Blood Shaper - Book 4: Chapter 35

“This feels wrong,” Kay muttered as he stared at the bracelet he’d received as loot from the Many Trial Rooms dungeon. The bracelet had an enchantment that let it change its appearance to match the colors around it, and Kay was still working on transferring that magic using his Blood Melder Class.

Eleniah glanced up from her papers, frowning. “Training your Skills-“

“I know.” Kay tossed the bracelet onto the table and threw his feet up next to it. “In my head, I understand that I’m one of our strongest fighters and that I can directly contribute to our preparations by training. But we’ve got people building massive walls, training with new weapons, planning out evacuation routes for the villages, and so many other things that feel more important than me sitting in a study room mucking around with magical junk from a dungeon.” He sighed and waved at the pile of broken loot on the other side of the table. “It doesn’t help that I’m not getting anywhere either.”

Eleniah absentmindedly flipped through the papers before setting them down. “Alright, walk me through it, and we can see if I know anything that could be helpful.”

“You still have papers to finish grading. I’ll keep muddling through until I find an answer.”

“I can finish grading those later; I don’t need to give them back to anyone for a few weeks.” She dismissed the papers with a wave, “Now start from the beginning. What are you trying to do, and how are you trying to do it?”

“Okay. Meld Blood lets me take preexisting magical objects and fuse them with blood to change their effects or potentially create a magical item using a non-magical item and a lot of blood and mana, but that’s a lot harder to do. I’m trying to take an enchanted item and instead of overwriting its magic with something blood related or twisting it into something thats more blood related, I want to take the magic into the blood, and basically disenchant it, while keeping the enchantment. I have this faint feeling that I should be able to make it work, which I’m chalking up to my title-provided instincts, but I haven’t succeeded at it yet.”

Kay grabbed a random item from his pile of functionally useless dungeon loot and pulled some blood from in his veins to pool in his palm. “If I take this metal ball that can create a small field that repels crustaceans from it and use Meld Blood on it,” He dropped it into the tiny pool, and crimson tendrils began dragging it deeper, “It becomes…” he waited for the process to finish then Identified it to see what the new effect was, “A metal ball that creates a field that draws the blood of crustaceans out of their bodies and adheres to the surface of the ball.” He picked it up and looked at it, “Do crustaceans have blood?”

“Yes, they do.”

“Do you need to take the blood out before cooking them?”

“No.”

“Then this is still useless.” He tossed it into the “junk results” pile.

“It’s not what you’re working on right now, but I’m curious.” Eleniah fished the ball out of the pile and inspected it closely, “Have you tried directing what the magic becomes when you meld it?”

“I have, yeah. It works, maybe, I’d say, half the time. I think I’ve got the methodology of that down mostly; it’s just directing the magic to a certain idea. My current theory is that what I’m trying to achieve isn’t possible on the ones that end up as something different than what I want. Like the ball, I didn’t really put any real thought into it; I just let the Skill work, but if I had focused on making it become something, I couldn’t make it anything too different from what it started as. It’d still make a magical field of some kind, and it would probably still be related to crustaceans. I couldn’t make it float in the sky and chase birds or whatever. I’m pretty sure I just don’t understand the limits of the enchantment on many of the items I mess with, so I can’t tell when what I’m trying to do is too much.”

“Huh.” She turned the ball back and forth between her finger and her thumb as she looked it over for a few more seconds. “Maybe we should get you some lessons with an enchanter or someone with a similar Class at some point. But we’ve digressed. Show me an attempt at what you’re trying to do.”

Kay grabbed a wooden amulet that made food taste slightly less salty and surrounded it with more blood. He concentrated directly on Meld Blood, focusing on drawing out the magic into the blood instead of infusing the blood into the magic. He could feel metaphorical tendrils of his will grab onto the core of the magic and begin to tug on it, trying to free the enchantment from the physical object. Aiming to both pull it free and subsume it into the blood, he had the tendrils begin tugging harder. He could feel the magic begin to slip and gave it one more hard pull.

The floating mass of blood bulged outward, and bubbles popped around the surface of it alongside a brief flash from inside. Kay could feel the magic surge out into the blood as the item inside broke, but within seconds, it lost all stability and dissolved into loose mana. Sighing, he pulled back the blood to reveal the shattered amulet, explaining what had happened to Eleniah.

She took a close look at it before having Kay explain himself again in greater detail, focusing step by step on his process. After he’d finished the second round, she watched him closely. “… You do know that enchantments are built into the item they’re a part of, and if you just tug the magic out, it’s going to do exactly what’s been happening to you, right? I feel like that’s something we’ve discussed before.”

“No, I understand that.” He tossed the broken pieces of the amulet into the trash, “But I don’t care about the physical item; I just want the magic and its effect; the amulet or whatever isn’t important.”

“I don’t just mean the item will break without the magic; I mean the magic’s going to be useless without the item; both of them are supporting each other from what I understand of enchanting. These aren’t just spells jammed into objects; they’re carefully calibrated pieces of magic layered into a piece of physical matter.” She grabbed a wand from the pile, “This wand holds the structure of the magic in place through its own physical structure; it’s why enchanting an item makes it significantly more difficult to break; both halves of the enchanted item reinforce the structure of each other. By dragging the magic out of the item, you break both of them.”

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Kay glared at the wand in frustration. “Then how do I make this work? My Class Line Progenitor instincts say this is possible, so what approach do I try since you’ve shut this one down entirely.”

“First of all, I encourage persistence. Second of all,” She slugged him in the shoulder, “Don’t blame me! Blame reality.”

He huffed at her and gave a little smile. “Fine. Seriously though, what should I try.”

“I don’t know, try experimenting.” Eleniah tossed the wand back in the pile and walked back to her papers, “But try and use more imagery and concepts related to blood while you experiment. Your Skill is Meld Blood. You’re always going to have an end result that involves blood, and you should use more blood imagery when you use it; it’ll make things easier.”

Kay set down the item he was grabbing and turned to face her, “What do you mean?

“The thought process you use and how you imagine what’s happening. You were talking about how you made little tendrils of magic and pulled on the enchantment; anyone with a Skill that used magic and liquid could do that, like Meld Water or even Meld Honey. Focus on imagery that has to do with blood specifically.” Eleniah saw the intrigued expression he was making and kept talking. “Magic is as much about concepts and associations as it is the physicality of whatever substance you’re interacting with. Actually, at lower tiers, that’s the difference between a manipulator and a mage. A Fire Manipulator can grab fire and move it around with magic. Fire Mages can use spells that shoot fire, but they can also cast spells that warm up a room or burn away an infection in a body. Until you get to around tier-four, manipulators are essentially all the direct physical nature of their element, while mages are mostly concepts, although they aren’t quite as skewed as far that way compared to manipulators. At higher tiers, things can start to blend a bit. Meld Blood is a Skill that is as much about the concepts of blood as it is about actual material blood; that’s why all of your creations have blood-related effects. Focus on the concepts of blood, the ideas of blood, the…” She waved her hand around in a circle, “The mysticality of it. If I keep using fire as an example, the fire burns, it destroys, it creates light and warmth, but it’s also the fire in your heart when you feel strong emotions or how we say that there’s a fire in someone’s eyes when they’re angry. Try to use imagery and ideas and concepts that resonate with blood both physically, but magically as well.”

Kay watched her go back to reading the papers she was grading while his mind worked through the ideas she’d just dumped on him. He’d already been doing that, to an extent, when he created the Skill gems out of people’s blood. He’d drawn on the connection between a person and their blood to link it to them, then drew on that connection even further to connect them to their own Skills. Hell, there was probably a Skill or spell that could track people through their blood, because of that same connection or concept of a connection.

Kay grabbed a random item from the pile and wrapped it in blood, sending his mana shooting into it with Meld Blood. This time, he didn’t try and take the magic since Eleniah had educated him on what a waste of time that was and instead focused on ideas, bloody ideas.

Connections, sure, I want to connect the magic to the blood. But distilling it down to concepts, why do I think of blood being related to connections. There’s the fact that blood is literally part of someone, and it is something that has your DNA in it, but that’s not all of it. Someone “is blood” if they’re family, so that’s a kind of connection there, lineage and “sharing blood”. People tried to bind themselves to one another with blood oaths and became blood brothers by literally sharing each other’s blood.

Working with those concepts of connection and kin, Kay could feel the magic in the item resonate with the blood he was covering it with. It felt a bit like two hearts beating in rhythm with each other. But nothing else was happening.

Okay, connection established, that’s so much closer than I’ve gotten before, but what’s next? How do I get more of the magic? I don’t want to break it again; I just… want a copy of it? So, how does blood relate to copying? There’s family again, giving birth and making new members of your family. But that’s not really copying; it’s making something new. How does one thing become two? Oh! Mitosis is when cells split and become two basically identical things from one original thing. Blood cells don’t do that, but this is magic; I can make a blood cell act like a stem cell, right?

“Oh!” Kay gasped out loud as he thought of an even better idea. “I can make the enchanted item be like the bone marrow, constantly producing identical blood cells, but magic instead. I just…”

Kay’s will-infused blood began to calmly churn around the item, making ripples and currents as it flowed around the enchanted object. Kay projected the image as the item as bone marrow, creating identical objects based on a built-in template. Bit by bit, as he concentrated, he could feel mana begin to drain from him into the blood that surrounded the item, pooling around it. After a few moments of intense concentration, the mana coagulated into a structure and broke off from the item, floating freely in the blood.

“Holy shit, it worked!” Kay cried out. “Oh crap, it doesn’t feel like it’s going to be stable forever. Hand me something to enchant real quick!”

Eleniah dashed over and slapped something into his hand. He thrust it into the floating blood and willed the magic to coalesce and connect to whatever she’d given him. He tried to use a concept he had some familiarity with, a blood transfusion, where blood from one person became part of someone else. There were fits and starts as he slowly merged them together, but it eventually smoothed out, and the magic became part of the second item.

Grinning widely, Kay pulled the blood back into himself and helped up the newly enchanted item. “…A pen?”

“It was the only thing I had that was close.” She leaned in to look at it. “What does it do?”

“You have Identify.”

“Sure, but it’s your first success at something you’ve been working hard at, you can find out first and show off.”

“Oh, thank you.” He used Identify, and his triumphant grin became mixed with a little bit of mischief. “Your pen can now…” He clicked the button on the retractable pen that was similar to older style pens back on Earth and sent some mana through it to activate the enchantment, “Make blood bubbles!” Little red bubbles began forming at the tip of the pen and floating into the room, pooping as they ran into various objects.

“That’s…”

“Practically useless! But I was testing with worthless items for a reason; I don’t want to break this baby before I can get it all working properly.” He snatched up the bracelet from where he’d set it down and tossed it into his Inventory Skill’s spatial storage. Grabbing the original item from where it’d fallen, he checked to see if it was still working. The object he’d grabbed at random turned out to be a toy top that blew bubbles when you spun it, and it still worked just fine. “Alright, now I keep testing until I can modify its functions when I copy it, and then I’ll start working on other items. I bet I can even get that level. I need to get Blood Melder back if I work at this enough!”