thomasdarkrose
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Fabricator v2 - Chapter 9
🕑 Added 2023-06-30 17:38:35 +0000 UTCJunichiro followed Mittelt through the house to a room she identified as an office. Inside she shwoed him through a collection of documents that gave him all the information he needed for his new situation, his new bank account information, and all the paperwork for his identity. That last one kind of scared him a bit. From what he could see, Azazel was able to hunt down everything about his life that Junichiro himself was aware of. This did not include the identity of his father.
His mother was... promiscuous, and he'd leave it at that. He did, however, know his father was not a supernatural being of any sort. He wasn't some shonen protagonist with a deep hidden past. He knew this because he'd checked pretty early on after becoming and Artificer. It was easy enough to do. Aside from that, awakening his magical core should have awoken any supernatural traits he would have had as well. Since nothing changed and his magical detection failed to find anything, he rightly concluded that he was purely human.
After showing him all the legal paperwork, Mittelt gave him a bored stare, “That about covers everything Azazel-sama wanted you to know about. Oh! The property has some minor aversion wards around it, but if you want anything better Azazel-sama said 'do it yourself,' got that?”
Junichiro nodded, “Got it. Just curious but will you be manning the surveillance systems in the house or will Azazel?”
Mittlet scoffed, “Azazel-sama has better things to do than watch... I-I mean...” Clearly looking nervous and slightly upset, Mittelt tried to give Junichiro her best 'adorable' look, though the twitch in her eyebrow kind of gave her discomfort with doing so away, “W-what surveillance systems? There's no way Azazel-sama would spy on you!”
Junichiro smiled brightly at her clearly uncomfortable look, “No, no of course he wouldn't.”
Mittelt glared at him for a moment before deciding the conversation never happened and moving on, “On the phone Azazel-sama gave you, there's a red button. If you press it you will activate an emergency beacon. When you press it, it will send out a signal that any nearby member of the Grigori can receive. We all know to render aid to anyone sending that signal because it means they're one of us. Obviously you should only ever use it in a life or death situation.”
Junichiro nodded in agreement. Having two members of Grigori knowing his identity was bad enough. Oh, he had no delusions that the whole organization would have known eventually, he would have just preferred to keep it a secret from them a while longer. The yokai would know soon enough when he contacted them for some trade and work but the yokai were his countryman. No, seriously they were. Yokai were native to Japan, the fallen angels, obviously, were not. So, he felt more comfortable with the yokai being aware of him than the Grigori, if that made any sense.
With her job done, for now, Mittelt didn't even bother saying goodbye before she teleported out of the house. She likely wouldn't return until Junichiro called her. Something he didn't plan to do for a while, at least not until he ran out of Mana Steel. With no one left in the house, he quickly left the office and made his way back to the workshop. He wanted to explore every nook and cranny of the place!
It was only once he was back inside and taking a much closer look at it that Junichiro realized just how massive the building really was. It was like a small warehouse it was so big. Which just went to show how massive the courtyard had been before the building was installed. Everywhere he looked were machines meant for manufacture. A lathe over there, a hydraulic press over there, a brand new five burner forge there, an ancient style coal forge there, smelters of various sizes, hammers, tongs, engraving tools, chisels, beakers, plastic tubing, Bunsen burners, graduated cylinders, and so much more!
Then there were the spaces for material storage. He had massive cabinets all labeled with different materials, iron, bronze, tin, copper, mahogany, black walnut, stabilized wood, and so much more. Then there were the various plants and extracts for alchemy, many of which he'd never heard of like Epajianna, Ashespeed, Echomard, Nasty Rose, Hollow Cane, Adina, and Twisted Belladonna. He had no idea what any of them could be used for and he'd never been more excited to be ignorant!
That was a bit of philosophy he tried to live by right there. Ignorance wasn't something to be ashamed of. Everyone, everywhere, every-when, had some ignorance in their life. No one knew everything at all times, that was the territory of Omnipresence. Besides, what was there to be ashamed of when it came to being ignorant? It just meant you had something new to learn! Now, ignorance was often substituted for stupidity, and that just annoyed him greatly. The same could be said of people deliberately choosing to remain ignorant, his personal definition of stupidity.
None of that was important right now though, what was important was the massive amount of toys he currently had at his disposal and his desire to immediately begin making something with them! The question was, what should he make? It only took him a few moments to decide, he needed to start by making some ink.
Why?
Because he desperately needed to replace his lost Scroll of Teleportation. Those were the far end of his ability to make scrolls using just parchment paper and took a lot of power to boot. So he'd only had the one and it had been wasted. He needed to replace it and hopefully making a more magical ink would reduce the time and energy requirements enough to make one significantly more quickly than the previous one.
He quickly began digging through the material drawers in the plant section. That's right, every section of different materials was properly labeled. He really had to give Azazel credit for how this place was set up. It was probably due to Azazel's likely personal experience from setting up labs to do his own research and work in. They might be in different fields but there was probably a fair bit of crossover.
He dismissed his thoughts on the subject and started retrieving various plants from their drawers. There weren't massive amounts of each plant, more like samples really. It made sense to him though. Why buy a ton of a magical plant when there's no telling if it would even be useful? With the small sample sizes he could check them out, figure out some properties, and then see if he could make them useful. Useful plants get ordered, useless plants get ignored.
To determine the properties of a plant, he would pick them up and channel his mana through them in a specific manner. Doing so gave him some minor information on any materials he checked. Like the plant he was holding now, Ashespeed. This particular plant had properties that could be best described as 'speed,' as in physical movement and perception. The best method to extract the properties, burning it and inhaling the smoke. Though it was entirely possible to convert the smoke into a liquid to use as an extract in potions. Epajianna was also another interesting plant that seemed to provide energy, similar to caffeine. Just like Ashespeed it needed to be burnt and the smoke inhaled, or turned into a liquid extract.
He studied the two plants, then grinned and set the to the side together. Combining speed and energy into a single potion, extract, or something else would be a nice additive to anything really. It could even be used on its own as a potion with some stabilizing agents and flavorants. There was no call for making gross tasting potions!
It took a while but he collected three different plants that had properties related to mana regulation, production, and conversion. With his ingredients selected, he moved over to the chemistry portion of the workshop and grabbed a decently large pestle and mortar. That's one detail Azazel hadn't missed, the combination of old school and new school things he'd had inside of the sheds in the junkyard. Some stuff just had to be done the old fashioned way to be done properly. In this case that meant smashing the crab out of the leaves of Phuzerry that he had.
He had zero idea what Phuzerry even was but it's leaves had excellent properties related to mana production. Adding it to ink would make the ink channel mana better than his own blood ever could while simultaneously giving it a mild amplification boost. The best method of using the Phuzerry was to pound it into a paste, add water to the paste, then boil it so that the steam rose into a condenser creating an extract, then boiling that extract to reduce the amount of excess water. The final product should appear to be just slightly thicker water.
How did he know all of that? Instinct mostly. The sheer amount of knowledge within his mind was more than he could hope to ever properly convey to another living being. Even if he'd never heard of Phuzerry and it wasn't included within his memories, he had enough other similar plants within his memory that he could deduce the process and expected results. Could he be wrong? Most definitely! But it was an excellent starting place and he had no need to argue with his instincts. If he was, in fact, wrong, he'd just get more and try a different method! That's how experimenting worked! Make a hypothesis and test it out.
The second plant, Twisted Belladonna, was actually even more poisonous than it's non magical relative. If he wasn't mistaken, regular Belladonna had purple flowers while Twisted Belladonna had ash gray flowers. Despite the toxicity, Twisted Belladonna had wonderful mana conversion properties. By that, he meant it made it easier to convert mana from one state of matter to another.
Mana in its natural state was energy. Converting energy to energy was significantly easier than converting energy into a solid, liquid, or gas. That was why fire was one of the single most common types of magic that beginners learned. Converting mana into another form of energy, fire, was a hell of a lot easier than converting it into something like water or stone. As a general rule of thumb, the more 'rigid' something was, the harder it was to make with mana. Though, one should never forget that it was all magic and there were exceptions, circumstances, and oddities that could negate that general rule.
The use of the Twisted Belladonna in the ink would make it easier to convert his mana from its energy state into a liquid state. Doing so would make it a lot easier on his reserves and concentration while working on the scroll.
Lastly he'd selected Oveheed for its mana regulation properties. This one was probably the simplest concept. Oveheed had a natural tendency to spead mana infused into it equally. This meant that as he put ink onto the scroll the Oveheed would make sure that the energy of the mana spread out evenly throughout all of the ink. This would greatly enhance his efficiency in making the scroll as some sections of ink wouldn't ever contain more, or less, mana than other sections. In other words, it was excellent for overcoming his lacking mana control, a weakness he was still working on. Mana control just takes a fair bit of effort to achieve mastery of. Just like everything else he was working on.
So, with those three plants combined with some well aged ink, he would produce a magical ink vastly superior to just adding a few drops of his blood to the ink. Once the ink was finished, he calculated that it would be between fifty to seventy-five percent more efficient. Meaning it would take between twenty-five to fifty percent as much time and mana to produce a new scroll of teleportation.
That was the significant difference having proper materials could make to the production process!
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Junichiro looked at his freshly finished magical ink. It was perfect for his purposes! There had been some close calls during the creation process, he'd had to infuse his mana into the extracts to help keep them stable until they could be properly mixed and he'd almost ruined the Oveheed. But! He'd managed to pull through and he now had the best ink he could make with his current supplies. The only thing now holding him back from making more powerful scrolls was the quality of the paper. Parchment was great, and traditional, but it had a hard limit on how much mana it could contain. A short distance teleportation spell was at that limit.
Since he'd spent a fair bit of mana covering for his mistakes during the ink making process, he decided to begin work on the scroll tomorrow. Which left him time to check out another spot in the house that greatly interested him. The library!
After setting the stoppered bottle of ink on his calligraphy desk, he made his way into the house to get cleaned up. Making ink was not a clean process and he didn't want to cover his brand new, or possibly very old, books in ink fingerprints.
When he arrived at the library, he wasn't disappointed, now was he thrilled. It had a fair bit of room but most of the shelves were barren. Obviously Azazel wasn't going to work to fill every last shelf of the library with priceless tomes, ancient grimoires, and the dead sea scrolls. There were a few books, most of which looked similar to standard text books. On further examination, they were textbooks but instead of geography, they were on magic. There was also a collection of books on the maintenance of houses like he lived in.
In hind sight, it was rather generous of Azazel to include books on how to take care of the house. Honestly thinking about it, Junichiro really had no clue what kind of maintenance his home would need and the provided books would fix that bit of ignorance. Nice, but not nearly as nice as the books on human magic!
It only took a few minutes of reading the first volume for Junichiro to grow slightly annoyed. His memories of DxD had informed him that it took a lot of instant mental math to cast magic as a human. Laws of the reality or whatnot. It turns out there were two common methods of casting spells. Method one is the method he'd expected, that is doing math on the fly to change the variables of the world using mana to get a desired outcome. Essentially, 'I use mana to do this and I get a fireball spell' kind of magic. Inputting your mana into the world and doing the math draws the spell circle and completes the spell. Rote memorization of specific formulas makes the process faster and allows the caster to make mental shortcuts.
So what's the problem?
Well, it was less a problem and more 'why the fuck doesn't everyone use method two?' Method two was to sit down, slowly and carefully perform calculations. Use those calculations to draw a magical circle, then MEMORIZE JUST THE CIRCLE. If you memorized just the circle you could form your mana into the circle with a flick of your wrist and cast the spell at will with ease. The only real drawbacks? Slightly higher mana cost and less flexibility than on-the-fly math. That's it!
So, he could sit around doing math and drawing magic circles for any spell he could imagine, memorize just the circle as an image, and cast the spell anytime he had enough mana. Only losing out on some flexibility and having the spell cost anywhere from ten to fifty percent more mana. Though the book did mention that better, more efficient, spell circles would naturally cost less mana to use. If there was nothing else about himself that stood out, he would be known for his desire for efficiency!
Whichever method he ended up going for, he would still need to study a whole new form of math in-depth to get anywhere with it. Right then and there he made a decision. While it wouldn't get him out of having to study the material, creating a homunculus and teaching it everything it needed to know to do the math for spell creation would give him an amazing edge in the process. Now a homunculus was never going to be very good at improvisation or thinking of a better way to do something. It was more akin to a programmed robot. To give it some free will he'd have to try making an artificial spirit and that way lay madness and slavery.
No, a homunculus was the way to go. It would be like a computer, once he programmed it with all his knowledge on spell crafting it would make spells at his request. Granted, the spells would be done within the exact rules provided by the books with zero changes, but it was a starting place. Once the homunculus made a first draft using the exact rules of spell crafting, he could take it and improve on it rather easily. Well... rather easily once he fully understood the subject! Until then the thought was more of a future plan.
On the bright side, he didn't have a normal school to attend so he had plenty of time to sit around reading up on the subject when he was recovering from using all of his mana on his work. Considering that his mana pool was still rather small, that was a fair bit of time he could dedicate to the subject. It also didn't hurt that his Artificer Essence seemed to be making it easier for him to comprehend the complex concepts outlined within the books. It was, after all, Spell Craftingand he was supposed to be able to become a master at any kind of crafting he put effort into.
Junichiro grinned to himself as he slowly devoured the first volume in the collection. Things were definitely looking great now!
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AN
Probably only one, maybe two, chapters until I do another time skip. I just wanted to establish his stepping into a new realm, or tier if you will, of crafting and showing some progress on that front. This way when he pulls out a wicked spell scroll you all don't feel like he's just pulling stuff out of his ass for no reason. This way his ass-pulls feel earned!
Also, I believe after I finish chapter 10 of v2, I'll hop back to Biokinetic to write a chapter there and try swapping back and for so both fics get some nice love.
Let me know if the alchemy ink section was too detailed or needs more details. I wanted to convey that its an involved process but not drag it out pointlessly. Did I get the right balance?
Also, I am super proud of my explanation on mana conversion. I hope you all found it informative!
Thanks for reading!
*EDIT*
Thanks to a comment by King hand axe, I realized I made a mistake in the potion ingredient descriptions. I've fixed it to what I meant it to be and added some minor missing text. It should make slightly more sense now. You can also check his first comment for further information that might help.
Comments
greatGUARDIAN100
Great chapter!
Evening Star
I'm liking this rework a lot. It's more detailed and entertaining to read. His ability really have a Snowball effect though. Once he finds a way to overcome his Mana issues or recover faster it's going to ramp up. I hope it happens in time before canon. Don't want him to be bossed around by the devils.
Cody S.
Yeah, I plan to do some non-crafting stuff with Mittelt to flesh her character out more and something else with Junichiro for character growth, then it's time for the time skip. I should be able to get all I want to do into just one more chapter, then move more toward the future.
Dave
Great chapter! I found everything went fine. The explanation with the plants and the mana conversion made sense. Glad you are thinking of doing a time skip because at this point it would be pretty much more of the same, testing and slightly improving. Found the interaction between Juni and Mittelt great, really looking to see more of them together.
