The Crafting (4)

After another short rest period Jien found himself with the mental fortitude to continue on with the crafting process. He knew that he would have some time before the plant would complete it's evolution based on the splicing but that did not mean that he wished to waste time. The Serpent Vine was digesting two plants worth of essence so it's slumber may last a full day if not more, but the further into its evolution it was the harder it would be to manipulate in the ways he needed.

He quickly thought of the crafting formation that he was going to be using based on the formations provided in the blacksmithing guide. The image became crystal clear in his mind as he began to use the same mana conducting ink he had in his previous practice sessions on a large piece of parchment. He was very careful with his movements, trying to match the curves of the shapes just so, paying close attention to how he drew out the required runes to ensure there would be no mistakes and keeping the placements of the objects he would be using as nodes in mind.

After finishing with the drawing of the of the forging formation Jien stood above the final product and concentrated on the drawing from the book. He kept the book's image at the forefront of his mind as he carefully examined his work to compare and contrast. In the end he found his work to be decent enough to not have to redraw the array. In some cases the shapes weren't perfect like in the book, usually because the lines were not without blemish. However, the runes were drown and spaced correctly and the connection points for the nodes were correct.

Luckily having rough lines would not be a huge detriment to the process as long as the shapes were close enough and the placement of the runes were accurate. Having seen that his prior practice sessions had paid off he walked over to the chest of crafting materials that Runa had gifted him. He opened it and quickly found a pouch with the title 'Airiey Agate' written on its tag.

Upon opening the pouch Jien saw a number of small stones that had layers of cloudy white striations. These agates were formed in areas where fierce wind storms would occur. Often times if a storm was strong enough the elements would begin to affect the surrounding Aether. If the effect would climb to a certain extent it would be possible for that influenced Aether to be blended into the surroundings. These cases were rare but not unheard of and often where they had occurred they would leave resources similar to ignis stone or these Airiey Agates. Over long spans of time these deposits would be found and mined like any other mineral.

The Airiey Agates were bound with wind influenced Aether, possibly caused by a powerful tornado or typhoon. They would be perfect for what Jien hoped to accomplish. His gifted rapier had two built in formations, one to use simple wind spells to accelerate or decelerate the blade and a simple air based paralytic poison formation. Jien hoped to attune his plant based crafting to the air characteristics of his current blade so that it would be able to survive when he would use the formations that the rapier was forged with.

Jien also gathered several pieces of the Allstone to use in his other formations but he did not place any of the nodes on the formation. First he would need to add the other formations of which he had chosen two. the first was a neutral version of what was used on the heating plate for alchemy. Instead of using it to turn up the heat he would use it to control the amount of lock down of the second formation. The second formation was a sealing formation that he had found in the guide for learning formations.

The sealing formation was used to lock down spaces and generally only had two settings, locked and unlocked. This was something that Jien felt was necessary as there was no way of knowing if he would be able to control the end result of this crafting experiment. His thought process was to seal the final product in a stable form and then unlock it when he needed it so that wouldn't possibly attack him or his allies in a way that he wouldn't be able to stop. The second formation after some experimentation was his solution to only 'unlock' the seal to a degree he felt comfortable with. This would assist in ensuring that his creation wouldn't be able to go berserk. He truly hoped that this would work as he had planned and tested, but he had never tested it on a plant that would attack like the Serpent Vine.

Jien drew the two arrays over the first, one at a time and paid close attention to how they overlapped. This was the hardest part of this version of crafting. One could draw the crafting formation easily enough and use it to mold the material as they wanted but if you wished to fold other formations into the crafting process you would need to draw your arrays on top of each other and ensure that the connections would not disrupt one another. If you made a mistake in this process on a large scale there could be many consequences but the lightest was likely for the formation to short circuit and cause an explosion. In such a case it would not be just one but all of the formations failing, leading to a larger disaster as a result.

Jien had spent a lot more time testing this process than he had working on general array drawing or formation blacksmithing. It took him another two hours of constant drawing with only short breaks to finish the final product. When he finally stood up and looked down at the large parchment in front of him he saw a work of art. It had several overlapping circles and squares, many evenly placed runes along the edges of the shapes, intersecting corners, all wrapped in a pair of large circles around the edge, filled with yet more runes that were at the 'corners' of each shape facing the outer edges.

He thought of the three necessary formations and like the rest of the knowledge that was recorded in his mindscape all three were drawn forward to his mind's eye. He compared and contrasted between the final result and the three in his mind for many long minutes, doing his best to meticulously search for failure points. At this stage if he made a mistake it wouldn't just be him to suffer, he could potentially bring a section of the manor to ruin.

One would wonder why he would complete such a process in a space like his room or the manor. The truth of the matter was that it was safest to do so in an area with as little interference as possible. If done outside a single leaf blowing into the process while mana fueled an array could cause disaster. He chose his room because if worse came to worse he had the possibility to try and funnel the destruction out of the manor through his window or the wall to the outside. If he did so in a cellar or underground area he could potentially cave in the area above him and lead to even more danger.

He examined the final product once more with a critical eye before finding it to be acceptable. He then placed the nodes on the array, giving a sigh of relief as he looked at the hibernating Serpent Vine and the finished formation. Now was probably the easiest portion if one didn't include the potential of blowing himself and those around him into tiny pieces.