Chapter 365: Operation: The Improved Elaine II

A few hours of mindless library work, and a quick dinner with Auri, Iona, and Fenrir, and I was back in my mini office, continuing to work on my skeleton design.

I’d picked up the crumpled paper and brought it to Auri for disposal.

“Brrrpt!”

She liked my new project.

I was happy with my design, but something was nagging at me. I leaned back at my picture, trying to work out what was bothering me about it.

Eventually I flipped open the Medical Manuscripts, and started going through various diagrams. I groaned when I got to the elvenoid anatomy section.

My design was a few hairs off of the elven skeletal design. And with a few exceptions – like being able to entirely rotate my head – their design was better.

With some difficulty, I swallowed my pride and made a few corrections to my design. I wasn’t going to let hubris sabotage the rest of my life.

I checked my earlier notebooks on various skull designs I’d toyed with over the past three years. I remembered them all, but there was nothing quite like double checking things to properly center and frame my mind.

The pachycephalosaurus, or ‘pachy’, was a mid-sized dinosaur, which was to say its head, when bent over, was just a hair under mine. It was known for its incredibly robust skull, which it used to headbutt predators, and each other. The two pachys would line up, then charge at each other, colliding head to head at insane speeds. Their weight meant there was a significant amount of momentum that their skulls needed to absorb, and their entire heads were about being hard, thick, and with the right amount of padding for their brains so that they didn’t get rattled around.

It was perfect. I wasn’t going to take their skull wholesale – I didn’t want to look like a dinosaur head – but there was significant inspiration from their design. Even better, there was a type of saurian that was modeled after the pachy. One of my biggest fears was head injuries, and their protection was just what the doctor ordered.

That was enough for one day, and I called it quits, heading home a little earlier than I planned.

Time to unwind with Iona and the rest!

The next day was the details and practicalities of the skeletal system. I had the design, but that didn’t mean I had the materials.

I was throwing things at the wall and was going to see what stuck, and what modifications and compromises I’d need to make once everything was in place. For my initial run through, I elected to use Kun Peng bones. They were light enough for the titanic creature to fly through the air, while strong enough to survive the crushing pressure of the deep ocean. For bone marrow I was eyeing up unicorn marrow, which had a list of fantastical properties long enough that I couldn’t believe it was classified as a non-magical material. The biggest one though? The blood cells produced carried 50% more oxygen than most other blood cells. The marrow could absorb tremendous amounts of shock and impact, and just bounce right back, which meant blows would sort of get ‘absorbed’ into it, and stop propagating through my body. Other biomancers had noted that it easily took to small modifications, without needing to make significant tradeoffs in other areas.

Almost every part of Auri, for example, was classified as magical. In other words, it just didn’t work without some sort of special magic making it possible. If I tried to give myself wings of flame, I’d just get a brief burning smell, then a pile of ashes. There was something intrinsically magical about a phoenix that my level of biomancy couldn’t replicate.

I put a star next to the unicorn marrow, and added a note.

Confirm with Marcelle and two other professors that Unicorn Marrow is mundane, and the reference book I acquired didn’t have a typo in it.

Just to be sure, I checked the reference book in question, paging through it until I found the section on unicorns. This book agreed that it was commonly listed as a mundane material.

A consultation with Metallurgy and Meat was next, and bless the author. He’d listed the best metals and alloys to use in an elvenoid body at the very front of the book.

A number of magical metals started the list. Mithril was the ideal combination of strength and weight, while Adamantium was practically unbreakable. Orichalcum wanted to float, and Purium leeched impurities and toxins, acting as a panacea for poisons. Terrarium’s density was unbeatable. Starsteel amplified magic, while Lusterite had no weight.

I was practically drooling over all of them, but they had three problems.

The first was getting any magic metal in the quantities I wanted was insanely expensive.

The second was working them into something resembling the complex shape I wanted.

Those two issues were bad, but I could work with them. I’d be willing to work and save up to get the metals to ensure I could have the best future possible.

The third issue made me sigh and pass over them entirely.

Magic metals weren’t conjurable. If my arm got cut off, [Dance with the Heavens] would dutifully restore my arm, modifications and all – except for the magic metals. I’d have a gaping void there, with all the structural compromises, pain, and the rest involved.

It had to be mundane, and I facepalmed as the first mundane metal made the list.

Titanium. Specifically, a titanium alloy with a metallurgical notation that I didn’t understand, but I would. Most bodies didn’t react at all to its presence.

With a different colored pen – silver – I started to delicately trace a hexagonal pattern over all of the bones. I was tempted to take a shortcut here. After all, I knew what I meant, and there was no way the skeleton diagram wasn’t getting redrawn a half dozen times.

Down that path lay sloppiness though, and sloppiness in this project would get me killed.

Done properly was the name of the game.

I did make a note in a different color.

While the designs for my own body require frequent quantities of low-level healing to maintain, another reader may find replacing titanium with Purium to be a worthwhile trade, as most of the healing I am planning is to cleanse my body of toxins that are otherwise unhandled. The proposed titanium structure is simply for strength and durability, and the structure will take to a different metal with minimal fuss.

I circled the note, and added a note to the note.

Note to self: This is for my current plans. If I change how I want to use my healing down the line, this note needs to be modified to show how Purium may or may not work.

Once the titanium was drawn on the skeleton, I switched to a red quill.

My joints were up next. I spent far too long waffling between titanoboa and basilisk joints. Titanoboa’s were a bit more flexible, while basilisk;s were a bit more durable, and ‘held’ things together better. It’d be harder for someone to, say, get me in a joint lock and dislocate my arm.

I wanted to imprint some runes on me. Runes that I’d have access to, no matter how badly my life went, no matter what weirdness I came across. It’s why I picked up Carving Your Enemy’s Bones into Runes and Power by Amina Tagreb, a complete primer on ‘how the heck do I put runes on my bones’. Granted, the author had been assuming dismembering your enemy before whittling away, but the principles were transferable.

My rune philosophy came into play here. I wanted runes that would be with me for a lifetime. That would be useful forever. Combat-related runes were almost entirely out. A runic shield wouldn’t be as good as my [Mantle], and more importantly, the rune and array wouldn’t scale with me as I leveled. Sure, there were a dozen ways to mitigate it, but at the end of the day, they just weren’t worth it.

No, I wanted runes that would be as useful to me at level 4000 as they were at level 500. Utility runes were primarily the name of the game.

The first was a simple one, drawn in Octagony. Pure water conjuration. If I ever got stuck underground, or in a desert, I could conjure up some water and get a drink. An isotonic solution would be marginally better, but unfortunately, it exploded in complexity. The marginal utility from a slightly different solution wasn’t worth the dramatically increased cost of space for the runes.

I sketched them into my pelvic region, the mix of bones in an excellent arrangement to take the spherical shape Octagony mandalas formed.

The language was more complex to write than Anaconda was, but it was more compact. It would let me draw the runes even larger, giving them more time before they burned out.

I did need to look up a standard water conjuration rune set in the Overflowing Stack at some point, but that’s why I was doing this in the library. Bonus – anything I didn’t know I didn’t need to work out. I could just post the problem near the Overflowing Stack, and post a bounty of a few dozen coins on the problem. One of the more brilliant wizards could tackle the problem and provide me with the solution.

I worked hard at wizardry, but I wasn’t a genius at it. Octagony constantly gave me headaches to boot, and while I was confident in my ability to write anything I wanted in Anaconda, I knew when to back off and let the people truly passionate about the subject tackle a difficult problem.

Runes burning out was a problem for another day. I hoped[Lepidoptera] could adapt to refresh my runes. I hoped that [Dance with the Heavens] would properly restore the runes when I used it. However, if both of those failed, [The Dawn Sentinel] evolving into the insane healing class I’d been promised should fix the issue. The last backup was [Butterfly Mystic]. The class was all about acquiring skills, and I was sure with dedicated practice I could get another ‘engrave runes into my body’ skill.

After water was an almost pure oxygen bubble for my head. Pure oxygen could potentially poison me. This rune set was also going to be in Octagony, and I was centering it on my head. It made the construction of the mandala easier, since it needed to be centered where the rune was centered, and not displayed.

Air. Water. The third was food.

Anaconda was the language of choice here, and anything ‘biological’ and ‘wizardry’ immediately scaled to absurd complexity, for no good reason. Almost 60% of the bones in my body were dedicated to summoning sugar, a simple compound with an acceptable calorie density. Part of the issue came in that multiple bones were a piss poor way of constructing a proper mandala, and instead I needed to draw hundreds upon hundreds of small arrays, each one connected to each other.

That one I simply starred as a “To draw later” set of runes. I hadn’t even started and I could feel a migraine coming on. The complexity made me think there was a wizardry language dedicated to organics, and I put a post in the Overflowing Stack asking for a compressed way to generate sugar at a range. While also mentioning the runic bones aspect to it.

The fourth rune was a shelter rune. It would make a small metal “half egg” that I could barely curl up in. The longer I ran the skill, and the more mana I put into it, the thicker the walls. The idea was simple. If I was stuck in the middle of a sandstorm or something, I’d need some minor shelter to properly cast the right spell for the situation, but that could require some time, effort, thinking, or simply being able to peruse a spellbook to find the right spell for the situation. The runes I was making would let me have all that.

I put the runes on my spine.

Next up was a set of buffs, similar to Origen’s Inscriptions. Runes that slightly improved my strength, speed, dexterity, and vitality. There were two ways of going about it – a larger flat bonus, or a smaller percent-based bonus.

I went with the smaller percent based bonus. It was worse than the flat bonus – for now. As I leveled up though, the percent based bonus would scale with me, and continue to be useful, while the flat bonus would eventually get lost in the noise.

I was thinking of eternity with my build.

Food. Water. Air. Shelter. Buffs. My Radiance magic provided some minor heating, but more in the ‘melt something and use the residual heat to warm myself’ more than anything else. It was one area I was less concerned about.

No, I had a tiny amount of room left. I’d left my sternum clear just for this.

Jiwa was a solid language for highly specific runes with no flexibility whatsoever. It was no good for conjuring water, for example, because it’d conjure the water at the focal point of the rune – inside my body.

Jiwa was excellent for the next rune I was looking at, a skill that I’d danced around wanting almost my entire life. A skill I’d constantly grabbed gems for, and now I’d be able to use on my own.

[Greater Invisibility]

An upgrade from even Magic’s [Invisibility with Eyeholes], [Greater Invisibility] had it all. It muffled outgoing noise. I wouldn’t occlude sound, so echolocation couldn’t find me. It softly removed footprints. It removed my scent. It emitted light exactly the same way and amount my eyes absorbed, letting me continue to see without any telltale hints I was there. It was exactly what it said on the tin – Greater invisibility.

Getting all that done in another language would be dozens of linked rings at a minimum, each one densely packed with hundreds upon thousands of tiny runes. Jiwa did it all with a single symbol.

Studying the rune, and all the different ways it removed my presence from the world was embarrassing. It neatly laid out a dozen ways Lun’Kat could’ve detected me, painting in excruciating detail just how naive I’d been.

My skeleton was basically inscribed and layered twice over at this point. I had one small spot on my chin, where the Octagony air runes wouldn’t reach, and they wouldn’t be close enough to interfere.

There wasn’t anything super practical I could fit there, but there was a fun little rune I could include. It would rarely be practical, not with my skills and Auri, but why leave any space unused?

In a homage to my old love, my old skill, and my old element, I squeezed in [Fireball].

One system down! Just the rest of the body to go!