Percy marvelled at the human-shaped construct for a second, once again reminded of how handy his girlfriend’s fused mana was.

The glossy stone – which they’d dubbed dimensional onyx – greatly resembled the material their spatial amulets were made of, though there were a few key differences. Nesha’s creation lacked the bright, star-like specks scattered across the surface of the amulets. More importantly, this wasn’t a naturally occurring mineral but a material fashioned out of a mortal’s mana, meaning it wouldn’t last indefinitely by itself.

Even so, it was remarkably practical.

It was easier to produce than Percy’s crystallized mana – at least before he’d started cheating with his Spiritforged Effigy. It also survived much longer – a couple of months even without preservation runes. Finally, it drastically boosted the power of Nesha’s enchantments.

Still, its temporary nature meant that they couldn’t use it to craft true spatial amulets. Not unless they were fine with the artifacts collapsing one day and dumping their contents in some random location – or worse, destroying them outright. Even if Nesha equipped them with self-repair enchantments – which she had already learned how to draw – they wouldn’t function properly with anyone else’s mana. Sadly, Percy and Nesha understood how hard-pressed they would be to find a second person with her unique combination of affinities, even among the Moirai – let alone somebody capable of fusing them in the same way.

If they wanted to craft more permanent spatial amulets, they’d need to acquire dimensional marble – the very material that had inspired the name of Nesha’s fused mana. The problem was that the resource was heavily monopolized by House Etna, and they were currently wanted fugitives.

Other controlled resources – like elixirs – weren’t as difficult for them to obtain. Elixirs were thousands of times cheaper per unit, and they exchanged hands in massive quantities across Remior. After all, a huge percentage of the population needed to consume them on a daily basis. Compared to that, there were very few spatial amulets around, and they were reserved for the elites at the top of the noble families. As for their raw materials, very few outside the Great House even had a use for them.

‘Thank Phoebe we don’t have a shortage of storage space anymore…’ Percy thought.

Nesha had originally learned runecrafting with the hopes of crafting more of the useful artifacts for the group, but they’d luckily outgrown that need. Even better, she had found several other uses for both the esoteric art and her fused mana.

Specifically, the material was perfect for her traps.

She couldn’t store them inside the amulets because their enchantments were fundamentally the same – intentionally unstable pocket runes meant for killing or maiming rather than storing or preserving. Still, Nesha could pack a lot more power into the dimensional onyx than she could on regular stone.

By adding self-repair enchantments and concealment runes into the mix, she could maintain the traps and unleash them onto her unsuspecting victims a lot more easily. The only reason she hadn’t filled her room with traps was because she’d rather not have to explain herself to the innkeeper should he decide to stick his nose into her business one day.

Regardless, Nesha’s affinity fusion wasn’t the point of their current project – just the convenient material that they’d been using for a while.

In fact, Percy and Nesha had gone out of their way to ensure that all the enchantments involved could function irrespective of one’s affinity. They were much more interested in the underlying theory than any individual application, and Percy needed all the new skills and knowledge they acquired to be transferable to his main body – who possessed an entirely different set of mana types.

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‘I’ll go first,’ Nesha said, snapping him out of his thoughts.

They typically took turns drawing the runes, the short breaks helping them rest and consolidate their gains.

Nodding internally, Percy watched his girlfriend fuse some mana around her finger before engraving an intricate enchantment onto the statue. It contained control, growth and memory runes – the building blocks of Percy’s own controlled self-repair enchantments – but that wasn’t everything.

There was a fourth type – the adaptation runes.

Adaptive self-repair enchantments differed in that they could accept foreign mana types. This was meant to somewhat mitigate the issues Percy and Nesha were facing, though it didn’t solve them completely.

Enchantments like this would behave in all sorts of unpredictable ways when infused with the “wrong” mana type. The exact results would depend on how the new affinity interacted with the runes or with the original mana types that were supposed to be fed into the enchantments.

For example, injecting ice mana into an adaptive heating enchantment designed to be fuelled by fire mana would either weaken its effect severely, or even reverse it entirely in some cases, causing the runes to sap heat instead of emitting it. These interactions weren’t universal, however, and had to be tested on a case-by-case basis.

Adaptive self-repair enchantments fed with the wrong mana would usually still do what they were supposed to, though they would introduce flaws during the regeneration. If done repeatedly, the constructs in question risked falling apart. In other words, Nesha would still find it difficult to craft spatial amulets for others. Repaired with other affinities, the devices might last a little longer than they would if left alone, but they would still crumble in the end.

The same was true for Percy’s scythes.

Given how he fought, his weapons tended to shatter and regenerate hundreds of times during the span of a battle. There was no way they would survive something like that if he fed them with the wrong mana. Even worse, others wouldn’t be able to use his constructs either, and not just because of this incompatibility. Without access to Percy’s soul affinity or the willpower embedded in the weapons, they’d also be missing out on the scythes’ autonomy.

That didn’t mean the adaptation runes were useless, however – had that been the case, Percy wouldn’t have bought the books on them.

Repairing a construct with a different affinity often infused it with unique properties. There was typically a sweet spot where an object could be altered in a beneficial way without its structural integrity being compromised.

Thankfully, it was always possible to reset the constructs to their flawless state by simply repairing them with the correct affinity. If Percy was careful, he hoped he could channel Micky’s soul-freezing ice into his scythes at key moments to increase the lethality of his attacks, before flooding them with phantom mana to restore them to their original form. He had no idea what the exotic resource might do to his armour, but he was interested in exploring that too.

Outside of that, he also hoped his clones would be able to maintain the scythes longer like this. Normally, their finite stash of mana wasn’t enough to get them far, but the adaptive enchantments would let them borrow mana from their hosts. Of course, the clones would still have to use the weapons sparingly. Not to mention that the scythes would have a much lower impact whenever Percy possessed Greens or Blues.

That said, having more options was never a bad thing.

As soon as Nesha was done adding the fourth rune into the enchantment, she paused for a moment to examine it. Only once she confirmed that it worked as intended did she continue. The first controlled self-repair enchantment was always the most crucial, because it would allow them to undo any subsequent mistakes – at least within its range of influence.

However, their project was a lot more ambitious than this.

What they’d been trying to master over the past year wasn’t any individual rune or enchantment – no matter how complex or useful it might be. Sure, they’d done that too – they’d learned the Vault’s written language and read all the books back-to-back multiple times. They’d grown proficient with all the runes they had access to and even learned to combine them in various interesting ways. They’d even developed a large pseudo-enchantment involving eighteen different runes – the one that Nesha was currently drawing on the statue. The intricate self-repair enchantment she’d already carved was nothing more than a small part of a greater whole.

But there was something else that had consumed most of their time.

Something much more difficult, and downright fundamental to the art of magiscript. It had to do with the way an enchantment could be drawn repeatedly and linked unto itself to amplify its effects and expand its scope. In fact, after having studied this topic deeply, Percy was confident that this was the very requirement that differentiated those capable of undertaking the Green level of the Vault’s magiscript challenge from those who weren’t:

Unit cell theory.

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