Book 4: Chapter 35

Book 4: Chapter 35

This feels wrong, Kay muttered as he stared at the bracelet hed received as loot from the Many Trial Rooms dungeon. The bracelet had an enchantment that let it change its appearance to match the colors around it, and Kay was still working on transferring that magic using his Blood Melder Class.

Eleniah glanced up from her papers, frowning. Training your Skills-

I know. Kay tossed the bracelet onto the table and threw his feet up next to it. In my head, I understand that Im one of our strongest fighters and that I can directly contribute to our preparations by training. But weve got people building massive walls, training with new weapons, planning out evacuation routes for the villages, and so many other things that feel more important than me sitting in a study room mucking around with magical junk from a dungeon. He sighed and waved at the pile of broken loot on the other side of the table. It doesnt help that Im not getting anywhere either.

Eleniah absentmindedly flipped through the papers before setting them down. Alright, walk me through it, and we can see if I know anything that could be helpful.

You still have papers to finish grading. Ill keep muddling through until I find an answer.

I can finish grading those later; I dont need to give them back to anyone for a few weeks. She dismissed the papers with a wave, Now start from the beginning. What are you trying to do, and how are you trying to do it?

Okay. Meld Blood lets me take preexisting magical objects and fuse them with blood to change their effects or potentially create a magical item using a non-magical item and a lot of blood and mana, but thats a lot harder to do. Im trying to take an enchanted item and instead of overwriting its magic with something blood related or twisting it into something thats more blood related, I want to take the magic into the blood, and basically disenchant it, while keeping the enchantment. I have this faint feeling that I should be able to make it work, which Im chalking up to my title-provided instincts, but I havent succeeded at it yet.

Kay grabbed a random item from his pile of functionally useless dungeon loot and pulled some blood from in his veins to pool in his palm. If I take this metal ball that can create a small field that repels crustaceans from it and use Meld Blood on it, He dropped it into the tiny pool, and crimson tendrils began dragging it deeper, It becomes he waited for the process to finish then Identified it to see what the new effect was, A metal ball that creates a field that draws the blood of crustaceans out of their bodies and adheres to the surface of the ball. He picked it up and looked at it, Do crustaceans have blood?

Yes, they do.

Do you need to take the blood out before cooking them?

No.

Then this is still useless. He tossed it into the junk results pile.

Its not what youre working on right now, but Im curious. Eleniah fished the ball out of the pile and inspected it closely, Have you tried directing what the magic becomes when you meld it?

I have, yeah. It works, maybe, Id say, half the time. I think Ive got the methodology of that down mostly; it's just directing the magic to a certain idea. My current theory is that what Im trying to achieve isnt possible on the ones that end up as something different than what I want. Like the ball, I didnt really put any real thought into it; I just let the Skill work, but if I had focused on making it become something, I couldnt make it anything too different from what it started as. Itd still make a magical field of some kind, and it would probably still be related to crustaceans. I couldnt make it float in the sky and chase birds or whatever. Im pretty sure I just dont understand the limits of the enchantment on many of the items I mess with, so I cant tell when what Im trying to do is too much.

Connections, sure, I want to connect the magic to the blood. But distilling it down to concepts, why do I think of blood being related to connections. Theres the fact that blood is literally part of someone, and it is something that has your DNA in it, but thats not all of it. Someone is blood if theyre family, so thats a kind of connection there, lineage and sharing blood. People tried to bind themselves to one another with blood oaths and became blood brothers by literally sharing each other's blood.

Working with those concepts of connection and kin, Kay could feel the magic in the item resonate with the blood he was covering it with. It felt a bit like two hearts beating in rhythm with each other. But nothing else was happening.

Okay, connection established, thats so much closer than Ive gotten before, but whats next? How do I get more of the magic? I dont want to break it again; I just want a copy of it? So, how does blood relate to copying? Theres family again, giving birth and making new members of your family. But thats not really copying; it's making something new. How does one thing become two? Oh! Mitosis is when cells split and become two basically identical things from one original thing. Blood cells dont do that, but this is magic; I can make a blood cell act like a stem cell, right?

Oh! Kay gasped out loud as he thought of an even better idea. I can make the enchanted item be like the bone marrow, constantly producing identical blood cells, but magic instead. I just

Kays will-infused blood began to calmly churn around the item, making ripples and currents as it flowed around the enchanted object. Kay projected the image as the item as bone marrow, creating identical objects based on a built-in template. Bit by bit, as he concentrated, he could feel mana begin to drain from him into the blood that surrounded the item, pooling around it. After a few moments of intense concentration, the mana coagulated into a structure and broke off from the item, floating freely in the blood.

Holy shit, it worked! Kay cried out. Oh crap, it doesnt feel like its going to be stable forever. Hand me something to enchant real quick!

Eleniah dashed over and slapped something into his hand. He thrust it into the floating blood and willed the magic to coalesce and connect to whatever shed given him. He tried to use a concept he had some familiarity with, a blood transfusion, where blood from one person became part of someone else. There were fits and starts as he slowly merged them together, but it eventually smoothed out, and the magic became part of the second item.

Grinning widely, Kay pulled the blood back into himself and helped up the newly enchanted item. A pen?

It was the only thing I had that was close. She leaned in to look at it. What does it do?

You have Identify.

Sure, but its your first success at something youve been working hard at, you can find out first and show off.

Oh, thank you. He used Identify, and his triumphant grin became mixed with a little bit of mischief. Your pen can now He clicked the button on the retractable pen that was similar to older style pens back on Earth and sent some mana through it to activate the enchantment, Make blood bubbles! Little red bubbles began forming at the tip of the pen and floating into the room, pooping as they ran into various objects.

Thats

Practically useless! But I was testing with worthless items for a reason; I dont want to break this baby before I can get it all working properly. He snatched up the bracelet from where hed set it down and tossed it into his Inventory Skills spatial storage. Grabbing the original item from where itd fallen, he checked to see if it was still working. The object hed grabbed at random turned out to be a toy top that blew bubbles when you spun it, and it still worked just fine. Alright, now I keep testing until I can modify its functions when I copy it, and then Ill start working on other items. I bet I can even get that level. I need to get Blood Melder back if I work at this enough!