“Can I sit next to you?!” Wen asked her “older sister.”
“Shut up.”
I stuck some meat onto a thick bamboo skewer and started to grill it. Wen’s eyes were as bloodshot as the dragon girl’s attitude was cold. No changes there, then. I was working nonstop, continuing my arcane experiments on the dragon girl’s scales when neither girl was paying attention. When they did, I tried to emulate Monk’s technique.
There were the three layers I had identified in the combustion knife: heat retention, heat generation, and the so-called condition switch. I had several theories why that last ability was required.
The first was that Monk’s power was limited and prevented him from creating an arcane tool that retained and generated heat at the same time, so the condition switch was a stopgap measure to create a tool with both effects despite that. If I was right about that, he would have applied the condition switch first before adding the other effects one by one.
My second hypothesis was that he could create an arcane tool with dual effects, but its effectiveness suffered when both were active simultaneously. Adding the condition switch avoided this by only allowing one to activate at a time. If that were the case, I could see him imbuing the knife with the heat retention effect first, then the switch, and lastly, the generating effect.
If I wanted to test these theories, I first needed to learn how to apply the condition switch myself. And that wasn’t going very well. Adding the effect on its own didn’t give the arcane tool any ability or feature that I could sense, making it impossible to determine if I was successful. It was therefore necessary to add another effect on top of that, essentially making an arcane tool out of an arcane tool. That was where I struggled.
I was in a stalemate. I needed to learn to apply the condition switch before I could add multiple effects, but I needed to be able to add multiple effects to test the condition switch. I decided to start at a different point instead.
Monk’s knife only generated heat at the tip of the blade. When I detected the essence within it, I discovered it was only the blade itself that had been turned into an arcane tool. I dubbed the technique “sectioning” and considered it a shortcut to applying multiple effects to an item. For instance, I could make only the surface of a blade sharper and leave the rest not as an arcane tool but as ordinary steel.
Using sectioning, it would be just as simple to apply a hardening effect to the steel as it would be to make the surface of it sharper. While this would probably leave an unaltered area between the two arcane parts, it seemed easier than figuring out how to apply multiple effects with the condition switch method.
I considered pausing transforming the dragon girl’s tail, but I couldn’t think of anything else to do other than hardening her scales, so I figured I might as well continue. If I was able to do anything better to them later, I could just peel them off. She was a creature who shed her scales, so new ones would eventually replace them.
I transformed my bamboo skewer into an arcane tool in a matter of seconds. Rather than penetrating power, I applied the same sharpening effect I used for knives. I ran my finger over the skewer’s surface. It didn’t break my skin, though the explanation for that was simple. A skewer had zero cutting power and multiplying that still resulted in zero.
I thought about it harder and realized it didn’t make sense. Though it would take an immense amount of effort, you probably could cut through a sheet of paper with this thing. Even water, which wasn’t sharp in the slightest, could break through iron with the correct pressure applied. It was an assumption on my part to think a skewer’s cutting ability was zero.
My impression of the tool in my hand was that it was for stabbing. I was unable to imagine it having any ability to cut, so that ability remained absent when I transformed it. I had imbued the skewer with nothing. A knife didn’t usually combust, so in order to apply such an effect, you probably had to imagine it doing so. That was another point in favor of children and their flexible thinking.
✦ ✦ ✦
Once I was done eating, I tossed the skewer behind me. That was when I noticed a change in the air. The girls hadn’t spotted it yet. Neither my pit organ nor my emotion-reading abilities sensed anything. I wasn’t picking up on any essence either, but all three of those senses together brought that something to my attention: a hole of sorts in the air.
I raised my unsheathed knife in front of my face and pretended to study it. I focused my attention on the shadow in the metal’s reflection. It crept three steps behind me. Then two. Then one.
I swung behind me, but something grabbed my arm, stopping my movements. It was a man clad entirely in black, likely from the home. He struck my jaw, then quickly reversed the movement to hit me again. My head wobbled, and I found my muscles fall out of my control. I collapsed to my knees and then sideways to the ground, my eyes open the entire time. As my vision turned black, I heard a familiar ferocious roar.