POV Swap – Tobias

Several days later…

The forge burned brightly, a black ring engraved with intricate markings glowing brightly with mental clasps holding it steady. The flames within emanating immense heat as they warped the metal. As the ring was pulled out and placed upon an anvil, a hammer landed atop it.

A striking noise emanated throughout the room and the width of ring was condensed. Steam filled the air as the black ring was promptly dropped into a metal bucket filled with water. The markings on the ring glowed with a golden hue.

Carefully removing from the bucket and placing it atop the counter, the black ring dimmed.

“Phew…” I sat down and leaned back into the chair.

The forging part of creation is truly the hardest part. Minor mistakes and adjustments can destroy hours of hard work. More terrifyingly, a major mistake could ruin the materials and make them unusable.

At that point, you could only cry without tears.

Now, then…. let’s test what you can do.

Equipping the black ring, I injected mana into it and tried reaching forward toward the apple-like fruit on the counter. The fruit teleported into my hand causing a smile appeared on my face.

The result of invocation, many hours of hard work, and masterful brilliance.

A spatial teleportation ring. Any object with within a ten meter radius could be instantly teleported into my hands.

The idea behind it was simple, but making the adjustments of the array from the boots of escaping was anything except simple.

Countless hours of research and experimentation in the illusionary hub and finally I managed to create a working prototype. It’s first artifact I’ve created without specific artifact to copy. While I used the teleportation array from the boots of teleportation as reference, the operation and purpose of existence is completely different.

This could be described as a potentially ultimate weapon.

Imagine teleporting the heart, or any vital organs of an enemy in a fight? Can they still survive that? Even if they can, I guarantee it will weaken them significantly.

No doubt, if it works, it can be described as an ultimate weapon...

However, there has to be a reason behind why spatial weapons like these weren’t described in the forging books. Considering there is detailed instructions on how to create planet destroying weapons, I doubt those reasons are ethical.

There should undoubtedly be a major problem with this spatial weapons.

Sadly, without specific testing, I cannot know say for certain what those problems are. Although I can hazard a few guesses.

People’s body might be able to instinctively resist such dangerous teleportation effects, or there might be spatial anchoring artifacts that were prevalent to prevent such attacks. It could be said there is almost certainly an inherent design flaw in this method of attacking.

Otherwise, where would people bother to create other types of weapons? It’s impossible that I’m the first person to think of spatial weapons.

Additionally, this spatial teleportation ring is actually far weaker than the teleportation boots. It can only teleport objects around the size of a fist, the teleportation distance is one third of size, and it still consumes far more mana than teleportation boots.

No doubt that if it an actual artificer saw it, they’d laugh at how terrible it is. I barely managed to get it to work after countless adjustments, the idea of optimizing it is completely out of the question.

Nevertheless, I’m still pleased with its existence.

If I cannot begin create new artifacts, how would it be possible save Kara? As the plan to find a reliable healer has fallen through, it can be seen that only this method has a chance of working.

“Knock knock!” A recognizable female voice at the spoke up. One of the twins, Lina or Laura, had arrived.

“It’s open.” I called out whilst putting away the boxes.

While it was already past morning and I usually close the shop around this time, they were paying customers. Not to mention I still felt guilty about letting them die in the previous timeline.

If they hadn’t been together, I probably wouldn’t have recognized them.

“Hello, hello~” Lina called out and entered the shop alone, it seems her sister hadn’t come with her. The bracelet around Lina’s wrist was the only common different I could tell between the twins. The twins seemed to enjoy dressing up identically to confuse people.

“How has the bracelet been serving you, Lina?” I took the opportunity to observe her.

Lina wore an inconspicuous black t-shirt and grey-ish pants. Silky black hair and green eyes that seemed to hold all the curiosity in the world. In short, a relatively attractive girl.

“It’s very neat~ There have been no problems! Thank you.” Lina smiled brightly. “I brought the night vision artifact from my sister.”

“Very well, let’s have a look.” I nodded.

I still surprised to have met the twins. Don’t look at the surface level, it could be said that everyone who got a Decima game token powerful character. Most of them were guild leaders or extremely dangerous.

I didn’t really recognize it before because I didn’t spend time in the Residential Zone. Of course, when compared to people in Hell Difficulty they’re not much.

Lina placed a golden ring on the counter.

I staring at it, blinked and grabbed up the artifact in surprise. “Huh?”

This is night vision? I wouldn’t even begin to know how to set up such an artifact, but… there does seem to be anything related to light in principles of this artifact and it didn’t seem to have a physical effect on the eyes?

Looking toward Lina, I tried to confirm. “Is this actually an artifact with a night vision effect?”

“Yep~” Lina nodded.

Is my translation wrong? Maybe those words doesn’t mean night vision in common? I suppose it doesn’t matter, I can just duplicate the principals engraved onto the artifact. I need to understand it to recreate it, I doubt they’ll complain.

“I’ll need a few days to study it before getting started.” I explained, gazed toward the artifact with interest. “It’ll probably take several weeks before the artifact is ready. Is that a problem?”

“No, that’s fine.” Lina reassured before preparing to leave. “I’ll see you in a couple weeks~”

While it might seem like I’m taking a loss on this trade, once I’ve learned to recreate it, I’ll be able to replicate this night vision artifact at will. In actuality, this trade is completely taking advantage of them.

Despite trading for artifacts on a near constant basis, most of the artifacts that are traded are one time use attack or defense artifacts. Anything better than that is almost never seen on the market. Who would be willing to make a disadvantageous trade? Even if artifacts are traded with one another, usually it’s only done within a guild.

Over the next week, I studied the effects of the artifact completely and was blown away from what I found.

The artifact clearly didn’t provide night vision, it was far more complicated than that. It overrode the optic vision center of the brain and poured in information about the surroundings. Even if you were completely blind, this artifact would do the exact same thing.

It only be said the brain is an amazing instrument has interpreted the information given to it as sight. People only confused it for a night vision artifact as in normal circumstances nothing changed, only in the dark when people wouldn’t normally be able to tell it made a difference.

The system should’ve told the exact purpose and description of the artifact when the trial that released it was completed, meaning the artifact was probably stolen from its original owner or they should’ve known better.

In a way, this was far more impressive than a night vision artifact. Even if someone was completely blind, this artifact would allow them to ‘see’. In fact, this type of artifact could completely allow someone to bypass the need for eyes at all. Additionally, the artifact provides information about the entirety of the surroundings, not just in a cone line-of-sight manner.

What does that mean? Three hundred and sixty degree vision! Vision that see through objects! That’s what it means! People’s brains are disregarding the extra information about the surroundings beyond their normal capability, but the information is still being poured in.

This artifact is simply ingenious! The main problem with the design is the brain’s limited capability to process information is restricting it.

However… I’ve run into a snag. There’s an encryption on artifact.

Most artifacts in the Difficulty Zones were created on a mass produce basis, they were created with the purpose of giving people a chance to survive. They were focused on creating as many as possible. Where would they bother to encrypt them and hide the principles behind their creation?

This artifact was likely created long before that crisis, and thus... intellectual property.

Copying the artifact directly over is impossible.

I don’t know what to say. This isn’t exactly a problem I’ve run into before. While the books in the virtual library mention decryption and encryption methods, they’re too many method. Learning them all to find a working method will be extremely time consuming.

Part of me wants to laugh in joy at discovering such an amazing artifact. The other half wants to cry, I’ve discovered such a great artifact yet I cannot do anything with it until it’s decrypted.

Sighing, I resolved myself to studying the artifact.

The encryption method’s are similar to those on environmental wards, but the difference in difficulty is comparable to the difference between breaking into a guarded prison and an empty residential home. Even if the same principles could be applied to both, the difference in difficulty is incomparable.

The only thing I could do was bunker into the virtual hub to take advantage of the time difference and study those encryption methods.

…I spent the next period of time learning, analyzing, and studying relevant methods encryption methods. While I managed to decrypt the artifact, it was extremely annoying and time consuming to learn.

The design of the encryption wasn’t even designed to be difficult or ingenious to solve. The encryption was merely created with one goal in mind, to be as irritating and annoying to resolve as possible.

Whoever made this artifact had simple goal of making the artifact completely unworth the effort of decrypting and they definitely succeeded.

By the time I’d created an identical artifact, I never wanted to see the bloody thing again. I felt like vomiting when I thought about the amount of time wasted. So much work and effort for such this worthless thing.

While it was certainly interesting and ingeniously design artifact, the time investment wasn’t at all proportional to the rewards. Never again will I agree to duplicate an artifact without checking the exact situation of the original.

If I hadn’t already agreed to the trade and accepted payment beforehand, I would’ve given up long before decryption it. If it weren’t for the time difference for the virtual hub and real world, it would’ve been impossible to complete this task in any reasonable amount of time.

Never mind several weeks, even several months wouldn't have been enough. This was simply a pit task.

The twins really are my unlucky stars. Unless they're paying far above the market rate, I'll never agree to another task from them again.

I silently swore to myself to never accept another commission from them without making them bleeding for it.