Fusing Techniques

He was in front of his workbench this time, normally he would be producing artifacts and pills for sale, there was no better time for that than a war, his high quality products sold like water. Each of his companions went about their own business, not all of them had side occupations and Nicola did not force them to do so, they should just become strong enough to walk beside him. The three AI had returned and employed the undead force to produce medium quality items in large quantities. Gin was churning out pills at full throttle. Fibula, to his surprise, was devoted to a book about runes and arrangements that Nicola had allowed her to read. The other three were in training camps fighting and improving their strength and skills.

But Nicola shook his head away from the thoughts, what was in front of him this time was the greenish Thrillium metal they had mined earlier. On the table were also other materials like Karsus ore, silver-grade slime goo, celestial ram wool, and several hexagonal pieces of a tortoise shell that Nicola had faced. Plus many other cores and mana crystals around.

Nicola then prepared a homogeneous alloy with Thrillium and Karsus ore, leaving the metal with a greenish gray appearance, the metal having the shape of a lightweight hexagonal arm shield and the ability to compress itself using the power of space, up to the size of a seed.

The second step was to use the main materials, just like in alchemy, Nicola would use the ingredient's innate energy to impart special abilities to the item, but unlike alchemy, all the mass and essence would be turned into a pseudo core that would be the source of this ability. The difference of this to a recorded spell was the ability to have a much greater power and cheaper consumption than a normal spell. He took as an example Brianna's hammer, which despite having very good materials would not be able to release tremendous attack as she did at the end of the battle.

In other words, the pseudo core absorbed energy in all previous fights and used only one trigger to fire the ability towards Nicola. What he would do now was create pseudo cores using the ingredients to allow the shield's versatility in battle. The slime ooze would allow the shield's ability to change shape even after being forged, allowing Nicola to change its aesthetic whenever needed, the hexagonal tortoiseshell fragment would increase the shield's raw defense, while the celestial sheep's wool was able to give the shield the ability to reach incredible speeds and possess the ability to self-recover.

Nicola could not engrave one core at a time on the piece as it would prevent the others from being placed later, so he would have to fabricate and fuse the three at once into the hot metal, writing matrix runes, just as he had discovered in the alchemy, at the same time forming the core, and further linking all three with skill arrays that overlap the skills, empowering them. He had already theorized the matrix that he could do this and the plans were on the table to be followed.

As if all this complexity wasn't enough, Nicola still intended to imbue the six edges and center of the shield with a low-level elemental core, fueling the spells that filled the matrix, and he had cut those cores into perfect dodecahedron shapes.

This complexity of artifact production couldn't be done by one person, bordering on the difficulty of producing a high quality mage tower core. In fact it took at least a dozen people working on the object for this to be possible, unfortunately with so many different energy flows acting at the same time on the same object under construction, it would make it impossible for it to be manufactured.

Impossible if it were anyone other than Nicola. Beside his floating four fairies AI, the newest member of the team was called murasaki, because of the violet color of her gem which was very similar to an amethyst. The AI ​​could simulate the same energy signature as their masters, as they were linked to their soul, and with their high processing capacity they could act in place of two people at the same time, that is, with all four working at his side Nicola could start attempts to produce his first item with this new technique, after all, he also had four hands and nine tails to perform multiple functions at the same time.