“Seems likely that Vellum was right about the contract spells somehow activating the potion. If it somehow tied you more deeply with your contracted monsters…”
Sera nodded. She still couldn’t reply aloud, but she began writing something.
I kept talking because I could, and because it helped me think. “Wouldn’t you still be able to draw from those contracts, though?”
Sera shook her head, writing some more. I waited this time.
If I have stronger connections than before, that might mean each contract is trying to draw more mana from me.
I did some reading, and there’s some precedent for Summoners making more contracts than they can afford the mana costs for.
The result is similar to what I’m dealing with; those Summoners lost the ability to cast spells completely until they get enough mana to afford the contracts.
Looked into breaking contracts, too. There are a few ways to do it. For full contracts, the best way is to actually summon the monster and negotiate with it. Obviously not an option right now.
There are spells that can forcefully break a contract, but they’re dangerous for both the Summoner and the monster. I don’t want to go that route, either.
I still have a couple bindings that aren’t full contracts, though — the ogre and the wyvern from the Survival Match. Those can be broken more safely. Usually, it’s a simple spell to do it, like how I got rid of a couple of them right before we dealt with the spire. But I can’t even use that spell, because I can’t use my attunement at all.
“Hrm. Is it possible to cast the spell using your mana from another part of your body, like your hand?”
She frowned, then wrote another reply.
I suppose it might be possible. The spell only requires gray mana, and I still have that. But since my attunement is on my lungs, I’ve only learned how to cast Summoner spells through incantations.
“I think you said you could determine where the cost of your spells came from, though, just by thinking about it. Is that something you do after you cast the spell?”
She nodded.
“Hrm. So you just need to be able to initiate the spell, then you can pay for it with mana from your hand. Oh, or maybe the bracer I made you? If the mana cost is too high, maybe you could trigger that along with it.”
She paused, then wrote another line.
It doesn’t sound impossible. I’ll do some reading and try to make it work.
“Good. In the meantime, if your main problem is that the attunement isn’t strong enough to handle all your contracts, maybe we could make it stronger. Not with my attunement. I think trying to infuse it directly with more mana is too much of a risk, after what happened when you drank the potion. Maybe something that doesn’t put more strain on the body, though, like eating some iros fruit?”
She stuck out her tongue in a sign of disgust. I didn’t like the taste of iros fruit, either. I would have recommended lavris, but that fruit was for building mental mana, and that wasn’t what she needed.
But I knew her, and if she thought it’d help, she’d start eating them.
“I’ll see if I can find anything on fruits grown for helping build air and transference mana, since I know that’s what your attunement uses. For tonight, though, I’m going to need to focus on trying to make a gift for Sheridan. I’m not convinced they’ll accept anything we found in Wrynn’s box.”
The sword that I’d been working on with Keras might have been better, but after seeing Patrick’s reaction to it, I couldn’t justify giving it away. If Sheridan wanted a sword, we’d make another one.
After that, I bid Sera good night so she could focus on reading about Summoning and I could get back to work.
Even after eating and resting a bit, my hand was still burning from the effort earlier in the day. I didn’t regret working so hard, but it’d taken a lot out of me. A quick check with my mana watch registered my hand at 45/84.
I guessed it had been about a half hour since I’d drained it down to almost nothing, meaning that it would take me about an hour to recover from zero back to full.
That was about what I’d experienced with my Enchanter attunement as well, although admittedly I never drained that one completely, and I wasn’t sure if the recovery rates would change if I emptied my mana past specific thresholds. Sera’s slower recovery in the tower when she’d pushed herself too far implied that overuse could lead to lowered efficiency.
I wasn’t going to push myself below zero. For safety’s sake, I’d try to keep my mana above ten. If I noticed diminishing returns on my recovery time, I could slow things down further.
Assuming I was willing to use most of my mana once per hour, I figured I could do that two or three more times before I had to sleep.
That was a big improvement over my previous abilities, but I still didn’t have enough time to make something complex.
I did, however, have a lot of ideas.
One of the things that interested me the most was learning how to copy Pre-Attunement Period items like the Jaden Box. It was obvious from watching Keras that his magic worked differently, but in a way that was similar enough that I could conceivably find ways to emulate it. Even if I couldn’t cast spells the same way he did, the end results — transferring magic into an object — could be mimicked.
I needed to figure out a few more details, though. The main impediment seemed to be that they didn’t utilize runes in the same fashion. The ring of jumping didn’t have a single visible rune on it, although perhaps some of the cuts in the metal served a similar function.
The Jaden Box did have runes, but many of them were unrecognizable. Maybe they were just types of runes that had been lost to time, or maybe they worked completely differently.
I was tempted to try to transfer some of the mana from the ring of jumping into an empty ring. Could I split the power in half and make two functional rings that were weaker?
It was a tempting prospect, but ultimately not worth risking ruining the single ring I had. Not yet, anyway. Maybe after I had a better idea of what I was doing.
I didn’t even have any practice transferring enchantments from my own modern style of items to new ones. Conceptually, it was nearly identical to transferring mana from a mana crystal into a rune, but it did pose some additional challenges.
Functional items often had mana flowing between the runes, not just inside them. Attempting to move the mana from one of those runes while it was giving or receiving mana — or worse, actively sustaining a magical function — presented some dangers.
The most common problem was simply losing a bit of mana in the process. That efficiency loss was close to inevitable, unless the item was deactivated before the transfer.
The real problems came from disrupting the item’s operation carelessly or in an improper sequence. It was analogous to sticking your hand in a bonfire to pull out the twig you wanted.
Getting burned was likely, and there was also a good chance you could end up spreading the fire — meaning detonating the item or transferring magic into an unintended object or rune.
To mitigate the risk, you either extinguish the fire, or you could pull out the twigs and logs from other sections first. The latter approach was what I was planning on for my first experiment.