Chapter 18 – Inspiration

Despite the teasing from earlier, Sal found himself on his way to the dorms after lunch. He wanted to check out the workshop and get a start on ideating the new tracker concept for Anthony, but with the ongoing aches and pains coursing through his body, he eventually had to admit defeat.

Thankfully, the elevators weren’t crammed with students having the same intentions, so he made it to the fifty-first floor with ease. As Sal leaned against the paneling of the elevator, he pushed away the discomfort and steadied his breathing. He was frustrated that his body was so weak in comparison to his peers. Even if he hadn’t gone through that essence ordeal with Vanessa, he’d still be in pain after the gauntlet with Lars.

He thought through all the events from his first month and realized that he had spent most of his time in the academy recovering from self-inflicted exhaustion and pain.

When the doors of the elevator opened to reveal his floor, he pushed back against the wall for some momentum. Such a simple movement earned him a shooting pain in both shoulders and an involuntary wince.

Gritting his teeth, Sal made his way down the corridor toward his room, wondering whether his body was subconsciously giving up on him as he got closer to his bed. The little thought he had in his head about maybe going through the exercise routine again was discarded the moment he caught sight of it.

Sal moved out of the way of his sliding door as it closed behind him and shuffled forward with a sigh of relief. He practically threw his tablet onto the bedside locker along with his sunglasses and didn’t even bother to change out of his uniform before slumping onto the firm mattress.

It took him a few moments of painful shifting around to get comfortable, but it was absolutely worth it. It was mid-afternoon and he was about to wreck his sleeping pattern if he closed his eyes now, but the alternative was to just stare at his ceiling in pain for hours.

Out of curiosity, he closed his eyes and focused on his internal essence, to see how it was progressing. The threads of light, which had once been as thin as spider webs, were now much more vibrant and sturdier. He was relieved to see there was some slack between the points, with the heavier threads drooping slightly between the gates.

Sal never really had any issue with essence control, so he was able to navigate around the different gates and see the differences from before. If he had to estimate by his own standards, he was currently feeling close to his old maximum. He wondered what sort of significance it would have on his abilities, if any.

Would it mean that he’d avoid exhaustion for longer, or would it allow him to reach a new tier of capability? Those questions played on his mind for a few moments. Maybe he’d ask Lombardi in the Skill class tomorrow.

Despite closing his eyes and relaxing his breathing, Sal couldn’t fall asleep. The once sharp pains had gradually reduced to dull aches, which he welcomed gratefully. Because he wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry, and he clearly wasn’t getting any sleep, Sal decided to brainstorm a little. He had already checked his essence and it seemed stable. It wouldn’t matter if he used his skills responsibly, would it? He deliberated before deciding that it should be fine. He could stop if he felt any sort of negative reaction from his core.

With his resolve in place, Sal activated his Mythcrafter ability and held his breath for a half second. There was absolutely no difference in capability, and it felt exactly the same as when he used it before in the workshop. He was a little disappointed because he didn’t know what he had expected to happen. The ceiling light blueprints appeared in front of his eyes for the ceiling light, but Sal dismissed that and pulled up one of the other ones he had stored in his head.

The visualization of the tracker came into focus, in the exact same configuration as he had left it. It was still signaling the need for lord crystal and hellfire titanium. With just a few thoughts, Sal changed the blueprint to the tracker that Quest had given him. He imagined it in its most basic forms and was surprised to see that the concept broke apart, jarring him out of the imaginary blueprint once its viability disappeared. He didn’t realize that would happen, and although he was surprised, he marked it down as a learning experience.

Normally, Upgrade would have him sketching out each blueprint as a point of reference, so this method of using Mythcrafter was new to him, which made it somewhat exciting. With a smile, he brought up Quest’s tracker again and started over.

He realized almost immediately why he had failed in the previous attempt. The runes that made the tracker functional had been erased in his previous iteration, so he was careful not to mess around with them too much on this run. It was harder to navigate the possibilities when random thoughts were able to influence the overall design. Just the thought of using a different material would cause the vision to warp and change to reflect the new reality, which resulted in Sal cursing and having to revert a few times.

Even if his essence control was well above average, his mental discipline was still lacking. When he needed to try again for the fourth time, Sal took things incredibly slow. He regressed Quest’s tracker to a Common grade and added in the Mythcrafter essence, which hilariously broke the image immediately. It was like the ability had rebuked him for having a stupid idea.

Trying a different approach, Sal brought up the tracker he was making for himself and added only the Mythcrafter ability to it. His hopes of it being an easy match were dashed as the blueprint failed to materialize. Even with the lord crystal and hellfire titanium, it looked impossible to add the Mythcrafter ability to it.

Sal groaned inwardly as he realized where he had screwed up. The materials he wanted were ideal for the Analysis tracker, so obviously they weren’t going to be a fit for something Crafting oriented. He pulled up the blueprint again and pushed his intentions onto it—a tracker that could hold the Mythcrafter ability. To his pleasant surprise, that method worked, and he was bombarded with a list of requirements that looked practically impossible to meet, including a list of components that had to be made with dozens of materials he hadn’t even heard of.

Barry’s suggestion of regressing the tracker to a lower grade, and adding an evolutionary path, didn’t seem like it was going to work either. The lowest grade of item that could potentially transform into the version he needed was Unique grade. Sal didn’t understand the logic behind it, because from what he was being shown, the starting point for it was Unique and the end point was Legendary. It didn’t have the capability of evolving into Mythic? What was it that made the sniper rifle so special in that case?

He lay on his bed and continued to stare at the blueprints hovering above his face. All the iterations and tweaks he made to it ended up breaking the tracker through a loss of viability. It was a constant battle of toeing the line and finding something that worked. Without the expertise of someone like Upgrade, Sal was forced to rely on his own intuition to come up with solutions, but he was hitting a wall.

He even tried regressing his own Mythcrafter ability to something like Rarecraft, but the design wouldn’t accept it. It was the exact same sensation he had felt when he tried to put Chatfield’s ability onto a blueprint at Upgrade’s urging. That told him a little more about Mythcrafter as a skill. He couldn’t utilize variations of his ability in his designs, even weaker versions of an ability that was his own.

Sal lay there for another hour, just going through different options until he finally had to admit defeat. The closest he could get was a Rare tracker that used the Upgrade ability, but the materials required looked expensive. He kept the blueprint in mind so he could sketch it out later in the workshop and maybe put it up for sale on the Credit Store.

Sal paused at that thought and a smile tugged at his lips. He hadn’t posted a single thing to the Credit Store yet, and his mind was already filled with dozens of blueprints. Barry’s suggestion of selling evolutionary equipment was great because it put the onus on the owner to accumulate enough essence to force the evolution.

Sal wanted to take that one step further, and sell the instructions for crafting that equipment, with flawless blueprints. All the equipment they had made for the tournament had already proved to be successful, and by the sounds of Chatfield’s report, there was a severe lack of equipment in the second-year roster. Sal thought about what Upgrade had said to him about the second- and third-year crafters. They all apparently picked the safest options when it came to crafting, unprepared to take risks.

Sal’s smile turned into a grin as he started to come up with a plan. He’d list everything as Myth, and create an entire range of feasible designs for crafters at every level. He’d price them low at the early levels, prove that his designs were the best, and then ramp up the cost with the higher grades.

Maybe he’d throw in some aspirational designs that would get people talking? Sal bit his lip as he mapped out the different possibilities in his head. Full suits of equipment that only he would be able to make. Maybe he could auction off commission slots after he gained some reputation as a Crafter?

The possibilities were endless, and Sal was excited at the prospect of having more Q-Cred rolling in. He didn’t want to be complacent, especially when Jez would be ramping up the difficulty in the Administration class.

All the fatigue that had gripped his body went ignored as Sal forced himself off the bed and to his feet. He pushed through the door to the next room, where his board was mounted onto the wall. He listed out the different classes within the academy: Offense, Defense, Controller, Healer, and Support. He needed to grab all their attention with the best equipment.

When he had last checked the Credit Store, an auction had been ongoing for a single Rare-grade breastplate. The last price he had seen it at was over three hundred Q-Cred, which was quite expensive for the listed benefits. He wrote down “breastplate” beside the Defense category and added “tracker” beside the Controller and Support categories. Sal spent a few minutes adding the existing blueprints he had created to the different sections, trying to get a better idea of which ones were the best fit for each group.

Sal grinned as he wrote rapidly on the board. So many ideas came to him now that they just flowed onto its surface. What had started in his head as a potential idea had evolved into an entire business plan. He utilized the Synergy trait from his own clothing, and added a set bonus for each of the graded pieces of equipment.

The basics of an Uncommon set were listed for each category of class, all boasting at least one ability with the addition of the Synergy trait. The set bonus would increase the overall capability and allow for either an additional skill, or effect. Sal guessed that people would end up buying the entire set to get the bonus effects. Because everything was just in blueprint form and didn’t require any actual Crafting, Sal was able to make a whole series of proposals on the board. All it would take was a bit of time in the blueprint room at the workshop.

As his brainstorming session continued, he added upgrade blueprints to each of the sets, so a Crafter could bring the Uncommon-grade set up to the Rare-grade set, and then up to the Unique-grade set. He even experimented with some naming conventions for each set to make them sound more premium. All he had to do was craft the blueprints and then the onus would be on the Crafter who bought them to bring the items to life.

He stood there for another couple of hours, forgetting about the pain in his body as he happily mapped out his Credit Store page.

With four stand-alone sets, and three transition sets—all made of five pieces of equipment—Sal was going to have thirty-five individual listings on the Credit Store. He wanted to map out the later stages, like Epic and Legendary, but those could wait for the future. It was incredibly unlikely that anyone could craft them, even with the perfect blueprints, but there was undoubtedly someone out there with more Q-Cred than sense. Sal was more than happy to take their Q-Cred.

It was obviously going to take a fair chunk of time to design and make sure that they all had the right synergies, but Sal wasn’t worried. Blueprints with the Mythcrafter ability were ridiculously easy for him, especially when he was just drawing what his eyes were telling him and removing any mistakes it highlighted. He had spent years working alongside his father in the Argento Auction; countless times, he’d seen buyers come in, looking for another piece of a certain set. Some of the most irrational auction spending had been a direct result of people bidding on set bonus items, and Sal was going to use that to his advantage.