I knew I was running on borrowed time, but Vex had made it seem like I still had a bit of leeway. I’d been in this dungeon for seven years. It really didn’t feel like it. I had no real sense of time. The recovery room kept me in a perpetual state of wakefulness. It was the sweet bliss of an energy drink starting to kick in, but before it made you all jittery. Thinking of it made me check Ink’s copy again. Ever the trustworthy companion, he flawlessly complied and displayed the code-like structure of the runes from the recovery room. I was starting to form a plan for how to use the concept in the future. I needed to get out into the world first, though. I could be very much reinventing the wheel, and didn’t want to waste my time. I sent a mental thank you to Ink and received a warming trill in return as he returned my arm to a non-tattooed state.

  I got back into my cultivation pose and started to turn up the heat in the hot tub. I wasn’t taking the potential anywhere just yet, but I wanted to get back in the practice of controlling its flow. I was spending the time now to get control. I didn’t know what my life outside the dungeon would be like, especially how hectic it might become. I wanted to focus on the challenging aspects, such as form, in a friendly and controlled environment, while I could.

  I started to cycle the potential up through my Stout loci, but I paid extra attention to prevent any of the potential from leaking out into the stack. Once I got all the potential flowing, I started to work on lifting it all out of the hot tub. I could remember back to my first days and how hard this was. Now I could control it with the simpelest of thoughts. I thought, and it obeyed. I wanted to test it by making a shape, but this was also not the time for games.

  Once I had the full amount of my remaining potential cycling in a loop around my Stout stack, I focused on one of the harder parts. I split a tiny stream off of the main flow. I was going to direct it into the third donut, but I felt a mental tug telling me that may not be the most ideal. I had the stream, though, and it had to go somewhere. I pulled it through the stack between the third and fourth and rejoined it to the downward flow outside the stack. I kept the stream going as I tried to figure out my next step. I wanted to fill the third donut and conserve potential as well. It made sense to focus on my target. I started splitting off more streams into the three-four gap, and soon I had the whole flow ending at that gap. It was commit time. I began the same process for the two-three gap as well. As I got the last of the larger flow diverted in the tight circle around the third donut, I could feel the strain. I was maintaining almost a hundred separate flows. It was a collection of flowing rings around a donut, circles within circles. The strain was intense, and I started to slip. Two of my flows crossed over and merged. I felt my concentration snap as the new ring doubled over in size and began to press against donuts two and four. I focused my concentration, trying to tear the flows apart. As I pulled the relatively uniform, round stream turned into a flattened out shape, straining my concentration even further. This was not sustainable. Even if I could keep the hundred flows going, I would never be able to uniformly tighten them to fill the donut. I don’t know why I wanted to fill the remaining part of the donut in such a fashion, but I did. Some deep instinct told me this way was better. I just needed to figure out a better way to do it. Then I saw it. I was now trying to force a half dozen combined streams apart. They formed a series of bands around the donut, and I saw it. I saw the giant fusion generator in the basement of one of my university buildings. It was a Tokamak with a magnetically encased torus, a giant donut of experimental fusion energy. The illustrations of the magnetic fields swam before my vision, as did my ever-persistent nagging itch that the drawings were a poor representation. It wasn’t magnetic fields plural, it wasn’t a collection of loops, it was a magnetic field, singular, a tight torus around the donut. It was exactly what I needed. As I conceptualized the torus, my control responded to my will. The streams smoothed out into a uniform sheet cycling around the palatial dount. It seemed like the fusion analogy was the right concept, which meant the next part was the hardest: compression.

  It was easier than fusion, well, easier than the experiments I read about. The strain was far less than maintaining the hundred threads I was before. I barely registered the resistance to flow as the fields connected. I was a perfectionist on this one. It wasn’t perfect, but I got almost all of the potential to contact the donut at the same time. I felt it rush in with an almost audible pop. I was right, it was all of the potential I had left, save a little. I watched as a tiny drop flicked off as the last of the potential flooded in. The tiny droplet arced gracefully in the air and fell back into the hut tub without a fuss.

  I could feel the energy of the donut come alive. I could feel the energy inside start to pulse and grow, cycling faster and faster, and for the first time in my life, I watched ignition happen. The energy of the ring exploded outward, not in the destructive fashion I’d come to know and hate, but in a warm, suffusing light. I felt the little tiny shards of concepts that were floating in the soup of potential grow, twist, and merge into something new. I watched a skill being born. And it was glorious.

  Ability gained!

  Fair Exchange- you can maintain any amount of currency in a pocket dimension. When retrieving currency from this dimension you may choose its form as long as one piece of that form is currently stored.

  Ok, now I wasn’t really complaining, but that was a fairly obscure and specific power. I totally got where it came from. I spent literal years focusing on the few coins I had. At this point, I could probably draw them from memory. But what the fuck was this power? I was a currency trader. It then occurred to me that it said ‘any amount,’ meaning unlimited storage. My coins took up space in my storage, not a lot of space, but still space. I had a variety of coinage, but no large amount of any. The more I read, the more I wondered if there was an exchange rate or if it was measured by piece. Coppers, I was assuming there were coppers, into platinum could indeed be a broken skill. The word ‘fair’ in the title made me think that its ability to exploit would be limited. I remember a cautionary tale about money changers being driven out of a temple, and thought with a giggle, that at least I wouldn’t have that problem.

  I started pulling coins out of my storage power, and as I pulled them back in, it felt different. I couldn’t see them in my inventory anymore. I could still feel that I had them, but I also had a sense of how much I had. I held off trying the Metaridium coins until I had some better scope, so I played with the others first. My interface didn’t provide me with a full amount, but it appeared that this skill possessed some inherent knowledge. I now knew what the coins were. And a rough feel of how much they were worth. It was similar to how I had a rough feel for my other stats, like mana, vitality, and even potential. It was just like things didn’t want to be exactly quantified. Most of the coin names had the feel of region-specific, but three had the same name. They were all called ‘Coin of the Realm’. I shortened it to CORE or core in my head, and my power followed suit. The cores seemed to be in a ten-to-one ratio, in the classical fantasy style. The others seemed to be of slightly differing value but pretty close to the cores of the same metal. The real value winners were the Mithril Coins of White, which had an approximate value of sixty gold cores.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  I grabbed one of the Metariduim discs, fighting off Ink’s desperate lunges in the process, and felt it absorb into the new skill. It felt like it was worth about thirty gold. I felt that was low given its ability to shift to anything, but given that they could only mimic a single coin, it was probably a good average. I added the rest, but noticed a difference; these all only felt like they were worth fifteen. The completionist in me smiled. It looks like I found my missing coin. Fifteen was a low average, and I hoped they would make for a cheap treat for Ink. They didn't add too much mass, but they made sense as to why he loved them so. I pulled one out and fed it to him. I hoped it was helping him grow and become stronger, and not feeding an addiction. He eagerly dissolved it anyway.

  My inventory was now empty with the exception of my blades and their sheaths. I pulled them out and got a feel for them again. I had not practiced with them much after the ascension as Mord was focused on hand-to-hand. I was hoping that I could explain that time was short and I wanted to learn them as well. I was confident in my hand-to-hand fighting, given the significant difference between Mord and any opponents I might face.

  I had one last project before I could step through and face Mord, though. I wanted to remake the firestone. I had a really good sense of the material and the rune, so I started there. I felt a mesh of the shape of the rune carved stone form in front of me. It wasn’t really there, but was just a template waiting to be filled with mana. I started filling and realized I didn’t have enough. The structure failed, dissolving into dust and wisps of mana. I tried three more times, and I just never had enough mana. I remember making it draw in mana from the room, but five experiments later, I still had the same result. I was sitting with a foot-high cone of rock dust in front of me when I decided to take a break. I didn’t know what was so hard. I could see the form with the rune in place. I must have been missing something. It wasn’t about mana to mass. One of my experiments had been to make one the size of a pebble. No matter what, I just didn’t have enough mana. I needed a different approach.

  I decided to go all out academically on it. I started by making stones. I started with pebbles and quickly moved up to stones the size of the original. None were overtaxing on my mana, I could make two of the original size stones with my current pool. So it wasn’t the material cost. I tried to make the stone with the rune carved in it again. I received dust for my efforts. I wondered if I could just carve the rune in by hand. I laughed at myself for trying the magical solution first before going to a more mundane approach, which I should have started with.

  I grabbed one of my blades out and immediately found a problem. I had no doubt they could carve the stone, but gods were they unwieldy. I couldn't even start to figure out how to manipulate them in a way that was good to carve. I needed a chisel or a scribe.

  “I'm a fucking idiot”

  *confused yet agreeable trill*

  I knew the pattern for iron, specifically cold iron. Deep down, I knew that if I produced it now, I couldn't keep magic from seeping in, and I would need to be much better to make actual cold iron. I didn't know the significance of cold iron, but at least I knew what it was.

  I started with an iron scribe. One thing I was blessed with as a child was a pretty powerful imagination, especially when it came to engineering and design. My parents supplied my childhood dreams with Legos, and that helped a lot growing up. It helped again here. I knew what I wanted the tool to do, and the shape quickly formed from there. It took almost all my mana to create the tool, but I was successful. I must have lost concentration in the making because I noticed a little flaw in the design. Just a wrongness in part of the shape that made it hard to handle. I was about to recycle it and try over when I realized there shouldn’t be anything stopping me from just altering it. I had the Creation, Transform, and Destruction aspects. I may not have had a specific ability to adjust objects, but what I wanted was just a combination of those three Concepts. Mord had said that abilities were reliable shortcuts, not the limits of what we could do.

  Mord was right. Once I got it in my head, it was something I should do; it became something I could do. It was harder, much harder than using an ability. It required far more concentration and mana than the initial creation. It drained me but I was pleased with the end result. I had made my first tool. A plain iron scribe. It lacked the special properties of cold iron. Worried, I pulled one of the Hexes, the cold iron coin, out of my coin inventory. The difference was clear; the coin had an almost sinister feel to it compared to the warmth of the scribe. I felt that this was important information. I knew that the material in the coin was special because it didn’t contain magic and was worked by hand, yet I produced it by magic. I pulled out fifteen of them, more than I had received from the coin bag long ago. All of them were the same. All had the sinister feel. Even I could tell that this was significant, and I realized that my coin ability was more powerful than I initially thought.

  I tried an experiment. I could manipulate materials I knew. It was challenging, but I could do it. I focused on the coin. I knew the cold iron. I knew the shapes I wanted. I had a coin and I wanted a nail. I tried to force the material into the shape of the nail, but it wouldn’t budge. I was literally forcing a round peg into a square hole; that was my mistake. I wasn’t making molds, I was doing more like forging. I needed small changes. I thought about how I would go about changing the shape of the coin into a nail. Folding it in half a few times and then rounding it. Tapering the front and flattening the back. I took those steps and expanded them out in detail in my mind. To my surprise, the coin followed suit. Soon I was back down to half mana, but I had made a nail. A cold iron nail.