Chronos thought, "A creature that can handle curses freely really is the perfect gift for her. Hrólmir did a good job giving us gifts that are suited to us."
Gregory looked like he was going to explode as he glared at Sariah. She turned to their group with a big smile, then froze as she saw Gregory's glare.
"Did I do something wrong again?" She asked quietly.
"Why did you perform a summoning ritual without informing us? Don't you know how dangerous those are? What if something besides the suture wisp moth showed up and we weren't looking? You could have died or been dragged off to some forsaken realm! We don't even have any protections set up; it was pure luck that we weren't thrown into a fight with a demon or worse a devil." Gregory scolded without end as minute after minute passed.
Finally, Chronos decided to say something as it looked like Sariah was on the verge of tears.
"Gregory, you should stop now. If you keep scolding her, she will come to hate you." He said with a smile.
As Gregory calmed down, he realized that he may have gone too far.
"Sorry for scolding you so much. But from now on I want you to tell me whenever you experiment with new magics. I want to be there to help if something goes wrong."
"Alright."
"Un, so what are you going to name it?"
"I think Nimsy is a good name for her."
She gently hugged the suture wisp moth as it slowly fell asleep. Nimsy was still just a small child by suture wisp moth standards, once it was fully grown it would be the size of a human head. To grow up strong it would spend most of the day sleeping and only wake up at night to absorb moonlight.
Looking around Chronos saw trees and water. They had been left on an island in the middle of the swamp, the water looked deep at least deeper than Chronos was willing to walk or swim through.
Wet wolf was not a pleasant smell in the afternoon sun.
"We should build a raft; it will be easier to get around with one."
"I could try to use my Nightweave threads to tie it together. Give me a bit of time to practice it first."
Gregory sat down to review the manual that was implanted in his mind. Meanwhile Chronos picked up his twin axes from the ground and went to chop down a few trees.
Sariah spent time studying the curse book she had brought from the Dragon churches library and Lyla assisted Chronos by stripping the felled trees of their branches.
After an hour they had gathered four trees and set them next to each other for Gregory, but they chose to wait for him to finish practicing instead of disturbing him.
During this time Chronos checked the message bird that Vice-Commander Adam had given him, but it didn't react no matter what he tried.
It was 2 more hours before Gregory stood up and spoke.
"This Nightweave threads method is really amazing. It shapes and molds the aura like how a blacksmith would then pulls it out thinly to make threads, then they are stored within my mental space. The number of threads and their length are limited by my rank but that means that only a part of my aura is transformed while the remainder can be used for other arts.
Normally with a method like this it transforms all of your aura severely limiting the techniques and arts a person can learn in the future. But this is more like having an extra weapon that can't be separated from my body.
Unfortunately, I only had enough time to make 2 threads. It is enough to bind the trees together, but I won't be able to use them for anything else." Gregory excitedly reported.
Every creature that was intelligent possessed a mental space. According to the famous Archivist Quillfeather the mental space contained great power and utility for anyone capable of opening it.
This could be anything from a space to store items to power that could enhance spells or even things like telekinesis and telepathy. In theory it could grant you almost any power you could dream of.
Regrettably very few people were able to access it due to the ephemeral nature of the mind. Out of one hundred thousand people maybe one could open up their mental space and usually they wouldn't gain a great power or wouldn't even know they had opened up their mental space.
They would just become a bit smarter or more creative than other people but not everybody that was smart or creative had opened a mental space.
A technique that taught you how to access and utilize a mental space had never appeared in the Leighla Kingdom or any of the surrounding nations.
At least not to their knowledge.
"It seriously teaches you how to access your mental space?" Gregory nodded. "We shouldn't tell anyone about this. Now that I think of it, we have skill points to purchase new skills. I wonder if there are other skills like this one?"
Lyla spoke up, "We can leave the research to the church, right now I want to get back and shower. We have been away from camp for too long."
Nodding Chronos held the logs as Gregory used his threads to effectively "stitch" the trees together.
Setting the raft into the water Chronos stepped onto it, then jumped a few times to make sure it could hold all of them.
Once they were certain it was safe everyone boarded the raft and Sariah cast [Elemental Control] to manipulate the water into pushing them.
Sitting down Chronos chose to take stock of his equipment. Taking out his spear to examine it, it was still his spear...but now there was a black streak on the central ridge of the blade. It gave off an unusual sense of power, but Chronos couldn't identify what sort of power it was.
Perhaps it came from the time it was stuck in the dark lord? That was more than a little concerning, until a specialist had time to examine it, he decided not to use it anymore.
Storing it in the armory amulet on his back he took out echoforge next.
Examining it from top to bottom there was no damage on it. It just needed to be cleaned before being returned to his back.
He had lost both small falchions and his sword with the family crest while inside the void space but those weren't a real loss. The small falchions were secondhand blades, and he had used that sword for several years now. It needed to be replaced soon.
Still, he did wonder where it had gone when the void collapsed.
No matter. If someone found it, they would return it to the Ulv family, and they could decide what to do with it.
Next was his bow, it was made of veyrite a metal that could easily contain or transfer aura. While the metal was slightly rare it wasn't so rare that it couldn't be acquired by a skilled knight.
Its use in weapons was widespread amongst the kingdom's knights, but it lacked the durability to be used in armor or shields.
Running his hand along the bow's limbs he found no deformation from long term use and the dracon ash bow string was still new, so it wasn't showing any signs of stress.
The final weapons to examine were his twin axes, which were a bit dull from being used by a hobgoblin, and the dagger that had yet to be used.
He took the time to sharpen the axes before returning them to his waist, now it was time to examine the one item he had been avoiding. His leather armor.
He hadn't avoided the hobgoblin's attack in the void space meaning it now had two rather large holes in its back. It was just a leather cuirass, but it had deflected many blows for him in the time he had used it.
Looking at the holes, he realized that it was a large tear. You couldn't do much to fix a large tear when you were out in the field, you needed leather patches and possibly rivets to fix tears this big. And his cuirass had two of them.
Grimacing, Chronos used his claw to poke small holes through the leather roughly one inch from the tear. Then he took out a thread and used a saddle stitch to pull the two sides together.
This wasn't a proper field repair, but it would temporarily fix the two large tears. At least until he could take it to a blacksmith for proper repairs.
Now that he thought about it, he might want to get better leather armor. His current armor was made from normal leather without any enchantments or resistances.
If he could get some armor that enhanced his speed it would make combat easier. If it was made from magical beast skin like the swamps crocodiles or boars it would also have resistance to their natural element.
Having elemental resistances would be helpful when they fought mages or particularly powerful magic beasts.