The blade of string saw ran back and forth across the spider’s head, tearing through its supple flesh as Lloyd severed the beast’s dagger-like fangs. When he had fought it, the spider hadn’t tried to bite him, but that was only because it had a more effective method.

  From its hooked fangs alone Lloyd knew it would have had a nasty bite, this theory was only confirmed when Lloyd accidentally tore into a sack of toxic, acidic venom. Going off his theory about enchantments, the spider’s fangs should qualify as a unique crafting material which should in theory help him create better enchantments.

  With his armour long overdue for an upgrade, Lloyd couldn’t help but be excited for what he could create with the superior materials he had gathered. At first Lloyd was enticed by the idea of making an armour piece purely from the materials he gathered from the spider but began to question the idea before it came to fruition.

  Could he even do that? His method for creating armour involved using the creature’s blood and bones to increase the pieces durability, but bugs didn’t have blood or bones. As opposed to most animal’s bugs didn’t have blood, but a substance called hemolymph, and their ‘bones’ were just there shell.

  With how good the materials from the spider were, Lloyd was unwilling to find out as being wrong would waste such valuable resources. Luckily, Lloyd didn’t have to take that risk, because he had a compromise that might just be better.

  The iguana titan Lloyd had helped the miscus take down was undoubtedly the strongest thing Lloyd had taken down, and it wasn’t even close. The giant crocodile Lloyd had only taken down with what was effectively a lightning landmine was only level seventeen a whole seven levels below the titan.

  Lloyd honestly had no right to have such high quality materials, even if he helped take down the beast, in the end the miscus chieftain had done ninety percent of the work. It was only through his strength and benevolence that Lloyd had these materials, as there was no way Lloyd could have gotten anywhere close to killing it.

  The durability alone was already as strong as what he was wearing and it hadn’t even been cured yet, once it was it would be nigh indestructible for anything his level. If he could combine the raw strength and durability of the lizard hide with the unique quality of the spider fangs he could have something great.

  All he had to do was find something that would work well with the fangs, no point in using a rare material only for it to go unused. With this in mind, Lloyd summoned a piece of paper from his spatial ring, grateful the dungeon had let him steal so much of it.

  A crude charcoal pencil scrawled across the page in precise patterns as Lloyd sketched the fourteenth piece of armour, finally realising something good. His design would incorporate the best aspects of both materials in a way that he could actually use, something that could be easily integrated into his fighting style.

  With his design ready, Lloyd prepared hung his sketch on a cobweb in front of the rock he was working off. Lloyd made sure to take every precaution, blocking the cave entrance, and setting plasma mines beyond the threshold, he couldn’t afford to have a rouge beast ruin this for him.

  Feeling it was okay to begin, Lloyd finally got his materials ready, cluttering the small cave with the giant sheets of lizard leather. To start off, Lloyd ignored the hide, deciding to prepare the bonding agent first so that it had more time to strengthen its potency.

  In the middle of the cave, Lloyd sat down a giant barrel, its contents being the giant heart of the deceased iguana titan. Thanks to the preservative qualities of his spatial ring, the heart was still in pristine condition despite being over two weeks old at this point.

  Scanning over some books to refamiliarize himself with the process, Lloyd was reminded of the giant pain in the ass he was about to go through. To properly prepare the bonding agent, you first needed to use a precise rune to convert the heart to a liquid.

  The problem came when you considered how you would go about executing this, if you engraved the rune directly on the surface of the heart would puncture it reducing the heart to a deflated blob. You had to first do the engraving on a different material, -preferably a sheet of bone from the same animal- and use mana to transfer the engraving onto the heart.

  In theory, this was simple, easy to execute challenge, but in practice it was a slow, painful process of failure and repetition, involving constant focus, precise timings and for something as big as the iguana’s heart, a lot of mana. All of this added up to being one of the most annoying processes when creating armour, so it was good to get it done first.

  The blade of energetic inscriptions carved into the dense bone from the iguana’s jaw, the spiralling geometric patterns leaving deep grooves across the materials surface. Compared to the rune Lloyd had used to liquify the heart of the monster in the dungeon, the one he was making was the nest most effective one described in the book.

  In comparison to the one he had used prior, this rune was far more complicated, but for something the size of the lizard heart the old one wouldn’t cut it. With the quality of the heart, along with its sheer size, the weaker rune just wouldn’t have been able to properly execute the task.

  Lloyd scraped off the few remaining imperfections as he did a final examination of the runic formation. At this point, there was very little Lloyd could do to improve the runes efficacy, and it would be more worth his time to get it finished and let the bonding agent ferment longer.

  The mana coming from Lloyd’s poured into the engravings, spreading across the surface of the bone illuminating the bone with an electric glow. Beginning his first attempt, Lloyd pushed everything out of his mind, focusing on nothing but the rune as he took control with his mental energy.

  His mind burned in strain from the focus, controlling such a large rune was akin to trying to read a book without moving your eyes. Lloyd inevitably failed, the rune collapsing a few seconds before reaching stability on the hearts surface.

  It wasn’t the ideal result, as it had effectively wasted a good fifth of his mana reserves, but for his first attempt with such a large rune it had went pretty well. The book remarked on how this was one of the biggest hurdles for novice armourers as some had to rely entirely on the willpower stat do accomplish it, wasting many of their free points.

  For Lloyd however, this wasn’t such a problem, as after only three tries he managed to successfully place the rune on the surface of the heart. With just under forty percent of his mana remaining, Lloyd kept up the pace stowing away the liquified heart as he readied a femur for step two.

  Compared to the first step, this would be a breeze. While complicated, the engravings marring the bones surface didn’t have to be meticulously held together with mana for them to work.

  The pointed blade of energetic inscriptions carefully glided across the bones surface, wrapping it in a net of runes and inscriptions. Before Lloyd knew it the bone was ready to be added to the mix, a catalyst to finish off his latest batch of bestial bonding agent.

  With a simple thought, mana rushed through the bone turning it to a fine white powder as fused with the barrel’s bloody contents. Lloyd held his hands against the archaic planks of the barrel, slowly channelling energy to create a steadily paced whirlpool within the confines of the container.

  Lloyd continued to mix the bonding agent together for well over half an hour before he sealed the barrel shut and left it to condense its energy. With the bonding agent complete, Lloyd was no longer in a rush, in fact it was best if he took his time, as that would give the agent as much time to grow in energy as possible.

  This was perfect for what Lloyd had to do next, putting the armour together wouldn’t take more than half a day, but that was only a fraction of the work that would follow. The process of designing and engraving the runes and inscriptions would take as much as a week if he was aiming for a good product, but it could take much longer if he so desired.

  For now, Lloyd had no need to put the armour piece together, he had to cure the material before he could put it together anyway, so there was no reason to use the bonding agent while it was so weak. In the meantime, Lloyd was best off to spend his time designing runes, and more armour pieces, be productive and ready for when the bonding agent was potent enough.

  With a goal in mind and a timeframe set, Lloyd spent the following week down in the spider cave, creating countless prototypes as he planned his new armour set. The days seemed to fly by, his time whisked as he littered the cave with innumerable charcoal drawings of armour and runes.

  This process was all consuming, his only breaks coming when he stopped working to cook a meal, but asides from that he didn’t stop. Only after a week had passed did Lloyd stop his ceaseless sketching, finally feeling the bonding agent was ready to cure the lizard hide.

  With a nervous excitement, Lloyd slowly and methodically cut the leather into shape making sure his measurements were perfect. After hours of cutting out the leather with surgical precision, a small mountain of armour material rose on the ground next to him.

  This mountain of leather soon sunk back to the ground before disappearing entirely, as piece by piece, Lloyd gingerly lowered every single fragment of leather into the bonding agent. The feeling of excitement that had been plaguing him since he started cutting the leather was now gone, replaced with the soothing knowledge that only the easy part remained.

  As he waited for time to pass, Lloyd couldn’t help but get impatient, as he still wasn’t used to doing things on such large timeframes, compared to the fast paced world of the twenty-first century this seemed to take an eternity.

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  To keep himself busy, Lloyd gathered all his leatherworking tools on the rock he was using as a bench, preparing himself for the next step. As he was doing this though, Lloyd realised that what was once extremely useful, was now barely usable.

  The talisman he had spent so long working on was now far weaker than what he needed. Back in the dungeon it had been perfect for working on the hide of beasts that couldn’t have been over level ten, but for the hide of a level twenty-four, it wasn’t going to cut it.

  Thankfully, the book Lloyd had used to design his current talisman had several of higher quality. Problem was, even the strongest talisman within the book from the guildhall might not be enough.

  From what Lloyd could tell, the strongest talisman could at best, effectively cure the hide of one of the crocodiles. It was a huge stretch for Lloyd to say it would work on the iguana hide, but he did have a solution.

  Compared to back when he had originally designed the talisman, Lloyd had a far better grasp on how runes and inscriptions worked, and using the talismans in the book as a prototype, Lloyd could do better. Taking the underlying concepts at use in the predesigned talismans Lloyd could remake them, improving the aspects that were lacking to make it better suit his needs.

  Lloyd stared at the book laid out before him, analysing and interpreting the many interlocking layers that formed the high tier talisman. Immediately, one flaw jumped out at him, as the talismans became more focused on improving mana control and less on the raw strength they infused.

  This design was the antithesis of what Lloyd wanted to achieve. His mana control was good enough that he didn’t need very much assistance, but when it came to the purity of mana infused, that’s where he needed the talisman.

  If he just infused the leather with mana from his hands, the radius which was cured would be uneven and inconsistent leaving clear weak spots on the material. When using a talisman, you would cover a uniform area with an evenly spread curing effect, much more ideal for leatherworking.

  The problem was, the designs from the book focused on improving the ease of using the talisman, highlighting and nullifying its weaknesses. Lloyd just needed a straight up improvement in the quantity of mana that could be infused in a round of curing.

  From what he understood, the talismans he was using for the curing process worked in a simple procedure. You would infuse them with energy as fast as you could until the talisman reached its maximum capacity, then it would slowly release the mana in a condensed form in a perfectly uniform amount.

  This effectively delayed the curing, releasing it in a stronger form over a longer period of time. By doing this, the talismans effectively acted as a buffer, increasing the amount of mana you could infuse each time.

  What Lloyd needed to cure the lizard skin was a talisman that simply infused larger amounts of mana, but none of the examples in the book were good for this. This rendered them mostly useless, as without an infusion rate high enough, they wouldn’t be able to bring out the lizard hides full potential.

  At best, the talisman designs already prepped for him would be able to exhibit half of what he needed, but that was at best. The most likely scenario would only yield him a third of the true iguana skins true strength.

  To counter this, Lloyd was actively singling out the runes within the talismans and determining their purpose. By the end he aimed to remove the majority of runes affecting mana control and replacing them with runes that would increase the volume of mana being infused.

  This seemed simple at first glance, like an easy task that could be knocked out in an hour or two, but that didn’t consider the subsidiary changes that would have to be made. With different runes in place, the inscriptions wouldn’t function as intended so he would have to design and introduce new ones, effectively rewiring the talisman.

  Needless to say, rewiring something as complex as this wouldn’t be quick. The talisman design Lloyd was basing his off was effectively an interlocking tower of discs covered in runes and inscriptions.

  Each disc was almost as complicated as an armour piece on their own, and with sixteen that all had to connect perfectly, this was a lengthy endeavour. Which, in this case was a good thing, just like the bonding agent itself, the leather would turn out better the longer it was left for -so long as you didn’t exhaust the bonding agent’s potency.

  Hours passed, Lloyd’s attention neve broke, his mind ever occupied by the puzzle of reworking the inscriptions. five hours in, Lloyd felt he’d made good progress, having fit five layers of the talisman together.

  Another five and Lloyd felt just about ready to give up, at this point he had just barely finished the seventh layer. Whenever things seemed to be going his way, Lloyd would suddenly realise the last hour of work was useless as it had all been relying on an inscription that no longer worked.

  Sometimes these mistakes could be fixed, others the problem was so severe that he had to discard entire layers. By the time he reached layer nine, Lloyd had already discarded over fifty failed layers, their broken shells shattered across the cavern floor.

  They served as demoralising reminders of his blunders, but at the same time they showed what he had learnt in the four days it had come to reach this point. The initial timeframe Lloyd had set for this project had been two days at most, but he had quickly abandoned that plan when he reached the second day with four layers after realising layers five through seven were a dud.

  Now, Lloyds conservative estimate was sitting at a week, but he wouldn’t be surprised if it ended up taking longer. Lloyd wanted nothing more than to stay optimistic, but as he launched his fourth failed attempt at disc ten across the room, the less likely a week began to seem.

  With every layer he added, Lloyd also added difficulty to the challenge, the higher the layer the places there were for him to connect the mana pathways to lower layers. The first only had a few connection points between the mana streams, layer ten had ninety-six.

  For how little Lloyd thought of the pre-designed talismans, he couldn’t help but be impressed by how sophisticated the inscriptions were. Unfortunately, Lloyd was unable to take any inspiration in this regard, as the inscriptions were functionally incompatible with Lloyd’s design.

  The intricate networks of mana pathways designed to improve ease of use simply wouldn’t hold up under the stress brough on by Lloyd’s design. The narrow pathways would quickly be overwhelmed and clogged by the far larger quantities of mana at use in Lloyd’s talisman.

  The idea of a leather curing talisman was simple in theory, but in practice the different elements gave way to wildly different designs, most of which were simply incompatible with each other. Despite having got his idea for a talisman from the mana control designs, they couldn’t be less alike.

  The designs of the two were polar opposites, and with nothing to go off of Lloyd was completely in the dark on how to proceed. Needless to say, he wasn’t excited when he had to go in blind when he realised layer eleven would reward him with the gift of one hundred and forty-four individual pathways to connect.

  At this point the number of connecting pathways was getting absurd, Lloyd was only discouraged more when he realised that layer sixteen would need a total of five hundred and twelve points of connection.

  Even with his perception stat allowing him to clearly see objects smaller than ants, five hundred connected paths across an object no larger than a donut was simply absurd. As the difficulty curve became steeper, Lloyd felt his perception of time slowly slip away from him.

  Days passed without him even stopping to eat, all he did was toil away at the talisman. Lloyd would sit motionless for hours at a time trying to figure out how to connect a single line of the inscription.

  Lloyd’s brain ignored all outside stimuli, pushing all distractions and urges aside as he hyper focused on a singular, all-consuming task. His body was practically screaming at him to do something, but he didn’t listen he was close, only one final layer to go.

  Lloyd’s mind was on the brink of collapse from exhaustion, he felt light-headed and unstable, but he had done it, it was finally complete.

  After—wait how long had it been? Well, after more than a week, Lloyd was finally done his talisman was complete and ready for use, and just in time. After sitting in the bonding agent for so long, the leather had absorbed far more of its energy than originally intended, and the mixture had become extremely diluted.

  Upon realising this, Lloyd hastily removed all the iguana leather, laying it out on the table ready to be cured. Lloyd was so excited he could actually feel his heart pounding within his chest the anticipation was killing him.

  As he placed the talisman upon the first piece of leather Lloyd couldn’t help but be concerned. He was actually shaking from how worried he was it wouldn’t work, his hands were jittery and he even felt sweat drip down his forehead.

  Despite his concerns for his mental health, Lloyd ignored this and pushed on, infusing the talisman with mana for the first time. every second he had worked on this talisman, Lloyd had carried a singular fear, would it work?

  Ultimately, he hadn’t even known what mana was a couple months ago, but now he was trying to make a complicated talisman with it? What were the chances that worked?

  He had known that it was extremely likely for something to be wrong, or for him to have misunderstood something important. This made it all the more surprising when it worked first try.

  His mana was rapidly absorbed until the talisman reached its capacity at about half of his total mana reserves. From there on, the talisman started taking mana at a far slower fixed rate, while slowly pumping out a huge amount into the leather, having an immediate effect.

  In seconds, the leather hardened gaining a sheen on its smooth surface, the leather was still just as flexible as ever, while being as durable as steel. It was seemingly the perfect material for armour, and in his opinion on of the best things the system did for him, as it was one of the few things not trying to get him killed.

  The systems disdain for physics and logic was something Lloyd often wondered about, like for example ‘how the fuck did that five tone lizard just make a ten metre jump?’ but here he felt it was good. It allowed for armour strong enough to protect him from the bullshit the system kept throwing at him, and it was flexible enough to let him move around normally.

  Best of all, this extreme hardness was after just one cycle of curing, ideally, he would do this at least three times, so it would only get better from here. By the third coating, Lloyd could barely imagine how strong this leather would be, but he was sure no material from pre-system earth could compare.

  Piece by piece, Lloyd worked his way towards this idea slowly curing the leather, all the while marvelling at his talisman. He just couldn’t get over the fact that his talisman had worked the first time.

  It functioned exactly as he had hoped it would, not being as easy to control as the original but holding far more mana, bringing out the full potential of the leather. Compared to the original, Lloyd estimated it to infuse roughly two and a half times the amount of mana, which wasn’t what he had initially hoped for, but he had also hoped to finish in a week, so he had abandoned those standards.

  From a realistic standpoint, this was amazing, almost three times as good on his first attempt was incredible. Even just designing a talisman that worked was far above what was deemed average, as apparently most people struggled to even make the predesigned ones.

  Personally, Lloyd found this hard to believe, as it was really no harder to do than a large jigsaw puzzle. Failing to figure out something like this just seemed embarrassing, but then again, if you had low amounts in stats like perception and willpower, he could kind of see why some would struggle.

  Lloyd was lucky in this regard, as both his class and profession awarded stats that were good for this sort of thing. Compared to someone who had a class like heavy warrior which gave no perception, and practically no mental stats, he was very well off.

  Had he even had ten percent less perception, Lloyd would have been fucked, as there was no way he would have been able to see such minute lines, let alone carve them. Even his intelligence which had no actual effect on how well he could make the talisman was vital because of the sheer amount of mana he burnt through in the process.

  Almost twelve hours and an absurd amount of mana later, Lloyd finally finished the first round of curing.

  Just… two more to go.