After training that day I returned to my room, where I rolled a wood chip around my palm. It was as small as the pad of my finger. I gripped it tightly and slowly let my essence flow into it. I willed it to become hard, as hard as possible. I filled my head with thoughts of nothing but that.
When I felt my essence exceed the chip’s limits, I squeezed it firmly between my forefinger and thumb. Eventually I spotted a crack, which was when the whole thing snapped and clinked to the floor. It had become as hard as I hoped.
I learned to slow down when imbuing things with my essence, allowing me a greater degree of accuracy. When I went too fast, my focus would splinter and my success rate would fail with it. At this point, I could reliably create an arcane tool from tiny objects like this wood chip. As for where I got them, I either tore them from the walls or picked them up in the forest.
It seemed that the strength of the effect you bestowed on an arcane tool varied depending on what the item was. The wood chips couldn’t hold as much essence as a nail, and any potential effect was weaker as a result. In fact, the arcane tools I made never got hard enough to survive the pressure of my fingers.
A broken arcane tool gradually lost its effect. Once it wore off, my wood chips were indistinguishable from any other. Similarly, if you stopped releasing essence halfway through the transformation, the item would not become brittle and break in the same way a failed article did. In general, it took five minutes to turn a single wood chip into an arcane tool. Today, I practiced on nine chips and had zero failures. It might have been time for me to focus on improving my speed.
After that, I wanted to make arcane tools with the dragon girl’s scale I had hidden, but I wasn’t sure what effect I should go for. Needles suited an increase in penetration power. With the wood chips, I had made different ones harder, heavier, and lighter, for example. What could I do with the scale?
While experimenting with arcane tools, I learned that you could apply almost any effect you wanted on an object. For instance, you could raise the penetration power of a wood chip. That said, while you could use your essence to sense the transformation of an object, that was it. I hadn’t actually checked if the wood chip did have more penetrating power afterward.
The degree of effect changed with the object too. For example, I tried imbuing a wood chip with the power to exhaust someone, but I didn’t feel the least bit tired no matter how much I touched it. If you failed to imbue something with an effect, there was no trying again. That was why I wanted to give the scale the best effect possible without going beyond its scope and rendering it ineffectual. I only had one, so I would have to choose very carefully indeed.
“You’re done.” The dragon girl declared my training over.
“Already?”
Although we shared this room, I wanted to practice making arcane tools here and nowhere else. When she released her essence here, the recoil ended up throwing me outside. That was no other environment to perform such a delicate task. That was why I struck a deal with her. For half our daily free time, she would refrain from doing any training that required releasing essence. When I was done, I told her she was free to do whatever else she wanted. She agreed.
Sometimes she watched me making my arcane tools, and other times, she left the room and wandered off somewhere. During our free time, we were only allowed to be in our rooms or in the prayer room, so if she wasn’t here, that was where I assumed she was going. That said, she didn’t look like a particularly devout believer. I thought about asking her and wondered whether she’d explain, but she seemed more likely to react with suspicion.
When her essence started to fill the room, I suppressed my own as much as possible. My aura became as thin as the essence around a transformed wood chip. The dragon girl glanced at me as if checking where I was before closing her eyes.
In my head, I mulled over the sensation of creating an arcane tool. I imagined a wood chip in my hand, then let the sensation resurface. If I was right, arcane tools would become the most valuable ace up my sleeve. Making them required being able to manipulate essence and a strong degree of focus. In terms of the latter, I had a slight advantage over my cohort because I was more mentally mature, and I intended to make use of that. I would learn to create arcane tools that did what I wanted them to, and I would do it before anyone else. That was my first objective.