The Dark Lord of Crafting

“You just tried to draw them?” Kevin was looking over my rune sketches, the pages spread across a worktable I’d dropped in an empty glass room. He picked up a drawing and made a disgusted sound. “What’s your Artisan? Five?”

“Fifteen,” I said. “And I don’t have any progress in Inscription. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.”

“Everything.” he let go of the page and let it drift to the floor. “You can’t do runes manually unless your skill is over twenty. You’re going to have to use the worktable. This one’s for Protection. Is that what you want to make?”

“It’s the only one I know. How many runes are there?” So I wasn’t on the completely wrong track, but I was glad to hear I would not have to physically carve the runes. There were recipes.

“Eh…” Kevin shrugged. “I know five. That’s all Jason taught me. Protection, Speaking, Fixation, Unbreaking, and Shadowbane.”

“Three of those are enchantments.”

“They’re all enchantments. Or, like, enchantments are runes. Bundles of them, so they do one thing, but they have to be complicated to be simple.”

While his lecture script could use some work, that made sense. My System was a module that functioned according to deeper laws, however the universe actually worked. Something like Feather Fall slowed me down when I was dropping. But how did the enchantment know when I was falling as opposed to kicking someone? It wasn’t just the speed my boots were moving. Using an enchantment was like double-clicking an app. There had to be a lot going on under the surface of a seemingly simple plug-and-play.

“And Protection makes a force field? What do the others do?”

“Unbreaking and Shadowbane are like the enchantments. Shadowbane is what you need to slow down the corruption. My armor has them built in.” He looked at me, raising his withered hand. “That’s why you should give me my armor.”

“Once I trust you more, maybe.” Gastard was walking around the perimeter, visible through the walls. I was glad he wasn’t a part of this conversation. He would have some strong opinions about giving Kevin any of his old equipment. The wyverns were outside as well, resting beside a lava pool. “Speaking and Fixation, what do they do?”

Kevin’s gaze followed mine when I looked out toward Gastard. His eyes narrowed, and he moved around the table to where Gastard was directly behind him, blocking my view. “Speaking makes paired objects. If you talk into one, your voice comes out of the other.”

“Wait, did the tin cans on your train have runes in them?”

“Yeah,” he nodded, “did you think I was just stupid or something?”

“No.” No need to get into that. “I wish I had realized and copied them. Does Fixation stick objects together? Is that the magic behind stacking blocks?”

“Kind of. It’s a part of it. But the runes make stuff float. They stay in place, so you can have blocks that aren’t supported by anything.”

Leaf blocks did that automatically, and having blocks staying in place without support could definitely be useful, but there had to be more to it. “When I was in Bedlam before,” I said, “at one of Jason’s bases, there was a cart that flew from island to island. Was it runes that let him set that up?”

“You went to Jason’s base?” Kevin’s eyes lit up. “Where?”

“A mine in the Free Kingdoms. It’s where I got my old armor. You don’t have any of those flying carts here, though. Do you know how to make them?”

He frowned. “It would be runes. Fixation and Speaking, maybe. There are more I don’t have. If I go there, I can tell you. Jason was a jerk. He moved his portals after he decided he didn’t like me, and once he was gone, I couldn’t find them.”

That was one way to describe it. Jason had realized Kevin was a sociopath and started hiding his stuff. The world was wide, and unless he dug down to investigate every square mile of Plana, Kevin would never find the old portals. That Fixation and Speaking could combine that way was fascinating. Did speaking transfer more than sound? Could you use it to move something at a distance, transfer essence maybe?

I kept asking questions and got the feeling that Kevin had never spent a lot of time pondering the fundamental laws of the universe. You crafted runes by placing coins in the grid in a simplified version of the rune for the effect you wanted. Each coin had to be of the same material, so for his perimeter fence, he’d generated hundreds of individual blocks and placed them in a connected line.

The redstone wasn’t necessary, but it helped prevent the force field from burning out. The barriers weren’t all powerful, and there were entities in Bedlam that could break through his shield even with the reinforcement. Runed materials could be used for crafting exactly like regular materials, so you could potentially make an indestructible furnace, or a floating minecart, or whatever.

Because runes were functionally a version of enchantment, crafting them came with an experience cost. Finishing the equipment for my templars had brought me down to level six. The cost in levels was lower than it had been before my assessment, but it also took me longer to gain them, so that was a wash.

Shadowbane was the most important. According to Kevin, if my Artisan skill was high enough, I could tattoo myself, but I would otherwise need to craft equipment from runed materials to gain the benefits. That meant giving up some of my current equipment. I settled on replacing my boots, as they only required four ingots to craft, and they didn’t have a huge armor rating to begin with. Though I didn’t have any spare enchanted books to add into them, and it would lower my defense overall, having the added resistance to taint was not something I could pass up right now.

Kevin gave me the recipe, and because I didn’t have any extra orichalcum, I crafted steel ingots from iron and coal before combining them into runed ingots. The result was straightforward, a normal ingot with a blocky rune stamped in the metal. It felt warm in my hand, arriving with a minor drop in my level advancement.

When I crafted them into boots, they felt wrong. They weren’t uncomfortable, exactly, but as I walked around the worktable wearing them, they gave me a negative feeling. It wasn’t something I could put my finger on. These boots just needed to come off.

Kevin smirked. “You don’t like them, do you?”

“You have something to tell me?”

“Not really. You’re already tainted, and your corruption is telling you that the runes are bad. Wearing them won’t fix you, but it will slow down your decline.” He looked at his corrupted hand. “I wore my armor all the time. It helped. I thought it made me better. It didn’t, though. It held all this back, and when I died, it got worse. You and me, we’re headed to the same place. I’ve just been on the road longer than you.”

That wasn’t ideal. I wanted to get back to normal, shed my more monstrous traits, and not have to worry about throwing up mushrooms in the future. Still, that the boots felt weird was evidence that they were doing something. Once I built up my experience reservoir again, I could craft an entire set and enchant them to my heart’s content. Anything to interfere with the absorption of demonic essence.

Kevin didn’t have a map. He’d had several in the past, and he’d torn them all up in successive hissy fits. Jason’s minecart network had allowed me to travel to different islands despite being in constant motion because his stop stations were all linked. Kevin’s maps had failed him, and he hadn’t been motivated to work out a solution.

The islands tended to orbit each other, however, and though they were always moving, they did so like constellations caught in mutual gravity. Kevin’s base was on a lava rich hunk of bedlamite a few miles in diameter.

There wasn’t much to worry about here aside from the magma slimes. Fire elementals spawned every once in a while, and he’d used their cores to craft brewing stands, but they could be handled with Splash potions that were just water and gunpowder. Other islands floated in the void, though they weren’t as tightly packed as I had seen around Jason’s base.

“Can you get us close to the atreanum?” I asked.

“If that’s what you want.” Kevin slid on the leather mask I had made for him. “When both of you die, I guess I’m free.”

We drank Fire Resistance potions before going outside, where Gastard was keeping his distance from the wyverns. Tame or not, he didn’t care for monsters, and he was never enthusiastic about the prospect of riding them. We had enough Elytrons for each of us to wear one, and we would, but they weren’t reliable for long distance flight, and too easy to lose control of in the unpredictable currents of Bedlam.

As soon as I flipped the switch to deactivate a section of the barrier, a magma slime rose out of the closest pool to lurch toward us. Gastard’s sword rang as he pulled it from its sheath, and Kevin backed away. Rather than try to sword fight a living blob of molten rock, I summoned a bottle of sparkling water and threw it at the mob.

The embers that served as its eyes crossed when the bottle flew at the center of its melting face. Glass popped, and the alchemic liquid sprayed, darkening the front half of its body. With its face solidified, the blob had trouble hopping, and after being hit with two more bottles, it slouched into a semi-solid pile like a massive, partially molten turd. Its eyes winked out, and we led the wyverns from the entrance into a field of cracked and carbonized stone.

“There are more of them,” Gastard said as a small group of smaller blobs approached us from across the barren landscape. He looked ready to start stabbing lava.

“There’s nothing here,” Kevin said. “Let's fly already.”

The barrier would shut automatically in a few more seconds. It wouldn’t open from the outside, so we’d have to dig our way back in when we returned. Not fun when you had to worry about magma mobs sliding into a tunnel after you, and a major problem for Gastard if he had to return alone. Kevin hadn’t built this place to be convenient for other people.

Alpha lowered his green scaled face when I told him to kneel, and we climbed atop the wyverns. They had no trouble taking off, a combination of the hot air under the wings from the lava pools and the health benefits of being back on their home plane. We were soon well out of reach of any leaping slime, and as we spiraled up, I watched the mobs squelch and slop around beneath us.

“You can take point,” I called to Kevin over the wingbeats of our mounts. It wasn’t phrased as an order. The more direct commands I gave him, the more opportunities he would have to surreptitiously trigger his paralysis and potentially act out. Though an improvement over the Curse of Weakness, the control the oath gave us was far from ideal.

He urged his wyvern forward with me slightly behind and Gastard holding the rear, along with the spare mounts. Unless I told them otherwise, the wyverns followed me like puppies. They were in high spirits, trilling and chirping like birds, delighted to be home.

We were almost in the void when I looked back to see a burning shape ascending from the island. It wasn’t as big as the blobs, ephemeral, a being born from fire. Shouting a warning, I used my legs to guide Alpha down toward a relatively lava-free plateau. Fighting a fire elemental in the air was an invitation to a precipitous drop. The wyverns might be at home in Bedlam, but this wasn’t their natural biome, and they wouldn’t be of any use with their wings burned off.

The others followed me, sighting the threat, and the elemental was almost on top of us when we landed. I slipped off Alpha in time to get hit by a fireball. It wasn’t any stronger than Raum’s had been, and did little more than startle the wyverns, who took off in every direction. The Resistance potions would wear off in a few minutes, and that was fine. They only needed to last long enough to get us off of this island.

The upper half of the elemental was vaguely human shaped, at least it had a torso and a pair of arms, while its lower half was a wispy tail of ember and ash. A few blackened stones orbited the bright orb of its core in its waist as it flew back and forth, harrying us with melon sized balls of flame.

It was fast, nimble, and supported by slimes. As soon as we landed, the magma blobs began their approach. Gastard and Kevin held them off. Kevin was equipped with a bandolier of Splash potions, water and healing, nothing that could hurt us, and he used them to good effect. Gastard was having more trouble. He could kill a slime with his sword, but he had to winnow them down first.

The large blobs split into a pair when sliced, and the mediums divided into smalls. He had to kill four to kill one, all the while engaging in an increasingly elaborate dance to keep himself from being swamped by molten rock.

I lost a few bottles trying to hit the elemental, took a few more hits, and summoned my bow. It had more trouble dodging arrows than the bottles, and the Shadowbane enhanced heads tore holes in the flaming form. It had no voice, the only sound it made was the whoosh of its fireballs as they soared through the air and the roar when they landed.

Our Fire Resistance was ticking down, and the blobs were multiplying. I absorbed another blast with my shoulder before switching to Knockback arrows and launching one straight for its core. The blunted tip plunked against the crystal ball, and in the same instant, the enchantment’s effect ejected it from the center of the ring of stones orbiting around its waist.

The fire winked out, and the orb fell into a pool of lava. I jogged over to retrieve it, but it had already sunk, and the elemental would soon reincorporate.

“Buckets?” Kevin asked, slinking up behind me.

“I’ve got one. I almost never use them.”

“Amateur.”

“Shouldn't you be dousing magma blobs?”

Kevin patted his leathers. “I'm all out. Got a healing potion if you want it.”

“Gentlemen!” Gastard shouted, surrounded by a crowd of hopping mobs hot enough to melt steel. “Are you finished?” His sword flashed, and one split into two, adding to his problems.

I drew Caliburn and helped Gastard clear a space for the wyverns to land, slicing blobs until they stopped blobbing. If nothing else, grinding out mobs here would recover enough essence to do some more rune work. But we needed to be gone before the elemental resurfaced.

Kevin, clad in leathers, and with a weapon that would break before the blobs did, tiptoed around us, trying to stay out of the way and avoid being jumped by stray lumps of animate magma.

Alpha swooped down when I called, with the others following. Gastard grimaced whenever he was forced to mount a wyvern, but he was a man who would do what he felt had to be done, and the beasts were our only reliable form of transportation in Bedlam.

A few minutes later, we left the burning island behind and crossed the space between landmasses. It was hard to avoid feeling a vertigo with an infinite abyss beneath you. The physics of Bedlam left a lot open to interpretation. Obviously, there was air here, as all of us were breathing normally, but why was there air here? And how did the islands all seem to have local gravity despite not being massive enough to generate it? Not that I was complaining. Doing a spacewalk would have been an enormous hassle.

Though there was no map to guide us, Kevin’s memory of the island constellations was enough to put us generally in the right direction. At least I hoped it was. After the hot spot, the first island we crossed was a desert of white sand. Obsidian towers jutted from its surface, and Voidmen wandered the dunes. It was uncomfortably close to the End Island from the game, but there was no dragon there to challenge us. No flying mobs at all.

From there, we flew to a body of water that curled around itself like a Mobius Strip. Phantoms dipped in and out of the ever-flowing sea. They moved in schools, hunting smaller, darting fish that were equally unaffected by the laws of gravity and inertia. This island, if it could be called an island, had no solid land at all.

“There are source blocks in there.” Kevin called over the rushing of the water.

“Water source blocks?” I asked.

“Yeah, but they swarm you if you get close.”

There were hundreds of phantoms, if not thousands, and something else moving beneath the curving rapids. A shadow in the blue-black ribbon, big as a whale. Being dragged underwater by a kulu once was more than enough for me.

“Good to know,” I said. “Let's keep going.”

We could already see the swamp.