A New Kind Of Grind

"The Sevenfold Necklace is a Sakurai family heirloom," Akane began.

"Your parents came to Dorn as peasants who were skilled enough to perform city-dwelling specialist work rather than being forced out into the countryside to be subsistence farmers," Nicky said flatly.

"Look, they promised me I'd get it once they were too old to work and didn't need it anymore," Akane said defensively. "It will be inherited. Eventually."

"Will it?" I asked. "Because if I'm understanding your suggestion properly, you want us to pool our talents together to make our own versions of the Sevenfold Necklace. Unless, of course, you intend to 'gift' your own copy to your dad so that she'll 'gift' her own copy to you, pretending that it isn't a trade so you can call it an inheritance."

"Yes, I want to make more Sevenfold Necklaces," Akane said with a sigh. "If I can finish, though, I'd like to tell you what the Sevenfold Necklace even is!"

"Aside from strange-looking?" Nicky asked.

We were walking back to Akane's apartment from the class, and quite grateful that it was a middle-of-the-day thing rather than an evening class, as that would've thrown off the schedule of either my sleep or the cowgirls' milking.

"It's not strange-looking," Akane protested. "Well. Okay, yes, but it looks the way it does for a reason! See, usually, an enchanted item can only really have one set of enchantments on it. But! The Sevenfold Necklace is different, with each pendant having its own, individual set of enchantments! I'll explain exactly how I did that later, because what's important is that each pendant is completely dedicated to boosting a single stat!"

"Which they can do more efficiently, since they're made of gold and ruby," I said. "Those have a much lower resistance to enchantment than other materials."

I found it worthwhile to think of enchantment capacity as more like enchantment resistance. You could, ultimately, put as much enchantment as you wanted on whatever you wanted, it's just that some arrangements used a lot less magic than others. Some materials held enchantments better than others, and of course, using more material gave better results too- a gold chain would take enchantment more efficiently than an iron chain of the same fineness, and a solid golden bangle would do even better than the chain.

"Exactly!" Akane continued. "Now, four of those stats the necklace boosts are all of the magic stats- it was designed by crafters for crafters, after all, and magic stats are super valuable in crafting!- and the other four stats are the Affinity stats."

"Four plus four is-" Veronica began.

"Only seven, because there's the Magic Affinity stat," I interrupted. "Which would be included in both sets of four."

"Ah," Veronica said, nodding. "Well, I suppose the Affinity stats are a good choice to boost for an accessory. But aside from an easier time passing your exams, why do you value it so highly?"

"Because the Affinity stats are really important for crafters," Akane said. "It's- look, you know how usually non-delvers only ever get up to Level 5 at the most, when they've been doing their class' thing their whole life? Well, my dad is a Level 5 Mystic Artificer after doing it for only twenty years, and my mom is a Level 6 Rancher. That only happens among delvers... because delvers already have such obscene bonuses to their Affinity stats. The Affinity stats are a serious XP multiplier for crafting classes, and just because we're delvers and we'll get those high stats anyways doesn't mean it's not worth investing in improving them now."

"If nothing else," I added, "it'll be a fun first project. Certainly more fun than me trying to work out the mechanics behind a better firearm and then pestering you into making it for me."

"A compelling point," Veronica said. "Well, what will you make after the project is done, and your Magic Capacity potions are no longer needed?"

"Some other potions, probably," I said. "Maybe more orichalcum and gemstones?"

"I am not exactly short on orichalcum and gemstones," Veronica said. "And Level 1 potions are hardly difficult to obtain commercially, in greater volumes than you alone can churn out."

"Yeah, well, maybe I want some for myself," I said defensively. "But if you've got a better idea, let's hear it."

"One class ability that Alchemists share with Farmers is the ability to brew alcoholic beverages," Veronica said. "Alchemists have the disadvantage of not being able to produce grain and grapes in the vast quantities that Farmers can, but they have the advantage of being able to concoct far more interesting brews than Farmers can."

"...So you think I should make weird novelty beer," I said. "You know what? Sure. But you're on the hook for all the grain I'll need."

"Call it an investment," Veronica said. "I'll give you seed money with which to buy materials for the first batch, but you must keep accurate records of how much you spend, and how much you make. And I will take half of the excess revenue until you've paid me back for the seed money, plus... oh, let's call it twenty five percent extra."

"And... how long do I have to repay you, and what's the penalty for failure?"

"Two years, and you have to give me whatever it is you bought with my money."

I nodded. "Well, write it up as a proper contract, and I'll consider it. Until then, I've got potions to brew."

"Good luck."

Akane, using the second recharge potion I'd given her, updated the enchantments on my room, giving me much more space to set up my new Alchemist Starter Kit. I'd probably want a dedicated alchemy workbench at some point, but for now, I was fine with the labware living on my desk. The real big chungus, however, was that enchanted planter. It was a cube, a meter to a side- I'd measured, and it was exactly enough more than three feet to be a meter instead- made of some dark metal, with the top being covered by an additional glass case, measuring twenty five centimeters high. The glass case didn't open, which was a little sad, but on one of the sides were two labeled ports with trays- one for "SEEDS IN" and one for "PLANTS OUT." It was a wholly automated blackbox, a particular flavor of 'beginner-friendly' design; more specifically, the flavor of 'I don't trust you to know what you're doing, and to be honest I don't believe you either need or deserve to learn.'

"I think I could make something at least like this," Usagi said, inspecting the planter. "Maybe not as magic-efficient or high-capacity, but... it's doable."

"I'm still not totally sure about what's going on here," I admitted.

"It's not that complicated, really," Usagi said. "If you have Mystic Artificer along with other classes, you unlock certain synergy recipes, which mostly amount to replicating class features. So a Mystic Artificer/Farmer like myself can enchant an item to let someone spend magic to accelerate crop growth, or harvest crops without having to go around with a knife doing it the hard way, or replant them without having to go around with a shovel or a plow and doing it the hard way."

"Ahhhh," I said, nodding. "Which is what this thing does, right? Put the seeds and a bunch of magic in, and it spits out the harvested plants without any real skill or effort on the part of the user, just a lot of magic."

"A whole hell of a lot of magic," Usagi said. "This thing is borderline unusable for anyone who isn't a Wizard."

"Luckily, I am one of those, so..." I shrugged. "Anyhow! I think I'll pass on commissioning some replicas for a while, and instead, I'm just going to use this setup as-is to brew the potions we'll need for Akane's planned project, in exchange for one of the artifacts she's going to be making."

"I do need your help," Akane began, "but you don't have to trade with me, Roxy. We're friends. You can just ask me to enchant things for you."

"Friends don't ask friends to work for free," I said. "Or have you already forgotten the wisdom of your mother?"

"Okay, well, we're not just friends, we're family," Akane protested.

"That sounds awful inconvenient to your ambition of riding my dick."

Akane blinked.

"Every so often," she said after a pause, "you say something that reminds me, that I choose to be your friend, on purpose."

"I have no idea if that's a good or bad thing," I said.

"I'm having trouble telling right now, too," she said.

"I vote for bad thing," Usagi said, somewhat unhappy about the joke I'd made about her daughter's desire to have carnal knowledge of me.

"Anyway," I said. "Moving on, I assure you, I am not unduly put upon by trading the things I've made for other things that I want. Hell, I've got other trades in mind where my end of things is already lined up and ready to go- at some point, I'm going to trade Haruna those machine tools I made, because she is going to actually use them, because she is an actual Blacksmith, and she makes money doing this sort of thing. She'd absolutely have a use for tools that can make complicated or precise parts without requiring the expenditure of large amounts of magic."

"I guess," Akane said, sighing. "I just... I don't know, Roxy, I feel bad about making you 'earn' stuff. I know what your daily routine is like, and I think you've done enough as it is."

"Let me put it to you this way," I said. "I like crafting projects, and trading with people means I get to do a craft project with a fairly specific end goal that I might've never come up with on my own. So, I assure you: it is no imposition for me to trade stuff with you and the rest of the household when I have something I want."

"Fair enough," Akane said. "So... how long is it going to take before we're ready to make the Sevenfold Necklaces?"

"Depends how fast I can make the reagents I need with this here planter," I said, patting the glass top. "Which... we are about to find out."

"Alright," Usagi said, three days later, reaching under her kimono and withdrawing her own, original, Sevenfold Necklace- I'd asked, and there were two of them. "Here you go."

Usagi's Sevenfold Necklace was notably different from Akane's, and bore the subtle marks of two decades of loving wear, tiny scratches and dings that had been mostly fixed, and tiny specks of grime in the deepest corners where it was the hardest to clean. Most notably, however, the gems were significantly smaller; the mismatched rubies were each the size of maybe a kernel of corn, acting more as central accents to the golden pendants, as opposed to Akane's more gem-heavy construction having (decently large, about the size of a pointer finger from tip to farthest knuckle) gems as the central piece, and gold as an exterior accent and housing.

Still, it had far more enchantment in it than Akane's did, even after three days of her slowly eking out incremental improvements while she waited for the herbs to grow so I could brew potions.

I put it on, and felt my stats absolutely fucking skyrocket, and grinned. Since my magic pool had been full for more than a whole minute before my Magic Capacity stat went up, my magic pool did not stay at its previous level before slowly filling back up, but instead went instantly to its new high water mark.

"Oh yeah," I said, grinning. "This is gonna be amazing."