Nate waited patiently for Felicia, the hotel owner, to finish her review of the room.

“Everything seems fine… but I am guessing this won’t be the last time you get attacked?” she asked.

“It won’t,” agreed Nate.

“But you’ll repair any damage from subsequent attacks?”

“I will.”

Felicia looked torn but after a moment sighed, “I should kick you out. Really. Customers are leaving because of the danger of being in proximity to you two. But, you paid, and I am not about to go back on my word or to blame you for the actions of others. Fine! You can stay!”

“We appreciate it,” added Kiri.

As soon as Felicia had left Kiri turned to face Nate.

“Gwen?” asked Nate.

“She left along with Jak and Fili,” replied Kiri.

“How are you handling it?”

Kiri shrugged, “Don’t worry about it. I was enjoying our time together but it was always just a fling. I don’t blame them for trying to distance themselves from us. We had our fun but it was time to part ways. Fili did send a parting message though.”

Nate could see Kiri was smirking and he took a not-so-wild guess, “Trouble?”

“Trouble,” agreed Kiri with a snicker.

“Guess she was pretty astute after all,” mused Nate. “Anyway, what’s your plan now?”

“Well, I think wandering around on our own is out. I’ll just throw myself into some training. We’ll need to shadow each other for our tournament matches though. That means Frick, Wulfgar, and Jemima too. So, I am coming to your match today.”

Nate nodded his agreement.

“Are you ready for it?” asked Kiri.

“Mmhmm. I already know what I am going to make. I’m as ready as I can be. Breakfast?”

“Breakfast,” agreed Kiri.

*************

Nate stood at his assigned crafting table as the stands above filled with spectators. The first round of the crafting tournament hadn’t managed to fill the stands, which Nate supposed wasn’t surprising. After all, was it really that interesting watching a bunch of hybrid crafters identify Concepts within materials? Maybe to a select few, but for the general masses, not so much. This time, however, they were going to be creating something and that was apparently interesting enough for a sellout crowd.

High above, he could see Kiri, Frick, and Wulfgar seated and ready. Kiri’s head was on a swivel but Nate doubted any attackers would be so brazen as to do so among the crowd. Still, it paid to be a little paranoid, because without a doubt there were people out to get them.

Looking around, Nate noted his fellow competitors. The elven Seed from the Dynasty was back and Nate caught a few glares from the man. Then there was the woman and her blue rat, the individual with a storm cloud Familiar and, of course, Jemima, along with a pack of others that Nate recognised from the first round. Fewer than he had expected though, which meant there would be no third round to trim their numbers down. This would be the deciding conflict to determine who earned a spot in the World Reaping and who didn’t.

Nate was quietly confident that he would be fine. Perhaps it was arrogance to think that few enough among these crafters could compete with him, especially since his unusually high amount of Divine Energy would not be a factor. Either way, he expected a positive outcome.

As for the competition itself, the rules had been reiterated clearly by the judges. They would be given four hours to craft something from the materials supplied, which included a stipend of mana that they could augment with their own reserves. The area around their crafting tables would be sealed off from the ambient mana, meaning that their own reserves and the mana provided were the limits of what they could use. In addition, no Divine Energy was to be used. Finally, the resulting creations would be kept by the Dynasty.

That last rule was unequivocally annoying, but Nate couldn’t fault them. They were supplying the materials after all. It did, however, mean that if he wanted to conceal any of his Sigils, he needed an effective way of doing so. He had gone back and forth on that topic but in the end decided on a way to conceal his Sigils from the eyes of others. It would bloat his mana costs, but that was fine because his actual design likely required less mana.

He continued to go over his plans, only partially listening in as the same elven judge that tried to mark Nate down in the first competition waffled on about the glory of the Dynasty. Finally, their materials were brought to each of the crafting benches. As soon as the materials were laid out, the crafting table sealed itself off from the ambient mana and a timer started ticking down on a large board.

Nate looked through the large collection of materials to make sure his plan was still going to work. The pile easily covered half the workbench, with slabs of metal, chunks of wood, over a hundred small gems all with different, albeit weak, Conceptual affinities, and finally a pile of mana gems. Every single piece was of Mythic quality, even if their affinities were relatively weak.

He smiled. He had everything he needed. It was immediately clear that part of the test was to see if you could align or improve affinities. He imagined that most Crafters should have a Skill to do so, even if it was limited to their own affinities. Of course, doing so came at the cost of mana, and as it was finite for this task, managing your resources was also part of the test.

Nate began sorting through the affinity gems looking for the ones he wanted for his project, slowly laying them out next to him. Water, Wind, Fire, Earth, Wood, Light, Shadow, Metal… the list went on, all of which could be considered almost elemental in nature. Back when he’d been on Galle, he had shared some new information with Jacque via Frick. The information had to do with a simple enough idea. Similar Concepts resonated with each other. That resonance could be conducted through mana. Where those resonances met depended on how the two Concepts resonated, which Nate found could be measured by distance. The theory behind it had relevance to rune design, but Nate saw another opportunity for using it. A way that could eventually support his automated crafting plans.

Taking some of the wood, Nate created a Wood Shaping Rune, melding the pieces together until he had a large, circular, flat board. The board was almost ten centimetres thick and, into the middle of it, he shaped a small bowl. Out from that bowl, he shaped thin canyons into the wood, leaning out to the edges like the spokes of a wheel. One canyon for each of the elements he had selected. At the end of each canyon, he sculpted a collection bowl that was as large as the bowl in the centre.

Finally, he activated Multi Conceptual Material Shaping and removed any affinities he could detect within the wood. He would have preferred to use a rune to accomplish the same, furthering his development of his Runecrafting Ability, but the fact was he needed to be efficient with his mana usage and now was not the time to be testing how far he had managed to develop that replacement ability.

With his base plate prepared, Nate moved on to the gems he had set aside. With each one he used Conceptual Runic Mastery to layer three runes into place.

The first was a rune at the heart of the gem that used a matching Sigil for the gem's elemental affinity. With his Intent, he reshaped the rune so that when it was empowered by mana, it would reach out with its element for the bowl in the middle of the wooden board. Sigils for Shape, Direction, Connect, Power, and the corresponding element were the main parts of the structure.

The second rune was designed to connect the gem to the mana batteries, so that when the item was activated all the gems would be empowered equally as balancing the mana flows was important. More mana would mean a more empowered connection to the bowl and so, if even a single gem was receiving more or less mana than the others, it would wreck the entire premise of his design.

Finally, he encased each gem in a Destruction Barrier that should be able to run on ambient mana. The barrier, through Nate’s Intent, was selectively permeable. It would let the runes within the gems reach out, but any mana trying to enter into the gem through anything but the mana pathway would result in the destruction of the gem and the Sigils Nate had melded within them. Finally, if the Destruction Barrier was denied mana it would activate itself. Nate could recognise that it wasn’t foolproof, but it was the best he could do to try and conceal his Sigils. The protections were also obvious, as Nate didn’t want the judges destroying his work when they came to do their assessment.

The Destruction Barriers had to be fed mana constantly to prevent them from activating and that put Nate on the clock or else he’d run out of mana for his creation. Thankfully, they only required a trickle to keep from activating, but it still meant he would need to continue to move fast rather than take his time.

With the outer ring of his creation covered, Nate did a quick assessment of his supplies and remaining time. He’d burned through about a third of the mana provided in less than an hour. Checking his other competitors, he got a sense of their plans.

The woman and her blue rat were creating some sort of staff, though what it would search for wasn’t yet obvious.

Jemima looked like she was in the early stages of crafting some sort of vile poison. Nate was basing that on the way the yellow gem dust was eating into the crafting table. He wondered if she would even have a workstation left at the end of the challenge.

Finally, the Seed of the Dynasty looked to be making a bow that was already crackling with electricity.

Nate lamented the fact that the mana sealing off his crafting table meant he couldn’t cast out his senses to detect the Concepts they were each using.

Returning to his own project, he moved onto the next stage. His entire plan was based around the issue that had reared itself in the previous challenge. Materials could have more than one affinity. That was fine if you wanted a material with multiple affinities. In fact, looking back, Nate’s first wand had intentionally had two affinities within it. The Water and Corrosive layered affinities had given rise to the acidic nature of the wand that he had used back in Helmfirth over two years ago. But multiple affinities were only useful if that was what you wanted. Otherwise, they could hinder the final product. That became even more true since Nate wanted to automate some of the crafting, meaning he needed the product to be consistent.

So, he was going to create an item that could automatically separate materials into their corresponding affinities, or at least as close as possible. However, to do so, he needed to be able to break the materials down. The other problem he had been working on had been about reverse-engineering his Divine Sigils for Creation and Destruction. It turned out that it was a lot easier to figure out a Grandmaster and Master version of such Sigils when you had a Divine version to work off of.

Nate formed the rune he had planned, combining the Sigils for Destruction, Connect, Shape, and Target as the core Sigils. Driven by his Intent, when fed mana, the rune would target whatever material was in the bowl, breaking it down into a dust. That did mean that, for now, the item would be limited to working on solids. Once again, Nate enclosed the rune in a Destruction Barrier to prevent tampering as he connected it to the mana battery structure.

Moving on, he started on the backside of the board, sculpting in a Shaping, Creation, and Target rune that would take any material in the collection bowls and combine them into a single cube.

Then came the final pieces. Connecting the mana battery to each rune via a Time and Transfer rune that would let the mana battery empower one section after another. In sequence, it should empower the material breakdown rune in the centre, then activate the elemental gems at each collection bowl, then the cube creation rune. The Destructive Barriers were all excluded as they could run off of ambient mana.

With his creation complete, Nate reached out for a gem to do a test run. The purple gem felt like hot water in his hand and he placed it into the processing bowl in the centre of the board. While his future design would be set up to turn itself on and off automatically, he had intentionally made this one manually activated. With a small burst of mana the board lit up. The purple gem dissolved before his eyes into little sparkling fragments of dust. Resting for a few seconds, the item then activated the secondary collection bowls and their corresponding gems. Nate activated his Conceptual Sight ability and watched as the mana fields from each gem reached out around themselves, changing the mana in subtle ways as they transformed the mana itself into various affinities. Those affinities touched on the gem dust in the processing bowl and the purple looking sand shifted, slowly drawn by the Conceptual Resonance towards various collection bowls. Most went towards the Water element, a lesser amount towards the Fire element, and a trickle towards Earth. Finally, a small amount of gem dust refused to budge, sitting in the processing bowl.

With the separation step completed, the final rune activated and, in each collection bowl, a small cube of purple gem formed. The sizes differed and they sat unevenly in the curved base. Nate decided a fix for the future item he would create for himself - spheres instead of cubes.

As for the leftover gem dust in the processing bowl, Nate had expected it. But he had neither the time nor the mana to do what he intended for his own version of the Affinity Separation Apparatus he intended to create. This one was a single layer and dealt only with the elemental affinities. But just as there were Concepts beyond counting, so were there affinities beyond counting. His own version would have multiple tiers, where the processing bowl would lower from one layer of collection platers to the next, working through every affinity Nate had a Sigil for until it reached the bottom.

When he sent this design back to Galle, the Emporium would corner the alchemical materials supply market. After all, it had been witnessing all the steps Jemima had to go through to determine and purify affinities that had given him the idea.

With his creation completed, and a gentle flow of mana being fed to the Destruction Barriers, Nate raised his hand, smiling as he waited for the judges to come and determine his score for the competition.