Chapter 28: Genius Craftsmanship

Page (1/3)

Before Melina went upstairs to craft the sigil, she left her armaments in the hall.

Miss Li would be coming by later that day to perform their maintenance.

The maintenance work was fairly complicated and involved very expensive equipment, so home visits were an essential skill for any artisan.

When Miss Li arrived, Sonia welcomed her inside. The two were old acquaintances, close enough to exchange hellishly tasteless jokes about their places of birth and banshee species—jokes that sounded as though they might get them sued for racial discrimination. They became somewhat more restrained only after seeing Maria.

After exchanging a few perfunctory pleasantries with the two of them, Li threw herself at the table and eagerly began maintaining the armaments.

She was a magic-factor practitioner of the Artificer Principle. The Artificer—the benevolent Great Mother and Creator—represented every time a craftsman tempered a blade, polished crystal with coarse sandpaper, or played the maternal role in technological craftsmanship. Maintaining equipment was also a form of cultivation for those who followed the Artificer Principle.

Li Carly Austin was like a moth drawn to flame, greedily absorbing wisdom and knowledge from the Flintlock Maiden Alpha-type muskets. She lavished praise on the control terminals made from Tarei crystal ore, repeatedly asking, “Whose stroke of genius was this?”

Every time she asked, Sonia would glance at Maria, who would shake her head, her face flushing crimson.

The blueprints were not Maria’s creation. She was not the sort of person who would brazenly use someone else’s designs and claim to have invented them, and neither was Sonia.

Only Sonia knew where the blueprints had come from.

They had come from the future Melina.

…

In Sonia’s view, a person’s strength should not be measured solely in terms of power—though, of course, if someone was powerful enough to be omniscient and omnipotent, then they were simply awesome.

Why choose Melina as the first freely selected SSR? Was it because she could have…?

That was merely the emotional consideration. Rationally speaking, Little Melina was more useful than the overwhelming majority of SSRs: the strongest in scholarship among those who specialized in force, and the most scholarly among those who specialized in force.

Little Melina had managed to rise again, despite her disabilities, through sheer intelligence and perseverance. She had overcome the Tarei crystal infection that had nearly destroyed her life, then drawn inspiration from it to create the control core that allowed her to become an explorer. Of course, the price was that her temper had become terrible, her aggression had reached its limit, and her entire body was shrouded in the ominous magic factors of the Madman.

After actually getting to know her, Sonia had come away with more than the thought that “Little Melina is wonderful.” She had also concluded that “this woman is genuinely a tremendous nuisance.”

Still, Sonia firmly believed that even the most troublesome woman was far better than that cold-blooded madwoman from her previous life!

She looked at Maria yet again.

Could Maria’s system contain things like affection elixirs or affection potions? Otherwise, how had the Little Melina who was a hundred times more insane than she was now been made to raise a trophy by the other woman…? A championship trophy, not that cup! In the first cycle, Little Melina’s chest had even atrophied after that severe injury… though it was still a little larger than Mayor Georgia’s daughter’s.

But the future could be changed. Sonia believed that.

Little Melina had already changed class into Mami Tomoe. She was no longer the fervent, undying will of Ionia. Even the Madman magic she used most often might be altered by her.

Sonia shook her head and concentrated on her notes.

Page (2/3)

“Next, I need to focus on the Sea-Eroding Dragon. After the Sea-Eroding Dragon comes… then the Great Golden One… and finally…”

Her memory was somewhat hazy. She cursed under her breath and drew several circles in her notebook with her pen.

A reincarnator’s memories grew blurry. Memories of the past were like dreams glimpsed in sleep and forgotten upon waking, fading away with astonishing speed. She had no choice but to record everything in a notebook. Unfortunately, she did not possess the ability of those protagonists in historical fiction who could remember, with perfect clarity, what had happened on this exact day eighteen years earlier.

…

Melina cleared the desktop with magic. It was incredibly convenient. As she watched invisible hands tidy the table, she covered her mouth and laughed.

Lazy people promoted the development of technology, and they promoted the development of magic as well. She could not imagine what she would do if, one day, she could no longer use magic even to this extent.

“Perhaps I should make a controller that automatically organizes magic factors?”

The instant the thought arose, her mind rapidly constructed a rough blueprint. For many years, Melina had been accustomed to thinking this way. Whenever inspiration struck, she recorded it immediately, without worrying about anything else. Thanks to this habit, even when she suddenly had to change the type of magic she primarily used, or obtained a precious magical material, she would not be left completely at a loss over how to use it.

Black Dragon genetic magic factors: one of the noble forms of genetic magic factors.

They were called noble because “this magic factor can produce magic factors.” That was the crucial reason it could set a person upon the path of the dragons, and also why it could be used to create expensive magical sigils.

In this world, magic was the art of engraving a Principle onto an object.

One prepared a base for the sigil, readied its magic factors, attuned it so that the sigil would remember the magic, and finally used a spell-carving knife to inscribe a magic-factor circuit into it. Once magic factors were injected, the sigil would operate along its inherent path and release the spell.

That was magic.

Outstanding explorers carried specially prepared belts of magical sigils, with a row of sigil cards inserted into them. Cards were a very common medium. When a spell was needed, one merely tapped the appropriate card lightly with a hand and released it.

Banshee explorers were more powerful. They could use magic factors to trigger magic factors—in other words, their equipment could activate itself directly. Melina possessed quite a few such sigils. She also possessed the so-called trait of a “powerful banshee”: the ability to engrave simple spells into the air and trigger them as one-use sigils. In essence, it was a matter of skill and experience.

The more powerful the sigil, the more powerful the factors it required.

Noble genetic magic factors could produce sigils whose power, for a brief period, rivaled that of high-grade armaments. That was precisely the sort of sigil Melina needed to create.

A sigil of the Stellar Principle.

The Stellar Principle was one Melina did not often use, and the gentlest and kindest of the Seven Principles. It represented Vigilance and Enlightenment. Whenever one gazed into the night sky and saw the moon’s madness covered by starlight, that was its Vigilance. Whenever one meditated beneath the stars and inspiration quietly flowed into the mind, that was its Enlightenment.

Taken literally, it seemed like a Principle inclined toward scholarship.

But that was not the correct interpretation.

The literal meanings of all the Principles were more or less similar, and all of them sounded rather scholarly. The magic of the Stellar Principle could be summed up in one word:

Hard.

When confronted by a Red Dragon’s dragon carriage, anyone who mastered the Stellar Principle’s advanced magic could meet it head-on and bring it to a halt.

When faced with a mighty breath attack, anyone who mastered the Stellar Principle’s advanced magic could resist the dragon’s breath and force it back.

“Send it back into your lungs!”

Page (3/3)

The magical sigil Melina chose to engrave was the Stellar Principle’s sixth-level spell, Radiant Alchemy of the Morning Star.

It was a complex, high-order spell that even Melina could not cast using low-level magic factors. Without an imprint, it was harder to use than ascending to heaven. That was also why it had become the signature high-order spell of the Stellar Principle, and why so many people who possessed the ability chose to copy it. Even with the drawback that, after copying it, one had to equip a magic-factor storage device that interfered with one’s movements, most high-level explorers would still choose it.

Radiant Alchemy of the Morning Star had the following effect: it swallowed and annihilated a single incoming draconic spell or dragon’s breath, transforming it into special dragon’s breath or draconic magic factors. Then, through a single action treated as an alchemical act, it converted the result into magical candy containing special beneficial effects.

First, its targets were dragon’s breath and draconic magic. That alone was absurdly powerful. Even the solar-beam spell used by powerful Red Dragons—mockingly known as World-Shattering—could be swallowed and annihilated by this magic. The swallowing and annihilation effect prevented nearly every spell from activating its secondary condition, namely, “when this spell is destroyed or blocked.” In other words, it essentially ignored all subsequent effects of draconic magic.

The conversion of factors needed no further explanation.

Any spell that could convert factors during combat was a good spell.

Its property of being treated as an alchemical act was even more terrifying. Many banshees possessed magic-factor traits that granted them massive bonuses after completing alchemy. With this property, one could trigger both the active and passive abilities of the alchemical school during battle.

The final pharmaceutical stage was even more broken. The dragon’s breath of a dragon like the Redfeather Dragon they had encountered before could even be transformed into an enormous area-wide healing effect. And that was merely one of the weaker dragons among the Red Dragon species!

This magic could be regarded as an almost perfect countermeasure spell.

Melina was creating it because she was worried about the possibility of fighting large numbers of dragons in the future. If Senior Sister really became a “senior sister,” then dragon breath would be utterly unreasonable… Attacks she herself could avoid with ease might strike Senior Sister and the others effortlessly. Therefore, crafting a countermeasure card capable of saving their lives and keeping it on herself—since she possessed the ability to cast spells over long distances—would provide complete insurance.

For all its advantages, the spell had only two unacceptable flaws.

First, it required a minimum material cost of nearly eight thousand to fourteen thousand gold lei.

Second, it was extraordinarily difficult to make.

For Melina, however, the second flaw did not count as a flaw. And the most expensive material, the genetic factor, had been obtained as a lucky drop directly—

Damn it, Sonia! How did that dog keep getting such absurd drops?

Melina grew irritated just thinking about it.

But she was not the sort of player whose performance fell apart whenever she became angry. Even with her face flushed bright red, she could still butcher this difficult alchemical process with ease. She would not end up making a blind Lucian dash into a bush.

A little patience, a little skill, and talent of the highest purity.

Done.

Radiant Alchemy of the Morning Star.

She then embedded the sigil into her beloved little parasol.

The work was complete.