A light blue grid, 3x3, super imposed itself over Merrick’s vision with an inaudible buzz that he could feel beneath his skin. Immediately, a sharp pain spiked itself through his consciousness, letting him know that he’d likely extended himself further than he realized in his efforts so far that day.
“Good thing potions are generally resistant to Nexus Portal Corruption. At worse, they'll lose most of their potency,” Merrick grumbled to himself as he unhooked a homebrewed potion from his bandolier. It was one of his more mysterious brews, composed of 3 parts Cogitatio dust, 2 parts Incantatio and 1 part Corporis, alongside water he distilled thrice before use. If one were to read the margins in his log next to the recipe, they’d see the dusts noted as Mental, Magical, and Physical, respectively, alongside a disgruntled note about the cheapest reagent also being the lowest percentage of the potion.
After quaffing his self-dubbed Rejuvenation potion, the throbbing in his head and channels both lightened significantly and he was able to focus more on the task on hand. The glowing grid remained in front of Merrick, reminiscent of an fresh game of X’s and O’s he may have played with his friends years ago. Like usual, the grid seemed to have sized itself based on his intent and each square was only slightly larger than the coins held within his hand.
The largest he’d seen the grid so far was when he tried his hand at making an improved sword. He’d thought himself clever attempting to combine three short swords of varied alloys to try and create a weapon with each of their strong points. Instead of a sword with the weight of aluminum, the tensile strength of tungsten, and the hardness of quality steel, he’d ended up with 50g of Corporis dust and 100g of Aes dust. A costly experiment and one he’d never ended up repeating due to financial strain.
With a frown on his face, Merrick brought the three coins toward the grid. Feeling diagonal this time, not that any of his experiments had ever shown that the grid selected impacted the results at all, he placed one in the top left corner and another coin in the bottom right. As usual, as he held the final coin suspended over the third grid, he could feel a pulling from the two already placed. The moment he released the coins, all three were pulled together.
[Merge Successful. One Bronze Steelhearth Coin returned.]
"Eh?” Merrick stopped and rubbed his eyes before re-reading the message and laughing to himself. “A successful merge, after five years? And all it took was three copper coins? Ha, Ha ha ha!”
With tears streaming down his face, be they from happiness or grief he couldn’t tell you, Merrick laughed to himself like a crazed man for an embarrassing amount of time. Eventually, he calmed down and picked him his log book. A leather tome, filled with 5 years of failure after failure, and sighed to himself before walking over to his pack.
“I should have tried this before finishing packing,” the disgruntled man unloaded his entire traveler’s pack to get to a parcel at the bottom of the bag. A well wrapped book of a much higher quality than his current experiment log laid within several layers of cloth, embossed only with the words ‘Successful Combinations’. He’d bought it nearly four years prior, to encourage himself to keep trying when the first of his sponsors had sold his debt off and left him by the wayside. The beginning of his end, he’d thought to himself at the time.
“First page, three Steelhearth copper coins. Yield, one bronze coin. Feels to be approximately one point five times the weight of a copper coin, will test when I’ve got more copper coins, I suppose.” Merrick trailed off on that line of thought and began tapping his pencil against his chin. He needed to figure out why this merge worked when so many before had failed. Hells, he'd even tried to merge three coins in the past. Though... he wasn't sure that the three coins had been from the same stronghold.
First things first, he thought to himself, he knew Steelhearth was the name of the Stronghold that he was currently living in. It was also, he knew, the name of the dungeon that dwelled beneath the city that powered the Nexus. The coins themselves were created by the dungeon and dispensed as rewards. He made a small mental note that perhaps the previous attempt to [Merge] the coins had failed due to them being created by different dungeons. Of course, there could still be an element of chance involved. He'd need to get more copper coins and test the success rate.
Secondly, there was no such thing as a bronze coin. Or at least, he thought to himself as he looked upon the empirical evidence laying in his palm, there hadn’t been. He’d have to check with the Dungeon Scholars in a way that wouldn’t get him arrested before he had a chance to flee the stronghold. Counterfeiting was a very illegal, and downright difficult, crime. Still, between Transmutation mages and Cloning spells, plenty got themselves caught attempting to make a quick chunk of change every year.
The coin itself looked hyper realistic. Apart from the fact that it was larger than the usual coins, Merrick could almost convince himself that the dungeon would have dropped it. It had the same faces, an image of the cavernous entrance to the dungeon on one side and a geometric shape on the other, some 7 faceted stone or another. The ridges on the coin seemed evenly spaced and had the same depth as the copper coins he was used to.
Wanting to verify the words that appeared upon the success, Merrick pulled up his Skill Log mentally and was surprised to see additional information.
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[Catastrophic Faliure … 5g Corporis Dust Returned]
[Catastrophic Faliure … 5g Corporis Dust Returned]
[Catastrophic Faliure … 5g Corporis Dust Returned]
[Catastrophic Faliure … 5g Corporis Dust Returned]
[Catastrophic Faliure … 5g Corporis Dust Returned]
[Merge Successful. One Bronze Steelhearth Coin returned.]
[First Success registered. Downloading v1.1]
[Update Complete. Basic Algorithmic Output Display Unlocked.]
{It’s about time}
[SIM: 100%, GRW Mod: 0%, GATH Mod: 0%, REF Mod: 0%, CRFT Mod: 0%]
[Total 100% Potential. No Excess Detected. No Personal Blessings Detected. Variant Change +/- %0. Standard Output]
Merrick felt himself starting to get a headache again, this time not due to the use of his Merge skill. At least, not directly. Not for the first time, he lamented to himself that his skill didn’t come with a translator. His father had been, or even could still be, an adventurer. Although Merrick hadn’t heard from him in years, he also hadn’t heard that he passed away. His siblings probably would have reached out by then, if they weren’t still upset with him he supposed.
His mother, an accomplished seamstress. Neither of them had been a Linguist or a Scholar, which made the fact that his skill exploration required him to sus out the meaning behind so many foreign words even more annoying. He had only a basic education as far as writing or reading or even arithmetic before he gained his skills.
His third and final booklet, much smaller than the other two he owned, slipped out of his breast pocket. His own little Lexicon where he recorded the various words his Skill Log would display to him and he’d attempt to translate them. So far, it was rather bare bones, but he hopped to one day fill it out.
He double checked his entry for Downloading and saw he had the word Adding written next to it. The v of his Ability going from v1.0 to v1.1 would make since, which validated the word as far as he was concerned. ‘Algorithmic’ was new to him, but felt vaguely scientific so he made a note to ask his more educated peers in the future. Output he knew and … he blinked twice and double checked the Skill Log.
[Update Complete. Basic Algorithmic Output Display Unlocked.]
[SIM: 100%, GRW Mod: 0%, GTH Mod: 0%, REF Mod: 0%, CFT Mod: 0%]
“Weird, could have sworn I saw a differently formatted message in there for a second,” his stomach chose that moment to aggressively growl its discontent at him and he wrote off the sensation as a hunger induced paranoia of some variety. Or potentially even a manic hallucinations, considering he couldn’t remember a time he was so happy in the last several years. Regardless, the Skill Log returned nothing and therefore there must have been nothing. Moving on then.
“SML, GRW, GTH, REF, CFT,” he scribbled down in his notebook. The capitalization told him they were probably an Acronym, a complicated word he’d learned during his alchemy training meaning each letter stood for its own word. That or it was shorthand. He’d learned that capitalization itself couldn’t tell him everything as many herbalists and doctors would write in capital letters due to their chronically atrocious handwriting.
He decided to operate from the assumption that they were shorthand abbreviations, since there were far too many words he didn’t know to try and figure out acronym combination, with even more words he didn’t know. His only hint was that the copper coins had 100% SIMs and 0 of everything else, so he started his theorizing there. After about half an hour of pondering, he narrowed it down to three likely options and would require experimentation to figure out which, if any, were applicable. He’d already narrowed out words like Simplicity, considering he’d tried to merge rocks and sticks in the past and had failed.
The most likely, as far as he was considered, was SML standing in for Smelted, or Smelt quality, or something along those lines. It was well know that dungeon drops were almost always perfect quality, so it would stand to assume his skill would read a dungeon created coin as perfectly smelted. He could test this theory by creating a few more daggers and trying to merge those next time he had access to a forge as his had been repossessed already. That may take a while however, since he was hired onto the caravan as an Alchemist rather than a blacksmith. Merrick imagined the first few months of forge use, after it was set up at the new settlement, would be relegated to supplies for building and farming as required. It’d likely be some time before a forge was available for rent.
Of course, he could also try to purchase three quality daggers. If he had the money for them, that is. He found himself hoping that whatever dungeon the newly cleared nexus was attached too was both easy enough to encourage delving and also difficult enough that his healing potions sold well enough to fund his newest round of experiments.
Another theory was that the coins were simulacrums, or clones of each other created by the dungeon. He wasn’t sure why them being conjured rather than minted would effect the merge success, but dungeons were the largest source of Magica in the realm and it wasn’t outside the norm for a skill to interact with dungeon mechanics specifically. There were entire dungeon architect skills cataloged. At the very least, he needed to try and source a few items from the dungeon and try to merge those to eliminate the possibility.
The third option, was that he was wrong and the three letter log entries were actually acronyms. If this was the case, Merrick decided he was likely better off running a massive number of experiments again and brute forcing the meanings through the newly unlocked Basic Algorithmic Output Display, which he could only assume was his Ability’s way of classifying the percentages that got displayed. He was already brute forcing the meanings for the names of the dusts his failures outputted to him. If you threw enough mud at the wall, eventually some of it would stick.
Finally, it occurred to him that he should gather some materials from the local dungeon before he left the following morning. He still had four hours of sunlight left, and then plenty of nightlight before the caravan left again the following morning. With the dungeons apogee being the following day, loot was at an all time high alongside the monster respawns. It’d be a little dangerous to go solo, but he wasn’t going to be going in very deep and he’d done it plenty of times before.
With a note to himself to try and source enough money for a cheap bag to hold his yet to be gathered experimental materials, he grabbed his currently emptied travelers sack, a few empty vials, his hand pick, and his sword before setting off toward the Steelhearth Dungeon entrance.
