Vivi missed runesmithing. She’d been away from her crochet hook for weeks now. Not quite as long of a break as she had when she got stuck in the blight, but she still craved to get back to her old routine of smashing her head against four-runed attempts until she slowly got closer to a successful attempt.

Shame, that she wasn’t even creating a sword today. This could very well end up being the weirdest project she’d made so far.

Many of the spirits, including Drean, watched curiously from the distance, far enough that they wouldn’t bother her. Cael had gone back to sand down more emberstones for more crucibles, since Vivi mentioned she’d need to break a crucible every time she created a projectile, and there was a good chance they’d need multiple.

She still didn’t get what that idiot meant by calling her cute…

She sighed and thought, I think we can fit at least five ether roots in this thing. The design is really simple.

“What are we making?” Lucius asked, while watching her shape the iron root.

A ball.

“A ball?”

Exactly that, Vivi thought. A large runic ball.

She separated the stalk of the iron root into eight smaller pieces, expanding all around the ball. Since she wasn’t creating a flat sword, but a ball, she had much more space to work with in all directions. The stalks bulged slightly outward before closing in again. Their tips met at the top, cauterizing. She essentially created four sharp-ended ovals. It looked similar to a baking whisker Grandpa had used at home. Hers was just symmetrical with a sharper tip.

Shaping the veins was simple enough. The hurdles came from the process surrounding vein-shaping. Vivi intended to add five runes into her contraption. That meant that the handle part that stuck out of the ball had to fit five ether roots. Carving that was a pain.

After that, Vivi had to find another ether root. One option was to relocate her whole setup to another ether root that stuck from the ground. She found that to be needlessly complicated. Instead, she cut the first ether root off of the mountain, and inserted a new one in, sticking it in place with clay.

That worked well enough. She shaped the remaining four ether roots—all with the same strategy. She separated the root into eight, except she made the ovals of each successive ether layer wider than the last. She used a green mithril root, white obsidian, ensium, and a lucky asmite root she found. Nothing was special. She just used what was available. The runes she chose, in order, were, mass, swiftness, crush, flow, strength.

In six hours, when evening was just starting, she was done with vein-shaping.

She stretched, satisfied, and moved to the next step, melting the metals. In Shivenar, this step was barely an inconvenience. She’d melt her perfectly pure and processed ingots in her crucible furnace, and that was that. Here, however, processing the metals had been a huge pain.

Vivi hoped to work with asmite, which required the most heat out of all the available options. The bloomery withstood the heat only if constantly recharged with ether. Cael and the spirits had spent hours separating slag from the bloom, before the bloom was melted again to hopefully create something closer to a pure metal.

The end product, the clump of black asmite they had, was still far from a perfect ingot, but it would do. Vivi loaded the best pieces of metal they had into the smelting crucible, placing that in the bloomery. They then fired it up to the highest temperature it had yet survived, with both Vivi and Cael, and three spirits, constantly adding ether to the bloomery’s runes.

The crucible inside took a little longer than usual to heat up, but within an hour, they’d fully liquidized the metal. Vivi picked it up with tongs, ether strengthening her arms to avoid slip-ups, and she carefully poured the metal into the ball-shaped crucible with her five-runed set of veins inside.

The spirits watched in silence while it cooled down, nobody knowing what to expect. Vivi had explained the process simply, but only Cael seemed to be the one fully understanding what they were doing.

Vivi didn’t bother trying to explain better, and instead broke the crucible. Inside was a rough ball of black asmite, double the size of her head, with the stalk of the veins poking out, what would have been a handle if this were a sword. It wasn’t done yet, though.

She moved to the forge. Not necessarily to change the ball’s shape, but to increase the metal’s mass. She heated the ball and began hammering it. The metal squeezed upon itself, and the ball got smaller with each hit. Within three hours, she had a smaller, much smoother ball, the size of a large fist.

“Hm,” she said. “It could still be larger. Let’s see how effective this one is.”

“So it’s essentially a runic cannon ball?” Cael asked.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“Something like that,” Vivi said. “Although, this will be way too unstable to fly any considerable distance thanks to the veins poking out. I can’t really remove them if I want inside carving to work. The ether roots need to be accessible somehow to push ether in. Really, this is just the heaviest and most destructive object I could think of. It’s ready to be tested.”

“I don’t know if I should be terrified or not,” Cael said.

Vivi smirked. “Drean? Would you like to guide us back to the entrance?”

“If witnessing your work in action means leading you there, that we will do,” he said. “We will be ready to depart soon.”

“And what’s soon in human times?” Vivi asked.

“I… will get us ready within the next hour.”

Vivi nodded. “Thank you.”

She hoped to talk with the others first anyway. Even if they broke out now, they were still at the bottom of the world. The lower levels didn’t have teleporters to just get back to the surface, or Shivenar, when they wanted to. The teleporters were powered entirely by Ythar. And while teleportation skills existed, such as Banishment Portal, they apparently weren’t commonly used.

Returning to the village, the landscape had changed within the last week. The grass had been turned upside down on both sides of the path, having been turned into a farm, extending well into the forest, though as far as Vivi knew, only parts of the farm were currently filled with seeds. According to Alda, it was best to try planting seeds all over the forest to see which spots grew the fastest. Nobody worked at the farms as Vivi passed, but a few spirits were patrolling, defending the grounds from monsters.

“Your people look more lively now,” Vivi said to Drean. “I don’t remember seeing this many spirits awake.”

“I can hardly call this lively,” Drean said. “We used to have separate mannerisms, maybe even personalities. Those are also forgotten the longer we remain unconscious.”

“Your memories are much stronger than Ythars’ spirits, though,” Vivi said.

“We store the knowledge we want to know as core memories,” Drean said. “Those will never fade. Our habits and likes and dislikes, however, are not valuable.”

A sympathetic pout came out on its own, until Vivi heard speaking as they approached the village. Noise escaped outside from the huts even without specifically eavesdropping. Alda’s confident voice resounded out.

Vivi entered the small hut, finding it already full. Aolinn and Lortel were crammed next to each other around a round table, with spirits sitting on their knees wherever they fit. Vivi knew two of them by name, Zona and Ria, both of whom looked almost exactly like every other spirit. They were quiet and timid women, who seemingly had no personalities at all, as Drean had said. Slowly, they were getting more lively.

“Hello, everyone,” Alda said with a grin. “Come to join us? It’s a bit cramped.”

On the table were three pieces of paper with three ether powered pens. Aolinn’s paper had scribbles of random objects, drawn relatively well. Lortel was writing in a language Vivi didn’t know, and one of the spirits had the last pen, though her handwriting was by far the clumsiest. Or maybe the language was just odd to Vivi.

“What’s happening?” she asked.

Alda glanced at Aolinn. “Want to explain?”

“We’re, um, learning languages,” Aolinn said. “Lortel is teaching us modern Fimian.”

“Oh, cool,” Vivi said.

Aolinn had a timid smile on her face. She still looked awkward to be with her new friends, but nobody shunned her, and she seemed happy about that. Her drawings were detailed, and it looked like she was truly interested in learning. Looking at her, the smile spread to Vivi, though hers was happy, not awkward in the slightest.

“We’re ready to test the new weapon,” Vivi said. “Thought I’d let you know. And I wanted to speak with you as well.”

“I suppose it’s time for a break,” Alda said.

“Should we leave?” Zona asked.

“No, everyone can stay,” Vivi said. “I doubt I’ll fully break levelstone today, but in case we do break out, I wanted to ask if there were any preparations someone wished to make. The outside world could be dangerous. Sannelia’s spirits haven’t been outside in over five thousand years either. Nobody knows what’s out there.”

“It’s the tenth level,” Drean said. “That is all we know. Perhaps one of you is more knowledgeable about the tenth level’s modern dangers.”

“Norfolm is there,” Lortel said with her usual calmness, though all attention went to her. “The city you knew as the Stormkeep. It’s led today by Queen Adalene, who claims to have the strongest military force of the world, though that claim has been proven wrong multiple times. She does not govern a single fifth elevation hunter. Those reside in Freimar, a hundred miles off, also on the tenth level.”

“What’s the level itself like?” Vivi asked.

“Lava,” Lortel said. “It’s not a pleasant world to be in. They’re known to have strong monsters, though what we witnessed in the blight was much tougher. Norfolm is a livable city. Freimar is grand as well, though small, and the city is governed by no-one. As long as we do not antagonize them, we will be okay.”

“Does the tenth level have food?” Alda asked. “Or should we wait for the first harvest before departing?”

“Gathering food won’t hurt,” Lortel said. “This forest is certainly safer than the tenth level.”

“That’s an odd thing to hear,” Alda said, leaning back, “considering we were banished to the most dangerous part of the world.”

“If the outside world is more dangerous,” Vivi said, “I should warn you that whatever is behind the levelstone will most likely hear us trying to break it.”

“A trap might be set, then,” Lortel said.

“Won’t we be treated as deities?” Cael asked. “We’re breaking out of the Gauntlet Of Gods. For all whoever waits outside would know, we could be ancient legends.”

“The location of the gauntlet is not known,” Lortel said. “We are merely weirdos breaking out of levelstone.”

“That feat will give us loads of merit regardless,” Cael said. “If it comes to it, I reckon I can act our way out of danger.”

Drean listened in on the conversation with a troubled look. When there was a short pause, he said, “How many know of this method to harm levelstone?”

Vivi batted an eye. “Probably less than a hundred.”

Drean stared at her. “It’s dangerous. Levelstone holds the world together. It’s designed to be unbreakable. Without levelstone, the world itself will crumble.”

“It is also said,” Lortel said nonchalantly, “that harming levelstone is akin to cutting a god’s nail. Levelstone is to be treated as sacred. Though, I believe we have a valid reason for breaking out of here.”

“We are going to break out,” Vivi said. “That isn’t a question. I’m wondering what will happen after. We’ll need to form a plan to get back to the fifth level. Everyone should think about that.”

Everyone went silent, already thinking.

“For now, I’m ready to launch the first attempt,” Vivi said. “We’re ready to test this now. Drean, lead us to the entrance, please.”

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep