Aethernea : Soulbound [Book 1]

Episode 135 - Replicating

Previously:

It's Friday, the last day of Muni entrance exams. It is time for the last exam of the day – Special exam. Kiel and Elaru make their way towards Sapphire Quarters where there special exams will take place. Elaru is confronted by three old geezers who are acting high and mighty. While Kiel shot himself in the foot – as it turns out, the Spell Replicating exam was not designed to test Kiel's spell replicating ability, but rather, to test for a special talent that can only be revealed through the process of spell replicating. Kiel is given a cog artifact whose enchantment he has to replicate onto other cogs.

Episode 135 – Replicating

"You may begin whenever you are ready." Just as the grandma's words fell, the youngest looking man of the trio, appearing to be in his fifties, pressed the button on the stopwatch he was holding.

The clicking noise of the button made Kiel's heart skip a beat. However, he was able to quickly regain his calm and return his full concentration on the enchanted artifact before him.

He tried to remember everything on it so he could replicate it to the best of his abilities. The pressure of the ticking clock making his entire being reach peak performance.

Soon enough, Kiel approached the second cog, the first one of the eight that weren't enchanted. As soon as his mana touched the cog, he heard the click of a button press again, followed by the sounds of pen writing on paper. (The middle-aged man was writing down the previously measured time.)

Kiel didn't let that disturb him and continued imbuing the cog with his mana until there was enough of it to weave the spell. Since the enchantment was mystified he didn't know which parts of the spell pattern were critical to the function of the spell and which weren't, so Kiel did his best to recreate the shape of the spell as he saw it, keeping the deviations to a minimum.

After a while of weaving, a magic pulse spread out, signaling the successful activation of the spell. What followed was another click of the stopwatch button and some more scribbling noises.

As soon as the spell was activated, Kiel released it from his control, turning it from an extension of himself to a foreign entity, a self-sustained spell, an enchantment. Once the mage released control of a spell, they could no longer regain it. The released spell would remain in the state it was in when the control was released.

Although the creator could no longer dispel or control such a released spell in any way, the spell would still need to be powered by the mana of its creator. Luckily, the enchantment could absorb such mana by itself when needed, as long as it existed in the vicinity of the spell. This allowed enchanters to recharge their enchantments when the mana they had initially imbued them with started running out.

Enchanters could personally re-imbue their mana, or they could just place a mana crystal filled with their mana in the vicinity of the enchantment.

Of course, there were also other, supplementary, ways to power enchantments, such as including a light absorbing spell fragment into the enchantment to power it through light or include a devouring spell fragment to feed on free mana.

Since Kiel didn't know what method of powering the enchantment used due to it being mystified, and he didn't want to waste time trying to figure it out, he ensured that he left a similar amount of mana inside his cogwheel as was left in the original magical artifact, before moving to the next cog.

Kiel kept repeating the same process of the enchanting on the following cogs, trying to weave each one more efficiently than the previous.

Each time he started or finished enchanting a new artifact, the middle-aged man would click his stopwatch and write down the measured time.