Infinite Mana - Chapter 109: Junk With Surprisingly Good Ideas (Thank you for your support, Matt!) (Patreon)

The light saber turned out to be only the beginning. Once Sieghart finished staring at the glowing blade long enough to satisfy his curiosity, he deactivated it carefully and began examining the remaining objects scattered across the warehouse shelves.

At first glance, most of the equipment looked like junk accumulated by people incapable of throwing anything away. Several objects were scratched, partially dismantled, badly labeled, or shaped so strangely that Sieghart could not immediately determine what purpose their creators had imagined.

The longer he looked, however, the more interesting the collection became. Vessa and Orin apparently possessed very little interest in organization, but their creativity was considerably harder to criticize once Sieghart understood what some of the unusual tools actually did.

Near one pile of folded fabric, Sieghart discovered something resembling an unusually thick sleeping bag. Several pale runic lines had been stitched through its interior, surrounding a small mana crystal embedded near the section where someone’s chest would rest.

Sieghart supplied a small amount of mana and immediately felt a gentle White Magic effect spreading throughout the material. It was nowhere near powerful enough to repair serious injuries, but minor cuts, muscle strain, and ordinary fatigue would apparently recover somewhat faster inside it.

“A healing sleeping bag.”

Sieghart stared at it for several seconds before nodding slowly. The idea sounded ridiculous when described aloud, yet soldiers and travelers recovering while they slept was considerably more practical than carrying expensive healing equipment that required someone awake to operate it.

The next interesting object was much simpler. A reinforced miner’s helmet possessed a broad rune across the forehead, and once Sieghart supplied mana, a steady sphere of white light appeared above the wearer’s eyes without producing noticeable heat.

“That one I could probably make.”

Sieghart already knew how to create basic light through Mana Rune, although he had never considered placing the effect permanently inside wearable equipment. His own version would probably be crude, but the principle was familiar enough that copying it seemed realistic.

Another shelf contained a round shield approximately half the width of Sieghart’s body. Unlike ordinary shields, its outer edge was reinforced with smooth metal, while several Wind and Arcane runes formed a circular pattern around the central handle.

Sieghart charged it, carried it into an open section of the warehouse, and threw it carefully toward several empty crates. The shield curved through the air, struck the floor, changed direction, and returned directly toward his extended hand.

He caught it awkwardly before the rim struck his fingers, then stared at the weapon with renewed interest. The return effect was not perfect, but the runic formation clearly corrected the shield’s trajectory toward whoever supplied the original mana signature.

“So they made a boomerang shield.”

That one had obvious combat applications. A skilled fighter could block with it, throw it as a weapon, and potentially recover it without abandoning their defensive equipment, assuming they developed enough practice to avoid being struck by their own returning shield.

Sieghart found reinforced gloves capable of producing short bursts of heat, boots containing weak impact-reduction formations, a water flask that slowly purified its contents, and a compact shovel whose edge hardened temporarily whenever mana entered the handle.

None of those inventions were overwhelmingly powerful. Most offered small conveniences rather than battlefield-changing abilities, yet that simplicity made them more impressive because ordinary workers, travelers, miners, and soldiers could actually use them without specialized magical training.

The warehouse gradually stopped looking like a mountain of worthless objects and started resembling the physical remains of hundreds of experiments. Some had probably failed completely, but others showed Vessa and Orin solving extremely specific problems using surprisingly clever combinations of simple runes.

Sieghart appreciated that approach. He normally thought about magic in terms of combat, progression, stronger spells, permanent parameters, and whatever dangerous problem appeared next, while the two craftsmen apparently looked at ordinary inconveniences and wondered whether mana could remove them.

His attention eventually returned to the portable hand cannon responsible for welcoming him with an explosion. Compared with the useful tools in the warehouse, that prototype clearly belonged to the considerably more dangerous side of Vessa and Orin’s creativity.

Sieghart wondered whether they intended to send something like it north once the design stopped attempting to destroy its operators. A portable magical cannon would be useful against heavily armored enemies, fortifications, or particularly durable creatures.

“Maybe the orcs?”

Mira had mentioned multiple groups pressuring the human borders, although she had not listed every enemy currently fighting farther north. Sieghart had heard enough conversations during the journey to know that orc forces were active somewhere beyond this region.

Thinking about them reminded him of something considerably older, something he had learned while studying the early history of magical conflict. According to surviving accounts, the world had entered a particularly chaotic period when people discovered increasingly immoral methods of gaining supernatural strength.

Human societies had once been dominated almost completely by powerful Aura bloodlines. Eventually, desperate people searching for ways to challenge those families began experimenting with monster cores, altered bodies, forbidden rituals, corrupted energy, and several other methods nobody sensible should have tested.

Some of those experiments created entire populations that were no longer completely human. Others produced monsters, corrupted bloodlines, or strange beings whose descendants supposedly remained somewhere beyond the territories controlled by modern human kingdoms.

Sieghart frowned while remembering those records. The histories were frustratingly vague, probably because the people responsible had either destroyed evidence themselves or because later rulers preferred simplifying everything into stories about foolish rebels receiving appropriate punishment.

That uncertainty made him wonder whether orcs might have originated from humans as well. Their humanoid bodies, tool usage, language, organized groups, and ability to develop supernatural strength made the possibility seem at least theoretically reasonable.

Sieghart had never heard anyone claim that directly, however. Every book he remembered treated orcs as their own people, usually describing them as hostile tribes without spending much time explaining where they originally came from.

He also remembered the handful of orcs he had killed near his grandparents’ farm years earlier. Nothing about their bodies had appeared particularly strange beyond the obvious differences expected from another race, and he had never sensed corruption from them.

Perhaps that meant nothing. Thousands of years would be more than enough time for an altered population to stabilize into something completely different, especially in a world where mana regularly changed monsters, plants, animals, and apparently entire ecosystems.

Or perhaps Sieghart was creating connections where none existed simply because he had recently become suspicious of everything involving corrupted magic. Not every unusual race needed to secretly originate from a failed human experiment.

“Another thing to research.”

His list was becoming unreasonable again. Sieghart already wanted information about Seraphina, corrupted cores, dungeon formation, Necromancy, Psionics, magical perception, runic engineering, and several other subjects that would probably require entire libraries by themselves.

He pushed those thoughts aside and returned to the actual assignment before curiosity consumed the rest of the afternoon. Vessa and Orin had hired Lunar Arc because they needed charged equipment, not because they wanted a ten-year-old secretly constructing theories about racial origins inside their warehouse.

Sieghart continued working until several swords, shields, lamps, medical tools, and other pieces reached their intended capacity. He deliberately stopped long before exhaustion would have become believable, remembering Mira’s instruction to avoid revealing how much mana he actually possessed.

The limitation felt ridiculous. Sieghart could have charged everything in the warehouse without losing a single point of mana, yet he needed to behave as though restoring several dozen items represented meaningful effort rather than slightly repetitive hand movements.

Eventually, he decided to carry the completed equipment into the main workshop. Part of his motivation was practical because he wanted Vessa and Orin to understand that he had actually been working instead of examining strange tools all afternoon.

The larger reason was curiosity. The warehouse had taught him plenty about finished magical equipment, but he had already concluded that studying completed weapons could only reveal so much about how their internal runic structures had originally been created.

Sieghart loaded several smaller items into a wooden crate before using Telekinesis to steady the topmost pieces while carrying everything toward the connecting doorway. The spell still handled only limited weight reliably, but preventing tools from sliding was easy enough.

The main workshop had changed considerably since the explosion. Most of the smoke was gone, damaged components had disappeared from the floor, and several reinforced lamps illuminated worktables covered with neatly arranged tools Sieghart had not noticed earlier.

Vessa and Orin stood at separate tables with their backs partially turned toward the warehouse entrance. Both wore protective glasses with multiple overlapping lenses, and neither reacted when Sieghart entered because their attention remained completely absorbed in their work.

Sieghart stopped without announcing himself. For once, someone else could experience what it felt like when people entered a room quietly.

Vessa was working on a broad military sword whose blade had not yet been attached to the handle. The exposed internal frame revealed channels, small crystals, conductive metals, and narrow grooves that would eventually disappear beneath protective plating.

Orin worked nearby on something resembling a short staff containing several removable sections. His project appeared considerably less complete, with paper diagrams spread across the table and numerous measurements written beside carefully drawn geometric patterns.

Both craftsmen held tools resembling metal pens with elongated crystalline tips. Mana flowed continuously from their hands into those instruments, causing the tips to shine before leaving extremely thin glowing lines across the materials they touched.

Sieghart immediately became interested. The tools were basically magical styluses. Vessa moved hers slowly across the sword’s internal plate, carving an intricate line into the metal while simultaneously depositing some kind of mana-responsive material inside the newly created groove.

The process was considerably more delicate than Sieghart expected. Every curve needed consistent depth, spacing, and mana flow, while small branching paths connected larger runes together into something resembling an electrical circuit.

Orin’s work made the comparison even clearer. His design contained several distinct rune formations linked through channels that directed stored mana from one section toward another according to whatever effect the finished staff was supposed to produce.

Sieghart remained near the doorway and watched silently. Neither craftsman noticed him, which allowed him to examine their technique without answering questions about why a child was staring at their hands with uncomfortable intensity.

The most immediately obvious detail was the mana consumption. Each line carved by the styluses drained a small amount of energy from the user, while complete runes required noticeably more whenever their internal patterns became active during inscription.

Vessa occasionally stopped, shook her hand, and resumed working only after several seconds. Orin did something similar, though he appeared to compensate by changing the intensity of the stylus according to the material beneath it.

Sieghart could probably operate one of those tools indefinitely. That thought interested him almost as much as the runes themselves. However, Infinite Mana alone would clearly not make him capable of producing magical weapons. Watching Vessa work for only several minutes was enough to reveal that raw energy represented one of the least complicated requirements.

Several large sheets of paper surrounded her project. One contained the sword’s dimensions, another showed internal material placement, while the largest displayed the complete runic network before a single line had been carved into the actual weapon.

It was a blueprint. Not merely for the sword. For the mana itself. Sieghart could see how every channel had been planned beforehand, including where energy entered the weapon, where it would be stored, which rune activated first, which effect followed afterward, and where excess mana escaped safely.

That immediately explained why the hand cannon had exploded.

A single incorrect line could redirect energy somewhere never designed to receive it. If enough mana accumulated there before the formation failed, the weapon would probably respond exactly as the prototype had earlier.

Sieghart quietly placed his crate on the floor and continued watching. His Mana Rune spell gave him the ability to create magical symbols, but that was nowhere near enough to reproduce what Vessa and Orin were doing.

Knowing individual runes was comparable to knowing individual words. Building a weapon required writing an entire language with them.

Sieghart would need blueprints prepared specifically for each item, knowledge of how different materials responded to mana, understanding of storage formations, activation mechanisms, safety channels, and probably dozens of technical principles he had never encountered.

Even that would only cover simple devices. More complicated creations like the returning shield or light saber required multiple rune effects interacting without interfering with one another, which meant every formation needed to be designed around everything surrounding it.

Sieghart narrowed his eyes while examining Vessa’s blueprint from a distance. Several symbols looked familiar because his own Mana Rune experiments used similar basic patterns, yet others were completely unknown to him.

Different effects probably required entirely different rune families.

Light.

Heat.

Force.

Storage.

Return.

Purification.

Healing.

Elemental conversion. The possibilities multiplied quickly. Sieghart understood immediately why merely owning Mana Rune had never transformed him into a magical craftsman. His System had given him a tool, not every piece of knowledge developed around that tool during centuries of experimentation.

That realization should have disappointed him. Instead, it made him more interested.

If everything could simply be learned instantly through unlocking one spell, there would be nothing to experiment with. The existence of proper runic engineering meant Mana Rune possessed far more potential than the small effects Sieghart had created alone.