Vermillion Beryl Scale-mail Hauberk

Quality: Rare

Fashioned from increasingly exotic materials with equally demanding crafting requirements. Due to the echoes of the potent concepts and affinities intermingling within the armor, those with insubstantial personal significance will suffer varying degrees of adverse effects.

"Huh," Rory stared at the description, eyes scrunched up. "That doesn't seem right."

Rory had been accustomed to descriptions that often went to great lengths to prescribe just how amazing even relatively ordinary items were. For his first piece of crafted rare-grade armor that didn't rely on a specific gimmick to boost its grade, it felt… lackluster, if not downright negative.

Sure, he hadn't gotten around to adding any inscription yet, but that still didn't change how the armor only seemed to mention bad things occurring.

"Well, only one way to test for sure," Rory said as he grabbed the hauberk and began to dress himself in the newly minted armor. As he adorned the armor, at first, Rory wasn't sure exactly what the description was getting at; he felt fine, but the longer he wore it, the more he felt as if he were being subtly crushed or weighed down upon.

That's an odd feeling.

It was almost as if he were wearing a weighted vest, except its weight was equally dragging down on his entire body and his mind simultaneously.

Seriously?

Physically speaking, the armor wasn't hefty, but it felt dense to Rory. Legs beginning to shake, Rory felt his lips turning downward into an annoyed scowl.

"I refuse to be bullied around by some armor that I made," Rory growled. Reaching out with his mind, he felt the well of significance like a bonfire inches away, its anchoring density. Refusing to budge, Rory grappled with the sense, like trying to carry an awkwardly shaped piece of furniture through a tight doorway; it wasn't the weight but the shape that was the problem.

I can handle it.

With a sense of the armor's significance locked firmly in his mind, Rory imagined himself pushing back against it, like trying to crush a piece of coal into a diamond with his bare hands.

No, that's not right. That assumes it's impossible, and for others, it might be. It's more like zipping up overstuffed luggage.

Not willing to give in, minutes passed as Rory struggled with the weight of the significance. At last, it was as if all the resistance suddenly vanished. Eyes fluttering open, Rory blinked several times as he adjusted himself.

"Not easy," Rory huffed. He could understand more what the description had essentially been warning against. Every action involved a degree of significance. Lift a pencil? There was significance in that action. Kill a tier-one monster? Significance, but for a tier-seven such as himself, it wouldn't be much more significant than lifting a pencil. It was that significance that was directly attributed to the gain of ascension energy. As one moved up the tiers, they embodied every significant action they'd taken in their lives.

What that meant was that, at its simplest, the higher your tier, the more weighty the significance of a person's life. The armor he'd created had involved some hefty concepts, even if they were barely more than an echo of those concepts, and as a result, a low-tier person would find themselves crushed under that conceptual weight.

"Now, the question is," Rory asked no one in particular as he began to test how it felt to physically wear the new armor. "Is whether that's any item above a specific tier or not."

His banner-spear hadn't, but if he compared the two, speaking frankly, Rory believed the armor of a higher qualitative state, even if they were the same tier. It was well known that the gulfs between the beginning and the end of a tier only grew more distant the higher in grade or tier something became. In essence, while his spear and the armor were both of rare grade, the difference between his banner-staff and the lowest grade item he'd ever created -an exceptionally poor grade cuirass- might be smaller than the gulf between his spear and the armor he now partially wore.

Still thinking about it, Rory, out of curiosity, took a look at his status. Contrary to what someone might suspect about living in a world with video game-esque mechanics, Rory rarely checked his details very often. It'd been that way ever since he'd reached the point where months could pass without any significant changes or developments; checking his skills every day was relatively pointless. Scanning over the list of skills, Rory mentally commanded all 'mundane' skills to depopulate; they were usually rather boring stuff, such as 'walking' to begin with. Next, he sent the command for all 'common' skills to depopulate -basic versions of skills like knitting or sewing.

He wasn't sure what he was looking for, if anything. Still, as he looked through the much shorter list, he noted something of interest, an additional entry that hadn't been there the last time he'd checked, however many months or years ago that was.

Metallurgy

Rarity: Uncommon. Skill Level: Low.

While the art of blacksmithing and forging is considered common enough, the know-how and understanding needed to develop the ability to manipulate and create new metals at will are far less typical. Only by undertaking challenges of the metallurgical variety and breaking them down through persistent trial and error can one achieve the breakthrough in understanding needed to understand metal and its greater possibilities.

"Nifty," Rory said. As far as the forging field went, Rory wasn't a particularly interesting crafter; he only had the most basic version of the smithing skill, named rather fittingly 'Blacksmithing.' Perhaps the only interesting part was that Rory had managed to raise the skill to the 'inexperienced' skill level. While Rory had a rather boring take on the smithing skill, Gil had a more interesting version of the smithing skill, 'Tremor Smith,' a rare-ranked version of blacksmithing which….

Well, Rory wasn't actually sure what made it special, aside from having a more flowery description of 'cultures embodied' and 'adopted son of the deep mines.'

Either way, while Rory had never earned a more advanced version of the smithing skill, the metallurgy skill that he must have obtained recently was far more interesting from that perspective. The two were closely linked, but if anything, metallurgy was almost like the alchemy version of smithing.

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Is that part of why? Perhaps you could also benefit from some alchemical experience?

Gil had no alchemy experience, so it wouldn't be surprising if that turned out to be the reason why he'd never mentioned a metallurgy skill, even though he spent far more time working within the forge than even Rory, having raised his rarer version of the smithing skill to Experienced.

"Probably going to have to give him a heads up," Rory muttered to himself.

There wasn't much else to say about the skill, as knowledge skills - skills that granted knowledge instead of offering an 'active' aspect – that hadn't progressed past the 'low' point often didn't provide a lot of new knowledge to begin with.

More than happy with the unexpected gains, as minor as they felt for the moment, Rory removed the hauberk he'd put on earlier. With a new skill under his belt and some armor in need of inscriptions, Rory once more returned to work.

"And done," Rory huffed as he placed his crafting knife in his inventory. Before him, his armor had been laid out to work on, covered in an extensive script of runes. Yet even as he watched, they began to fade, the faint lines barely visible unless he really focused. Rory had never been sure why, but as the volume of inscriptions increased, their visibility began to decrease.

Not that I mind.

The inscriptions were nothing overly complex, meant to ground, disperse, or funnel energy, normalize climate, and allow for small amounts of self-repair. The problem had been one Rory hadn't encountered before, and that was that the nature of the armor was that it was one big, dense blob of significance. Inscription could do a lot of interesting things, but when he'd tried to add more complex inscriptions, they were burnt up like trying to use a crayon on a hot piece of metal.

Rory had one suspicion, and that was the lack of runes that could maintain the integrity of the inscriptions. The simpler the function of an inscription, the less fragile it was overall. As more complex functions were attempted, more vulnerable points that could unravel the entire system emerged.

Typically, it wasn't a problem, as his creations didn't actively burn them. That was until his most recent creation, as nothing he'd made in the past was quite the same as his newest armor. If he wanted more complex inscriptions to take, he would likely need to anchor them alongside more advanced runes that could shoulder the stress for their 'weaker' brethren.

The issue was that the only higher form of rune he'd made to date, an 'evolved' rune as he'd labeled them, was his Living Rune.

"But, it's useless here." Rory had muttered to himself as he'd deciphered the source of his struggles with his inscriptions. As much as he would love to, just slapping a Living Rune on anything willy-nilly wouldn't magically empower an item; it was more likely that the entire thing would blow up in his face.

The solution was to make a new evolved rune, but that was like saying all you had to do was whip up a master craft item, far easier said than done.

Hell, the fact that I can't even come up with a potential concept for a new evolved rune means I'm nowhere close.

Not intending to spend however many weeks and months, if not years, would be needed to gain the inspiration for a new evolved rune, Rory finally wrote the entire thing off as pointless, accepting a much more mundane inscription work on the armor than he might have liked.

"Anyway, that's the point of gems," Rory consoled himself. As a rare-grade item, each piece of his armor could hold three gems. Float and Barrier were the obvious choices, with the third slot serving as a flexible solution to whatever problems he may encounter. For the time being, he intended to add a conversion gem to each open slot, which could break down excess pneuma into purely kinetic energy. While it seemed redundant, turning a magical attack into physical force was an option for dealing with forces that were otherwise annoying to defend against, such as the original space-destroying magic of the fearsome jackalope from his early years.

Of course, the more he relied on the socketed gems, the more often he'd have to replace them. Without the facilities of Ehkorrus, that would be far more annoying. Still, it was a cost Rory was willing to cope with.

Armor crafted, inscriptions laid, and gems chosen, there wasn't much left to do.

That's not quite correct. There isn't anything left to do at all.

Rory had crafted a suitable void vessel, had succeeded in his inventory project, had slain the Tyrant of Earth and Scales, had made his new armor, and had even managed to gain a new skill in the process.

Oh, and even got a new hand.

All that was left was to take a gem that he'd pre-mapped with the general 'intent' of where he wanted to appear, and he would be set.

"Huh," Rory crossed his arms, frowning. "It's really here."

He had done everything he could think of. Now, there was nothing left except for-

Oh, right. Eia.

-except for tracking down Eia and then leaving Ehkorrus.

For a moment, a wave of apprehension rolled over him; he'd been here for over two decades now. It wasn't easy to leave that behind.

But.

But there was more out there than just the little village they'd built, and his path forward wasn't trapping himself within a workshop in the single village for the rest of his life. He needed to see more, discover more, and live purely for himself. He had a long life ahead of himself. While he wasn't about to turn into someone who was purely self-driven, he cared most about the things on the horizon that caught his attention. The simple reality was that there wasn't much catching his attention here. If he stayed, it would be nothing more than an endless slog of slowly exploring the third floor of the Maw and making items that were more and more focused on the sole well-being of Ehkorrus.

Nah. I'm going to do my own thing.

No longer wavering, Rory packed up as he made a quick exit from the forge to his home. Stopping inside, Rory tossed anything that might be of importance into his inventory. The inventory wasn't super massive, but it was more than enough for any of his possessions. Most importantly, he grabbed a single space gem that had been specifically tailored so that each transitory point was formatted to reflect the details of where he'd like to appear once he stepped through the Null Window. It wasn't a perfect system; Rory understood that much, but like most things as of late, he was feeling too impatient to wait to devise a perfect system. Patting the wall of the Star Blood Sequoia, Rory left his home, likely for a decent while.

Quickly exiting Ehkorrus for the nearby forest, Rory spent some time searching for the oversized snake. It was surprisingly simple to find her as attuned to the feel of her aura as he was.

The fact that she did not attempt to mask her presence and the path of carnage the snake had wrought didn't hurt either.

He soon found her wrapped around a tree, enjoying the warmth of the day. It was clear there had been some struggle, likely from a high-tier-five given their distance from Ehkorrus, but a high-tier-five wasn't close to enough to handle Eia.

"Hey, you going to laze around forever?" Rory said as he deftly stepped around a crater in the ground as if something had slammed into the earth with incredible force.

Eia's head lowered from her perch, the oversized serpent's deadly fangs only inches from his face if she were to attack.

Rather than attack, her tongue flicked out, tickling his nose.

"I know that you know that murdering a bunch of tier-five and below monsters does piss all for your ascension."

If Eia had shoulders, she would have shrugged.

"Yeah, yeah, whatever, you glutton. I'm leaving for greener pastures. You coming?"

Instantly, the massive snake decoupled from the tree, slithering to his right.

"Thought so. I know you've been bored as well."

While it was true they could have hunted through the third floor, Eia had made it clear to Rory that she wasn't much of a fan of the cavernous nature of the Maw, preferring the open air of the surface world.

"Well, let's get going," Rory said as he led the way back to Ehkorrus. The building excitement was evident in the speed at which they traveled as they returned in only a few minutes. Several citizens noticed the two of them, some of whom were brave enough to wave, while others seemed to duck out of the way.

Not all that interested either way, Rory ignored it as they soon made their way to the pavilion that the Null Window sat within. Staring at it for a few seconds, Rory finally shrugged.

"No time like the present,"

Ushering Eia to stick close to him, the snake proceeded to wrap herself around Rory. Given how large she'd become, it was a rather comical sight, like he was wearing an extremely puffy snakeskin coat that bulged out several feet in every direction.

"You're lucky I don't actually need to cross through fully," Rory muttered as Eia tickled his face with her tongue once more.

Taking a deep breath, Rory stared into the void-like space between the edges of the Null Window.

Here goes nothing.

With one hand holding the space gem meant to dictate his landing location and his artificial hand reaching to touch the space-like nothingness, there was no more time for second-guessing himself. The moment his hand breached the event horizon of the Null Window, the pavilion was empty, save for a shower of black and purple dust-like sparks.

Without a single word to even his closest friend, the Founder of Ehkorrus and Architect of the Precursors vanished without a trace.

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