I’d miss the rock of regeneration, but ultimately, I needed something a little more practical.
I picked out a bracer as the target for my enchantment transferring experiment. I liked working with bracers. They were easy to wear and much easier to inscribe than a ring or necklace. Moreover, they were large enough that I didn’t have to bother looking up their mana capacities; there was no risk of overloading a bracer at my level of experience.
From there, I had to figure out which enchantments to move first. Carving the runes only took a few minutes, and during that time I considered the safest sequence.
I decided that the first things I needed to move were the runes that recharged the item, since it would be dangerous to have an item filling up with mana if I took out the other parts.
I could have safely moved the activation rune before that, but I didn’t want the bracer to activate in the same way, so I decided not to bother.
Moving the recharge runes first was going to pose another problem, though — the new item’s capacity runes weren’t functional yet. So, if I moved the recharge runes over and took too long, the new item would eventually explode. I didn’t know how long it would take, but I didn’t like that risk.
I decided that before I moved anything, I’d power the capacity runes on the new item. That was easier to decide than implement, though. The gray mana and mental mana runes were easy enough, but regeneration items also used life mana.
Until recently, I’d never had access to life mana. I’d powered the rock by transferring the mana from crystals, not my own body.
With my Arbiter attunement, I could use life mana — it was the attunement’s secondary mana type. I’d just never done it before.
I powered the other capacity runes first, then took a break to recover. Each rune was taking up nearly my entire mana capacity, since they were Carnelian-level runes. If they’d been Sunstone or Citrine-level, I couldn’t have handled them at all.
I’d been told the original ring was Citrine-level, but I assumed that had to do with complexity or risk factors, not the mana requirements.
After I’d recovered the necessary 60 mana for the life rune, I gave it a try.
It wasn’t difficult using a new type of mana. Not exactly. I already had it flowing inside my body, and I’d been able to feel it as a distinct form of energy since the new attunement had been active. When I had my Enchanter attunement active, I could even see it if I concentrated on pushing some out of my hand and into the air. Life mana was a shimmering green, at least to my perception.
There was still a degree of strangeness that came from manipulating a new form of energy, though, at least for me. Being able to see it helped. If I couldn’t visualize it, I wouldn’t have been confident that I was using life mana instead of just transference or gray, which I’d manipulated so frequently in the past.
Maybe it was easier for someone like Keras, if his magic truly had a cost that was tied to the type he was using. Fire mana costing body heat made sense to me on a visceral level, now that I’d heard about it. I was grateful to my attunement for removing or altering that cost, but it also made it harder to conceptualize what type of mana I was working with.
Regardless, I made it work, and I filled the capacity rune.
I grinned as the rune flickered to life.
Success.
I had to rest a bit more after that. Even moving the runes from the other item would take up a bit of transference mana, both for moving the enchantment from place to place and overcoming the item’s natural resistance to alterations. More advanced items would have specific runes designed as safeguards to prevent alterations, but I’d never made one of those.
Given how I’d handled Jin in the fight, that omission may have saved my life.
Moving the mana from the existing runes on the rock proved easier than I expected. Maybe it was because I’d enchanted the rock myself, but the mana inside didn’t seem to resist my pull at all. The process barely taxed my body and it only took me a handful of minutes.
It still felt a little tougher than charging the rock had been in the tower. Maybe that was because the mana saturation in the tower had helped, or maybe I’d just managed to rush through the process because of the dire nature of the situation.
Either way, I was still enchanting at roughly ten times the pace I’d been able to before I got the new attunement, and that was an amazing improvement.
The last part of the process was charging the new activation rune, which was distinct from both the one on the rock and the one on the original ring. I picked a classic; the standard activation rune used on a dueling cane. That way, no shaking was required, and it could be turned on by someone other than the wearer — a necessity for cases when I wanted to use it to heal unconscious friends.
Hopefully I wouldn’t have to deal with that many unconscious friends in the near future, but I was sensing a bit of a trend, and I wanted to be ready for more.
With the bracer done, I had to lie down and just cradle my aching hand for a while. The ring of regeneration was easing my pain, but it didn’t cancel it out entirely.
That was probably good, because even the diminished pain was letting me push myself down to close to zero on a regular basis, and I’d been warned earlier in the year that pushing myself that hard could result in scar formation.
I had to be ready for tomorrow, but after that, I promised I’d slow down a little. I still planned to exercise regularly, but I’d lost track of the number of times I’d abused my attunement over the course of the day. I needed to stop.
After just one more thing.
The bracer was an interesting idea, but ultimately I knew it was nothing unique. There were probably plenty of variations on the ring of regeneration out there, many of which would be far more powerful than this one. And if Sheridan was anywhere close to as powerful as Derek and Elora, they probably had better items already.
I needed to make something unique. Something that would give someone like Derek or Elora pause.
Ideally, something that would qualify as forbidden knowledge, but I didn’t think I could accomplish that so soon.
I knew what I wanted to attempt, but once I’d laid down on the floor to recover, I physically couldn’t push myself back up for several minutes.
When I did, I noticed that my hand was shaking.
That was not a good sign.
But I couldn’t stop. I needed to do this.
First, I looked up the runes I wanted. Runes that weren’t meant to be combined. Then I drew the design on paper.
My runes were crooked. Awful. If I’d etched them in metal, the item would have been wasted.
But I couldn’t stop, so I put the new bracer on the wrist of my trembling hand and turned it on. Immediately, I felt a surge of relief as a second regeneration item began to work.
It probably wasn’t a wise idea to have two regeneration items working on my body at once, but I promised myself I wouldn’t do it for long. Just long enough to make one more item.
It was an item I’d told Sera that I couldn’t make. I’d told her that it wouldn’t be safe, that it wasn’t possible.
I worked deep into the night, until it was finally finished. I didn’t even try it out, I was too exhausted.
I fell asleep with both the ring and the bracer still active.
In the morning, I couldn’t move my right hand.
Chapter VIII – Sorcery Scars
I took a few moments to breathe, then a few more moments to panic.