Chapter 146: Experimentation

Chapter 146: Experimentation

146:

To say that Tom hadn’t expected the results he was seeing would be an understatement. He wasn’t even sure if he liked the way the Object Permanence sub-skill worked, but it had certainly subverted his expectations one way or the other.

He went through the newly modified Warrior’s Shardsong’s description carefully, making sure that he didn’t miss anything. A part of him wondered if he had been too hasty in his decision, if he had invested too heavily by sacrificing the mimic slot of the Revenant Claw, an incomplete yet incredibly powerful deckholder.

“No,” Tom muttered to himself, shaking his head. Hoarding artifacts would do him no good if he wasn’t practiced in using them. The Blood Wyrm chainmail he had recovered from the gatekeeper didn’t offer protection to the arms, but Zeth’s damaged bone armor set would encase his arms along with chest, legs and feet once Aleph repaired it for him.

Layering an artifact on top of another artifact wasn’t possible, a fact that Aleph had told him early on in their lessons back in the Syrelore Kingdom and Tom needed all three of the set pieces for the set effect. But even if that wasn’t the case,Tom couldn’t bring himself to forsake the lesson Zeth had learned through his fateful encounter with the man who had defeated him outside the tower.

It had taken Zirel, Aleph and himself to take down Zeth and he had an ephemeral soul card on his side that had given him a glimpse into his fighting style and weapons even after failing. He could not ignore Zeth’s fierce determination and even after they had slain him and Tom had claimed his Shadow Wraith card, he was nowhere close to attaining the mastery his fallen enemy had over the shadows.

If he could limit his arsenal to deck cards that he had extensively trained with and artifacts he was well versed with using in combat, Tom shuddered to imagine just how much of a nightmare he would be to fight with the advantages his ephemeral soul card gave him. He didn’t have to mirror Zeth’s extreme fixation with obtaining total mastery over a single card, but he could adapt it to his own fighting style.

Refocusing on the artifact, Tom ran his hands along a band of silver that had looped around the sword, his expression gradually turning to one of awe as the implication hit him.

‘I see why this is a pseudo epic,’ Tom thought, as he compared the original iteration of the weapon with the new one his object permanence had crafted. Aura of Enhancement was both stronger yet paradoxically, weaker than the Revenant Claw’s weapon skill, Greater Enhancement at the level Tom had mimicked.

It had narrowed the scope of the flat effectiveness boost to a single card in comparison to eight cards that could be quickly switched into an active slot, but in exchange it offered a 50% increase in effectiveness to any card upto the Rare rarity versus the 32.5% Greater Enhancement offered for a Rare Card.

Alone, that distinction would give Tom more raw power in exchange for versatility, which was a change that Tom could’ve taken more time to think through.

It was as safe as an environment he was going to get, so Tom decided that he was going to give funneling SP a shot.

Merely holding on to the artifact let him sense Warrior’s Shardsong’s hunger, if he could call it as such. The blade wasn’t sentient, let alone sapient but it had been designed and then redesigned to function on frost energy.

Tom leaned into that hunger and he almost immediately felt the pull on his SP. Instead of resisting it, he allowed Warrior’s Shardsong to drain him of five SP before he fought back against the sensation.

Almost immediately, the pull faded. There was no intelligence behind the longsword, so it came as no surprise that it was incapable of siphoning SP from him without his permission.

Warrior’s Shardsong had grown a little more luminescent, a fact that Tom only noticed after he directed the Aura of Enhancement to recede.

The beginnings of a smile began to tug at Tom’s lips as he realized that Warrior’s Shardsong was just over 5% pull. While that meant that Tom would require a hundred SP to fill it to the brim, he could already use weapon skill perfect conversion to fire off a scythe formed out of frost energy.

He had been right after all. The sub-skill, object permanence had transformed Warrior’s Shardsong into an entirely new weapon.

Guess I am a Rare Crafter after all, Tom wryly thought as he stored the longsword in his inventory. Sure, no one besides himself could use it, but that wouldn’t stop them from stealing a clearly valuable blade.

Now, it was time to pay Aleph a visit and see if Zeth’s Armor was salvageable. A part of home wondered if he should try and use object permanence on Zeth’s Armor if he found any remaining mimicked artifacts that had a synergy with the set armor’s properties, but he shelved the idea for now.

As powerful as object permanence could be, Tom had no doubt in his mind that he gotten lucky with the outcome he’d ended up with.