Chapter 2-52: Four!... (2/2)

Ten years of silent, solo training. Staying away from conflicts that could reveal how dangerous she was, except for teaching her siblings how to fight. They could all shoot, they could all use a knife or a stick. When it came time for their mandatory military service, they’d be pretty well-prepared.

Training, training, training...

Sometimes, it had been as simple as sitting out in the woods, paying attention to everything, on so many levels, remembering where stuff was, training up her Visual File to record and remember. Sometimes it had been ghosting through those woods, playing hunting games with the dogs and cats and local wildlife.

Sometimes it had been hours of meditation, getting her ki circulating through her in multiple patterns and pathways, building it up to support her Vajra. At others, hours of smithing or craftwork, starting with carving wooden Implements for junior Casters, later graduating to QL 26 and even higher Staves, Batons, Rods, and Scepters for them.

Practice, practice, practice; getting in the Skill Focus, Affinity, and Training bonuses; the Masteries to /2; add in Discipline in Training from her Melee Levels, and the crafting bonus for being an Artificer. Even with only three active Ranks, with the Class bonus and her +4 bonus from Intelligence, she’d been able to reach a +22... and that was before the +6 combined bonuses of her Tools.

+22 meant she could make something at QL 32. A Zeks-Slot item was incredibly valuable, and when she had offered up increasingly well-made Implements at auction, the gold had begun to flow in.

Dwarves had a racial bonus for working with metal that other races couldn’t match, always giving them an edge in the Quality Levels that defined everything that dealt with magic. Elves, despite all their natural affinity, didn’t have a similar bonus with wood, and instead relied on the fact some of them could get to Eight to have an edge.

However, nothing she had discovered indicated they could Assay themselves truly properly, or had the system of Leveling and Karma and training and everything all worked out. Oh, magically, yeah, they had it down, and Levels and Classes they were mostly clear with. But the ephemeral, hard to measure and sort aspects of Feats and Masteries and Skills and training them properly were a bit harder to ascertain and actually build upon properly.

Ten years of silent, steady training. She’d sold her first Implement when she was four, carving up a Masterwork Wand and selling it online with her mother. The payment in gold coins was promptly reinvested into better raw materials for more crafting, and slowly but surely, she had crafted her way into ever-increasing amounts of money.

Her mother knew she was a prodigy, and hadn’t told her father, because she was also making plenty of money for him the traditional way. Sama had laid out what she was trying to do to her mother, noted the amount of money involved, and how it just kept going up. If her father learned about it, he’d either want to stop her spending so much money on stuff, or grab a chunk for himself, slowing down the process.

A pound of gold, a hundred coins, was thirty thousand dollars. The most basic magical Weapon required a minimum of ten of those, if made by a Powered, which made up two goldweight... Four, if Invested by a Primos inefficiently.

If made by a Forsaken, it required one third of the final value, if you had the relevant crafting skill. Instead of being made up by a minor amount of Karma by the Powered, it was made up of the skill of the Craftsman.

She could turn a goldweight of raw material into three goldweight of a magical item, given the time to Craft it.

But there was a limit on this, based on Quality Level. The Crafting limit was +100 gold pieces per QL over 20, cumulative.

This meant that a QL 23 Weapon she made was worth 600 gp towards the 1000 gp a Powered needed to make it magical, or the 2000 gp a Primos needed; it cost her 200 gp in raw materials, and her time. The rest would be made up by the recipient, but it meant 400 gp, $120,000 in pure profit, for being one of the people in the world capable of making an item by hand in the proper way and QL.

It was ridiculous in dollars, which was why goldweight was used as the standard for magical stuff. A hundred and twenty thousand dollars was a lot of money... but it wasn’t even a goldweight.

A QL 27 Weapon from her was 2300 gp in Value, just over four and a half goldweight, and straight-up magical when she was finished crafting it. Three goldweight of profit, four hundred and fifty grand.

The only thing required had been to shrink her time required, effectively upping her GP/hour. Starting off with basically Masterwork items with a +15 modifier was a whopping 30 gold of work completed per week, taking weeks to complete even a basic item. Getting Shaping Tools, a Floating Forge, a Silent Anvil, and a full alchemical lab had added modifiers to her speed; first merely stacking +2’s helping to speed things up, and then straight-up cutting times in half, to a third, then a quarter normal.

Those would only improve, with Levels and time, meaning she could make money faster and faster.

It meant, among other things, that she actually did have a true Weapon.

It was time, after all, might as she might like the casual bliss of a rural life on a farm to go on.

“Tremble,” she murmured, and the Runes on the short sword lit up as she injected two Ki into it.

At the same time, she mentally clicked over two levers in her mind. She didn’t have a lot of floating Karma, after all; it was mostly directly applied to the Classes involved as she trained and practiced and whatnot.

But this was stuff assigned a long time ago, for the most part, just waiting for her to take it... years before any normal human being would bother to.

She’d been a Null at birth. Doing things years ahead of time was like a thing now.

Her Melee/4 Level clicked over, as did her Human/2. +1 Inherent bonus to Con, thank you...

Yes, she knew that her Human Level was going to get flushed into those Rantha Racial Levels when they came. It didn’t matter. She needed some skill points right now, and more Health.

Human/2 was the Obsession Level, where your drive to excel and dominate hopefully spurred you on to bigger and greater things... reaching Seven, and taking Human/3.

She already had the obsession with regaining the strength her granted memories told her she’d had, and she’d had years to dream of getting it. So not a problem to take that first step.