18

Leslie having a day off actually meant Leslie had a lot to do.

He'd gone to a military surplus shop in Gotham and bought out about a third of their supply of shelf stable military rations.

As much as he'd have liked to, he couldn't get any of the more interesting things.

This was Gotham, not Bludhaven.

Or worse, Detroit.

His second stop of the day was going over to talk to Jeff at the recycling center. He traded an hour of converting cans into more expensive pure aluminum for half a ton of iron and five hundred dollars.

Jeff still ended up coming out ahead on that deal.

Leslie had reached level twenty-one in the Realm of Forbidden Knowledge, a massive jump since he'd been at eleven before that.

Five perk points, fifty stat points and a significant amount of GP lead to a lot of improvements. With his intelligence and wisdom both at forty-three after distribution, he had a lot more MP to go around. And it regenerated significantly faster, too. Three hundred and twenty-two MP at sixty-four percent per hour gave him a lot of leeway compared to where he used to be.

The perks had a lot of potential, too. Metamagic: Pierce didn't make his spells any stronger, but they had an increasing level of ability to ignore magical defence. Up to half at max level.

Leslie really, really hoped that would let him ignore "Boss immunity" for casting toad.

Metamagic: Minimum Powah! had the very, very useful effect of keeping his spells from getting too weak if spread across too many targets. It would preserve half of a spells power, if the spell was at max level.

Yeah, it also impacted spells below the max level, but he didn't care very much at the moment. Life and Cure were now persistantly useful!

The final perk he'd gotten was the second tier of the magical development tree. Magically A-Practiced replaced Magically Apprenticed and gave a twenty percent discount alongside a twenty percent boost to all spells.

It didn't make Transmutation any easier to use, but it was now significantly cheaper!

With the majority of his tasks for the day taken care of, Leslie found an abandoned warehouse and got started on his next major project.

Advanced Homonculi Creation had been a bust for his purposes. It demanded ingredients and reagents he just didn't have access to.

Like a dragon's heart.

Or fairy wings.

If pushed, he could just purchase them from the game shop, but they were -expensive-.

As in, he'd had two-hundred thousand GP after the Duras Drum incident, and he could have gotten the dragon's heart. And only the dragon's heart.

And after he'd apparently bought a Dragon Egg, he didn't have enough left to do that at all.

Instead he chose to blow it on another crafting book Synthesis: Fuse for about half of his remaining GP.

That would let him combine items, unfortunately at a loss of efficiency, to create overall better items.

After he read it anyway.

And he bought the various spellbooks from Final Fantasy Two that he was still missing, barring Ultima.

Break, to turn a target to stone. A more permanent and still non-lethal option for dealing with things trying to kill him.

Haste, the quintessential spell for improving speed. He'd never be on the level of The Flash, but he could live with that.

Berserk. Basically the same as Haste, but for strength instead. Again, he'd never be swole like Superman, but then, who was?

Curse was kind of the odd duck out of all of his spell choices. It was a pure debuff, reducing strength, defense and magical power of the target. It could be resisted, but in time Leslie hoped the Pierce perk would help with that.

Shell. It was exactly like protect, improving defense. Except specifically for magic. Of limited use in the world of DC, true, but the magical threats here were, one and all, kind of a big deal.

Holy. There was just not much to say about Holy. It was one of the two attack spells based off of wisdom, and it dealt especially strong damage to Undead and Evil monsters.

Now had Leslie actually read any of these spell tomes? No, no he had not. Each of them would take about half an hour, maybe even a full hour to read.

And if Synthesis was anything like Transmutation or Homonculus Creation, that could easily take him a week of on again, off again work.

All of that book learning would be useful in one way or another, but it wasn't why he'd holed himself up in a warehouse.

He'd come here to get started on building a new body.

At least, the first step. Creating living steel.

In description, it was fairly simple. You just fill iron up with Life magic.

In practice, not so much.

Leslie used transmutation to shape an ingot of iron out of a handful of solid metal scraps, rust and carbon dropping out and being left behind.

He'd heard people claim that iron could resist magic, but that had always seemed especially odd to him. History and myth were absolutely riddled with magical swords and armor, and they'd been made of iron and steel.

The misconception about 'Cold Iron' bothered him even worse.

Leslie shook his head and focused. The next step was going to be difficult.

Using transmutation once more, he reached into the iron ingot. It was homogeneous now, pure iron barring the traces of oxidation already forming on the outside.

Carefully, very carefully, he pushed a little more energy into it and the ingot expanded minutely. Inside, at the molecular level, the bonds between the iron atoms expanded as well.

Leslie swallowed heavily. Holding it in this state was... Actually very taxing. He could see his MP dropping fast.

He'd never actually tried something like this before.

Focusing on the ingot with a second spell was particularly challenging. Dualcasting was a difficult art to begin with, and this was his first time trying anything with it.

He managed to cast Life on it just before his MP ran out completely.

Breathing out a sigh of relief, Leslie looked over his stats. No MP, but it was coming back fast. He'd be able to check on his work in a moment.

One little bar of iron, maybe less than a kilogram, and it had completely exhausted him.

No wonder it had taken the combined power of two god-like spirits and an ancient, elven master smith to make an appreciable amount of the stuff.

Leslie shuddered a bit at that thought.

It hadn't just been used to make the near-human Holmcross. Living Steel had been the primary material in making the massive and imposing Golems in the world of Filgaea.

That had been what Duras Drum had warned him about. Not the tiny, almost insignificant command unit that was the Holmcross, but the ensouled weapons of mass destruction that, at their peak, still failed their original goal.

After waiting several minutes, Leslie took a look inside the ingot with transmutation.

It was... Not impressive. The concentration of life magic in the steel was spotty at best. Shifting it around and concentrating it, he had a small sliver of material that was maybe one-hundred grams.

Over three-hundred MP to make one-hundred grams of material, and he needed... A human skeleton was somewhere around two and a half to three and a half kilograms, and steel was about four times denser. Add in that the Holmcross had various internal supports that were otherwise made up of other organs and supporting fat...

Leslie put down his phone where he'd been searching for data on the internet and sighed. He'd probably need about twenty kilograms of material, and he could do one-hundred grams every two hours if he wanted to exhaust himself.

Two hundred times, or four-hundred hours of work.

Yay.

At least he hadn't had an accident that created a world-spanning stretch of desert!

Opening his skill menu, Leslie looked at the crafting skill he'd picked up when Transmutation hit fifty, Conversion.

It would let him turn one material into another, provided he could afford the MP cost to do it.

-Alchemy: Conversion-

-Transform the materials or properties of one object into another, provided you have used Transmutation on them in the past!-

-MP cost: Varies. Similar materials or properties can be Converted with greater efficiency!-

Looking at it from that skill...

Converting Iron to Living Steel was eight MP per gram.

Converting Steel to Living Steel was six MP per gram.

Aluminum was more expensive, and stone was a lot worse.

Starting off it would be a lot worse, but if Conversion leveled up decently it might more than even out!

Leslie was about to look into his inventory to see if he had any gold or silver to experiment with when his phone started ringing. Looking at it, he had two questions.

Who was Megan Morse?

And how did she get his number?