Vol. 7 - Power - Chapter 4 (Patreon)

After stripping down for bed, Thomas didn't immediately go to sleep. The sun had only set a little while ago so it was still early in the evening. The perfect time for him to explore the unknown items inside of his inventory and attempt to increase his inventory all on his own. He decided he would go for that first.

Thomas closed his eyes and focused on his body. He could feel the spot he needed to feed mana into to increase the rank of his Inventory. He took a deep breath and began to channel his mana toward that spot. It took some effort as he has to turn his mana into a thin stream and guide it toward the center of the black hole. As his mana made contact it was instantly consumed. He could feel his mana decreasing rapidly as it seemed to vanish into an abyss.

He let his mana flow until half of it had been consumed. Not wanting to wait a moment longer, he opened his eyes and checked his character sheet. He was pleasantly surprised by what he saw.

  Inventory // Rank 14 // 58/150 Exp    

He practically jumped for joy seeing the change to his character sheet. It took half of his mana but he'd gained two more ranks to his inventory. It even had an experience gauge now! If he kept doing this then his inventory could easily increase in size until it was a massive amount of space. He couldn't wait so he closed his eyes and resumed feeding his mana into it. Soon his mana dropped dangerously low and he had to stop as he felt rather dizzy. Running out of mana was not a pleasant experience. He quickly checked his character sheet again to see how well he did.

  Inventory // Rank 16 // 54/170 Exp    

It took almost all of his mana but he'd increased his Inventory magic by four whole ranks! He didn't expect that it would continue to grow so fast but if he constantly spent mana on it daily it would at least grow at a steady rate. He didn't have much else to spend his mana on anyway. Well, he wouldn't after he took a look at everything sitting inside of his inventory. He needed more mana so he could use his eyes to do that though.

He closed his eyes and started to use Serenity to rapidly recover his mana. He really loved this skill as it came in extremely handy when he had time to use it. Since he liked crafting so much it was more useful to him than someone constantly fighting. Snowlily curious watched Thomas as he recovered his mana. She could tell he was excited about something but she had no idea what. She would learn when she could take on human form though.

With his mana completely recovered, Thomas looked inside of his inventory and tried to decide what to appraise first. His eyes fell on the pitch-black ore that he hadn't had a chance to smelt yet and grinned. He pulled one out of his inventory and activated his 'All Seeing Eyes'. They flashed with blue light and allowed him to instantly identify the ore.

Item Type: Raw Ancient Lead Ore   
Rarity: Rare   
Quality: Below Average   
Description: Ancient Lead is formed near the core of the planet. Through eons of being exposed to pressure and heat regular lead is compressed until it becomes dense and hard. Ancient Lead is twice as heavy as regular lead but this leads it to be many times harder when treated properly.    

Thomas felt giddy when he read the description for the ore. Not just because of how impressive the ore was but simply for the fact that he could actually know what the ore was just with a glance! Still, he wanted to learn more about it so he deactivated his eyes and dug out his metallurgy book to look up Ancient Lead.

Ancient Lead
This rare material can only be found underground and never appears naturally on the surface. Ancient Lead is a heavy material and requires a significant amount of power to be used in just about any application. Additionally, Ancient Lead cannot be smelted by normal means. It requires a multi-step process. The first step is to smelt the ore as usual but do not expect the ore itself to melt. Instead, the impurities around and within the ore should be melted or burned off. Once the ore has been cleaned of impurities it must be submerged in a special alchemical bath and allowed to soften.
Once the ore has been softened it can be worked with. Ancient Lead by itself makes for terrible weapons and armor. It works significantly better when used as a core within a weapon to provide rigidity and weight. Due to its low mana conduction, it is best surrounded by highly conductive materials if the weapon is intended to be enchanted. As for armor... just don't.

After reading the book, Thomas couldn't help laughing. It's like that cave the pirates used was determined to produce all the materials necessary to make an epic holy sword. Mana-Touched True Silver, Sunshine Gold, and now Ancient Lead. If he combined all of them into a single weapon it would practically scream 'HOLY SWORD!' to the world. The only thing that didn't really fit with the theme in the cave was the Icebound Platinum. Well... unless it was a sword for a God who's domain included ice.

He shook his head and stored the ore back inside of his inventory. The metallurgy book contained the name of the alchemical bath the ore needed to be bathed in but he had no need to rush into it at the moment. Instead, he had more things inside of his inventory to examine. One of which he'd had for a long time and still didn't have a clue about. The parting gift Hekrin gave him.

It had been inside of his inventory for a very long time and he hadn't looked at it since Hekrin gave it to him. There was no better time than now. He pulled the highly decorated box out of his inventory and grunted at the weight of it. Thanks to the increase in his Power it didn't feel as heavy as before but it still had a fair amount of weight to it. He looked over the box without activating his eyes and smiled at the intricate details. The whole box was covered in detailed work that looked like a combination of scrollwork and runes. There were no obvious ways to open it giving it the feel of a highly complex puzzle box.

After he finished examining it he activated his eyes eager to see what secrets its description might reveal to him.

Item Type: Myriad Puzzle Box   
Rarity: Epic   
Quality: Perfect   
Description: Myriad Puzzle Boxes are ancient devices said to have been built by the god of puzzles himself. Whether that is true or not is unknown. Each time a Myriad Puzzle Box is closed the owner can state the conditions for opening the box. The box can only be closed if there is a prize located inside of it. Whoever opens the Myriad Puzzle Box becomes the owner and must place a prize in the box before it can be closed again.    

Thomas felt enlightened and disappointed at the same time. While he now knew about the box he still had no clue how to open it. The description was interesting but simultaneously useless. He ran his fingers over the engravings on the box for a while to just admire the detailed work. There was also a small hope that he might randomly trigger something but nothing happened. Once he was satisfied admiring it, he stored it back away to check on it again later.

After storing the Myriad Puzzle Box, he retrieved another box. This one was made of plain wood and had a clear latch on it making it easy to open. The box contained a variety of ingots. He'd purchased it a while back and still hadn't identified what the ingots were. He just knew that they transmitted mana well and seemed to already have an element inside of them. The one he'd experimented with most was the one with a yellowish tint to it. He pulled the ingot out to examine it.

Item Type: Lightning Imbued Mithril   
Rarity: Rare   
Quality: Above Average   
Description: Lightning Imbued Mithril is a rare variant of Mithril that has been exposed to natural lightning mana. Most commonly when the ore is struck by lightning before being mined.
+Putiry: 82.3%    

Once again, Thomas was thrilled. He'd suspected that the ingot had something to do with the Lightning element or electricity thanks to his Metallurgy skill but he'd been completely unclear on what metal it was. Now he had absolute confirmation on the material and its property. He even got to see exactly how pure the ingot was!

He quickly turned his attention to another ingot in the box and found it to be Flame Imbued Mithril. The only difference between the two was their purity, though the Flame Imbued Mithril had a purity of 87.6% and became Flame Imbued by being located near a natural source of fire. Maybe it had been mined near a volcano or something? The third ingot was Water Imbued Mithril. Its purity was only 79.4% and it became water imbued by spending an extended period of time being purified within flowing water.

After reading the descriptions of the three kinds of ingots within the box, he noted that there were four of each. It wasn't a huge amount of material to work with but he would be able to make a few excellent items. Things became even better after he read the descriptions of the various imbued ingots of Mithril. They could still have embryos hammered into them! Obviously the embryo's needed to be the same attribute or it would cause issues but it would greatly improve their elemental nature. The ingots would make for excellent weapons with elemental enchantments.

Thomas stored the Imbued Mithril ingots away and pulled out a Troll mana crystal next. He had an idea for these but it would depend on how this next step turned out. He activated his Transmutation and quickly purified the mana crystal until it was perfectly clear. Once it was he quickly identified it.

Item Type: Mana Crystal   
Rarity: Rare   
Quality: Perfect   
Description: A mana crystal collected from a defeated Dungeon Troll. Currently purified by 100%.    

Thomas nearly flipped his shit when he saw that not only did the rarity and quality of the mana crystal increased but the purity had jumped up to 100%. Even better, there was no mention of it being an artificial process or any mention of his name. Slowly a wicked grin began to grow on his face. He was about to head to a city filled with wealth and a giant auction house. How much would one of these crystals go for? He knew they were worth a fortune but how much of a fortune? The greatest thing about it all? He could get away with it!

He looked at the lounging form of Snowlily and continued to give that creepy grin, "Maybe having that annoying woman follow us all the way to a racist country was a good thing. Thanks to her I have the perfect plan to make a fortune."

He almost wanted to thank Lexiana for following him so... doggedly. If she hadn't he never would have had a reason to make a Ring of Disguise for her and wouldn't know how to do it again. With a Ring of Disguise for himself, he could change his appearance, sell a pure mana crystal or two, and get away scot-free! No one would know who he was or what he looked like so they would never be able to find him. He had to fight to keep from letting out a loud laugh. He might have nearly two million gold but he would never, ever, say no to more. Especially when it was essentially FREE.

He tossed the purified mana crystal back into his inventory and smiled. The Troll mana crystals had a decent size but he planned to see if he could find bigger ones inside the depths of the Breidset dungeon. The bigger the base crystal the bigger the purified crystal and the bigger the payout would be. The more gold he could get for it the better. It would allow him to purchase a larger supply of Mithril. Maybe even enough for him to purify it and make it into yet another godly material.

After planning his 'caper', he was too excited to go to sleep just yet. To help himself calm down he started to pull the items he'd stolen from Yorik out of his inventory to try to appraise them. Unfortunately, the results were not very pleasant. All of them came up with the same description.

Item Type: Broken Item   
Rarity: Trash   
Quality: Below Average   
Description: It's trash.    

It was disappointing, to say the least. He would need to break the items down into parts and smelt them to find out if they were made of decent materials. Or maybe he could do so with his Transmutation. Either way, that was a bit too much work for now so he would save it for later. Maybe he would get lucky and find something interesting that he could use. If he didn't, he would either use, sell, or discard the scraps.

He sighed and rolled his neck. His shoulders felt a little stiff from staring at so many items. His eyes even felt a little dry from the effort. It was all worth it though. He now had a much greater understanding of many of the items he'd known nothing about before. From now on he would be able to identify things even before buying them. He'd never end up buying something useless in the future.

With a yawn, Thomas stretched and lay down on the bed to get comfortable. Before going to sleep he used the majority of his mana to put some experience into his Inventory magic once again. There was no point in going to sleep with a mostly full tank. He snuggled with his little ball of fluff and slowly drifted off to sleep. Tomorrow was going to be... borning, probably.