If you are reading this novel anywhere except Royal Road you are reading a pirated copy.

Support authors and their mediums by reading on the original hosting site.

"Well, that could have gone better," Elicia said, after Josephine stormed out, dragging Gene with her.

"It's about what I expected," Damion said. He was aware of the risks of his artifact being misused. However, those risks did not mean he should not continue. It simply meant he should not allow it to be misused.

"Contact Dean Teft and ask her to come here please," Damion told Elicia while he got to work on his tablet.

Right now, the resolution served his purpose. He could see inside a person, even in great detail, but trying to view the microscopic glyphs of magic seals on a person's magic core, which was no bigger than a few centimeters in diameter was not easy. And Damion aimed to keep it that way. He might create a perfect version of the artifact for himself. But if he wanted to stay out of hot water with the nobles and the Mage Association, he thought it would be best if he only publicly acknowledged that the artifact could not make out such tiny details. As long as they believed it was limited, no one would bother with worrying over it. In fact, those same nobles and Mage Association might just waste a lot of time and resources trying to improve his artifact when it did not need it. The resolution was limited by the tablet, not to the scan or a flaw in his enchantments.

As long as everyone believed the flaw was in the artifact and not in the tried-and-true tablets that everyone had been using for years, no one would ever be able to 'fix' his artifact.

Still, even if his artifact was working, there were still plenty of improvements to make. Portability for one. Right now, the artifact was a mass of layers of hides and bones with engravings on them and a person had to be sandwiched in between them for the scanner to work. Ideally, Damion wanted to turn his artifact into a small handheld device similar to the testing crystals.

"Elicia said you wanted to see me," Mage Teft said, entering the workshop.

"Yes, I was hoping you could help me with my artifact," Damion told her.

Mage Teft took a moment to look over Damion's creation. The artifact did not look like much, but she doubted Damion would have called her here if the thing did not work.

"What do you need?"

"I have already tested it on myself, Elicia, Eugene Hill and Josephine Caplan, but now I need to do at least 3 more tests to see if my theories are correct."

"Three tests?" Mage Teft questioned.

"Yes, I need to scan someone stronger than me, to see how the artifact holds up. And then I need to scan a knight, not a mage working as a knight, but an actual knight who does not have a proper core and a normal person."

"You are wanting to see the differences in people's cores."

"Yes."

"Why?" Mage Teft asked. To her it seemed that Damion took the Mage Association's stance on forbidding the study of people's cores as a challenge to find a safe way to do it.

"Because something is wrong with them."

"What makes you say that?"

"Perhaps it would be easier for you to see," Damion handed Mage Teft his tablet. If she took a look at the scans, he felt she would understand.

If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

"This is remarkable," Mage Teft said as she reviewed the scans. She had never believed such an artifact could exist. The ability to see inside a person, to be able to study a living person had many applications, both good and bad. "Your core. Why do you have so many affinities and why are they outside your core, when everyone else's are inside?"

"I have a theory, but I don't have enough information to prove it."

"Can you make this artifact portable?"

"I should be able to. It took me a few hours to construct this prototype, but that was just with the materials on hand. I'm hoping to be able to make a handheld version."

"You just need me to lay down inside to do your scan?"

"Yes."

Mage Teft quickly slipped into the artifact and let Damion's creation do its scan. Once it was completed, instead of climbing out, Mage Teft circulated her mana and poured it into the artifact. A moment later, the artifact let out a puff of smoke and the bones, used as a frame around the hides turned to dust.

"Dean Teft! Why did you do that?" Elicia said, surprised Damion's mentor would destroy his artifact.

"Because of Josephine," Damion answered.

"Precisely. Now you can truthfully tell the Caplan family the artifact you tested on Josephine was destroyed and you won't be building another one like it."

"He won't?" Elicia asked, confused.

"I won't. The next one I make will be much better," Damion confirmed with a smile.

"Excellent. Now, let's look at my scan."

Damion hit the projection option on his tablet and a three-dimensional representation of Mage Teft appeared in the room. Her mana pathways were even more distinguishable than Damion's. When she saw in her core the glyph for Water affinity, she paused for a moment considering what Damion had said before.

"Start working on a smaller one. Perhaps focus on a device that scans just a part of a body, instead of an entire body at once. If you can avoid scanning the magic core, or not show that you can scan the magic core, your artifact will attract less unwanted attention. And whatever you do, don't improve the resolution of the scan. If your device can be used to read magic seals on cores then it will cause you no end of trouble."

"That should not be an issue," Damion told her.

"Good. Once you have a new prototype ready, let me know, and I will arrange some knights and some normal people for you to test it on. And don't go showing your scan off to anyone. I would advise you to delete it."

"Understood."

Damion agreed with Mage Teft's cautious approach. While she did not say much regarding the difference in his core, he believed that with his request to scan normal people and knights, she was beginning to suspect what Damion did.

Several days passed uneventfully. Josephine and Gene came and probed Damion on his artifact, no doubt at the request of the Caplan family elders. But when Damion told her the machine had overloaded during Mage Teft's scan and that he had no intention of making another artifact like it, she left satisfied, and no other inquiries were made.

By the end of the week, Damion was finishing his new artifact. This time, since he did not need to test the enchantments as he worked, Mage Teft had provided him a set of engraving tools and other items he needed to work on his new artifact.

Since he wanted to make the new artifact appear different than the old, Damion needed to work with slightly different materials. For the core of the artifact, he still made use of Holy and Light affinity materials from his abundant supply, but he also traded a good portion of those for a few sheets of Adamantine.

The blue steel-like metal could easily channel mana and since it was not the core of the artifact, did not need to be of Light or Holy affinity, it just needed to allow the mana to pass through it unhindered.

Damion's new artifact resembled a box. Each side was about half a meter in length. On the front of the box, was a small lens, which had embedded in it one of the C Rank Holy affinity cores. On either side of the box, were handles, while on the backside, Damion had built in a tablet and limited its features to strictly work with the artifact.

On the outside of the artifact, in the Adamantine metal, Damion made a number of nonsensical enchantments, that looked like they would work for the purpose of the device. However, in actuality, they were like the enchantments on the Mage Association's testing crystals, just there to confuse anyone who would try to decode the secrets of his artifact.

The real workings of the artifact were on the inside. However, if someone tried to get at them, then the disguised enchantments on the outside of the artifact had one real purpose, to destroy the insides of the artifact. If the mana flow through the Adamantine is disrupted by opening the artifact, that disruption would destroy the sensitive enchantments on the Holy affinity bones on the inside. Just as Teft had done by overloading the artifact. Using her as an example, Damion had built in a failsafe to make sure no one could dissect his artifact and put it to nefarious use.

Now that the second version of his artifact was complete, Damion just needed to start scanning as many people as possible to make certain his theory was right.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.