238 Ingenium

Orbiting near the poles of Ilium, was a small moon of metal and volatile materials.

It was a barren world, save the many undead duergar operating the excavators below the surface and the anti-gravity ferries sitting atop it.

It was around that world that the artificers chose to call home, creating an orbital ring to house their worlds of stone and metal and the infrastructure that went along with their crafts.

It was within that ring where me and my chief engineer relocated after brewing a hundred thousand superior healing potions and receiving the paltry rewards that came with the title of Grandmaster Alchemist.

Well, one perk was paltry.

The Alchemist's Eye was much like the Appraisal skill. With focus, I could ascertain the ingredients that went into making the potion as well as the quality and the effects.

The Alchemists Cookbook, however, was no different from the Ledger in nearly every way imaginable. It was like my apps, providing a checklist of materials and step-by-step instructions on how to brew every potion I had ever learned to make, which numbered in the hundreds, but still, wasn't very full.

Unlike my Ledger. Which, after living through three eras and spending nearly a century and a half learning and making things in my past life, was fairly extensive. Far more extensive than the Starfarer's Archives, even, after learning the things I've learned in this life.

The digital library shared by all humans in the Solar System and beyond contained knowledge of how to do everything from making stone tools, pelt clothing, and mud huts to creating cybernetic implants, building megastructures, and terraforming worlds.

Like many on the outside, the Archives had been downloaded into the servers and databases embedded in my neural interface and streamed through my sensory implants in more or less the same way as the Eternal Eye.

Thus the Ledger, like the Cookbook, was of no use to me.

Ed, Forgruna, Els, and Matt, however, were different stories. With their Ledgers and the powers embedded in this realm, they too had a sense of augmented reality. And with one of my domains being engineering, they too had access to those vast Archives. And much, much more.

Capitalizing on that knowledge, I created a sub-world of my own. A place like my home- formed with a high concentration of divine mana, but attuned with my engineering domain, rather than- for the most part- my lunar domain. It was a cube rather than a sphere. A cube filled with spatially and temporally distorted boxes or modules in which anyone could design and create whatever came to mind.

Capitalizing on the powers granted from my divinity, the artificers and the undead craftsmen took their blessings of tireless inspiration and worked without pause throughout the month, surveying the many components and materials born from my divine realm of Eotrom and using them to create things that utterly blew me away.

As far as they were concerned, the most notable of them was the materials that absorbed the divine essence of moonlight or twilight, including adamantine and mithral. Though their names had yet to be agreed upon, the woods, metals, liquids, and stones more or less held the same properties on both ends. Albeit with varying intensities.

Depending on how they were refined, both subsets could be crafted into items with illusory, charming, umbral, radiant, or even necrotic effects. Both had the potential to heal or connect with nature. And had some connection to space-time and gravity. But only materials holding the power of twilight could curse, hex, or worse.

Conversely, only materials imbued with the essence of the moon had a connection to the water and open seas. Creating materials that were frictionless and able to withstand the tremendous pressures of the ocean deep.

As far as I was concerned, however, the most remarkable materials in my eyes were imbued with neither. They were a pair of yet-to-be-named crystals. One, strongly imbued with gravitational energy, and the other, an RTG in crystal form.

An immensely powerful one at that.

With the latter, my clone, the undead, and the citizens were able to leap past the jet and atomic ages and even push past the realm of information. Enabling us to build and test an array of complex vehicles for the Captains' subordinates. Although, most of the designs would be hard to use without the proper training.

And harder to use still without the proper infrastructure.

And even then, they would be improved upon with enchantments at a later time.

Regardless, however, the array of new materials afforded to us meant that in some cases, there was no need for enchantments. And with my studies of the art on the horizon, I found the perfect excuse to create as many prototypes as possible in the meantime.

[Level 7 - Grandmaster Alchemist.]

[To continue the path towards becoming a Grandmaster Artificer, you must learn the basics of enchanting by mastering the use of the Mana Scalpel and Mana Chisel, then learn enough of the art to carve your first ten sigils.]

It was a long road with a lot to learn along the way, and few things excited me more than such prospects.

Coincidentally or not, one of those things was the very act I delved into after I bottled my last potion. Designing and creating technologies of fantastical proportions.

Technologies that had no hopes of existing on the outside.

"So, everyone has their personal vehicles?" I asked my fellow artificers.

"Damn right!" Els ran a polishing rag across his pony-sized chopper for the umpteenth time- a beast of metal that ran on alcohol and would keep running so long as it was maintained. For a dwarf, there wasn't a greater treasure in the world.

"Though some of the ungrateful bastards didn't want them," Matt grumbled under his breath, someone eyeing the many barbarians multiple worlds away.

"They will when they have to ferry people across the continent." Ed laughed, exchanging knowing glances with me before he gestured around us. "What's all this then?"

As was customary in the space around Ilium, bolts, screws, or bubbles of lubricants and curved panels remained suspended in space around a trio of magical crystals. Aligned precisely with a holographic blueprint, each component was painstakingly inspected by the undead duergar craftsmen while their ebon lips twitched in ritualistic prayer.

"It's Zakira's new bike," I finally said with a chuckle upon remembering her immediate love for beach cruisers.

As of a few days ago, that love moved on to one for motorcycles- bikes she somehow knew to ride innately. Her world was filled with racetracks and open roads at once. And she prayed- yearned for the opportunity to ride across the lands below. And so, to answer her prayers, I sent the array of components into motion.

Though still, she would have to earn it.

Their fascination never fading, Ed and the others watched intently as the silvery-blue plates and black pipes and white conduits fell into place, followed by an army of screws and washers and bolts, spinning into their homes to tighten it all down.

Even with my backs to them, even with the Piety Nave turning my actions into a dizzying blur of motion, even with the undead chanting prayers into the room, I could see their eyes darting this way and that as they tried to form the final product in their minds.

Els and the other dwarves noticed it first. The two wheels attached to either side of a squat chassis, keeping it standing upright as the pieces kept falling into place to hide up to two-thirds of the wheels behind elongated fenders of the same silvery-blue metal.

"It's to fly!" Came his exclamation just as the vehicle hummed to life and poured a purple ambiance around the wheels.

But the pieces kept falling, making handlebars and foot pedals and storage compartments while I moved from front to end with paints and decals at the ready.

"It shall be called, the Moon Runner!" I declared as they marveled over the first anti-gravity bike in creation. But it was just one of many marvels being created at that very moment. One of many marvels that wouldn't make it to their respective owners for quite some time.

For the most part at least.

In workshops like this, to our front and rear, to either side, both above and below, and dozens more beyond them, more lattices of components, lubricants, coolants, and magical materials were cascading into each other under the divine guidance granted to me by the Piety Nave.

Using it, I could see something similar to Zakira's bike being brought into creation in the module above us. A long and squat, purple-glowing carriage of divine wood and the unnamed bluish-silver metal that came from mithral infused with moonlight.

In another, the various components were cascading into a 392-meter-long, nuclear crystal-powered submersible battleship called the Moonsliver. A monstrous beast compared to the 41-meter-long, hydrogen-powered fast attack ship, soon to be received by the Servant of the Moon and taken away shortly thereafter.

And in yet another module, hellfire-infused mithral plates were being formed into a pair of eccentric winged suits that weren't of my design. And many expedition trucks or vans, long-range planes, subsurface trains, and other fantastical vehicles formed still in others.

But one module, in particular, contained no screws or bolts or washers. Or few pieces of metal, for that matter. Only four: a pointed cap of death-infused mithral. A strange, twilight-infused mithral plate, engraved into the likeness of a certain raptor. And a pair of twilight-infused, talon-footed leg prosthetics.

The only other materials floating in the space was a hand-sized piece of unicorn bone, carved and stuffed with more marrow than necessary before being infused with Twilight. Two fat globules, one of dusky feathers and another of nightly quills, orbited a drow-made cloak off in another ambiguous corner of the module. And a beam of divine wood from Zorrenor's tree orbited around another beam cut from mine off in another.

More so, the entire module was bathed in twilight, creating an almost infinite expanse inside what was already a vast workstation.

And at the center of that realm, floated a dark-skinned shadow of a man with pointed ears and long, flowing locks. His clothes were shed, revealing a blacker than black mark sprawling across his chest- the light of dawn looming behind a great tree.

There was a solemn look on his face, for he knew that today would be his last day living as he always had.

He knew that he was no longer just a Doppelganger. But the dark twin of Amun. Made of shadowstuff and spirit still, but born anew as a result of the divine flowing within him.

He wasn't alive, per se. But he was the other side of the coin that was Amun. He was the god of Mana, Engineering, and most of all, Twilight.

But not Moonlight.

Only the one of true flesh and blood- only I held the power of all four domains.

But that mattered not for the Doppelganger-no-more. He was an engineer and an artificer too and thus could see the same sigils glowing before his eyes as I. He could trace them out with mana-bolstered fingers just as easily as I, and could mutter the arcane words just as fluently. He could use whatever amalgamation of Mana and Divine Wells he possessed to bring out the powers of the Material Purification Skill and watch the magic unfold alongside me.

And the end result was no less potent than mine.

Using everything in my Arcane Well of the Eighteenth Grade, I could purify up to eighteen tons of material, compared to the two tons Ed's Eighth Grade Ice Well afforded him. But my Doppelganger-no-more could refine just as many grams as I could.

The bone and marrow had been purified the day before and promptly infused with divine twilight. And the mithral the day prior to that, just before it was infused with the appropriate energies and formed into a pointed tip. The twilight-adamantine and feathers and quills were plucked and purified before that, even. Leaving the wood as the only target.

Like a sunbeam through a magnifying glass, the surrounding energies of the realm- both magical and divine- cascaded into the sigil and burst out the other side in the form of a dusty mist. Enshrouding the two meter-long beams in a veil that forced the various knots to unfurl and voids to fill and the grains straighten into the most beautiful patterns wood could ever create.

And then came the blur. For the Piety Nave worked on him too, here, in the divine realm of Eotrom.

Using the same power, I saw the drow-made cloak and the globules of dark fluff turn into a feathered robe that contained the power to make use of both sides of my heritage. The beams, on the other hand, were gnarled together to form a cane tipped with the mithral point and handled with the carved bone.

It was then that I appeared in the Metaphysical. As a visage of my true self. With all of my powers to boot, despite my incorporeal form. But after a quick pulse of purple energy, I was gone.

Meanwhile, the Doppelganger-no-more was busy slipping on his robe, allowing the innate powers of the dusky feathers and nightly plumes to turn his body into amorphous darkness. His form shrank to the size of a halfling as his arms pulled through the sleeves, forming barbed wings that stretched out wide.

With those fingered and barbed wings, he brought himself up to full size by slipping his mechanical talons legs over those stubby legs of darkness. Then donned his opalescent mask of dark shades and gilded highlights, and thus turned his astral eyes to see his gravity and death and twilight-infused cane floating before him expectantly.

Tentatively, he reached for it. Muttering words that would one day be written and retold in the Sanctuary for eons to come.

"The Light of Dawn brings a sense of peace to the same lands viewed as dreary in the Shade of Dusk." Taking his cane, he thrust it downward mightily, releasing a wave of horrid screams across the otherwise empty workshop.

"But neither shall stymie the Gloom that stalks the horizon, for The Owl flies through both Dusk and Dawn!

"Long may his feathers rain."