The next week flew by in no time for Argul. She was permanently occupied with her training and slowly but surely got comfortable in working with wood. There were small differences between wood from different plants, but she was able to adapt to them relatively fast. 

Her progress on fabrics was quite a bit slower than on wood. Argul wasn’t worried about this however. Enchanting clothes was a lot more difficult so the slower progress was natural and she didn’t need to enchant any clothes for her identification plate anyway. It gave her a lot more leeway in terms of time management in that regard.

That no weird and shady people visited over the week helped quite a lot too. Her visit to the market had ignited a spark of curiosity and people did come to the inn looking for her now and then, but that was manageable. 

While Argul didn’t like being watched or stared at, she did enjoy meeting the few that asked her stuff about magic. In the mornings that often ended with Mia proudly presenting her repertoire of spells since people were more interested in the magic that they could replicate. 

Argul didn’t mind Mia ending up with more attention. More people being able to cast stuff would heighten everyone's living standards, hers too. They might also come up with interesting stuff she had never thought of, which was even better.

At the end of the week mana exited Argul’s domain for the first time in quite a while. The new mana movement brought some freshness to the world, especially since the density of mana had gradually been sinking. 

The event made Argul aware of the passive mana consumption of nature. It was a bit weird since that meant mana had to be converted into something else like energy or matter, which would mean that nature was continuously putting stuff on the planet. If things stayed like this the planet would eventually grow larger and Argul had no idea what this would result in. She firmly believed that for once this wasn’t her fault however and would just keep an eye on this. If she was lucky nature would find its own way to balance things out again. Argul had more important things like the intent pollution to solve anyway before she started to tackle such a long term problem and even the intent pollution would have to wait.

She sat down on a random chair on the first floor of the inn after sending off Mia on her daily training. It was time to initiate the next phase of her birthday present project and this one would take her by far the most time.

Argul wanted to start this with the creation of a contract skill, because training it would be the most difficult. To improve a skill like that she had to use the skill, the more she did the better and contracts were quite a niche application in her opinion. Really all skills that required more than one person were more difficult to train.

She opened the description of her fate contract to plan things through.

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• Fate contract
  • This skill allows you to create nearly unbreakable contracts that will change and bind your fate to those of others. Breaking such a contract will cause a wave of intent with the goal of punishing the oath breaker to be freed. While this is not an archive restricted skill, it will be policed by it and abuse will always issue elimination quests to others.

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There were a few things she needed to change for her normal contract skill. Firstly the punishment had to be toned down a lot. Argul had no idea what the fate contract would do to a person, but considering her own personality death might be one of the best things that could happen to them.

Now, sadly she couldn’t do things like taking stats or levels away. Argul had asked her daughter beforehand and while Alyra said that in theory it should be possible, the victims life would likely be miserable afterwards. It had something to do with stats just being a numerical representation of the body and taking them away would mean attacking the whole body, which would likely lead to a lot of damage. 

Strengthening someone was a lot easier on the other hand, because getting strong was preferable for the body. It was more like talking the body into doing it and then controlling the process. Argul considered that to be more of a reward however so that option was out.

She thought about a few more possible punishments like weakening the contract breaker with something like illness, but nothing really sat right with her. The penalty being something harmful to the body seemed wrong altogether.

Argul searched through her list of skills in hope of finding some inspiration until she came across her curse skill. Maybe she could use that somehow?

A curse wasn’t much of a skill, rather some kind of affliction that attached intent to a person and forced said person to maintain that intent. In Argul’s case that meant there was a small cloud of intent that tried to make her look harmless around her at all times. Since it wasn’t a lot intent the actual effects were all rather small and quickly overshadowed.

She was pretty sure she could do something similar with the contract skill. Let’s say breaking a contract gave a person a small curse that made them untrustworthy and the more contracts they broke the stronger the curse would get. Argul could add a penalty like that to what her plate of identification would show too.

The punishment for breaking the contract wasn’t too harsh and would in fact not help to make all people follow a contract. For a trader however it would be a big blow that impacted their business, which was exactly Argul’s goal. It made no sense to needlessly punish for example a small farmer and now the skill wouldn’t do so, but the more was at stake the more important the skill would get.

She scratched her head in thought. Only punishing people wouldn’t do it of course and adding a reward for not breaking the contract would help motivate people to keep their promises. It could also offer a way to redeem your past failures. 

Argul would have to make sure that the reward was a lot smaller than the punishment for now. Later she could actually create some kind of ranking system like in a video game. She only needed more data for that so giving Alyra the ability to actually reward people with the skill was essential.

The only problem Argul had was that the reward might be called a curse too and this did not sound like something rewarding at all. She would have to speak with Alyra about naming those skills differently. Maybe calling it boon instead of curse depending on the circumstances would be enough.

Having planned out everything, Argul now only had to create the actual thing. She needed a second person for that though and since she could create a contract with Luna about staying in the inn for the paid time, going to the innkeeper made the most sense.

Argul stood up from her chair and wandered over to the kitchen door. She took a quick peek inside, but Luna wasn’t there.

Argul knew that she hadn’t gone out, which made Luna’s room the most probable place for the innkeeper to be. She went upstairs and past Arthur’s and a few more rooms before she stood in front of Luna’s door. Thinking of it, this was actually the first time Argul had come here.

She knocked at the door and announced herself. “Luna it’s me, Argul. Can I come in?”

A few seconds later Luna opened the door and stepped aside. “Sure, sure!”

Argul stepped past her and took a look around. The room looked like a cozy living room with a couch and tv. Underneath the window was a desk with a few unfinished pencil drawings strewn around. There was a closed door to the right that likely led to Luna’s bedroom and bath. She hummed to herself. “You sure do have it nice.”

Luna closed the door behind her and sat down on the couch, gesturing for Argul to join her. “Thanks! My friends helped a lot with the decoration. What can I help you with?”

Argul sat down next to Luna, who scooted closer to her. She tried to ignore how close to each other they were. “So, I wanted to ask if you would agree to help me create a new spell? It’s a contract spell and I need a second person because of that.”

A hush of disappointment went over Luna’s face before she smiled kindly at Argul. “Sure, what do I have to do?”

Argul fumbled around with her hair a bit awkwardly. “Nothing much except for staying close to me. I might need a few tries so this could take a while.”

Luna agreed to still proceed and Argul began to explain what exactly she was doing while she created her spell formation. Similar to the fate contract this spell was very complex so it took Argul a bit. She didn’t need a constant mana tether and only a message mechanism here however so Argul managed to do it on the first try. Creating a tether was extremely difficult and just a split moment of distraction was enough to destroy the whole spell.

Argul finished the spell and two notifications appeared in front of her.

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You have created a skill:

• Contract
  • This skill allows you to create contracts with other people. Contracts are required to have a definite time span in which they need to be completed. Completing a contract gives you a small boon of +1 to make you appear more trustworthy. Breaking or failing a contract takes away 10 points of your boon, resulting in the application of a curse to make you appear untrustworthy if you fall below 0 points.
  • Contract rank: 0

You have offered a contract to the innkeeper Luna:

If Luna accepts she has to provide lodging and food for you and your group for the next 2 and a half months. You have already paid the required prize.

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Luna blinked, seemingly having gotten a message too. “That is an awfully convenient skill to have.” Argul was super thankful for the system interpreting her contract, otherwise the spell wouldn’t even be half as nice as now.

Luna swished around in front of her a bit. “It even shows you a list of all the contracts you have and when they run out.”

She looked at Argul. “Could I learn this spell too?”

Argul shook her head. “I don’t think you can learn it.” It was really complex and required you to multitask a lot, like all her spells did.

Luna looked a bit downtrodden at that so Argul tried to cheer her up. “Ah, but as an innkeeper I am sure you will get a quest with this skill as a reward in a bit.”

Luna looked up at that. “Is that how the system works?” Oh shoot, that might have been a bit too much.

Argul tried to fake her knowledge. “I don’t know for sure, but after I created the magic missile my daughter got a quest for it so I think the system knows only what people show it.”

Luna nodded absentmindedly. “If you say so.”

Argul could only sigh. She didn’t want to leave too many tracks behind and since Luna wouldn’t come with them she couldn’t tell the girl her true identity. It was still better than being hunted down or worshiped so Argul couldn’t do much about it.