Lith and Solus only needed a few minutes to put all the information Quylla had sent them on paper. After that, Soluspedia did the rest. Once something was stored inside of it, they knew its content by heart as if they had an eidetic memory.
Lith and Solus discussed all the possible approaches to give Zinya sight, taking into account the degree of risk and chances of success involved in each procedure.
‘Even though none of those who have the fewest failures have shared their spells, they all described in detail how they work. Thanks to true magic, we can follow their lead and even combine their techniques together.’ Lith thought.
They spent a few hours using holograms to simulate the procedure. Lith created a replica of his own optic nerve while Solus would tweak and twist the hologram at random, to cause complications he had to deal with on the spot.
All the while he actually used Scanner on both himself and Solus while using Chisel on the hologram. Triple casting tier five spells while keeping the hologram active proved to be quite tiring.
“Dammit, this is hard. I’ve made over thirty attempts, succeeded twelve times, partially succeeded five times, failed eleven times, and killed Zinya at least four times!” Lith said.
“Calm down. This is the first time we’ve dealt with such a complex case. You became too used to true magic that makes healing the impossible possible. Don’t forget that you have been working non stop since you returned home. Follow your own advice and take the day off.
“Tomorrow we’ll practice the procedure until we are satisfied with the results. Now it’s too late and you are too tired. There is less than two hours before you need to be at Kamila’s place.” Solus’s wisp rubbed against his shoulder, spreading her mana around him in a warm embrace.
“I think you are right.” Lith replied.
“I’ll take the day off as soon as I’m done with the Skinwalker.” He Warped inside his Forgemastering lab, taking the WellMert hammer and the keychainmail out of his pocket dimension.
He placed them over his obsidian Forge while Solus demonstrated her outstanding creativity in mixing English and common language insults to express her feelings about Lith’s stubbornness.
First, he used Invigoration to go back to what was now his peak condition. With just an hour nap and after practicing the medical procedure many times, Invigoration’s effects wouldn’t last very long.
“Necro or Bloom Forge?” Lith asked.
“Neither! Go to sleep dammit!”
“Necro it is!” Lith said, making her emit a loud and unladylike groan.
Lith had acquired the blueprints for the Skinwalker Armor when the Crown had elevated him to the status of Great Mage. They had even provided him with all the ingredients needed to make a new one.
Yet only now that he also had the Orichalcum at hand did he have the opportunity to improve its properties. Tista had already received her own as a reward for her services in Othre, whereas the rest of the family had no need for it.
Not after Lith had given them all of his Skinwalker prototypes and Forgemastered magical protections for them in the form of rings, bracelets, or necklaces.
“Whenever people ask me why I joined the army, I always have to spew a bunch of lies about how much I love the Kingdom. The truth is that it’s much better than the alternative. I get to rake in merits and rewards and get paid for it.
“To obtain ingredients, I would be forced to travel Mogar with my own money and risk my life. On top of that, I would have to do a bunch of missions for the Association to obtain the blueprints.
“This way, all expenses are covered and I get everything I need delivered to my door. Every time I solve a mission, the army rewards me with ingredients commensurate with its difficulty.
“Sure, usually they are not as precious as Orichalcum, but it would still be hard and expensive to get them on my own.” Lith said while taking the ingredients for the Skinwalker out.
It required the skin of a polymorphic monster species known as a Skinwalker, hence its name. It also needed a bit of slime goop as a stabilizer, powdered petals of Magma flower as a power core, and a Thunderbird’s plume to boost the base material’s defensive properties.
Thunderbirds had sturdy feathers as hard as iron, and their affinity to lightning granted them a natural electromagnetic field capable of weakening most attacks.
The last ingredient to Forgemaster a Skinwalker Armor was the pseudo core of a dimensional storage item that would be merged with those generated by the rest of the ingredients.
First, Lith used the Bonding spell to fuse a blue mana crystal with the keychainmail.
Then, Solus powered up the Forgemastering circle as Lith refined the ingredients one by one. The skin, the powder, and the feather were all flooded with his mana. It revived and amplified their magical nature while destroying their physical vessels.
They produced a rainbow colored, a red, and a yellow pseudo core respectively. After Lith was certain that all the residual magical energy had been extracted from the ingredients and assimilated by the pseudo cores, he generated the last one.
A Skinwalker Armor required a dimensional subspace to store the clothes that it would reproduce.
Lith had Forgemastered countless dimensional items over the years, so he threw the dimensional core just a glance to make sure it was perfect. Lith raised his arms, bringing the four pseudo cores close to each other, until they started to emit sparks.
At that point, he refined the slime goop. Slimes were incredible creatures, with amazing vitality and capable of adapting to any environment. The goop didn’t produce another core, but a fine mist that filled the Forgemastering circle.
The mist harmonized the different energies of the pseudo cores, allowing Lith to merge them into one. Then the keychainmail and the pseudo core started to orbit around each other.
The Orichalcum started to resonate with the mystical energy, making the pseudo core grow in size and power.
‘Fuck me sideways! That never happened before. It must be due to the interaction between the Orichalcum’s artificial mana flow and the Thunderbird’s amplification field.’ Lith thought.
He stimulated his own mana core, boosting its energies until his body started to ache from mana overloading. Solus called upon the energies of the mana geyser, filling the Necro Hammer with mana to allow Lith to exceed his limits.
The armor rejected the pseudo core until Lith struck the Forgemastering circle with the hammer, producing a silvery sound. It released a deep blue burst of light that was captured by the circle and channeled into the ongoing spell.
Lith’s mana and willpower pushed the pseudo core inside the keychainmail, allowing it to overcome the resistance that the mana coming from the blue light produced. As soon as Lith was once again overcharged, he hit the circle a second time, generating another burst of light.
With each strike, the merging process became easier and faster.
‘Dammit, I think we messed up. We created a pseudo core just as strong as the one in the hammer, but this time it’s much more complex. I cannot regenerate it and continue the merging at the same time!’ Lith thought.
Solus stepped in to help him, but between keeping the hammer charged and powering the circle, her focus was already spent. They fought against the odds for half an hour before the pseudo core collapsed and the blue mana crystal shattered.
