A Unique Advantage

"I was thinking about the Magic Weapon Summoning Tome," Petty answered bitterly. It was no longer a secret, so there was no harm in talking about it openly.

"What's wrong? Run into a problem?" Kesha asked curiously. The two of them lived together so Petty could study combat techniques more easily. Once the Magic Weapon Summoning Tome was no longer a secret, Kesha had learned that Petty was a Magic Weapon Wielder too.

"I can't decide which Magic Weapon in the tome to choose." Setting aside some of her worries, Petty explained her problem. The tome held all kinds of weapons—blades, spears, swords, and halberds.

Learning to use even one weapon well enough to master it was hard, let alone using every kind with ease.

"What's there to worry about? Just pick one category," Kesha said with a light laugh. "The basic Magic Weapons have no summoning restrictions, but starting at Beginner, you have to summon one often to increase its strength. As for Intermediate, I can only see basic information right now. I don't even know how to unseal them for summoning."

Kesha had worked that out herself. The Magic Weapon Summoning Tome was fairly straightforward, so it had not been difficult. For the Intermediate Magic Weapons, all she could see were their names and brief descriptions. That information was probably there to help her make a suitable choice once she met the conditions to unseal them.

"One category?" Petty looked up, puzzled. Kesha's account of the tome seemed different from her own experience.

"Mm... Each Magic Weapon comes out at a different strength. The more practiced you are with one, and the more often you summon it, the stronger it gets. It doesn't matter much for basic Magic Weapons, but after that, you can only focus on developing one category." Kesha was a warrior, so she had a keener sense than Petty for small differences in a Magic Weapon's strength.

She had spotted a few subtle distinctions easily, giving her some idea of how the Magic Weapon Summoning Tome would develop. As for whatever influence it might have on people, probably none of the Magic Weapon Wielders cared.

It was only an Equal Contract. Even if it contained a trap, it could not be like an Evil Contract with a devil, the kind that cheated people until not even a scrap of bone remained. So it hardly mattered if some plot lay behind the tome's appearance.

After all, they paid no steep price. Summoning cost some extra mana, and they supplied the Magic Weapon Summoning Tome with one percent of their mana each day. Warriors who used Battle Qi had to supply that power instead.

With that in mind, Zheng Yichen had later spent considerable effort, with Lolise's help, patching the Magic Weapon Summoning Tome. The patch added a separate mana channel to collect Battle Qi and other kinds of power. Given his talent, he could use even foreign power once he got hold of it. So when he realized Battle Qi warriors could sign contracts too, he had made the patch without hesitation.

The mana channel supplied the mana needed to sustain a Magic Weapon Projection while also receiving the user's Battle Qi. Battle Qi was not like mana and could not replace it, so Battle Qi warriors had trouble using the tome unless they had another mana source. That source was the mana stored inside the tome. Consequently, using a Magic Weapon Projection cost them much more Battle Qi than it would mana.

He could call it a conversion tax.

Mana was easy to come by; Battle Qi was harder to get. After all, besides producing large numbers of Magic Weapons, part of his original reason for making the tome had been to create a powerful item that could grow. Mana in the outside world was stubborn. Casting magic with it was relatively easy if assisted by mental power, but truly putting it to use otherwise was difficult.

Gathering ambient mana in one place was easy; gathering it inside an item was hard. But mana that a Mage or a mana-using warrior had absorbed and converted into their own had no such problem. They could freely move that power and even "give" it away. Likewise, the unusual power known as Battle Qi was among the things Zheng Yichen intended to collect.

Just think: the Magic Weapon Summoning Tome was only in its infancy, its strength nothing remarkable. If, over hundreds or thousands of years, countless people used it and laid an unending stream of foundations for its mana reserves, how vast might its power become? It might even undergo a new qualitative transformation.

Only Zheng Yichen could have made something like it. Mana from countless people carried countless traces of its owners. To truly use that mana, one first had to remove those traces—an extraordinarily troublesome process that would probably erase most of the mana along with them.

Zheng Yichen's talent let him ignore those traces entirely... Once he got hold of the mana, it was his!

"Is that how it works?" Petty asked uncertainly. Kesha's tome really did seem completely different from hers. Every Magic Weapon Petty summoned could reach the highest level of advanced summoning, while Kesha meant that her summoned weapons started out relatively weak and could only grow stronger through repeated use.

Petty had no such restriction, nor did she have anything like Magic Weapon Sealing. For her, the only question was whether she met the standard to summon a Magic Weapon from the tome or had to summon it below that standard. As long as she had enough power, she could summon every one of them.

Other people, it seemed, could only develop one category of Magic Weapons later on. To summon other Magic Weapons at a high level, they would have to spend extra effort. It was like magic: most Mages specialized in one branch, and any other spells they knew served only as support.

"But even so, it's already quite good," Kesha said with interest. To her, Petty's confusion simply showed that she did not understand the tome. That makes sense. She's a Summoner, while I'm a warrior through and through. If a Summoner knew more about weapons than I did, what kind of warrior would that make me?

"Then what do you think of the Magic Weapon Summoning Tome, Kesha?" Petty rubbed her cheeks lightly as her mood gradually improved. Others might have contracts with the tome too, but she clearly still held a unique advantage. She did not know what things were like for everyone else, but they were probably much the same as for Kesha... No, surely they were.

"It's wonderful. Mana and Battle Qi are both forms of power. Being able to use powerful Magic Weapons just by expending some power, without worrying about them breaking—that's fantastic." Kesha sounded delighted. Magic weapons were expensive to make and buy, and they were not indestructible.

Like ordinary weapons, they wore down with long, frequent use. That meant regular maintenance, another expense.

The Magic Weapons summoned from the tome were comparable to conventional magic weapons on the market. Basic Magic Weapons took little power to summon, and keeping one around only required a slow, steady expenditure of mana. The drain was slight, as though the mana cost of a spell had changed from a lump-sum payment to installments.

The wielder could stop paying at any time without suffering any loss. That gave Magic Weapon Wielders tremendous flexibility: they could bring out a Magic Weapon whenever a fight began without frequent use draining too much mana.

If they summoned one only when needed, the cost of several uses combined would roughly equal the mana needed for Basic Magic Weapon Creation. Careful use could cost even less. This made the Magic Weapon Summoning Tome much more accessible. Nearly every Magic Weapon Wielder who tried summoning one would want to keep using the tome.

Convenient, inexpensive, and costing only a little power—who wouldn't want to use it?

So as knowledge of the Magic Weapon Summoning Tome spread, more and more adventurers wanted to obtain one and sign what people jokingly called a Magic Weapon Contract.