Guild Wars

Chapter 429 - Elite Rank Scrivener

"Recording complete, removing unnecessary information… compiling… assessing…"

"Complete. The magic technique 'Earth Arts: Pitfall' has been assessed to be a valid technique. Generating Rank… complete."

"Earth Arts: Pitfall is graded as a Common technique. Would you like to record another?"

Draco shook his head. "That will be all for now. Thank you for having me, Satine."

"Not a problem, Scrivener. However, make sure to-" Satine began to set up her usual line of nagging him for more visits, but was rudely cut off by Draco who exited the Vault of Techniques with a smile.

His eyes glowed when he counted the number of techniques in line for conversion. He had created every possible offensive variant for the four basic elements, even spells that had no spellbooks - as far as he knew at least- like Ice Mist, Earth Golem, Wind Dispersion, and Cinder.

Perhaps an ambitious archmage had created them for his own use, but the limits of objective spells and traditional spellcasting were hard to break. The conventional skills passed around made up the basics and they boasted reliability as well as accessibility.

Subjective Magic simply had no limits. Whatever nonsense runes he engraved would come out as a spell, as long as he could handle the resources, the implementation, and the strain.

For example, when working with support and defensive spells under the Box, Draco had created almost 10 times more spells than their offensive variants.

Richmond had only taught Draco spells like the mana shield and magic wall, but Draco had stepped beyond that. Using the basic elements, he created an element ring, elemental field, and anti-elemental domain for each of them.

The first created a defensive ring around a place that reacted to enemy intrusion. For example, if two thieves tried to break into a building Draco had guarded with this spell, the thin circle of fire that looked more like an ember about to go out would flare-up in the direction of the intrusion and incinerate the intruder.

Obviously, an objective variant would not have that level of practicality and would likely be transformed into something used for battle. Still, its power would be higher for its Rank compared to what Draco had created.

Pros and cons.

The second was the elemental field. This spell was designed for basically changing a landscape totally to suit one's own element, like playing 'field cards' from one of those popular card games in which some loser kid with spiky hair loved sending people to the shadow realm.

The fire version could create a hellish inferno, the water one could create a small ocean, the wind one created an area of turbulence and the earthen one created a desert or barren land.

Naturally, since these were so powerful, Draco had to limit their distance in order to keep it at the Common Rank, otherwise it would have been graded at Rare or Epic.

The third was an anti-element domain. This was essentially creating a special domain around the user that blocked off a specific element completely. Casting the anti-fire domain, meant all fire magic and attacks would fizzle out.

It was a crazy valuable control skill that any mage would sell their children for. Not only could you dominate in a PVP against other mages, but more importantly if there was a rare Field Boss that was in a volcanic region, using this spell could turn it from a super tough fight with a 1% success rate to a walk in the park for the duration of the spell.

Draco also had to limit this one's range and power to keep it at the Common Rank.

Why did he do this? Well, the answer was obvious. At the Amateur Rank of Scrivener, he couldn't create skill-/spellbooks for anything higher even if he had their converted versions waiting to be penned.

Of course, Draco had made sure to record the same technique at different intensities to create stronger and weaker versions so that he could pen them at any Rank.

This meant that the total number of techniques he had in waiting surpassed 500!

He had spent a whopping 3 months in the Vault of Techniques, which was merely an instant in the real world. The time dilation had been so intense that Draco's pod in the real world was overheated a bit, but held out.

His body was also slightly feverish out there, but quickly recovered with the care of the AI and his bloodline. Draco felt nothing of this in the game due to the sheer immersion of the pods and his body in the game being more than a hundred times superior to his real one.

For the Common techniques which numbered 246, he only needed to pay up 40 high-grade Aether Crystals. For the Uncommon ones which numbered 124, he had to cough up 4.5 top-grade crystals.

As for the Rare ones, which numbered 99, he had to pay 40 top-grade crystals! And finally, for the Epic ones which numbered 31, he had to pay 300 top-grade crystals.

This did not include the fee for speeding up the conversion, but Draco paid it all at once. His face didn't even shift in expression, and a strange aura was rolling off him that made Pair Dadeni and Mjolnir who were auto-crafting by the side pause.

The items might not know what this aura was, but Clarent or Qiong Qi would have instantly screamed in fear and awe.

This was the pure and unbridled aura of a silk pants young master!

Someone who had grown up with a platinum spoon in their mouth and did not value money, feeling that if he lazed about for a day, more of it would appear with ease.

From someone who used to spit blood and curse when spending, Draco had finally ascended into the Ranks of the rich! He had spent over 300 top-grade Aether Crystals in one go without batting an eye!

Even the Merchant Guild would plead on their knees in fear, crowning him the new God of Wealth!

After getting this done, Draco created a comfortable chair and table, seating himself. He also receded most of his armor to sit down more comfortably, and took out a quill and some of the ink he had prepared in bulk before he left to begin this quest.

He also took out the rolls of parchment he had cut up and prepared long ago. However, despite the plentiful nature of both the ink and the parchment, Draco shook his head.

He would need to make far more than this to carry himself through the Amateur Rank alone. Every Common Rank book used 20 sheets, and each one used about 3 liters of ink.

Currently, Draco had about 2,000 sheets and 250L of ink. Since he had about 250 Common skills to transcribe from this recent batch plus some others from earlier, he would about 5,000 sheets and 750L of ink in total.

As such, he spent about 1 week alone on preparing a lot of this. In this time, he made 30,000 sheets and 10,000L of ink. It seemed like overkill, but just because he would Rank up didn't mean he would wash his hands of Common skill-/spellbooks.

He planned to make a bucketload of skill-/spellbooks for Umbra. Especially spellbooks since he could transcribe his crazy creations for his guild member to dominate their peers on the battlefield. As for skillbooks, he only had his Sword and Bow Skills, so it wasn't broad enough to cover all his players.

The moment he was done with the preparatory section, Draco got into the meaty bits. He began with the Fire Arts, then went on to the Water Arts, and so on. He scrivened the skills in the same order as he performed them for Satine to record and evaluate.

Since it took only 10 minutes for him to create one book with his Control and expertise, Draco was able to blaze through them faster than with Magical Engineering.

Then again, it wasn't surprising. The two Tradeskills had different focuses. Magical Engineering emphasized meticulous creativity and steady production with moderate cost (for an Epic Tradeskill) while Scrivener empathized mechanical accuracy and mass productivity at a high cost (even among Legendary Tradeskills).

After all, everything cost Aether Crystals with Scrivener. To convert cost prohibitive amounts of Aether Crystals, to speed up the process cost even three times more than that and to prepare the materials also required Aether Crystals for both the parchment and the ink.

Compared to Magical Engineering where you only paid Aether Crystals once - when learning the designs - the difference was clear. As such, the time penalty was also different.

One might ask, what time penalty? After all, Draco was crafting within his Rank, so why was there a time limitation? Well, this was a mechanic implemented by the system to limit the amount of skill or spellbooks being spat out.

When Scrivening, Draco would see something like a faded version of what he should write per page, and he only had to trace his hands along those lines to create the spellbook.

Elementary stuff that children in kindergarten were made to do in order to learn how to read and write. After paying so much in the earlier stages, even the AI had a sense of guilt in making the final process as easy as hell.

But even then, it was still evil and heartless. The lines on the paper that Draco was supposed to mimic didn't appear all at once, but slowly over time. The full thing would only be displayed after 10 minutes, and Draco who was following along patiently also finished it at that time.

Hm, one could argue that the AI did this because not everyone was like Draco who had the Body of Godliness to give him perfect mechanical control of his muscles. By doing this, those who had bad handwriting or needed time to carefully transcribe what they saw would be able to do what they needed to do.

Hehe, a person who made such an excuse on behalf of the AI was exactly the kind of sheep it liked to play the game. Having those cute little bleaters justifying its evil was a sweet feeling.

Draco had also tried to copy what he wrote in another book, but it was a wasted endeavor. The AI was not a retard, every time he was prompted to write, the lines would be different, even for the same skill-/spellbook.

After all, people weren't going to read what was in it, only learn it through the system, so most of what was in there were refined gibberish. Thinking you were cleverer than the AI was always the sign of baseless arrogance.

It would always be 4 parallel universes ahead of you.

250 skill/spellbooks at 10 minutes per book meant that it took Draco a whopping 41 hours to complete everything!

…

Damn, that's quite short huh? Doesn't hit the same as spending 2 months on Magical Engineering…

Whatever the case, Draco was at level 6, 30% in the Scrivener Tradeskill. Since each new transcription gave him 5% Tradeskill experience - while every subsequent one gave 1% - he was able to gain 1,250% experience or all the skill books.

This instantly shot him to level 18, 80% in Scrivener, just a small bit away from the Elite Rank!

However, Draco had no plans to stop here. After taking a short break, he came back and repeated the sequence of scrivening he had done before without pausing.

This time, he neglected the extra ones from his Bow Skills, so he only scrivened the 246 Common spellbooks. Since they gave 1% experience, he gained exactly 246% after spending another 41 hours on the task.

Draco hit level 21, 26%, and was now an Elite Rank Scrivener!

However, the madman still didn't stop there. He had prepared 30,000 pages and 10,000 liters of ink for a reason, so he repeated the sequence over and over again.

With the amount he had, he could only perform the sequence another 5 times before his sheets ran out, though he had more than half his ink remaining. Including the breaks, he took in between, Draco had spent a total of 13 days on writing, meaning that the gross total crafting time for Scrivener was 3 weeks!

But he wasn't done yet!