Despite my eagerness to continue working on my primary Endbringer project, there was nothing I could really do until the Protectorate responded to my proposal. While it was annoying that they were taking so long, I at least partially understood the reason why. By and large, parahuman powers were tricky things, and much more often than not, something incredibly powerful usually came with a cost.
Several examples of power gifting trumps sat in the bird cage, as their power turned crazy, or could be used to master the people on whom it was used. Even tinkers were limited, unable to keep up with maintenance when their equipment was handed out en masse, resulting in catastrophic failures. After all, the local constituents of the PRT and Protectorate had plenty of examples of my equipment being safe and without side effects, intended or not, the rest of the country was less focused. It would be unfortunately easy to pass off the city as a well-kept bomb, waiting to go off when whatever shoe was hanging finally dropped.
All I could do was wait and be patient. I would give the powers that be a bit more time to make up their minds and come to a conclusion, before eventually, when time started to get short, before beginning to work on the project by myself. This was too important to let myself be limited by nervous government folks, corruption, and bureaucracy.
Still, I did not sit idly around twiddling my thumbs. There were other things I could do, interim projects that I wanted to work on, as well as things I needed to prepare for. I had a specific concept in mind for my next cycle of points, something that was likely to be a massive investment spanning multiple cycles. To help that along, I spent most of my time designing and working on spells and other concepts, buying various interesting things using the Slaughterhouse Nine bounty money, trying to be prepared as I possibly could.
Part of me was operating under the presumption that I would get another level of alchemy, as well as the idea that it would further upgrade my conversion arrays and infusion abilities. To that end, I gathered a huge amount of metal, stacking it away to be converted into whatever I needed to upgrade anything that I wanted, as well as to dive into my topic.
In a fit of disgust at the massive stack of solid rusty steel piled up nearly fifteen meters tall, I ended up digging a large pit and then reinforcing it by growing an Iron Oak around it. The roots dug into the surrounding earth, plating the walls in thick wood while the floor was made of stone. The whole thing was capped with a towering tree that could be shifted with simple druidcraft, allowing me to reach inside and pull out what metal I needed.
It was absolutely overkill, but it kept me busy as the cycle wound down, which was always a good thing.
Eventually, as the cycle was about to restart, I settled in at the forest compound, sitting at the campfire, watching the flames. Olivia had gone to bed already, while I stayed up, waiting for my charges to refill, praying that my idea would work. Eventually, midnight rolled around, and I could feel the cycle flip. As usual, I did my best to patiently wait until the bonus subject was revealed, breathing a sigh of relief when the third level alchemy began to flow into my head. By the time it was done, I had to force myself not to cheer out loud and risk waking up Olivia.
Once again, Alchemy had proven to be an incredibly potent and useful subject for the direction I had gone in with my magic. Not only did I learn ways to significantly improve all of the metal conversion arrays I had created, but I also learned how to create an entirely new metal, orichalcum.
Orichalcum was a copper-gold like metal that, while durable, was not much stronger than high-quality steel. What it was, however, was incredibly magically conductive. It took enchantments and rituals in like a sponge, able to hold a massive amount of magic before being eventually overloaded. The closest equivalent I had to it now was potentially a blend of infused gold and silver, which was infused electrum. Orichalcum blew that out of the water.
The downside to its conductivity was that stacking dozens of enchantments or rituals on it was impossible, as the conductivity would cause new forms of magic to simply wash away previous layers. The creation process was… not precisely what I would call easy, but the metal's properties were powerful enough to make it well worth the time, effort, and resources. It was an incredibly potent tool added to my arsenal, and would allow me to create powerful, if not a tad simple, creations.
The fact that I had just received an upgrade to my material production, as well as a whole new material to work with, settled what my next move would be. The concept had been bouncing around in the back of my mind for a while, but I had never acted on it because I was concerned I didn't have the knowledge or resources to put it into practice. Now, with three levels of alchemy, a decent understanding of spell creation and rituals, I felt like it was time to give it a shot.
I spent a moment visualizing the idea of a unifying subject. A way to work everything I knew and would know, both through the Marvelous Mage system and learned through my own work. A way to build bigger,m better, more constructs.
It took a bit of work to get my thoughts lined up in the way that I wanted, but when I did, I crossed my fingers and pushed the charge down. Like a miracle, the charge gleefully sank into a new subject.
Grand workings design and crafting.
As I reviewed the subject in my mind, I was both incredibly excited and incredibly daunted by what I saw. On one hand, it was exactly what I had wanted. Grand workings were works of magical construction that ranged from massive buildings to smaller, more portable equipment. They were incredibly complicated or massively powerful, and frequently they were both, but what they could do was just about unlimited.
The general concept, which I now knew from the charge investment, was to take smaller concepts like enchanting, rituals, spells, and more, and work them in together, using them as building blocks to create intensely powerful creations. Unfortunately, even as I slid in the following two charges, unlocking the second level, what I was receiving for information was even less than I got from the annihilation magic subject. Grand workings design and crafting was a charge hog, and as I threw three more points into the subject, I couldn't help but wince as I barely got into the actual practical knowledge.
On the plus side, as the subject was pushing into the actual usable portion, finally past the theoretical portion, I could feel it branch off to literally every other subject I had unlocked. It was a spider web of connections that left the previously most connected subject, magical mass production, in the dust. Interestingly enough, it was most heavily linked to magical mass production, as the two seemed to have an outstanding level of synergy.
With my last three points, the reward gained from killing the Slaughterhouse Nine, I upgraded enchantment design and crafting to the second level, leaving me one point to spare and save for next cycle.
I let out a long breath when I was finally done, opening my eyes for the first time in what felt like hours, but was likely closer to fifteen or twenty minutes.
"How did it go?" Alya asked, floating semi-corporeally beside me.
"Pretty damn well," I said with a nod. "I got a third level of alchemy for the mystery unlock, and my concept for combining everything together fixed onto something easily. A subject called grand workings. It's almost perfect for what I need...
"But?" she added after I trailed off.
"But, it's going to be a while until I'm done putting charges into it," I finished, shaking my head. "I dumped all six normal charges into it, and the results prove I'm on the right track, but I'm only just getting to the meat of the subject. Plus, I'm going to need to invest in other types of magic if I want to really create powerful things. Grand workings is all about weaving everything together. The more subjects I have a good grasp on, the more I will be able to weave together, which will make the things I create even more powerful."
And it was gonna grow fast. Even with just the second layer of enchantment, I was already seeing a significant improvement in what I could conceivably work with. Technically, by the definitions of a grand working, both my flight suit and my annihilation gun could be considered grand workings, but at best, they would be regarded as less than proto workings. While they were certainly complex and drew on a variety of magical concepts, they didn't have the depth or breadth to be considered complete works. In order to make something actually grand, the scale had to be significantly larger, and with significantly more… more.
To be honest, it wasn't exactly a clear-cut edge, more just a general vibe of impressiveness.
"Okay, first step is to upgrade the Alchemy station. Yes, if I get another upgrade to alchemy, I will have to do it all over again in two weeks, but in the meantime, I need to take advantage of the new conversion ratios. Once I have that… I'm going to attempt to make my first grand working."
Alya nodded, and we made our way to the alchemy platform. There was no reason to touch the infusion array that took up most of the platform's center, as my design was already non-standard and used a sacrificial method, consuming material to purify and amplify the remaining stock. This design was inspired by the magical mass product subject and was both quick to use and required very little mana to initiate. The standard method took a lot more mana, and if I had used that, I would have likely had a significant upgrade to apply.
The conversion tables, the more than two dozen arrays lined around the work surfaces that surrounded the platform, however, did need an update. Luckily, rather than deconstructing them completely, I would only need to modify a dozen or so parts of the previous design, while adding a whole new circle around each existing array. These, I was rebuilding line by line from the information I had downloaded to my head, though building a permanent array would have been considered a bit advanced for what I previously had, but once again, magical mass production pushed me along.
Even with the use of magic to manipulate the metal, carve the stone, and prepare the surfaces, it still took around four hours to update the permanent conversion arrays. When I was done, I ran a few tests and was happy to find a significant increase in efficiency. At this point, it was finally crossing into generally applicable territory, whereas before it had only been worth the effort because I had access to a gigantic supply of scrap. From what I could tell, it was somewhere around forty to forty-five percent efficiency, a sizable upgrade from previous levels.
This new level of efficiency would very much come in handy as I attempted to make my first grand work.
I made my way to my supply trees, grabbed my notepads, pencils, calculator, rulers, and just about everything else I would need, and set them down at a table by the fire. Once everything was ready, I took a minute to clear my head and have a snack, knowing this would likely take some time. The moon was still up when I finally settled in and got to work, planning out my first design, a pertinent concept that would hopefully make further creations significantly easier in the future.
Now, the first thing to understand about grand workings was that it wasn't a singular, connected subject. There wasn't a grand working magic, and it wasn't like enchantment or rituals. Instead, it was much more similar to magical mass production or quick casting, in that it was a conglomeration of knowledge, methods, hints, tricks, and more that helped tie things together, working multiple magical concepts into one, massive, powerful construct. That's why it tied in to every subject I had unlocked, as you could make a grand working focusing on anything, from druidcraft to lightning spells and geomancy.
It was kind of like the mundane concept of engineering. To build something truly impressive, you needed to know how to connect the understanding of a wide variety of subjects. Grand workings design and crafting worked in the same way. It pulled together a wide spread of knowledge, and the wider the spread, the more you could build.
That's why it was such an unbelievable charge-hungry subject. It was a subject that encompassed everything I knew, tying it all together to create flying ships, floating cities, weather machines, grand portals, sentient golems, all of that and more. The only limitations were what you knew and the depth of your knowledge.
Now, at the moment, I had four major crafting methods on my hands: enchanting, spellcrafting, spirit totem magic, and rituals. Normally, this would not be nearly enough to create a proper grand working, as my knowledge needed more building blocks to work with.
Essentially, more subjects meant more places I could ply one type of magic against another, creating powerful interconnections, almost like gear ratios increasing speed when going from a large gear to a smaller one. Without enough subjects, I would be exceedingly restricted. It was kind of like trying to build a home with only nails and wood. Sure, you could create some of a house with just nails and wood, but what about Windows? Doors? Siding? Foundations? All of these things worked together to make a functional house, so just having two or three of them wouldn't really cut it.
Thankfully, I had a different source of understanding when it came to creating methods. Buried in some of my subjects, like druidcraft, annihilation magic, and even Alchemy, were little tidbits of crafting. Things that I generally didn't touch for one reason or another, most because the concepts I did have access to were enough, so why dabble in other ways. For example, there was a bit of thread and weave magic from arcane focus crafting, and I skipped over a whole breadth of concepts from druidcraft.
With the alchemy, my newly acquired metal orichalcum required a specific forging process, which included celestial enchantment, specifically interactions with the sun, as well as resonance manipulation. By using those, a few other bits, enchantment, and rituals, I was hoping I could skip the low-level orichalcum creation process and move right to making an orichalcum forge capable of creating the metal on demand, rather than completing a lengthy process. I just had to put together all the pieces first, like a 3D puzzle, where each piece had a personality and needed to be treated appropriately.
If I managed to do so, I would significantly increase the amount I could use in my future creations, unlocking even greater possibilities when creating grand workings. The usual way of creating orichalcum required waiting for sunny days, a few different rituals ritual, a specifically enchanted resonance chamber built into a forge, and several other equally complicated steps
My hope was that with the right design concepts, working what I had together and pushing hard on my grand working levels, I would be able to put together a way to skip all those steps and simply input materials, then receive orichalcum return.
The task was a bit daunting, but if I succeeded, it would absolutely count as a grand working. I was pretty sure I could handle it, as magical mass production, grand workings, and alchemy were all sort of working together to push the idea forward.
Still, it would not be an easy design, and I resigned myself to working on it, both the design and the actual project for at least the day.