Andrew Rowe - Sufficiently Advanced Magic

“As a rule, I don’t sell anything below Carnelian-level. Much as I might like you Corin, you aren’t a Carnelian yet.”

“Fair, I’m not. But I can make a few Carnelian-level items.”

A “few” might have been exaggerating, but I’d made one. How hard could it be?

“Won’t give you a deal without seeing what you’re offering. But go ahead, do your research. Can’t hurt me to take a look.”

I grinned at that. “Thanks, Lars. You’ll be the first on my list when I get around to making this stuff.”

Professor Vellum had mentioned selling the items herself, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t sell some on my own.

I snickered to myself and got to work.

It turned out that magical items were reshing expensive.

I’d known this, of course, but I hadn’t really seen the scale or ubiquity of it until I left the court and hit the other three nearby shops I’d known about. Lars liked to brag about how good his deals were, but I never expected those boasts to be true . I liked Lars, but he was the kind of guy who turned chasing a mouse into a story of mythic proportions.

As it turned out, he was beating his competitors not only in variety, but also in prices. Even his stuff was nowhere near my price range, though.

On the low end? Two or three hundred sigils for a basic Carnelian Mage-class item with a single function.

Something Sunstone Mage level? Several thousand, and they were scarce.

Citrine Mage enchantments? Tens to hundreds of thousands, and I didn’t even find any on display. Not surprising, considering that was enough money to buy a house. A nice house.

Anything higher wasn’t even listed.

In fairness, there were some items that were considerably cheaper, but they were all of the limited-use variety, and I fully supported Vellum’s view that those were vastly inferior. I’d have considered buying one if it had a life-saving function, like a really powerful healing or teleportation item, but I never saw any of those for sale.

So, on the minus side, I wasn’t going to be buying any of these items outright any time soon.

On the positive side?

I managed to find a few Carnelian-level items up for sale that were similar to the ones Vellum wanted me to work on. And, when I checked the material costs — usually about four to five medium-sized crystals of varying mana types for each of them — I knew I could make them for a fraction of what they were selling for. About a sixth of the sale cost, in most cases.

That meant that even with Vellum taking half of my net profit, I’d still be making almost triple the material costs. Of course, that was assuming Vellum sold the items for a similar price to Lars, but I thought that was a fairly reasonable approximation.

The main problem?

I didn’t have enough money to get started, and Vellum hadn’t been willing to give me a loan.

That was when I realized what she’d been trying to get me to think about in the first place — the obvious idea that I’d somehow been missing for weeks.

I headed back to Vellum’s office almost immediately, finding her still inside.

“How do I make my own mana crystals?”

The ancient professor cracked a rare grin. “That was faster than I expected.” She waved a hand to the chair on the opposite side of her desk. “Let me show you.”

Vellum extracted herself from her chair, trudging over to one of the shelves on the left side of the office. She groaned and reached for a box on a high shelf. I expedited the process by walking over and pulling it down for her.

The box was a simple wooden one, maybe twelve inches across, and closed with a simple latch. I handed it over to her.

“Thank you, dear. Now sit back down.”

I sat. She took the box over to the central table and opened it. Inside were about a half-dozen clear crystals. It took me a moment of inspection before I realized they were hollow, but they didn’t have any obvious openings.

“I haven’t had to look at these in years. Students usually don’t bother looking into making their own mana crystals.”

I scratched my chin. “What are those? Some sort of mold?”

She nodded. “That’s a good way to think of them, but ‘practice mold’ would be a better way of putting it. They’re a tool for learning, but you shouldn’t need them once you’ve mastered the process.”

Vellum lifted one from the case. “These prisms are made of quartz, which is magically inert and capable of containing mana. The simplest way for a student to create a mana crystal is to channel mana of the appropriate type into the hollow interior.”

I leaned across the table, taking a closer look. “Wouldn’t that just be energy trapped inside a prism, rather than making a crystal?”

“Initially, yes. Once you have enough mana to fill the chamber, you must condense the mana into a solid state. This occupies less space than the mana does in a solid form. Typically, students find it easiest to focus on ‘pushing’ the mana into a corner of the crystal, then ‘hardening’ it.”

She paused for a breath. “It is also possible to simply continue to channel mana into the structure until there is enough to harden it into crystal all at once, but most students find that more challenging.”

I tilted my head. “That sounds like shaping, not enchanting.”

Vellum sighed. “It’s a common misconception that only specific attunements can perform certain basic activities. There’s a significant amount of overlap between some similar attunements. You’re not a Diviner, are you? And yet, you can still see mana while activating your attunement, something that would be typically classified as Divination.”

She offered me the prism, and I took it, turning it over in my hand. While I inspected the device, Vellum continued speaking. “Similarly, Summoners can call on elemental magic from their bonded monsters, even though they’re not Elementalists. The more you learn about attunements, the more obvious it becomes that they’re just parts of a greater whole. When you start seeing attunements from other towers, you’ll see even more examples.”

I nodded, but the idea of changing the state of mana just seemed so integral to the Shaper Attunement that I was having trouble accepting that I could do it myself. “Should I try it here?”

“Goddess, no, boy. I don’t have time to watch you embarrass yourself. If you can’t figure it out in a week, come see me again. If, by some miracle, you manage to fill all these crystals, you can bring them all back here and I’ll show you how to extract the mana. Do not break my practice prisms trying to get the mana out.”

I set the prism back inside the container. She shut the lid and pushed it over to me.

I accepted the box, pondering aloud. “If Enchanters can make our own mana crystals, why isn’t every Enchanter in the school doing it?”

“It’s difficult, and not particularly rewarding. The first crystals you’re going to make are going to be weaker than the smallest type found in the tower. Stronger crystals have a higher density — that is, more mana in a crystal of the same size. You can’t just keep adding more mana to a crystal you’ve already made, however. Once it’s solid, it’s solid. You can’t force more mana into it.”

I nodded, following the logic. “So, I need to be able to pack as much mana as possible into a small space…then solidify it after that.”

“Precisely. And because you need to do it in a single session, it’s not possible to make a crystal with a greater value than whatever portion of your mana capacity you’re capable of expending all at once. Which, at your level of skill, isn’t much.”