"We couldn't examine this yesterday because of the sudden breakthrough, but now I'm really curious to see what this does. Phloria thought it was a dimensional item, but the Odi had to steal Professor Ellkas's ring to have one, so she was wrong."
The small ring was covered in glowing blue runes and had a small green mana stone embedded on it. Lith could now recognize a single rune pattern, which made it even more underwhelming.
Such a weak pseudo core that required both runes and a crystal to work couldn't be anything important. Especially since after it had been lost, no one seemed to have ever cared to pick it up, letting it end in the fungal creature's hands.
After checking that there was no self-destruct mechanism, Lith imprinted the ring. Much to his surprise, the enchanted item started to suck upon his mana avidly and its pseudo core grew in both size and power.
"Damn, I'm a moron!" Lith blurted out. "Of course it was weak as fuck, the ring was ownerless for centuries and if not for the runes, its pseudo core would have already dissolved."
While the ring recovered its strength and its pseudo core stabilized, Lith continued to translate the book about the body-swapping procedure, searching for a way to replace the lost Odi technology with modern magic.
Quylla had been right all along. Normal dictionaries were pretty useless to decipher the Odi's jargon about magic. Thanks to the vocabularies she had written and borrowed to him, however, Lith's and Solus' work progressed smoothly.
Even when they encountered an unknown term, between Quylla's work and their own brain it wouldn't take them long to make sense of it. At some point, Lith took also out the books he had copied from Kalla about Lichhood.
The two procedures were indeed quite similar and the past mages who had strived to achieve eternal life had already solved some of the issues that Lith was now facing.
"If they succeeded, then I can do it too." Lith said with renewed confidence once he realized that he could blend the two procedures into a new one and maybe obtain something better than the Odi had ever dreamed on.
"Yes, but it will take some time." Solus pointed out. "Even by using the Odi's book and Kalla's notes as a foundation, it's still a mammoth task. In the little free time you have as a Ranger, we can work on the theoretical field, but putting it into practice will have to wait."
"That's what I was planning to do anyway. It's not like I'm going to drop dead tomorrow, so there's no rush. The more we travel, the more we learn. Once I'm done with the army, I might visit the Empire and the Desert.
"I'm sure that they have lost ruins and secrets as well. The problem is how to get there without having trouble with the local authorities. To them, I might as well be just a spy." Lith sighed.
"We'll think about it when the time comes. Now let's get back to the ring. It has already stabilized for a while now. We can use it without the risk of it crumbling due to mana stress." Solus said.
Lith nodded and took another good look at the small blue thing on his finger. Now that it had the time to self-repair, the ring didn't look so shabby anymore, making Lith's hopes fly high.
It was then that Lith suddenly realized he had no idea how to use it. Huryole's sword was a different matter since its enchantment was so simple that it only needed to be activated to produce air blades against a target.
Lith was sending the ring the mental command for activation, yet nothing happened.
"Okay, maybe Phloria was right and the Odi were just dumb due to their long slumber." He shrugged and then tried to store his inkwell inside the ring's alleged dimensional subspace, but nothing happened.
Then he tried to infuse it with his own spells, in case it was a magic holding ring like those he already owned. Lith had yet to find a single ring capable of holding a tier four spell, so it would still be quite a catch.
After another failure, he remembered that the Odi lacked tier four and five magic except for Light and Forgemastering. Both were too complex to be stored, so he had to discard that idea as well.
"Okay, so it's not meant as a means to attack, nor to store energy." Lith checked the pseudo core again, looking for clues. It somehow reminded him of a dimensional item, which explained why Phloria's Royal Forgemaster spells had mistaken it for one.
A flash of understanding appeared behind Lith's eyes as he sent his will through the ring and making it generate a small energy bubble around his hand.
"Eureka!" Lith said in amazement.
He had been wondering why the runes on the Odi's blade were invisible whereas the ones on the ring glowed with a blue light. The answer was that they were part of the ring, but not engraved into it.
They were part of the enchantment itself and were now floating in the air, encompassing the ring's energy field. Lith discovered that it could be shrunk at will and enlarged up to a sphere of one meter (3.3 feet) around his hand.
"This looks great and stuff, but what does it do?" Solus asked.
"It's a gravity field of sorts." Lith replied while putting one of the books inside the energy bubble. Yet instead of floating, it retained its normal weight, at least until Lith wished for it to be lighter.
Then the book darted toward the ceiling, stopping in mid-air after exhausting its momentum and falling back down in the energy field.
"This makes no sense. Odi had slaves to carry their weights and air magic would be much easier to use than this thing. Unless…" Lith placed his hand above the book, wishing for it to be lighter again.
This time, however, he and Solus used Invigoration to understand what was happening. This way they managed to see the mana going from the ring into the runes, charging them up before sending the book flying.
"Newton's apple!" Lith blurted out when he confirmed that he was indeed the problem. When the book fell back, he simply wished for it to be a little lighter and noticed that instead of accelerating, the book moved through the energy bubble as if it was a dense jelly.
It took Lith a few tries to learn how to properly regulate the ring output, but once he managed to do it, he realized that even though the ring itself was utter crap, the runes surrounding it were a ground-breaking discovery.
"By my maker!" Solus said. "Runes can also be used to overcome the on/off-like nature of the enchanted items that we are able to craft! This is a property that not even the artifacts used by the Awakened we faced in the past had."
"Indeed." Lith grabbed a chair, noticing that once he touched something, the sphere would stick to the object like a second skin, allowing him to make it heavier or lighter at will.
"So far, all the Forgemastering techniques we have developed follow the same limitations of fake magic. A stored spell can only be released in one go, a barrier can only be active or inactive, whereas the Odi's ring can be regulated like a true magic spell."
