Thomas’s eyes were spinning as he sat on his anvil, staring at the set of veins balanced upright on his vise. The veins created a tall and thick network, easily larger than the greatswords Vivi seemed to wield, but Thomas couldn’t exactly make it smaller, considering the sheer amount of stalks and branches inside. The blacksmithing process would be a nightmare, he already knew.

  The ability to shape ether would help a little, but it would still probably kill him.

  Did the veins have mistakes? He had no idea. His eyes were too clouded to see properly, and his consciousness had wavered multiple times during the shaping process. Not during crucial moments, thankfully, but he hadn’t been far from shaping the veins straight into a project-ending crash.

  When his focus hadn’t been taken by old age, he had felt sharp. Practice was still there, despite the pains in his lungs, though he felt his own lifeblood leaving with every minute he worked, as if merely focusing was taxing on his withering body.

  That was a dramatic way of putting things, perhaps, but if this sword snapped in half, Thomas doubted he could repeat the attempt.

  If it didn’t snap in half… Well, his daughter would receive one hell of a sword to swing.

  Thomas groaned as he stood. He stumbled from one heavy step to the next, toward his bed, where a wire poked out of the wall. He transferred ether into the everything rune, and sat down to wait.

  “So, this sword is done now?” the voice in his head asked.

  Thomas could feel the frown on the being’s face. Ever since it woke up some days ago, it had been grumpy, wondering why Thomas was down on the fifth level. It is.

  “It’s going straight to Master.”

  Yes, yes, yes, Thomas said. Of course. Now shut up. I’ll go crazy if I hear your voice again.

  The being muttered something. Thomas ignored it. It turned out, ignoring the voice in his head was a decent way of getting it bored enough to stop talking.

  A minute later, the door opened. Another humanoid creature with horns stepped in. After some squinting, Thomas recognized him as Undre. The man was his new personal assistant after the previous one, Lucas, decided to die. Thomas was free to pester the demon on the premise that he would soon be delivering runeswords for the company.

  “You have called, Sir Runesmith,” Undre said.

  “Two things,” Thomas said. “I need someone to protect this.” He glanced at his finished set of veins. “If anything scrapes those veins now, I’ll probably die from a heart-attack. Then I need a carriage to the mines.”

  “The mines again?” Undre asked.

  “I’m not about to forge my masterpiece with this shitty adamantite,” Thomas said. The words felt odd. Adamantite certainly wasn’t shitty. On the surface, he would have definitely crafted his best sword out of adamantite. Down here, however, the metal suddenly wasn’t rare at all. Adamantite was tossed in practically everywhere. The definition of rare metals shifted entirely. If adamantite was used, his supposed best sword would merely be added to the pile of junk.

  Shivenar’s miners had, however, promised a new metal. One that Vivi herself, or rather, Vivi’s pet fiend, had helped discover.

  The thought made him grin. He had been worried about Vivi’s progress as a runesmith after she gained a spirit, now with duties as a hunter distracting her from practice. Yet somehow, her progress hadn’t slowed down. She had actually improved faster. Thomas had no doubt Vivi would one day surpass him.

  Well, perhaps not as a vein-shaper, considering the network of veins behind Thomas now. Vivi would surpass him as an inventor and a legendary hunter. But nobody would surpass his ability to shape veins. Not even Vivi.

  “A carriage can depart immediately,” Undre said.

  “Yes, yes, let’s go,” Thomas grumbled. He forced his way outside.

  The facets’ blinding light pushed into his eyes like spears. The headache he’d been ignoring grew rampant, almost unbearable. With every step, his lungs hurt more. Stubbornness alone let him into the carriage, where he could finally sit for the rest of the ride.

  This sword better not fucking snap, Thomas thought. Because if it did, its creator would likely snap with it.

  ***

  “What do I need to invent for the slingshot launcher to be more powerful?” Vivi asked.

  Freyven furrowed a brow, head tilted slightly. “What do you mean?”

  “We need more firepower,” Vivi said. “What needs to be improved for the design to be as powerful as it possibly can?”

  She left out the mention of the behemoth. It would only make everyone nervous, pushing them into hasty work and probably mistakes. Everyone was already working overtime.

  “That’s one hell of a question, Vivi,” Freyven said, though he gave it thought. “Honestly, I’d call our design very proficient already. The missiles are enhanced by strength and crush runes, and inside-carved, making them deal inconceivable amounts of damage. The new barrel is durable, and the rifling will make the missiles accurate as well. The stretch ropes are perhaps the weakest part, but adding more force into the launch would not be feasible with current designs. The missile would be far too violent.”

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  “So a whole redesign would be needed for something more powerful,” Vivi said.

  “This design of the second iteration is very close to being fully optimized, at least with current theory,” Freyven said. “For a more powerful weapon, we’re simply considering upping the scale, with a larger missile and a larger barrel. Though creating something like that will require weeks.”

  “Which part of theory would need to be solved for the next improvement to happen?” Vivi asked.

  Freyven wore an amused smile. “I’m not sure what I’d even suggest. We don’t know the limitations of the revelations that have been made, let alone where the next wall is.”

  “What if I invent ascension skills?” Vivi asked. “For missiles, I mean.”

  Freyven merely blinked, uncertain how to react.

  “The missiles are limited by how much ether the metal can hold,” Vivi said. “If the metal itself is ascended, like how ascension skills work, not only will the strength and crush runes be more powerful, we can probably make the enhancement string more powerful as well.”

  “A more powerful enhancement string would probably harm the barrel,” Freyven said. “But, yes, that would certainly make the missiles more powerful.”

  Vivi nodded. “I’ll get it done, then. If you have spare ether roots shaped for the enhancement strings, please deliver them and I’ll use them for testing.”

  She headed over to her workstation, while Freyven watched, baffled, until he shook his head and got back to his own work. She sat down and closed her eyes, moving to her ethereal senses, where she zoomed in on her basic ascension skill.

  “Vivi?” Lucius asked. “Since when have you figured out ascension skills?”

  I haven’t, Vivi thought. We’re going to do it now.

  The structure of the ascension skill opened up. A complex string of runes—complex enough that, at a glance, Vivi had no idea what she was looking at.

  For now, she wasn’t looking to create anything stupidly powerful. She just needed to figure out the base principles that made ascension skills enhance the amount of ether that could fit in a person.

  Just like with the weapon enhancement skill, Vivi saw a lot of flow runes. Those were what essentially enhanced ether, making it move more swiftly, amplifying effects, making ether burn more quickly.

  The ascension skill also seemed to have three different pathways, just like the weapon enhancement skill. And it seemed that the pathways had similar functions. One of them defined something with a lot of nix runes involved. The second pathway gave orders on what to do, and the third pathway amplified ether.

  She tried to make sense of the details within, trying to see which parts of the skill were the useful bits, and which ones wouldn’t be needed for Vivi’s required use. The skill had clearly over a thousand runes or sub-elements. If Vivi had to add all of those together, she’d need over a thousand pieces of ether roots.

  She could theoretically do that. If she got to work right now, she’d probably need a few days to carve the exact string of runes present in the skill wisp now. But was that really worth it, just to increase the missile’s capacity by a measly five hundred ether?

  Not to mention, the skill probably wouldn’t even work on weapons. The first pathway out of the three probably defined concepts such as the pull within a human’s body. The rules would undoubtedly be different for missiles.

  Vivi paused, the previous thought suddenly provoking another. The pull! That must be a part of this. I think we need to create an enhancement string that pulls ether toward it.

  “Could work?” Lucius said. “Maybe?”

  As far as Vivi knew, metal didn’t have any pull to it. Most metals were conductive, at least mildly, meaning that ether flowed well inside, but that didn’t necessarily mean it pulled ether into itself.

  But at the same time, metal did contain ether. Was that effect because a pull happened within metal, or because the metal itself contained ether like a glass contained water?

  Vivi shifted her focus and recalled her spar with Essi in Paradise. Specifically, she focused on the ethereal realm inside her runesword. Starting the spar, Vivi filled her runesword with as much ether as the runes would take in. Once the sword was full, it simply stopped taking in any more ether.

  As the fight went on, however, and their blades clashed a good dozen times, the blade could suddenly take in more ether. Partly because dim wisps flowed back to Vivi’s body from her own pull, but the total amount of wisps within the sword also grew. That must have been because the pressure within the blade grew. As the metal collided against another strong runesword, the wisps within were pushed closer together with more pressure, thus letting in more wisps, so long as Vivi continued pushing more ether through the runes. The ether couldn’t escape, as the thick metal stopped it from leaking into the air. That was why inside-carved swords, instead of leaking like outside-carved variants, actually grew stronger as a battle went on.

  If Vivi managed to create pressure in the missile using a new enhancement string, she could probably cram in more ether. But at the same time… enhancement string would add more ether into the weapon. Any space for more ether created by an enhancement string would probably be occupied by the very ether that came from the enhancement string.

  Wait, Vivi suddenly thought. If swords clashing with each other causes pressure to build within the metal…

  An idea came to her. A stupid idea, but one that could possibly work.

  She summoned an inside-carved missile—the lone missile she kept in storage for herself, both as a reference and in case she needed it. She pushed ether through its strength and crush runes, filling it up. Quickly, the missile filled up.

  One of the foundry workers approached her with a sack of ether roots just as she placed the missile on her anvil. The man paused, watching her curiously.

  Then she summoned her hammer, and smashed the missile with all the strength her muscles had, repeatedly. She added a thousand ether to her muscles, hitting harder. The man leaned back, concerned.

  Vivi ignored him and pushed more ether through the runes. The missile glimmered brighter. She continued hitting, pushing more ether.

  After a solid minute, she had pushed at least three hundred more wisps into the missile. The metal surface was hot to touch, filled to the brim—beyond the brim—with ether.

  A misty aura was slowly forming around it. Not because the metal leaked ether, but because some of the ether pushed its way back to the stalk of the ether root. As with all inside-carved weapons, a part of the ether root had to poke out of the weapon for the runes to be attached. That part was a weak-point.

  Still, only a wisp or two escaped every second—as if some force within the metal still pulled wisps deeper. Perhaps metal did have its own pull, after all?

  “Vivi?” Freyven asked, seeing the missile glowing much brighter than usual. “What is this?”

  Vivi grinned from the sheer stupidity of her discovery. “It’s not exactly an ascension skill… But here you have an ascended missile.”

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