Chapter 21

Name:Elysium's Multiverse Author:
Chapter 21

Beginning to see a trend, Riven wasn’t surprised when the clothes makers, seamstresses, and tailors had similar advantages. They could create articles of clothing that self-repaired or self-cleaned, perfectly fit whoever wore them, smelled certain ways, camouflaged the wearers, or gave various buffs and resistances. There was even a thermally heated blanket one could make without electricity, which in Riven’s opinion would be a great Christmas gift if he ever celebrated Christmas again.

Mapmaking...now, this was where it got weird. There were different types of maps to be made, and they required different ingredients and materials to create, as well as what the Elysium administrator considered a semiperfect knowledge of the area being scouted out. Sure, someone could just draw a map on a piece of paper and call it a day—but mapmakers specialized in creating maps one could utilize in different ways. Some of them could track your movements between towns. Others could be edited to your liking as blank slates. Some could be incorporated into your peripheral vision, and others were even three-dimensional or a combination of all the above. This one caused Riven pause, and he seriously considered stopping there to take a deeper look at it—but then realized it required a lot of advanced math. Riven was by no means stupid, and he’d never been bad at math while he’d been in class, but he had dropped out of high school to take care of his dying mom before her vanishing act. So he doubted he’d be able to understand the concepts here after looking them over.

Then, coming back around to the last of the bunch, was totem making. Frankly, he found it hilarious that totem making was even a crafting option at all. What kind of benefits could someone get from that? What kind of game world would invoke that, of all things, as a craft? Was the administrator being serious about this?

But then a remnant thought concerning channeling items crossed his memory—one brought up by the spell tomes he’d used to learn Wretched Snare and Bloody Razors. Totems were one such channeling item that he could utilize to emphasize his spells...and his interest was immediately piqued.

He also hoped the book had some information he could use concerning his porcelain vase. It was a small hope, one that probably wouldn’t yield results, but he had little else to go on. Placing the object on the table beside the book that had a pot drawn onto the front in black ink, he opened it up and began to read. Surprisingly, what he found...was rather fascinating.

Totem Making—The Blessings of Fae and The Curses of Devils: Author Unknown

Totem making has long been used as a basic means of creating decorative monuments, household apparel, and things to keep evil spirits out as a focus of old wives’ tales, and it wasn’t originally such a lucrative or useful craft in the beginning. This is likely due to the disgust many mainstream mages hold for shamanistic practices despite its usefulness, and it is often referred to by great scholars across this land as “barbaric” for its affiliation with forbidden nature magics and the dark arts.

Awakened items are entities that have their true consciousness bound to a physical item without any actual soul.

All three have different lock-and-key sets, or different runes or rules, that are bound by the system. All three have their own unique downsides or perks. They are three different parallel pathways to creating items of power, even comparable to how mana, divinity, and stamina differ from one another in their own abilities. But now we are getting off track. Back to totems and influence fields:

Influence fields can be anything from a pleasant smell to seduce the opposite sex to an electrified floor to a defensive barrier—the commonality between them being that they are bendable, fluctuating spell alignments and are contained within a physical object that we call totems. Specific combinations of the right materials, right ingredients, right incantations, the right soul shard, and right runes or symbols in just the right way can create truly potent effects. The important part about this is that the one who makes the totem must have the correct attribute in order to imbue the totem with a spell. If the mage creating the totem gets the symbols, materials, and shape right but fails to have the specialized Forest attribute—they will fail to imbue the totem with any forest magic regardless of how perfect the totem otherwise is. The same goes for Water, Blood, or any of the subpillars of Fae and Unholy. As Forest is a subpillar of Fae and Death is a subpillar of Unholy, you will only ever find totems enchanted with categorical magics underneath the Fae and Unholy pillars. Fae, Volcano, Storm, Ocean, Glacial, Swamp, Forest, Unholy, Blood, Shadow, Death, Infernal, Depravity, and Chaos will be the only types of totems you ever run across. Well, that and their more specialized pillar types that evolve from the major subpillars. Additionally, those affiliated with the Unholy pillar may never be able to wield totems affiliated with the Fae pillar and vice versa, as pillar orientation is needed to command the soul shards and totems after they’re imbued properly.

With the right knowledge and attributes, you may place the right runes or paintings in the right patterns to provide a magical webbing of sorts. Creating the right shape of the totem is also very important, as they act as a key to a lock in conjunction with the runes you place upon them. If the runes, shape, pictures, or patterns of the vase are incorrect, the key won’t fit the lock correctly, and the effect won’t take hold. Sometimes even the coloring matters. Sometimes if you do a half-assed job, you’ll get a half-assed effect. That’d still be better than no effect, though.

Moving on to examples of what such things I have seen as a master totem maker, you would likely be surprised. I have created vessels that burn with fae light, illuminating the darkest of places as beacons to the world. I have created vessels to seal away the greatest of demons, placing them in forbidden tombs to keep them at bay from the civilized world. I have created totems that poison enemies around them and heal those who are marked as friendly, totems that capture the sickness from those they touch and towering bastions that bless farmland for miles around them over decades to come.

Many once scoffed at me, laughed at me, told me I was a fool for pursuing this very abstract and often disregarded profession. In the end, though, it was I who laughed, and as I sit upon a mountain of treasure and bathe in the gifts that kings shower upon me, I often ask my many wives if they’d have another man, to which they of course say no.

“Well, goddamn, he’s living the life!” Riven snorted a few laughs and smirked at that last sentence, then flipped through the pages some more. It was time to expand his horizons.