NOVEL NEXT Chapter 67
The ghost sightings were called that because, as witness reports of supernatural things usually went, the reports were very vague. They had mostly been made by intoxicated people who had been scared by what they had encountered and only the few people who hadn’t searched for help while being sky high even gave credibility to the rumor.
Viewed from a rational point of view Tania was speaking about a bunch of reports that described the appearance of an unknown humanoid creature late in the evening in one of the more unsightly districts of Newport.
Said creature was described to be around two and a half meters tall with a hunched over posture. It had long thin arms and hands with claw-like fingers. Nobody had seen it from the front yet and some people claimed to have witnessed it disappear into the shadows without emerging again.
Argul had a few problems with those reports, mainly that all of them stated the creature's color as black and that without street lights you of course wouldn’t be able to see a black creature in the late evening. It was dark outside for goodness sake.
She would have normally dismissed these reports as some kind of scam or prank on earth, but with mana around Argul had to at least consider the possibility of something weird like that popping up.
Alyra had already said that despite the god other creatures that were able to feed on mana had been born. It was natural for creatures to evolve that were able to utilize a new foodsource, but normally that took some time and only due to mana being involved quite a few steps were skipped here.
Argul just hoped that those creatures weren’t too bad and especially not black things that lurked through the darkness. She had enough horrors in her imagination and preferred them to stay there too.
There wasn’t much Argul could do about this but keep her eyes open though, something she would do anyway because of her curiosity. It was still disappointing in her opinion.
Next to the ghost sightings Tania sadly didn’t have any other interesting news. Argul could ask her about current market prices, but she wasn’t really interested in that topic.
She would have liked to know more about the things happening in Sacra since it was weird for the church to suddenly have such a huge influence when the military had been in charge the whole time, but news on the political state over there was scarce for some reason. Maybe Arthur knew more about that since he had been part of the military there for some time.
After her talk with Tania Argul borrowed a cloak from the shopkeeper to stay somewhat hidden on the market and returned to the wooly sheep. She didn’t think the cloak was hiding here from any schooled eyes, but it would keep most of the interest away and was a much better option than walking invisible over a full market. That would just create a completely new rumor about people colliding with an invisible person.
Back in the inn Argul put the rock of cobalt ore into her room and played a bit with Aina before she sat down on the first floor to think about the ore’s uses and her present for Aly.
If she could make Alyra’s birthday gift with the cobalt that would be the best, though Argul doubted she could learn how to smith the metal in the next four months. She had a vague idea about how to work the material from the lizard village’s hoove smith, but that wouldn’t help her out too much.
Speaking of smiths, those guys probably had the best time of their lives right now. Without machines around it all fell back to them, making smiths some of the most important people right now. Argul wondered how long it would take them to create a new currency though, the bullets were annoying to use because of their forms.
She shook away the idle thought and concentrated back on the original topic. It should be possible to create the present she had in mind without any metal so Argul would put the cobalt aside for now.
Instead she started to plan out all the spells she would need, the most important being a new form of identify. To create that she had to tone her fate contract down somewhat and create a less severe version of that. Argul would then have to combine the two spells to create something that was able to view the status of a person so long as they approved of this. Not the complete status of course, but things like the name, stats and titles should be okay. Digging deeper into the archive than that without Alyra’s consent was a bad idea in her opinion.
On a secondary layer of importance Argul had to figure out a few neutral enchantments. The most important three being an intent shield, some kind of passive mana absorption spell and an enchantment to store mana.
In her opinion the mana storage would be the most difficult, not because the spell to hold mana could be too much for her to figure out. Finding a suitable material that could withstand the mana pressure would be more of a problem.
The metals Argul had tested until now wouldn’t help her here. Their characteristic of conducting mana quite well made them an inefficient choice for mana storage at the same time, because the enchantment to keep the mana in place would need a lot more power for maintenance, reducing the battery time.
Once she had this Argul would then have to create a few sensory spells to develop what essentially would be activation and deactivation buttons. If you could only use the tool by injecting mana into the input the mana storage would be useless.
She leaned back on her chair in thought. Maybe she could use the sensory spells and some kind of memory spell to create a repair spell?
Argul’s tail wagged a bit. In theory it should be possible, but the enchantment for that would be extremely complicated. She knew that even without knowing how the spells she needed looked like, but the prospect of such a challenge made her a little excited.
Argul shook her head. She shouldn’t overdo it or she wouldn’t be able to finish the present before her daughter's birthday. There was time for this after Alyra’s present was done.
Now the only thing left was training how to enchant organic materials and creating the spells. Argul gave herself about three months for that. The last month she would then have to craft the very first identification plate by hand and enchant it.
Argul smiled to herself. The next goal was set and she couldn’t wait to start working on the project.