Lucifer and Enrique walked out of the house together and walked through the village silently with Lucifer following Enrique as he studied the surroundings for any glitches.
However to his disappointment he didn’t find any.
There were people wherever he looked and they looked consistent, no missing eyes, nose, ears or mouth, the surroundings were also rendered well and looked totally realistic.
There were no missing textures, holes, or even pop in artifacts that plagued poorly made games.
’Was I wrong?’
’Is the reason I’m locked in my home really for my own safety and not because the illusion monster is losing power to sustain the illusions?’
’Perhaps there’s another secret everyone’s trying to hide from me and they’re all real?’
’But there’s no way mom would let Jack kill me in front of her... she’d have shouted or jumped in the way... or done something to protect me... she just stood there and watched the last time.’
’I’ll keep an eye out still... maybe the illusion monster is doing something else?’
’I should go check out that cavern where I dropped my broken scimitar. There might be a few clues there too.’
Soon, the father son duo arrived at a relatively open space in the village grounds.
There were no children playing here as there were in the rest of the village spaces.
Two guards holding spears and wearing thick leather armour stood stiffly at the entrance of the grounds as if they were guarding something precious.
The guards looked at Enrique and bowed quickly before sparing Lucifer a short glance and quickly looking away as if Lucifer was a curse that could spread to them.
"I’ll be using The Forge for a while... make sure no one enters this place during this time..." Enrique requested calmly.
"Yes sir!" The guards respectfully said while slamming the butts of their spears into the ground and raising some dust into the air.
Lucifer ignored them as they did him and quietly followed Enrique into the grounds while making sure that the guard didn’t try anything funky behind his back.
"This place doesn’t need a roof?" Lucifer asked once they moved past the guards.
"Well... it doesn’t really rain here, after all I can control the weather and... I hate working when it gets hot because of the enclosure." Enrique explained and Lucifer simply nodded.
’Well good for me... I can keep an eye on the village doing something funky if that happens.’
Lucifer firstly observed the several pieces of equipment present at the site.
There were sacks of mana crystals of different sizes strewn about at the base of the desks, several etching equipment sat on top whose usage Lucifer didn’t particularly understand or even have a hint about.
There was also a magnifying station with several glass lenses fixed at different angles that was probably used to study tiny mana crystals and embed them into various artifacts.
Curiously there was no forge... so Lucifer guessed the place was only called the Forge figuratively.
"Let’s begin!" Enrique exclaimed as he pulled out a handful of mana crystals from the sack on the table in front of them before picking one relatively clear mana crystal and handing it over to Lucifer.
"The basic principle of making an artifact is really simple..."
"All you have to do is first cover it in your mana to include the mana crystal in your code. This allows you to access all the variables of the mana crystal."
"Once you do that, set the final target of the spell to the mana crystal and boom, once the spell executes it’ll stick to the mana crystal. Try it out with a basic flash light spell first."
Lucifer heard all that and absorbed the information for a second.
The crystal felt incredibly realistic to Lucifer. It was about the size of his thumbnail yet he could feel tremendous amounts of mana contained within the crystal. It almost felt like he was holding a fifth of his reserve in his hand.
"What grade of mana crystal is this?"
"That’s a level two mana crystal."
’I have quite a bit of mana then... being level zero and having four parts more than level two amounts of mana... I’m definitely above average.’
’From what I remember, level zero mana is a hundred units, level one is ten thousand and level two is one million... it increases by a factor of a hundred each time...’
’So I have about five million units of mana.’
’Alright... let’s try with my flagship spell!’
’Time to turn you into an autistic glow torch little guy...’ Lucifer thought while bringing the clear blue mana crystal close to his right eye and peering into it.
He looked at it only for a second before expending some mana from his body to enclose the mana crystal.
A dense blue cloud exited his body and enclosed the crystal, giving him information about the mana crystal in his mind.
He then began writing out a simple spell.
Light.intensity = (mana crystal.mana amount) / million;
Light.position = mana crystal;
Lucifer added a slash million beside the mana amount this time since he guessed that if he didn’t do that the spell would use the entire mana crystal’s worth of mana amount at once.
So to slowly use the crystal and give out only a soft glow, Lucifer added a divided by a million to the spell’s mana amount.
Then compiling the spell and executing it took only a moment or two before the thick blue mist compressed into glowing lines of code that collapsed into streams of ones and zeros and disappeared into the mana crystal.
Immediately afterwards a soft dim glow enough to light up a dark room began to emit from the mana crystal.
"That was..." Lucifer started, trying to find the words for what the action of artificing made him feel.
"Magical?" Enrique helpfully completed.
"...duh."
"Ha! That was the exact reaction I had when I first learnt about and discovered artificing!!! It’s interesting, isn’t it?!"
"It is..." Lucifer openly admitted. "How do I strip a mana crystal of its spell?"
"That’s simple, first you decompile the spell to expose its contents, then you reabsorb the mana used to create the spell."
"Huh... it’s that simple?"
"Yeah... but it almost always takes a little finicking to get the decompilation working..."
"You need to know the linking symbols, things that link the mana signature of a piece of code to its actual code, to be able to decompile it so it’ll be a little hard for you to understand and seem like gibberish to you for now."
"You’ll have to study the common linking symbols but it should be doable eventually."
"Done." Lucifer announced as the light of the mana crystal dimmed slowly and then vanished.
Enrique’s mouth fell open and his eyes widened!
"Wait!!! What!!???"