Jacob sat cross-legged on his bed with his eyes closed. The Void Gauntlet rested in his lap.
He wasn't looking at it. He was feeling it.
He had been like this for three hours. To anyone walking in, it would look like he was napping. In reality, his mind was navigating a labyrinth.
The enchantment inside the gauntlet was . . . loud.
That was the best word for it. It hummed with a chaotic, buzzing energy that felt nothing like the smooth, silent 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. There was a central core of mana that acted like a battery, but the pathways leading out of it were twisted and jagged. There were sub-cores grafted onto the main line at random intervals. There were nodes pulsing with power that didn't seem to connect to anything at all.
It was a brute-force enchantment. It screamed Power at the top of its lungs, but it wasted half that power just trying to keep itself from falling apart.
Jacob opened his eyes and frowned.
How does this even work? he thought. It is inefficient. It is leaking mana everywhere. If I built a circuit like this, it would short out in five seconds.
But it didn't short out. It worked. The gauntlet was incredibly strong.
He set the heavy stone aside and grabbed a stack of cured raptor hides from his bag. He needed a comparison.
He laid a strip of leather on his desk. He picked up his mithril tool.
He closed his eyes and visualized a simple Durability field. He constructed it using his method. He saw the 3D lattice. He saw the honeycomb structure. He saw the way the lines supported each other.
He etched it into the leather with a quick pulse of blue mana.
Click.
The enchantment settled instantly. It was silent. It was clean. The mana flowed through the lattice with zero resistance. It was a perfect, 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. He carved a "core" node. He drew jagged lines. He added random sub-nodes.
He pushed mana into it.
Fizzle.
The leather smoked and curled up. 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 and focused on what the mana was actually doing. He traced the current from the core to the fingertips.
The main core pumped raw power. The first sub-core acted like a dam to build pressure. The second sub-core acted like a release valve. The random nodes weren't useless. They were anchors. They were holding the chaotic energy in place by brute force.
It wasn't an elegant circuit. It was an explosion held together by duct tape.
Jacob realized with a start that this was exactly how the System worked. It didn't care about elegance. It cared about results. It pushed massive amounts of power through a structure, and if the structure wasn't efficient, it just added more anchors until it held.
He looked at his own smooth, logical lattice on the first piece of leather. His method was better. It was cleaner. But the dungeon method had one advantage. It could hold more.
His lattice was limited by geometry. The dungeon's method was limited only by how much force you could apply before it exploded.
What if I combine them?
Jacob grabbed a third piece of leather.
He visualized his clean, 3D honeycomb lattice. But this time, he tried to tweak how the runes meshed together. He tried to create a high-pressure "core" node at the center of the geometry by folding the lattice in on itself. He wanted to trap mana in a dense loop to mimic the battery effect of the gauntlet.
He pressed the tool to the leather.
He pushed.
The mana rushed in. The lattice lit up. The pressure built rapidly in the center where he had folded the runes. The leather glowed with a fierce, bright light. It was working. The power density was spiking far higher than his standard enchantments.
Then the humming started.
It wasn't a stable hum. It was a 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 static charge. They were designed for flow, not storage.
Crack.
The leather strip snapped in half. 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.
It had worked for a second. The concept was sound. A high-efficiency lattice could support a high-pressure core. But something was missing.
His lattice lacked a component. It needed something to stabilize the core. It needed a container. The dungeon used brute force anchors. Jacob refused to use brute force. He needed a specific geometric structure to hold the core in place without shattering the lattice.
He didn't know what that shape was. Not yet.
He looked at the Void Gauntlet again. The messy, chaotic enchantment mocked him. It was ugly, but it endured.
"You win this round," Jacob muttered to the stone. "But I know what I am missing now. I just have to find the right shape."
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.