As the metal began to cool, I set to work. My body was durable enough to handle this level of heat, in addition to all my Resonances, so I could gently shape the metal into a rough orb, smoothing the surface with my palms, while feeling the heat slowly dissipate as the metal cooled.
The fox was very interested in what I was doing, but I gently nudged her away so she did not burn, then I remembered that she was nearly invincible and I sighed.
The metal cooled into a rough grey ball the size of a plum, and I turned it in my fingers, a bit amazed at how small it was, but seeing that a helmet was mostly a thin sheet of metal forged to cover a head, it was not supposed to be very big.
The first alarm clock I had made, the silver orb with Mel’s voice, had taken me weeks. I had failed almost a dozen times before I got one of them to work. However, my successful prototype had been carved in thirty minutes. I had carved sixty scripts into its surface, mostly air scripts to keep it afloat, and I had been proud of that work.
Now I had more knowledge, a greater soul, and more experience about magic. The Inscriptions I had glimpsed in the chips and the door had opened something in my mind, which I could only describe as a new way of seeing the patterns that made magic work.
I held the rough orb in my palm and closed my eyes. The scripts I had seen in the chip were nested, layered, like a forest of meaning. I could not replicate that, but I could use the structure and build something that echoed a bit of that radiance.
And then I froze, because I had nothing to carve with.
The metal was cool now, and waiting for me to make my first cut, but in the joy of the new knowledge in my head, I had forgotten I was not in my tent, where I had access to an Engraving stylus.
My staff was gone, not that it would help, and the blade of the knight was not fine enough to cut the scripts that I needed.
I sat there for a moment, racking my brain on how to solve this dilemma. Could I create a stylus?
The fox tilted her head when she noted my confusion through the link. "What’s wrong?"
I scratched my head, "I need something to carve with, and it needs to be small, precise, sharp enough to cut metal, and more importantly, be able to channel Anima."
She looked at my hands. "You have lightning."
"Lightning is not a knife. It’s... too broad and hot. I can’t carve fine lines with it. Besides, it would not channel my Anima."
She padded closer and peered at the orb. "Can’t you make it less hot and maybe even smaller?"
I blinked. "Make it smaller?"
"Your lightning. You can make it thin, right? Like your threads?"
I looked at my hands, then manifested my threads, coiling them around my fingers; each of them was as fine as spider silk. Since I had acquired them, I had been using them to cut, bind, and unravel both flesh and metal, but I had never thought of them as tools... they should be able to channel my Anima.
I reached for a thread, pulling it from my fingertip, letting it grow thin and long. It was sharp, but it was also flexible. I sighed; this was a thread, not a point.
"Too flexible," I said. "I need something rigid."
The fox looked around in confusion, and then her ears perked up. "What about these bone spikes around you, the ones you pulled from your body? Could they work?"
I looked at the spikes lying on the ground beside me. There were a lot of them, and I had unconsciously removed them from my mind. The memory of pulling them out of me was not one I wanted to remember.
I gathered several with my threads and narrowed them down until one was left. This one should have been stabbed into my heart if I remembered correctly, which I did not care to do.
It was long, thin, and tapered to a point, and even though it resembled something made from bone, I had to really make an effort if I wanted to break it. I weighed it, and it was lighter than I expected, and the point was sharp enough to draw blood.
However, its hardness and sharpness were secondary properties; what was most important was how well it could channel my raw Anima.
I drew in a deep breath, and from the dozens of channels on the tips of my fingers alone, I chose one of them, and sent a thin stream of my Anima towards the bone spike, and it swallowed it all without giving anything out.
My eyes widened in astonishment, and I continued adding more channels until nineteen channels were sending Anima into the bone spike, and only then did the tip of it begin to glow, and the air around the tip was shimmering as if it was very hot, but the temperature of the spike had not changed a single degree.
"It’s not a stylus," I said, "I don’t think there would be any mage in existence that would be able to use something like this, but it might work."
I held the spike in my right hand and the orb in my left, and I began to carve.
The first script was simple, and it was the one I was most familiar with, a containment script, to hold the shape of the intent I would pour into the orb. I traced the lines slowly, carefully, letting the point of the bone follow the pattern in my mind.
It was a good thing that with the present state of my soul, I had absolute control of every micro-movement in my palm, and the script slowly took shape, drinking the Anima I poured inside of it, and I felt the orb’s surface shift, accepting the pattern.
I paused and looked at the Inscription for containment, and it was nearly perfect. I had drawn this without any mistake, and I did not need to run my Anima through it to know that it was going to hold ten times the amount of Anima that was contained in the first Inscription work I made.
After admiring this script for a while, I began working on the second script, and this one was a link.