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Last of the Fae Chapter 80: Setting Up Shop Pt. 3
🕑 Added 2024-12-17 02:52:43 +0000 UTC'It worked,' Thane thought in disbelief. As his shock faded, he reached out and picked up the small wooden box that had appeared. Taking off the lid, Thane looked inside and stared at the neatly wrapped bundle of Dittany, a plant with far-spaced circular leaves and powerful healing properties. 'It actually worked.'
While Thane could have relied on the potency and marked-down prices of his alchemical goods to dominate the market, he realized that he needed an x-factor, something to make him stand out from the rest.
The analogy Thane came up with was dining at a five-star restaurant. It wasn't the food that attracted people but the experience. Everything seen, heard, smelled, and tasted had to leave an impression, one unique enough that it couldn't be replicated anywhere else. This is what Thane wanted to achieve with his store, creating a trademark people would associate with anything he attached his name to.
With his end goal in sight, Thane only needed to lay the brickwork to cross the distance. The idea for a storage network came to him after Thane enchanted his trunk with the extension charm and was once more amazed by the convenience and utility of magic. But with his restless mind, Thane soon realized the endless possibilities of warping and folding space.
But there was a missing piece: the extension charm was too rigid; like all spells, it was designed to complete one function well. Though the charm could be scaled in potency, adjusting its function was nearly impossible. Fortunately for Thane, Formations were made for this precise reason; while they could take weeks, months, or years to finish, they could be customized for any purpose, all thanks to the power of runes.
Elara had explained to Thane that runes were the essentially written language of magic. They weren't spoken or created by a sentient race but were instead a pattern of nature influenced by countless factors as they manifested in places of high mana density. Eventually, ancient mages figured out how to copy the runes and string them together to achieve the desired effects, creating runic magic.
There were countless runes, so many that Elara boldly proclaimed that there were an infinite amount, meaning there were an infinite number of applications, and no effect was too small or grand that a formation couldn't be applied.
With that encouraging speech, Thane asked Elara for the runes he needed to achieve a similar effect to the extension charm, which only made Elara smile. Instead of giving him the answer, Elara instructed Thane on the complex and arduous process of deriving runes from the vocal incantations and wand movement of spells and charms. The process required a sound understanding of both linguistics and arithmetic, but Thane was stubborn and spent countless days and nights slowly chipping away at the extension charm until he was left with its runic equivalent.
Once he had the formula, Thane combined it with a relay ritual, which allowed him to link one expanded storage space to multiple gateways, such as the glass display cases or the metal crates in the storage room. While the concept might have seemed simple, implementing it in the real world had been a nightmare. Space was a fickle thing, and it didn't like being folded in on itself.
Perhaps Thane should have tamed his self-expectations and started with a more straightforward task for only his second time: creating a formation. However, his ego had swelled to new heights. Thane's persistence carried him through many trials and errors and countless calculations regarding dimensional proportions, but it had all been worth it.
"This changes everything," Thane muttered as he started to consider possibilities he hadn't dared think of before knowing if what he sought to achieve was even possible. The current Storage Network in the shop was limited to a range of roughly fifty meters from the Anchor, the central formation that housed the mana battery, and the main storage dimension. Any 'gateway' within this range could be fueled by the Anchor and access the storage dimension allowing the input or output of any item as long as there was space left within the primary storage. A safety measure that Thane had implemented after one stress test failed catastrophically.
"But I managed to extend the range and the storage capacity," Thane continued to mutter under his breath, "Is that even possible?"
Before Thane's mind could wander off into another insane endeavor, a voice sounded from outside the shop, "Hello....is there anybody in there?"
Shaking his head, Thane freed himself from errant thoughts as he quickly fixed a polite and charming smile, entering what Thalion called 'performance' mode.
As Thane approached the door, he waved his hand, sending a flurry of silver motes of lights around the room. The lights affixed themselves to the walls and ceiling, lighting up the store's interior.
The dual doors slid aside and vanished into the solid stone wall without a trace, letting Thane step into the doorway and greet his waiting company, "Mrs. Skeeter, right on time, exactly what I expected from someone of your caliber."
The gossip correspondent whirled around from where she had been talked to a member of her film crew, shock evident on her face as, from her perspective, the doorway had appeared out of thin air.
"Fae-I mean Lord Fae!" Rita exclaimed in shock, almost forgetting to address Thane by his noble title before quickly collecting herself, "It's a pleasure to finally meet you in person."
Rita extended a hand, and Thane quickly shook it, though gingerly, as his hand completely encompassed hers. As they did, Thane took a moment to look Rita over and realized that perhaps Daphne was right to think so little of him.
Rita was in her late twenties or at least early thirties, but a certain air lingered around the journalist, making her feel far older. However, it did nothing to subtract from her physical appeal. Rita's blond, nearly white hair was kept short but expertly curled and styled, along with makeup that accented her natural beauty, only using the bare minimum without overdoing it.
The same could be said for her outfit, a dark red sweater dress cut off at the shoulders with a plunging neckline. But Rita preserved her modesty with a black shawl across her pale shoulders; she wore a pair of black high-heeled boots and a glass of thick-rimmed glasses balanced on the tip of her thin nose.
There was a simple but well-executed elegance to Rita's outfit that Thane could appreciate. Letting her hand go, Thane stepped to the side and gestured into the shop, "It is my honor to welcome you all as the first-ever patron of Fae's Apothecary. Please step inside and let me show you what makes us one of a kind and the future global standard of apothecaries and alchemical suppliers."
Comments
Bob Joe
as of now the uploading schedule I'm trying to maintain is every Monday Wednesday Friday Saturday and Sunday.
First_Steps
hey author, what's the release schedule for the Last of Fae?...could you make this more frequent?
First_Steps
one more please
