Chapter 143: Theorycrafting (Patreon)

The best thing about Narrative Forging, one of several best things, was that the vessel could be garbage.

Not just permitted to be garbage. Preferred. The Blank Page Principle. An item with its own history fought back, argued, insisted on being what it already was, and every ounce of that resistance had to be paid for in Artistry and Awen and better verse. A rusted training sword with no enchantment on it whatsoever had no opinions. It lay there and let you write.

Which raised a question he'd been circling since he first attempted the forging.

What happens if you stack it?

Say he had a Conceptual Material for fire. Say he had a wyrm's heart as the Anchor, thematically perfect, all that furnace-blooded resonance. Say the Vessel itself was a breastplate hammered out of red drake scale. Three layers of the same idea pointing the same direction. The story wouldn't need to fight the paper, because the paper would already be trying to tell it.

Theoretically the result would be obscene.

Theoretically he could also blow himself up and lose a Mythic reagent, since the codex in his head on this subject consisted entirely of experiments he'd run personally, and the sample size was two.

He filed it under later and pulled the auction interface open across his knees.

The Grand Theater's upper tier was mostly chill, it being a marketplace considered. Down on the floor, the auction stage churned, criers barking lot numbers with the practiced rasp of men who'd found a niche, spellwork flaring gold each time a bid landed. Thousands of listings breathing at once, each one a small weight tugging at the eye, the expensive ones heavy as wet sand, the junk skittering past like dry leaves. He'd learned to squint through it. Mostly.

Vessel first.

The soul in his bag was called The Maker's Abandoned Breath, and the ink he'd pair it with was Ink of Origin, and both of them meant roughly the same thing said from two directions. Genesis. Draft. Art. Potential. The moment before the first stroke, and the first stroke itself.

So the item had to live inside that. Which left the actual decision.

Do I make it for me?

He let himself look at that honestly, because self-flattery was how people ended up under-geared and confident. He ran the audit.

Level 28. Artistry at a 141, which the Samurai subclass was quietly laundering into strength and agility at a conversion rate that got better the harder he fought. Mumyo, a Legendary that grew two points of attack per level and had no weight and no recovery animation. A Unique amulet, a Unique ring, a full set of dyed medium gear that shouldn't have synergized as well as it did.

And sitting in his bag, waiting for level thirty like two loaded guns in a locked drawer: the Shroud of the Weeping Bell, plus fifteen to every attribute and a reactive sonic burst that scaled off Artistry at three hundred percent, and the Gloves of the Final Draft, whose entire design philosophy appeared to be what if a hit, once landed, simply could not be argued with.

On top of that, the Jisei tree. The Threshold, bleeding him stronger the closer he got to dying. Sutemi, which let him take a hit on purpose and hand the bill straight back. And the Hand of Words, one of the First Maker's legacies, loosening the grammar of his entire Lexicon.

Then there was the thing he kept coming back to.

His last actual class skill had unlocked at fifteen. Form III. The Haiku. He was twenty-eight now, thirteen levels of nothing, and no game in the history of games spaced a progression tree like that by accident. Five, fifteen, thirty. The pattern was so obvious it was almost childish.

Something was waiting for him at thirty. Something bigger than a Haiku.

So. Do I need another item.

"No," he said, out loud, to the empty row of seats.

He'd beaten a level forty Axiom Entity in a sealed duel with a sword the thing had personally declared worthless. His character wasn't a build anymore. It was a structural flaw in the game's economy that hadn't been patched yet.

Which meant this craft was for money. Unless he stumbled into a combination so good it would be malpractice to sell it, in which case he'd reconsider and feel briefly guilty about the profit margin.

He started with the obvious search.

[Category: All]

[Quality: Common]

[Sort: Required Level, Descending]

The list unrolled. Level 30 at the top, a scattering of 28 and 29 beneath it. Rope-bound cudgels. Journeyman's aprons. A pair of level twenty-nine common trousers whose only listed property was Armor: +19 and whose seller had named the listing "trousers lol."

Good. High-level blank paper exists. Base stats mattered, even in forging. A legend written onto a level five wooden practice sword produced the world's most magnificent stick. A level thirty common at least had bones.

Two rows down, someone was having a conversation at the volume of a man who wanted to be overheard.

"—no, you're not listening, it's not a set piece, Brastok, it's an actual orange."

"Screenshots or you're buying me pots for the next grind."

"What do you mean, just filter for it and you'll see? Guy's apparently got it up on consignment because he can't wear it, wrong class, poor bastard."

"Well, digi dong me sideways Marcel, isn't that the first since launch?"

"Since launch. First one on the market. Not first one dropped, obviously, the top guilds are for sure sitting on theirs like dragons, I would bet my middle testicle on that, but first one anybody's actually willing to—" A pause, some rustling. "Okay, look at the buyout. That's not a real number. Nobody's buying that."

"So don't buy it."

"I'm not buying it, I'm fucking poor haha."

Kage adjusted his filter.

[Quality: Legendary]

[Available Listings: 1]

There it was. [Sootwalkers of the Ninth Candle], level twenty-eight, cloth, Intellect and mana regeneration and something that made your third spell in a sequence cost nothing. Mage boots. Beautiful for exactly one archetype and useless to everyone else, which was probably the only reason a solo player had let go of it at all.

Current bid: 640 gold. Buyout: 1100.

A week. The playerbase had gone from selling copper ore at a markup to auctioning Legendaries in approximately a week. He'd known the curve was steep. Seeing it laid out in a single listing was different from knowing it.

He opened a second window. Stark. Corporate.

VerseEx Gateway.

INPUT Crown of Destiny Standard Gold (CoDSG): 1

> CURRENT MARKET RATE: $110.42 USD / 1 CoDSG

He looked at that for a while.

A week ago it had been over a thousand. Yesterday—or was it two days ago?—around two hundred. Now a hundred and ten and still sliding, because more players meant more gold and more gold meant less scarcity, and every economy in history had done exactly this. It would find a floor somewhere. Twenty dollars, maybe fifteen, after a month or two, and then it would sit there forever and the dark gamers would grind eighteen hours a day for rent money.

Still. Eleven hundred gold for a pair of boots was a hundred and twenty-one thousand dollars, and someone was going to pay it. An image of Zherdev flashed in his eyes, and he shook it off. Even he won't spend that much on mage gear.

Three hundred and fifty thousand, he thought. NRT-7. The number hadn't moved. The path to it just kept changing shape.

He closed the Gateway.

So he needed something the market had never seen. Not a good item. Good items were now, apparently, appearing without him putting them out there. He needed a category.

He went back to the soul and read its keywords again like a man checking his pockets. Genesis. Draft. Art. Potential. Abandoned. Breath.

And that was where the common-item plan fell apart, because it was too literal. Blank page meant cheap gray sword only if you were reading the mechanic at surface level, and he'd stopped reading anything at surface level around the time a dungeon called him Master.

The Maker's Abandoned Breath wasn't blankness. Blankness was a page nobody had touched. The Breath was something else entirely. Abandoned. That was the load-bearing word.

Not empty. Started and left. He sat forward, elbows on his knees.

What in a game had a high-level beginning and no ending? What was made with skill and intent and then discarded before it became anything?

The answer walked up and hit him so cleanly he almost laughed.

Failed crafts.

Every blacksmith in the game, every one of the millions of players currently mashing their profession bar—or whatever it was in this game—toward mastery, produced them by the wagonload. A smith swinging for a Rare and pulling a scorched, warped, structurally unsound lump. A high-tier attempt that collapsed on the last strike. High-level intent. High-level materials. No story, because the story had died at the anvil.

They were drafts. Literally. Materially. Every failed craft in the game was a draft that the world had thrown away.

And the soul in his bag was the breath of a maker who did the same thing on a cosmic scale.

Resonance. He typed with the speed of someone who already knew the answer.

[Search: "failed"]

[Quality: Common]

[Sort: Required Level, Descending]

The results came back and they were pitiful. Nine listings. Total. Across an entire server's market, nine, and the top one was level fifteen.

[Vaguely Sword-Shaped Object]

Quality: Common

Type: One-Handed Sword (technically)

Physical Attack: +4

Requirement: Level 15

Description: It has a pointy part. The pointy part is on the wrong end. Sold as-is.

Asking price: 11 copper.

Seller's note: "my first sword pls buy im sad."

He tried other angles. Ruined. Botched. Warped. Cracked. Misforged. He tried searching by the debris-tier material tags. Everything came back empty or came back level nine. Because of course it did. Failed crafts were vendor trash. Nobody listed them; you sold them to an NPC for four copper and moved on with your life, and the whole reason his idea was worth anything was that not a single person in this world had a reason to save one.

Which was the entire point.

That's the recipe. A conceptually unfulfilled vessel, the Breath of an abandoned maker, and the Ink that made statements retroactively true. Three layers of the same idea, stacked, all pointing the same way. The dragon-scale theory, applied to something nobody would ever think to hoard.

And it was completely unavailable through any market in the game.

He sat back and looked at the theater ceiling, where somebody had painted a fresco of the goddess of commerce holding scales.

So I need a blacksmith. A very good one. Ideally the best one on the server, because he didn't want a novice's failures, he wanted the wreckage of someone attempting things at the edge of their skill. Failed Epics. Failed Rares at minimum. The corpses of ambition. If he already had a Legendary Poet class, there had to be someone with at least a Rare Blacksmith class, right?

…Right?

Now, how does a gray man with no reputation approach the best smith, somewhere in this absurdly large world, and ask to buy his garbage?

He can't. Obviously.

But I'm not a gray man anymore.

That thought had a bad aftertaste. He'd spent every hour since launch making himself unmemorable, and then an amphitheater had put his title in the sky. The forums knew Kage. The forums were arguing about Kage.

He couldn't put that back in the bottle.

So he'd spend it. Fame was just a currency he'd acquired involuntarily, and currencies existed to be converted into things you actually wanted. A good craftsman would, most likely, take a meeting with the man everyone talked about. The craftsman might even give him the failures for free, out of professional curiosity.

And finding that craftsman meant knowing people, which meant a network, which meant—

[Lily → Kage] so zara's serious about the guild thing btw!! she has like a whole document now l o l

Huh.

He held that for a moment, turning it over. Then set it down. It could wait an hour.

Because a second problem had arrived, and it was the more expensive one.

Right now, his best possible instrument for Narrative Forging was Form III. The Haiku. Which meant if he took the Breath and the Ink of Origin and forged them today, he would be forging at the ceiling of his current ability.

And in two levels, the ceiling was probably moving.

He didn't know what Form IV looked like. He was extrapolating from an unlock pattern and a hunch, which was exactly the kind of thinking he'd have mocked in someone else.

But he had three uses of a Mythic ink. Three. Spending one of them at ninety percent of his eventual capacity, on a Mythic soul he could never farm again, to save himself two levels of patience.

No.

The Breath waits. Level thirty. He'd know by then whether the hunch was worth anything, and if it wasn't, he'd have lost nothing except time he was going to spend leveling anyway.

Which left him with the small problem of being broke.

Thirty-one gold, seventy-four silver, twenty-four copper. A rounding error. Enough to buy the failed sword eleven thousand times and nothing else.

He opened his materials pouch.

[The Stifled Toll]

Quality: Legendary

Type: Conceptual Material

It had been sitting there since Ashenvale. The concept harvested off a boss whose whole tragedy had been grief that never got to leave the bell. Silence held under pressure. A ring withheld. Weight that wanted to move and couldn't.

Fine. Liquidate it.

And more importantly: use it as the test.

Because the entire three-piece theory, the thing he'd been chewing on, was untested. One soul, split across multiple vessels, bound into a matched set. The system might allow it. The system might reject it, or split the power so thin that each piece came out anemic, or produce three separate cursed items that whispered at their owners.

If he burned a Mythic soul finding that out, he'd deserve whatever happened.

If he burned a lesser one, he'd learn the same lesson for a tenth of the price, and either way he ended up with product. Set works: he sells a bundle, the first matched conceptual set in the game, and lets the guilds bid against each other. Set fails: he sells three unrelated items and still clears more gold than he's ever held.

Both branches profit. Do it.

For this one, common vessels were fine. Cheap paper, cheap experiment.

So. Which slots.

He pulled up the market again and started thinking about it properly, and the answer surfaced almost immediately, because it was the same principle that had been in front of him the whole time.

Forging added to the vessel. It never replaced the base. Write the greatest legend in history onto a common sword and you'd still have a common sword's attack power carrying a beautiful story, and the buyer's damage numbers would be sad and the buyer would notice.

Which meant weapons and armor were traps, especially in the beginning levels. Slots where the base statistic did the heavy lifting punished a cheap vessel.

But accessories.

Rings. Amulets. Cloaks. Trinkets. Slots where nobody expected raw numbers, where the entire value proposition was the effect, where a common vessel's contribution to the final product was somewhere around zero and therefore cost him nothing at all.

He typed it in.