I put my maul on the table and thought about how I would attach the gold to it. I didn’t have any way to attach it or melt it down so I needed to think outside the box. Enchanting was something most people, even my old teacher, liked to overcomplicate.

 

The default method for making enchanted items would be to pick an item, pick a conduit then pick a catalyst. Most people would only want a weapon or piece of armor enchanted so that’s what I had the most experience with. The conduit would hold the mana for the enchant and feed it into the item. Finally the catalyst helped you pick the enchant. I knew a few and one was iron sand and a slimes core to make the enchant increase the sharpness of an item. Another would be enchanting boots with quicksilver root oil on a pair of boots to increase movement speed.

 

Every single item could be enchanted without any need for any other items though. Doing just that would be suboptimal. You just force your own mana into the item, strengthening it. The reason not everyone does this is eventually the item would break down. If an enchanter was imprisoned they would speed through his trial to his sentencing because the enchanter could keep enchanting the same bar until it weakened to the point he could break it with his bare hands.

 

So that was out of the question to do with my maul, maybe my arrows in the future but I didn’t plan on using the bow until I had a frontline to hide behind. It just so happens that gold makes a relatively good conduit for holding mana. I had to find a way to bind the coin to the axe though. Without a catalyst the conduit would keep running itself out of mana but I didn’t have the resources to add a catalyst.

 

I started by slamming the coin with the back head of the maul to try and shape it so it would lay flush against the maul. I need some cloth or something to hold it on. I’m half tempted to rip one of my sleeves off but that won't do. As soon as it starts to fray it’ll quickly become a useless piece of cloth. 

 

Clothing was in a weird spot in this world. Compared to earth where we had technology and different types of cloth. The most common cloth and the cloth we use for clothing on Thera was linen. This gave most new clothes an itchy feeling but with people able to have the tailoring skill many clothes were stronger than even leather when it came to defending against attacks. Several layers of linen would be equivalent to metal on earth in durability while metal armor here would be stronger because of the blacksmith profession.

 

With every single sentient race, even the monster ones getting a professional skill at birth it was only a matter of leveling them to have a skilled workforce. That led to the next biggest problem, if your village already had a skilled person in that profession it would close off the opportunity for other people for that profession. I had to convince the enchanter to teach me. That was why my enchanting skill was so low. Well that and my feeble trait made me more clumsy so I really shouldn’t have been near extremely expensive material.

 

I remembered dropping a bucket of elder oak resin that would increase the magical strength of a staff. The cost of that alone was five platinum coins. That was another reason I was so broke even with a rare profession like enchanting. The cost of my fuckups was deducted from what I would make and I still had a ten platinum debt to pay back if I ever returned to the village.

 

I finished tying the braided grass together. It wouldn’t hold up even remotely close to rope but it would be enough to hold the gold onto the axe. Any small cut or a wolf biting into the middle of the axe would knock it loose and could potentially ruin the gold piece itself. I moved it right up underneath the blade because of that. 

 

If I were to compare it, I’d guess the axe itself could hold an enchant for an hour while the gold could hold it for a week. If I enchanted the axe itself I’d guess it would start falling apart after a few days, the gold coin might last a year before it became unusable. Not only could it hold the enchant for longer it would degrade at a much slower pace than enchanting lower quality materials.

 

I put my thumb onto the gold and started pushing mana into it. Doing this wont make the axe any more special, it’ll just make it much more sturdy and harder to break. If I needed to chip away at stone I could do so without causing much if any damage to the maul's head. Pushing mana into gold always felt incredibly natural, the metal was such an amazing conduit it made working with other materials much more difficult.

 

It took almost all of my mana to do so but that still left the axe unenchanted. I felt woozy so I would need to take a break until I recovered. I sat around braiding more grass rope. It wouldn’t be very strong but for holding several pieces of wood together to make a grate for cooking it would be enough. A plain sheet of metal would make this a lot easier and I could use rocks but I didn’t want to have to lug them around or look for them every time I needed to cook. 

 

I’ve recovered enough mana to try and attach the conduit to the item. Attaching a conduit to an item was almost like tailoring. You made thin mana threads that would let the mana seep from the conduit into the item. Thankfully I lost most of my clumsiness when I lost the feeble trait. No, I was even better than my teacher at sewing in mana threads now. The type of affinity you had affected what enchants you could use in the future and it seemed like with going up to a stronger affinity increased my ability with mana threads.

 

With the improved mana threading the enchant would be slightly stronger and last longer than a week. If I were to find a catalyst then the enchanted item would normally draw mana from its surroundings to keep its enchant working. That would be too convenient though. I couldn’t get lucky and have this house have a basement full of goods the previous owner of this body didn’t notice. 

 

I made a quick circle around the house just to make sure there wasn’t a cellar door. The paranoia from my life on earth seeped through with that decision. I finished making about a fifty foot rope out of grass. It’s crazy the stuff I unnaturally remembered from earth. Watching youtube videos on everything led to having an extremely wide but shallow knowledge pool. Fragmenting those memories and the knowledge I knew seemed to be almost random. 

 

Tomorrow I’ll look for some food and make two more ropes then tie them together. If I were to be stranded outside of the house I could try to build a decent shelter. I could do it without rope but having rope would make it tremendously easy compared to not having it.

 

I needed to tame a goblin so having rope to tie them up would also help. I went to sleep tired. The next few days I spent hunting small game and making more rope. I set up some fallback shelters in case the house was found and set a few traps around the house that might warn me if goblins ever found it. The holes might actually break their legs if they didn’t notice them.

 

I wanted to make traps for catching small game but every show I’ve watched that involved them looking through traps it never worked or they used planted animals. One guy did over ten traps and the energy he burnt checking them every day is what most likely caused him to not be able to complete the challenge. Everything I worked on was to increase my survivability. I started to build a dam at the nearby river to help catch fish. The first group of goblins was too big to attack. I was about to fight three before another four came around the clearing and started walking with them.

 

On the fourth day after I revived I got my first chance to catch a goblin. The goblins didn’t cross the river so the only way to find them was to look on the other side. I found one separated from the rest who was harassing a creature on the ground. I snuck up behind him and almost clubbed him over the head with the blunt end of my maul when the smell hit me.

 

These fuckers stunk. As I got within striking distance I let out an involuntary gag. It drew the attention of the goblin. He turned and as I struck down I hit him directly in his temple. I could tell from the way the body ragdolled that he was a corpse now. The other goblins must have not heard the body collapsing. I got a better look at what the goblin was playing with.

 

He had a rat pinned by its tail with a rock and was torturing it to death by poking its belly open with a stick. The rat let out a few twitches and I felt bad enough to waste mana on healing it. The moonbeam would have given me away if it wasn’t the size of a rat. I quickly canceled the spell once the wound closed and the beam vanished. I almost gave myself away healing this thing. I picked up the rock and it scurried away. I snuck closer to the group but it wasn’t like they couldn’t see me.

 

If any happened to be looking in the goblins direction when I kill it then I’d have been caught. I hit the deck and a few seconds after I did a goblin looked in my direction. He scanned looking directly my way before continuing to look for his now dead friend. I could see at least three but some might be obscured by trees. As I moved closer I could tell that the three were also standing around something.

 

They were extremely inattentive. I moved closer to the group over a minute but after the first goblin looked none of them did as they stared down at something together. I kept the rock hoping to throw it as a distraction but now I could use it as a club to knock one unconscious. I planned it out in my head, I’d bring my axe down one handed on the one with its back facing me while lighting another's face on fire and smashing the remaining goblin in the face with the rock.

 

I stood up and sprinted the remaining distance. I had assumed they’d have turned but was pleasantly surprised as they were too enamored in whatever they were looking at. I thought the first goblin I killed with a single blow was a fluke but I’m certain now that they are far more brittle than I thought they’d be. My almost blunted maul smashed down with enough force to dig down to the handle from its weight instantly killing another one.

 

I took a brief moment to let the absurdity of the situation pass by as I could finally see what had them so distracted. One of the goblins had crudely drawn a woman. It was more so a stick figure with two huge circles for boobs. I let out a tiny scoff as I finished casting the damage spell. The moment it connected and the goblin started howling in pain I realized how badly I messed up.

 

I turned completely around and ran as fast as I could away from the goblin. As I moved away I knew I wouldn’t be able to outrun it and breathed in. The original rancid horrible smell was transformed into a chemical attack by the fire. I made it four steps away before I breathed in and even that far away I still had the uncontrollable urge to puke. I kept running away from the smell as I puked in my mouth while running. The goblin ran after me not nearly as affected by the smell pelting me in the back with a stick. If the stick or him were any bigger I’d have been in big trouble. While lurching to puke again he jabbed the stick at my face scratching my nose, almost taking out one of my eyes.

 

In a rage I launched a haymaker at him that caught him completely off guard. Bam! Almost decapitating him with my forearm I launched his body so hard he almost landed on his head, knocking him out instantly. I picked him up and realized how lucky I got with this goblin. He was definitely the runt of the group, I had no doubts if any of the others were left alive they could have done more damage to me while I was incapacitated puking my guts out.

 

The other goblin burst into flames from the spell. Whatever made him stink was also very flammable. I tied up the survivor the best I could before throwing him into the river to try and wash off as much of the smell as I could. Doing so woke him up and I had to fight him the entire time I tried to clean him with him almost biting my nose at one point making me want to hit him again. The best I could do was make his smell only noticeable once you were an arm's length away from him.

 

I had been steadily gaining stats and skill levels but coming home that day I noticed I gained a new skill. 

I shrink down the list of skills to fit on the same line like I did with my stats as well. Great! That’s a huge boon to me. This is one of the skills my previous body's owner knew about and tried to get. Well, when I say try to get he spent a few days trying to sneak into the mayor's wash room to spy on his daughter bathing. He was almost banished back then too. Thinking back to the beauty of the mayor’s daughter made me think that she was at least a mid tier human as well.

 

Well, getting back on track I looked at my stats again. Four in each from leveling and a ton in the physical stats from using them so often the past few days. As silly as it might be, rope armor might be the only way I can increase my light armor skill while out here in the forest. I’ll have to look into it in the future once I catch up on everything else. 

 

I spent the next few days experimenting with taming before I realized that goblins were going to be a bust. Feeding them gave me one reputation gained but throughout the day I would randomly lose reputation with them. So I could gain possibly three reputation but I could potentially lose up to ten reputation that same day. It would be good for power leveling my taming but as I only gained a single level I knew that the gains weren’t worth the food I was wasting keeping him alive.

 

When I took his life with my axe I felt it heat up in my hands. As I looked at the axe I watched it glow before getting a notice.

I clicked yes and could feel an instant change in the weapon and gained knowledge on the enchant. Woah! This was a scaling enchant. It would get stronger alongside me. I could also tell I could shape the weapon slightly until it would be my preferred shape. That was a huge boon to me as it was too heavy to wield single handedly. I’ll have to start working on reducing the weight of the head and trying to sharpen it over time.

 

I looked more closely at the weapon as that was only the default power it came with. The unranked enchant I applied had become an uncommon one. It also gained other effects tied to the enchant itself.

Both stats were long game increases for me. Stat increasing gear wasn’t uncommon but at the same time it was easier to find plus one, two or three to a single stat on a ring. If I killed a thousand creatures just holding the axe would make me smarter as well. As stated before weapons tended to be stats that would help you kill with them. 

 

As of right now, my plans were to kill as many goblins as I could before possibly going back to town with my tail between my legs if I couldn’t find a different monster to tame in another week or so. Gaining levels was something I desperately needed to focus on right now as every single level could be the difference between living and dying out here.

 

I channeled all of my mana trying to make a tangible difference by shrinking the head of the axe but even my entire mana pool I couldn’t tell if the changes were placebo or not. It’s going to take weeks if not months into shaping the axe so I could wield it comfortably one handed.