Chapter 56 - Dannan

Laurence stood at his table, twenty different metals strewn in front of him in various warped shapes. Every so often he would pick up one, watch as it twisted in shape and then warp into something unrecognisable. Sighing he put the metal back down and turned back to the open page in his Book.

Arcane limb: Arm - A mechanical and magical device made to replicate a severed arm with full usage and mana channelling. While not a perfect replacement for the original arm, the creation can have a variety of supplemental abilities that make up for the perfect loss of mana flowing through the lost limb.

The section was a short one, dictating the various material mixes and compounds used in making something that had to conduct mana well while also being sturdy and flexible. It was a tough ask, but Laurence was sure that given enough time he could find an answer. The issue was that nothing he tried seemed to look or feel right. He had tried trueforming all sorts of different shapes of arm, but after each and every attempt he would rend them to scrap and start again.

He knew there were a few things he had right. He knew the bone layer had to be made of aegean copper, the tendon connections out of a salamandrite-cobalt compound, and the muscles out of axium, a rare rubber-like metal found only on the seventh floor. After that, however, he was drawing a blank. The skin carapace and the substance used for binding mana pathways were all causing him trouble. For whatever reason he could not find any form of material that could connect to his mana reservoir even close to the way that his body did.

“What am I doing wrong? Why is there nothing within any of the designs that let these materials work well together?” He sighed and pulled out all the crafting materials within his bag, scrutinising each one in detail. “It needs to be thin... It needs to be flexible... It needs to connect to my magic tools well, and it needs to be light... It needs... to be light?”

He stopped. Slowly a grin spread across his face and he picked up the aegean copper bones that would make up his hand. Focussing, he began to inscribe extremely fine lines all over the metal. He continued with his forearm and upper arm, right up to the point where it would connect to his shoulder. Next he grabbed the metal tendons and began to do the same thing, making thin rivulets that connected all the parts together. He bound them as one and soon enough he had a limb without any muscles.

Next, he completely restructured the muscles within his body so that rather than being like thin ropes, they were in fact like micro-chains that made up a muscle in the stead of each line of sinew. When that was complete he placed the arm back down on the table and just looked at it. It was a very good piece of fine construction, very precise, fine work, but it was in no way complete. Without the skin layer it looked odd, alien to the point of true otherness. He needed a skin for it.

The skin had even more issues than the muscles or the tendons. It needed to be tough to cut but soft to the touch even at the thinnest layers. Blend after blend, compound after compound he tried all sorts of materials, but nothing seemed to work perfectly. In frustration he knocked over some of the tubs holding a few compounds he was using together and watched as they drained together and mixed inside the ingot cast that he had left out.

Turning around Laurence left his room and walked down to the mess hall to get some air. No one was around, but it was fine for him. He found that he had developed a problem with being trapped in a small room because of the time he had spent in the Lupe prison, but he did not let it affect him any more than anything else would have. Every time he became agitated he would take a walk to the mess hall, sit down and just have a drink of something random. Sometimes it was a new fruit that Yun had discovered on his journey through his world, sometimes it was a kind of animal milk, and sometimes it was a distilled spirit or wine of some kind. Today was fruit juice.

He sipped the sweet orange liquid and just sat in the room, relaxing and letting his mind rest from the work he had put it through. He found the silence relaxing. Sometimes he felt that his mind was far too loud.

An hour passed uneventfully. Laurence had three more glasses of the juice before finally going back up to his room, going to the toilet and then back to work. Unclipping the ingot from the ingot mould he used, he tested the density and flexibility of the metal. It felt right, and was dense enough, but the metal was not flexible enough by any measure. Even the chance mixture was a dud.

He was about to separate the ingot back to its core components when he noticed that the thin trail that had come from the cast channel had curved down. With his truesight, Laurence could see that the material that had been in the channel was a single element different, but that was enough. There was a thin residue of tornado diamonds in the channel before he had emptied the mixture. That had joined the material within the ingot and caused its durability, but the previous combination was perfect.

“You... You I will call dermatium. Skin-metal”. He smiled and began cleaning the cast and channel before making himself a new ingot of the compound before, sans the tornado diamond. He took the metal and placed it on a specially built anvil. Because of the situation with his arm he had to work out a new way to hold the ingot still while he worked on it, so before he had started he had engraved various runes all over the anvil for adhesion. As long as he channelled his mana into the anvil, anything that touched its surface would stick to it.

He summoned his hammer and looked at it a long time before sending a sliver of mana into the anvil. Raising the hammer up he continued to look at the bar of metal that would become part of his skin. It was an odd concept for him, but he was still happy about it. Slamming his hammer down once he felt the hot metal deform under the pressure of the strike. He struck again, feeling the surface of the ingot begin to flatten. A third strike landed against the anvil, a fourth, then a fifth, and soon he had a rhythm going. He began to relax into the motions, not thinking about anything other than the hammer, anvil and the ingot.

Having left his door open the sound of the hammer and anvil rung throughout the tower, up and down, attracting those who could hear it to see what the commotion was. At first it was Cleo, then Manas and Damascus, then Louisa. More and more people began to flit up and just watch Laurence as his act of hammering moved from functional into an artform.

“It’s almost musical isn’t it?” Manas said to no-one in particular. There was reverence in his voice, like he was shadowing, learning from a deity of some kind.

“It is music,” Cleo replied, smiling at the young man’s back. “It’s music only Law can make”.

Laurence ignored the people behind him. In truth he did not know they were there. He was too focussed on his new creation. With each hammerblow the ingot became flatter and closer to perfection, soon enough the ingot had become a sheet and the sheet became thinner until there was enough of a surface area to cover the entire metal limb. It was ready.

He grabbed his arm and moved it on top of the sheet before folding it over and connecting the skin layer to the muscles, tendons and bones, then to itself in a single seam that ran from the shoulder to the hand. His hand was slightly more intricate of a procedure, so without much thought he grabbed his hammer and began using his inner flame to melt through the excess metal. One by one he sealed off the fingers, leaving only his middle finger open. Laurence closed the seam that followed the side of his arm and then walked over to his table once more. On the table in the far corner lay the bones of his severed arm, bare to the world. He smiled wistfully before pulling a thick strand of light straight out of the bones. The strand of light solidified in his hands and became an odd looking chain of light that was at least as thick as his arm. He gingerly walked over to the anvil and connected the end of the chain of light to the open fingertip then watched as the light ran through the arm like water filling a riverbed after a drought.

As the last trickle of light filled the arm it seemed to pulse into life. Laurence sealed up the only open hole upon the arm and then began pulling his fingers up the skin, leaving strange runic patterns on his skin. Many of the runes covering his new skin were to make the skin tougher, to make the passage of mana through the entire limb smoother, but there were several that simply represented Laurence. They were not there to do anything but in their own way they told of the creation of the arm, of the journey that Laurence had made to get to the point where he needed to make such an object. As he filled the last rune, completed the last piece of the pattern and picked the arm up it shined with a great light and the originally dull grey arm shone and transmuted into a silver-like material.

“You shall be called Dannan, the arm of a king,” As he spoke, a weight fell upon the room. This arm was obviously the creation of a masterwork, a Heaven ranked tool for one purpose, to replace that which Laurence had lost. The pressure grew heavier as Laurence raised his new arm up to his body. The object seemed to sing as it went to its rightful place and connected to his skin perfectly. It sprung to life and moved as Laurence attempted to clench his fist. He smiled, he was complete again.

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