Jacob sat cross-legged on his bed with his eyes closed. The Void Gauntlet rested in his lap.
He wasn't looking at it with his eyes. Instead, he was feeling it with his magic.
He had remained in this position for several hours, appearing as if he were asleep to anyone passing by his door. In reality, he was tracing a tangled path through the internal structure of the artifact.
The enchantment inside the gauntlet felt abrasive.
It possessed a chaotic energy that lacked the efficiency of his own work.
He pushed his perception deeper into the stone to visualize the structure.
It was a mess.
It looked like someone had taken a handful of magical wires and thrown them into a blender. A central core of mana acted as a battery, but the pathways leading away from it were twisted and jagged.
There were sub-cores grafted onto the main line at random intervals, and nodes pulsing with power that didn't seem to connect to anything at all.
It was a brute-force enchantment that pushed massive amounts of power through a poorly designed circuit, wasting half of that energy just to keep the internal structure from collapsing.
Jacob opened his eyes and frowned.
How does this even work? He thought. It's inefficient and leaks mana everywhere. If I built a circuit like this, it would probably just short out in five seconds.
But it didn't short out. Somehow, it worked. The gauntlet was incredibly strong.
He set the metallic stone gauntlet aside and grabbed a stack of cured raptor hides to use for a comparison.
He laid a strip of leather on his desk and picked up his mithril tool.
He visualized a standard durability field using his own method, focusing on the honeycomb structure where every line supported its neighbor.
He etched the pattern into the field of the hide with a pulse of blue mana.
Click.
The enchantment settled instantly. The mana flowed through the lattice with zero resistance, creating a logical loop.
He looked back at the gauntlet.
Why was the dungeon's enchantment so messy? Was it just bad design? Or was it doing something he didn't understand?
He picked up another strip of leather.
Okay. Let's try to copy it.
He tried to replicate the chaotic structure he sensed in the gauntlet by carving a "core" node. He drew jagged lines and added random sub-nodes.
Then he pushed mana into it.
Fizzle.
The leather smoked and curled up when the enchantment failed instantly. The conflicting pathways fought each other and tore the material apart.
"Weird," Jacob whispered.
He tried again. This time, he didn't copy the shape. He copied the flow.
He ignored the messy wires of energy and focused on what the mana was actually doing. Then he traced the current from the core to the fingertips.
The main core pumped raw power, while the first sub-core acted like a dam to build pressure, and the second sub-core acted like a release valve.
The random nodes weren't useless. They were anchors, holding the chaotic energy in place by brute force.
Jacob realized with a start that this was exactly how the System worked. It didn't care about elegance. It cared about results, pushing massive amounts of power through a structure, and adding more anchors until it held.
He looked at his own smooth lattice on the first piece of leather. His method was better, but the dungeon method had one advantage. It could hold more.
His lattice was limited by the geometry of the runic patterns, while the dungeon was limited only by how much pressure the anchors could withstand.
What if I combine them?
Jacob grabbed a third piece of leather.
He visualized his clean honeycomb lattice but tweaked the way the runes meshed together. He tried to create a high-pressure core at the center by folding the lattice in on itself, hoping to trap mana in a loop that would mimic the gauntlet's battery effect.
He pressed the tool to the leather and pushed.
The lattice lit up as the mana rushed in. Pressure built rapidly in the center where he had folded the runes.
The leather glowed with an intense light that signaled a power density far higher than his standard work.
Then the vibration started. It was not a stable hum, but a violent wobble.
The core he had created began to vibrate. The clean lines of his lattice couldn't contain the raw, chaotic pressure of the artificial battery. The runes weren't designed to hold that kind of power.
They were designed for flow, not storage.
Crack.
The leather strip snapped in half as the enchantment unraveled in a burst of blue sparks that singed his eyebrows.
Jacob coughed, waving away the smoke.
He stared at the broken leather.
The concept was sound, but he was missing a piece of the puzzle. His lattice needed a specific component to stabilize the core.
The dungeon used brute-force anchors, but Jacob wanted a geometric solution that would hold the core in place without shattering the surrounding frame.
But he didn't know what that shape was yet.
He looked at the Void Gauntlet again. The chaotic enchantment mocked him. It was ugly, but it could withstand much more power.
He picked up his notebook.
Project Update: Goal: Integrated Mana Battery. Problem: Core Destabilization. Missing Component: Unknown Stabilizer Rune.
He closed the book. He hadn't mastered it yet, but he had learned. The Void Stone was appalling in its inefficiency, but it had shown him that there was a ceiling to his current method.
And Jacob Hemlock hated ceilings.