up his spellbook and turned to a fresh page.

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