It wasn’t a perfect start, but it helped Angor get familiarized with how to use Narda’s Vision pretty well.
He was a little disappointed to know that the cantrip only told him inexact options rather than unique results like how he expected before. However, he had no problem with this since he also knew that it had something to do with his limited knowledge gain.
He gave up doing a further examination on the “white bullets” in the revolver since he’d never get a true answer in this situation. He needed more tests before checking the bullets, meaning, using the revolver against the undead. To do this, he had to capture enough undead creatures and perhaps find a way to imprison them.
The Church of the Deceased he crafted was a good choice for containing undead spirits even though he might have some trouble with catching them. The revolver was designed for killing undead, not ensnaring them.
And he couldn’t possibly brawl with an undead spirit without using the revolver.
He rubbed his temples and frowned. He thought about making something non-lethal that could suppress undead creatures, but whether he could do it or not, it had to wait until after he finished studying Narda’s Vision.
He put away the revolver and began building a “server” in his mindspace again.
The second model came out quicker since he had experience with the first one. It still took him several minutes, but at least he succeeded in one go.
Instead of looking at something complicated, he decided to identify simpler items this time, such as common objects with no supernatural properties.
He noticed that the “server” did not spend much mana when examining these items. He managed to check through a dozen items, and the cantrip model remained solid and steady.
There was something else. Since there were no special properties to tell, Narda’s Vision could only tell him about the base materials used in the items. However, when Angor believed that an item could be considered as a piece of art, the cantrip would give him art-related evaluation as well.
But this extra piece of information was also restricted by Angor’s own expertise. If he wasn’t capable enough to judge the artistic value of the item, then the cantrip wouldn’t help him much.
Since examining common things had given him enough trouble, Angor was getting worried that he’d never be able to fully identify alchemy items.
Thankfully, Narda’s Vision worked fine on several of his alchemy creations by revealing the correct results right away.
When he finished examining another alchemy item, which was a Tang Dao crafted by Dave, the cantrip model of Narda’s Vision showed signs of breaking, by which time he had looked through eleven non-tiered alchemy items. This meant the “server” he just used could identify over 30 common items plus 11 non-tiered alchemy ones in one go.
He didn’t know whether the result was good or not. After considering, he took out two alchemy notebooks from his bracelet—one was from Prome, while the other was given by Mithra.
He read them to see what the two alchemists had to say about studying Narda’s Vision.
It seemed Prome’s first try allowed him to identify 17 common items, while Mithra managed to check 50 common ones, 7 non-tiered alchemy items, and 1 tiered alchemy item.
Telling from these, his “score” was better than Prome, but he fell behind Mithra by a large degree.
Well, Mister Mithra is one of the best alchemists in Floating Mech City... His true talent was plain to see from the very beginning.
As he remembered, Prome was also an alchemist who affixed the model of Narda’s Vision onto a spell slot, which meant Prome could keep checking more items as long as he did not exhaust his mana. If they were to compete with each other to see how many items they could check at a time, Angor wasn’t sure who would win.
He spent more days reading books.
He had turned his life into a simple routine during which he was either testing Narda’s vision, meditating to recover lost mana, or reading. It might appear to be taxing and dull, yet he could almost feel his knowledge getting enriched rapidly.
He finished creating all 27 variations of the model in his mindspace and discovered the one that took the least time for him to build.
Currently, he had decreased the “casting time” of Narda’s Vision to 1.5 minutes. It was still slow, but the axes of the universe could let him cast the cantrip perfectly without making any mistakes, whereas common alchemists tended to need several tries before the cantrip was out.
Yet successfully casting Narda’s Vision didn’t mean reading items correctly. After more tests he did during these days, Angor had acknowledged the fact that as long as the item he was checking contained something he wasn’t familiar with or did not know at all, more “results” with ambiguous information would show up. In these cases, he either had to check through the information and refer to more books to pick the right answer or give up completely if there were too many uncertainties.
He realized that apart from knowledge, Narda’s Vision also called for perception and resolution. To alchemists, this cantrip was both a lifelong tool and a standard that measured their growth.
...
It was ten in the morning. The bright sunlight in the Month of Wildfire shone through the tree leaves outside and cast a golden and uneven picture on Angor’s desk.
Angor was enjoying the sun while savoring a glass of fresh milk with a relaxed expression. He usually didn’t request specific meals from Goode, but the butler would still send him dessert and milk every day.
While tasting the lingering sweetness on his tongue, he took out a diamond-shaped crystal from his bracelet—the strange crystal Spotty gave him. He believed he had learned enough to identify this object now.
He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, removed random concerns, and began building the model of Narda’s Vision in his mindspace.
When he reopened his eyes, his irises were glittering with colorful luster. Soon, he saw symbols and digits showing up from the crystal in his hand.
He frowned when he noticed a lot of question marks among the symbols, including those supposed to suggest the base materials that made up the item.
He knew that these question marks represented “unknown variables”, which led to uncertain results, or no result at all if there were too many of them.
He could still tell something from uncertain results like how he did for Prelude to Rebirth, but no result meant complete failure. There was nothing to see until he mastered enough knowledge and tried again.
He frowned and wondered what to expect when so many variables were revealed in his view.
He felt a little faint when the final results showed up. The “server” usually did not strain his brain much as most of the calculations relied on the model itself. In other words, checking on the strange crystal involved a terrifying amount of work that was enough to affect his brain.
He waited a bit for his head to “cool down” before checking on the results, which were already left in his memory.
And he was pretty surprised to see that the examination succeeded partially—there were six sets of results, which all looked drastically different.
To make sure, he was going to disregard all uncertain elements of the results and only looked for what they had in common because that would probably be the useful part.
His pupils suddenly constricted.
“This crystal, it’s a...!”