Few changes were made to our routine over the next few days, the wisps would go out to gather herbs while the serpents went out to hunt and I would stay with Sili to give her a basic education in mana manipulation. She had already proven capable of using mana when she used a breath attack in the caves but the tricks I hoped for her to pick up were actual magic, not just breathing fire.
After the wisps and serpents come back, the wisps would rest in Sili's body and help her to recover her mana before beginning for linking practice on the serpents. At first, the only changes that took place were that Sili was expending more mana faster even though the probe itself never changed. However, during the third session she began making the probe move around a little bit.
After working on the alchemy stocks one day, I decided to test a theory and give Sili a shorter link to work with. Not only could she begin moving it in just a few minutes but after half an hour of playing around she poured in enough mana to make it grow. Her issue was not that she had no psychic talent but that she had no talent for mana consumption.
It took her ten times more mana to accomplish something that take me part of a percent. Which could be considered as not having much talent in that particular field. Her overall ability to control magic through breath or tail attacks was average, though.
Now that both Sili and I had some understanding of her abilities I could appraise her status to see her complete stats and affinities. Her Strength alone was over two hundred and she even had some skills listed such as 'Affinity Breath', 'Heavy Impact', and 'Grip Enhancement'. Her affinities were for water, fire, lightning, and holy light energies which meant she had a healing breath in her arsenal.
Heavy Impact was a skill that increased the blunt force impact of her tail and body attacks while Grip Enhancement increased the strength of her jaws and forelimbs. All of these were quick burst variations of my own physical enhancement skills but they were still effective. In fact, some were new because here breath attack had only been registered as 'Breath' when she first achieved it.
I finally gave in and let Sili simply get closer to the serpents, allowing her to reach one of the serpents with her minimal skills and the extra mana of my wisps. In another day or two the villagers would finally start showing up with a shipment of fish for the serpents. With a more intensive training and the use of some potions, she should be able to form links between a willing person and serpent in no time at all.
Well, at least soon enough that I could make a trip to the village and do it publicly. I could make a show of her intelligence and docility by having her do something like kissing the heads of children in order to link them to a serpent. The crowds will love it.
Letting Sili explore her newfound ability as much as she wanted, I decided that I was done with stockpiling alchemy crafts and sent wood and stone golems out to search for decent quality materials. While I waited I spent some time sitting on the altar bridge overlooking the mountainside below and twisting cave rat sinew into bowstrings. Whenever I stopped to actually smell the roses, the world usually seemed pretty nice.
After having taken a rough headcount of the villagers I made a full-size bowstring for the current population and then made shorter strings for younger training bows. After taking my time doing this by hand for over an hour, I returned to the caver to start transmuting iron and conductive materials into alloyed ingots. From there, I organized differently sized ingots into piles based on more numbers than just the villagers and drank a mana potion to supplement the candy I had before breakfast.
While directly transmuting weapons would be fast and effective to an extent, it was the same as casting them from steel and would make relatively inferior products. Both in cheap integration of mana and cheap production quality. Not only did this steel needed to be strong enough to break bodies covered in its alloying component but also had to be able to do it for in quantity.
If I wanted quantity output I needed to input quality.
Such an affect could only be achieved through properly working the steel with magic elements to draw out its best qualities while deeply integrating mana. The difference was literally every fold in the steel with magic was a layer of magic as equal in power to the others as the integrity of each layer of steel. Even if I had to do it at mass-production speed I still had to do it right.
My familiar and the serpents had long since lost interest in their play to watch me deconstructing large blocks of materials into smaller blocks of materials. So, to continue putting on a show for them, I waited for the potion to take full effect for stimulating my mana consumption and production before setting to work and relations with the village.
For every hunter I made a two-foot spearhead that started at six or seven inches wide at the base and tapered down to a one-inch rounded point with a thick supporting spine.
The ingots were three pounds apiece and went through the heating and folding process for two sets of ten folds to make one-hundred-layer weapons. Ten at a time. In roughly ten minutes a set.
For every villager young and old alike I made an all-purpose seven-inch hunting knife with a naked tang from more three-pound blocks of insecticide steel in similar folded fashion but in only two sets of knives. As a gift for each person who accepted a serpent familiar I set to work crafting basic but thick and sturdy single-edged sword that had two feet of ten-pound blade and four pounds of naked guarded tang.
Whatever the individual chose to adorn the grip with would add weight for balance and most young adults in these living settings had a base Strength stat average of between twenty and thirty. They could handle a heavy sword. The only thing I needed them to train was Agility for dealing with small fast moving bodies.
Closing my eyes after five sets of thirty swords, I simply let my mana recharge while staring back into the cave. From where I sat I could just barely see over the walls I had transmuted recently. Sili and the serpents were all lounging around her basking pool that had long since been cleaned of evolution mucus.
It had also been enlarged to accommodate her enlarged body.
After a few minutes spent appreciating the view and estimating the time based on when Gryn arrived, I went back to my work mass producing cast steel arrowheads from the remaining prepared alloys. I did, however, save several larger ingots of this steel to use in future projects. It was more suitable to armor plating than weapons but I did not intend to provide such materials to the villagers just yet.
With a sample of the steel I had come up with, I could transmute more of it without ever having to remove it from the void. Gryn's party's public armor could be cheaply made from this material while a better alloy was made for their emergency suits. These heavy duty suits would happen to be what they would be wearing next year when I came back to check on the insects.
My golems returned early in the evening with the rest of the materials I needed for my projects. These were decent quality woods to make spear shafts and bows from. I could even make then much more swiftly than metal weapons despite the higher mana cost involved.
I simply had to cut a portion of live growth from the strongest or most supple part of the wood and use life energies to grow the wood. The inner heart of a five-hundred-year-old ironwood tree was sectioned out and grown into dozens of spear shafts. The young limb of a scaled yew was cloned and grown into dozens of long and short bows.
The process of growing the wood in such a way was as good as properly smithing the steel but took intense amounts of mana to do in so much bulk. I had to stop and eat and recuperate between shafts and bows. Worse still was that I needed to grow as many arrow shafts as arrowheads.
I had really cut my work out for myself.
Just to prepare myself for the process of growing arrows I stopped and meditated by emptying my head for an hour before settling in to the crafting.
*