Mage Tank

Chapter 339: Crafty Crafts 4: Dream Master

Chapter 339: Crafty Crafts 4: Dream Master

Mage Tank

Wands! Your girlfriend loves ‘em! Like, to a weird degree. She sleeps on them, rubs them all over her toned, athletic dragon body. Thick wands, skinny wands, short wands, looooooooong wands…

Have you considered taking the Cuck skill, because most of those wands aren’t yours, you know?

Whatever. Choose a Level 40 Wandmaking evolution and maybe your puny human wand will finally be able to keep that princess satisfied!

“You can’t hurt me with this,” I said to the ceiling. “I’m very secure with my wand size.”

Xim and Ishi exchanged a look that I comfortably ignored.

The Immutable Tradition

You gain basic comprehension of the Immutable school of crafting. You can imbue the Immutable property into any item you craft without increasing its requirements. This does not eliminate any material requirements or other conditions for applying the Immutable property. This evolution can be improved by studying under a master of this tradition.

An Immutable item cannot be damaged, destroyed, or altered in any way, while retaining all functions that allow the item to serve its purpose. Immutable items are not Invincible, however. If a force exceeds an Immutable item’s tolerances, the force will travel through the Immutable item via the easiest path. That is, if an arrow strikes an Immutable leather bracer, the arrow can still travel through the bracer and into an entity’s arm. When the arrow is removed, the Immutable item will be undamaged.

Once crafted, Immutable items cannot have any additional effects added. However, no effect on an Immutable item can be interfered with or removed, short of Deific means.

The Dreamforger’s Tradition

You gain basic comprehension of the Dreamforger’s school of crafting. You can imbue the Dreamforged property into any item you craft without increasing its requirements. This does not eliminate any material requirements or other conditions for applying the Dreamforged property. This evolution can be improved by studying under a master of this tradition.

A Dreamforged item may be instantly summoned or dismissed at will, regardless of its distance from the summoner. When summoned, a Dreamforged item will immediately appear in an appropriate location relative to its owner. A weapon will appear in your hand, a helmet will appear on your head, a necklace will appear around your neck, etc. When dismissed, a Dreamforged item disappears and becomes completely inaccessible to anyone other than the item’s owner.

The Diverse Tradition

Deep expertise in a singular tradition is not always the wisest path. Sometimes necessity demands variety. Choose an additional Level 10 and an additional Level 20 Wandmaking evolution. You cannot choose an evolution you already possess, nor can you choose any evolution that grants additional evolutions such as this one.

The best part of the first two evolution options were that they didn’t just apply to wands I crafted, but items I crafted. That meant they could be applied to anything I made with Smithing as well, along with any other crafting skills I might somehow pick up.

Immutable items were nice, needing no repair, upkeep, or even any real cleaning. Most of Varrin’s gear was Immutable. I sometimes wondered about that because he was so meticulous with his oil and polish. His reasons were a mystery to me, but the man was a creature of habits so I tried not to bring it up. He was an extraordinarily effective person, so his maintenance kung fu was certainly doing something for him.

Ultimately, the most appealing part of the Immutable Tradition was that it could be improved by studying under a master. Varrin’s grandfather, Papa Junior, was the creator of the Immutable property. For this generation, at least. It was entirely likely that somebody in past civilizations figured it out first. Regardless, the Ravvenblaq’s world-class smith was certainly a master for the evolution’s purposes. Indestructible was the next step in the Immutable property’s development, and being able to slap that onto all my gear without increasing the requirements was sexy as hell.

Also sexy as hell was the Dreamforger’s Tradition, which would naturally take me back to studying under Khigra in the Third Layer. It would just be studying this time, since both of us had our own partners now. The woman was a consummate expert and excellent instructor, even if she’d need to adapt a less… physical regimen for me this time around.

It was interesting to see the System quantify what it considered the basic Dreamforged property. Ultimately, dreamforging was a complex process that invoked concepts chosen by the eventual wielder and could take a number of forms. That potentially made it more adaptable than what the Immutable Tradition promised. While Papa Junior was probably a better smith than Khigra in regards to traditional methods, Khigra’s true expertise was dreamforging. She was the best in the world, so far as I knew.

The main tangle with dreamforging was that it required collaboration with a group of people who could help manifest the thing being dreamforged. It was a completely alien process to typical smithing and not something I could effectively accomplish on my own. That being said, I kind of had an entire kingdom in my back pocket. I also had an on-demand portal to the Xor’Drel tribelands and hadn’t spent nearly enough time with the people who’d adopted me when I first stumbled, clueless, into Arzia.

The Diverse Tradition looked useful, but it didn’t tempt me when compared to the other two. Earlier Wandmaking evolutions I’d seen paled in comparison to either of the first two traditions.

While I didn’t lock in my evolution choice right then, deciding to wait until I saw my Smithing options as well, I’ll save you the suspense. I ended up picking Dreamworker’s Tradition. Somncres’s ability to pop in and out of existence was insanely useful and having other dreamforged items would make swapping them in and out of my hand as quick as a thought. Really, I could make fully modular gear sets with different effects for different needs, letting me adapt mid-combat as I learned about the enemy.

While Immutable Tradition was probably better for straight tanking, the utility of Dreamforger’s was incredible, and if there was one thing I loved, it was having an extra-bigass pile of tools to work with.

With Wandmaking at 40, a couple of personal golems in my inventory, and all of the Infernal Cleanse wands made, I left the Woodworking Dungeon. I’d seen exactly one part of it, and man was it a shitty part, but I wanted to get back to the Caving Tree to work on Smithing next. I did a quick check-in with Tavio and Major Kai, did some portal work for supplies and personnel movement, then got the green light to pursue my own projects so long as I kept them updated on my location and stayed available for portals.

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Tavio planned on moving to more aggressive scouting now that they had an entire arsenal of anti-Charl wands, on top of having a cleric around who was Charl kryptonite. That exploration would also include various construction projects and divination nodes to help the small number of Delvers monitor what was a very large stretch of forest. That would take as long as it took, depending on the resistance they ran into, but Tavio was hoping to be pushing deeper into the Forest and through the combat Dungeons within a week.

Thus, I happily skipped off into the bowels of the Caving Tree. I spent the next week working on getting Smithing up to snuff and figuring out how to make myself an overpowered staff using both of my crafting skills, a whole pile of precious materials, and a literal fortune in mana chips.

The first decision I made upon entering the Caving Tree was to ignore its curse and see what happened. The Bone Root Weathering affliction targeted bones, and my bones were kind of not bones anymore. Over time an uncomfortable tugging developed throughout my body as roots presumably grew in, but it wasn’t anything that caused damage or even slowed me down. It was painful and annoying, but taking an hour here and there to relax and let the mental fatigue of constant low-level pain wash away was more efficient than spending the time it would take to gather materials and make an item to sacrifice to the Clockwork Cursewarden.

The Caving tree had two types of exotic metals within, but I chose to work exclusively with Sonoris since it buffed Sonic effects. Half my time was spent running around and harvesting crystals then refining them into the metal. I also had a stock of Guardian Wood I’d gotten from Ishi that I was trying to incorporate. That stuff could naturally boost defensive effects such as Shielding.

The actual smithing and woodworking wasn’t too difficult. I made a one-inch rod of the metal that would serve as the core of the staff. This was also where much of the mana weaving was done, engraved into the metal, which would be hidden and protected. I slotted that into a 6-foot length of carved Guardian Wood with the center drilled out, then added bands of Sonoris around the outside.

Both Guardian Wood and Sonoris were light-colored with a bright sheen that made them visually complementary. I tried to give the staff a bit of artistic flair by doing the banding in flowing organic patterns, but this was an item for battle, not something to sit pretty on a shelf. The design was functional and pleasing without becoming ornate.

The essential weaves weren’t anything groundbreaking, and combining the materials to take advantage of both of their natural properties went smoothly. Where I ended up doing the most of my experimentation was with the mana weave displayed on the Clockwork Cursewarden.

The formula for the curse-breaking weave was carved right into the surface of the machine, and I’d initially dismissed it as a novelty. All it did was enable the machine itself to eliminate a curse in exchange for destroying the item the weave was affixed to. When I started taking the weave apart, however, I found a few useful sections that I could redeploy.

The entire inspiration for this came from a flight of fancy during one of my hour-long pain cooldown periods. My mind was wandering over the weave when I got fixated on the name of the machine. Clockwork Cursewarden. Specifically, the Cursewarden part. Names for items and weaves were generally intentional, referencing the specific components that composed them, and “warden” seemed like it might be one of those terms. After all, I had a skill called Life Warden that let me take damage in place of my allies.

Rather than take a direct route to a functional staff with basic but useful weaves, I decided to travel down the “warden” rabbit hole. As I mentioned earlier, skill progress benefitted from challenging oneself, and this kind of reverse engineering of a weave wasn’t something I’d focused on heavily. As it turns out, the warden effect allowed its wielder to use the item as a focus to automatically channel a cleansing or defensive ability to an ally.

One hangup was that the Cursewarden effect was naturally destructive to the item. Upon deeper study, this was because the weave was designed to consume the specific materials found inside the Caving Tree, rather than utilizing a more appropriate channel, like an essence of some kind. The trade off was that the weave could be made from only what was found inside the tree, but the efficiency was so bad that it literally destroyed the item just to power its own effect. As for the actual curse cleansing portion, that came directly from the machine.

I stripped away the material-destroying properties of the weave and came up with a rune combination that would make use of a Mirror essence we’d gotten from… somewhere. Pretty sure it was the crystalline extradimensional entity boss called Kaleidoscope from back in the boss rush before entering Deijin’s Descent. Man, that was some book 2 shit.

Anyway, the Mirror essence served as a bridge between my Life Warden skill and a predetermined effect on the staff. Rather than doing some roundabout and overly complicated weaving to try and automate that, I added a Machine essence to do it for me. It still took a bit of tweaking, but the intent-based conversion of essences helped a lot.

We’d gotten the machine essence from the Clockwork boss that we’d also fought back in book 2. Huh, whaddya know. That essence added some mechanical flourishes to the staff and may have turned it into a kind of pseudo clockwork elemental. It didn’t seem like it would cause any problems though. Magic was weird sometimes.

I was already throwing essences at this thing like a lunatic so I tossed about eight death essences at it that we’d gotten for murdering thousands of undead back in the Throne of Zng Delve. (Book 4, by the way.) Death essences dealt with the end and were excellent for, among other things, ending beneficial effects in order to help you end your target. The simplest use was adding Penetration to a type of attack, but could also do a lot of other interesting things so long as you were creative with it.

All of this cost me a barrel full of scrapped prototypes and ultimately led me to Smithing 40. That meant another selection of fantastic evolution options. The first was the same as Wandmaking had been, the Immutable Tradition. I was also offered another Diverse Tradition. Frankly, the latter was a solid choice since my current evolutions were entirely focused on making the toughest armor possible. I could make weapons, tools, and utility items, but none of them would be on par with a proper specialist.

Diverse Tradition would let me become a potent crafter of another class of items, which would be helpful. Of course, Varrin was also working on his Smithing skill and the man was wholly focused on weapons. If we really needed to, we could work together on projects. I didn’t think the breadth I would get was worth it when I could collaborate with someone else if I really needed to.

The final choice was the one with the most pull for me. It spoke directly to my heart, whispering tales of outlandish bonuses. It promised stacks of effects so deep that the item descriptions wouldn’t fit in my field of view, necessitating an auto-adjustment to the text size until it was too tiny for my superhuman eyeballs to read.

Eventually.

The Heirloom Tradition

You specialize in the creation of Heirloom sets, where multiple items are crafted with the intent of being worn together. You can cause any item you craft to become part of an Heirloom set without increasing its requirements. The maximum number of items in an Heirloom set you craft is equal to the number of Smithing evolutions you possess.

When matching Heirloom items are equipped, all mana weaves on each item of the set are empowered as though their governing attribute requirements are 5 higher per matching Heirloom piece worn beyond the first. That is, with two Heirloom items equipped, an item with a Strength requirement of 10 will have the effect of its weave increased as though the Strength requirement were 20. The requirements to equip the item are unchanged.

Additionally, Heirloom items can be bound to a specific person or bloodline. If an Heirloom item is bound, anyone other than the chosen person, or a member of the chosen bloodline, cannot make use of the item. The owner of an Heirloom item always knows the distance and direction to that item. This evolution can be improved by studying under a master of this tradition.