I rented out a space in a blacksmith shop to work on inventions for the fair. I had two weeks before the fair and wanted more to show for myself than a cannon without an undercarriage. I couldn't present my weird orange rock guns as inventions since I couldn't replicate them.

  I wanted something more impressive than the flintlocks, anyway. Maybe some functioning revolvers. Maybe I could do a take on the infinity bags and create a rock that you can hide under without anyone knowing. Eh, if I did that, then everyone would know that exists, and that would defeat the whole purpose.

  Maybe I could do fireworks or bombs. Maybe I could level up my tinker skill and invent watches. Something I really wanted to make were mana fueled robots. That would probably be artifice. I could probably make steam or electricity or even maybe gasoline fueled robots with a high enough tinker skill.

  As far as I could tell, the only major difference between tinkering and artifice, which were very similar disciplines, was that tinkering achieved results through scientific, non magical means, and artifice achieved results through magical means.

  I would probably end up doing both magical and non magical robots. The magical ones I'd save for robots that could cast spells since their components were probably more rare than non magical ones. The non magical robots I'd save for either menial tasks or I'd mount guns on them. Or both.

  There were so many possibilities and not much time to accomplish them in. I started by looking through the books that the wizard had given me. I hadn't looked at them when he picked them out for me. I just stuffed them in a bag.

  After looking through them, I realized he had given me a treasure trove of knowledge that wasn't just magic casting. He had given me a series of books on enchanting, tinkering, and artifice. They were treatises written by elven, gnomish, and dwarven scholars, respectively.

  Elves, gnomes, and dwarves mostly stuck to their own communities and rarely interacted with the human world. They weren't completely unheard of or unseen in the human world, but they were rare travelers rather than envoys.

  Enchanting, tinkering, and artifice were the major trinity of crafting. Blacksmithing and alchemy, along with other crafts, had their place, but knowledge of enchanting, tinkering, and artifice were highly sought after and rarely found.

  Without my class allowing me to directly choose proficiency levels in those disciplines, I basically wouldn't have been able to learn them until now. That's why the woman at the adventurers' guild had been so enamored with my infinity bag. Products of enchanting, tinkering, and artifice were extremely rare in the human world.

  Elves were known as the pioneers of enchanting. The same applied to Gnomes and tinkering, and Dwarves and artifice. Since they were so isolated and kept to themselves, knowledge of those disciplines rarely got out.

  It was astonishing that the wizard at the shop had not only had these books, but had given them to me. I supposed the trade for an infinity bag was a fair trade, after all.

  He had also given me tons of books on magic casting, but those weren't as useful to me as crafting disciplines. I planned to learn them eventually, but after I got the Accelerated Comprehension perk, which would allow me to read and learn the concepts faster. I didn't have any abilities that aided me in magic casting, so it just wasn't as advantageous for me to learn them right now.

  I started with tinkering since my proficiency in tinkering and artifice was journeyman (4), and I had to choose one of the two. During the day, I worked on new designs and components for guns in a corner of a blacksmith shop with my own forge and counter space and anvil.

  I was working on making new flintlocks with more reliable spark generation, better weather resistance, reduced misfire rate, and faster lock time. I also developed paper cartridges containing the bullets and powder for use in the new flintlocks.

  At night, I learned tinkering techniques and concepts from the books I acquired from the wizard. I learned there were a number of different ways to power or fuel your machines, and they all had different pros and cons. There was steam power, but that utilized geothermal vents to create the steam.

  Since gnomes lived underground, they could use those vents, but I couldn't. So that was out. Then there was electrical power generated by steam turbines that got the steam from boiling water that was heated from geothermal vents again.

  They also had battery technology for portable devices, but again, they were charged by electricity generated from geothermal vents. So, in terms of generating power through tinkering, I was out of luck.

  I was about to give up when I remembered that artifice powered their items and weapons through mana. They used mana stones as batteries and magical repositories that not only fueled items with power, but also generated specific effects.

  If I could figure out a way to combine artifice with tinkering, I could create mana fueled machines. Simple machines, but still machines. Artifice itself was less about creating machines, and more about creating magical weapons, armor, and golems.

  You could argue that golems are a form of machine, but they aren't made from mechanical parts. They're made from some form of material like rock or earth, or bones, in Glogmore's case.

  Golems also possess a consciousness which machines generally do not. You could argue that AI was a form of consciousness, but gnomish tinkerers hadn't discovered AI yet. The machines they created performed tasks, and that was all.

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  If I could combine artifice and tinkering, I could ostensibly create sentient machines by infusing machines with golem consciousness. That was way too advanced for where I was now, though. Right now, all I was trying to do was invent a clock.

  So I spent the first week developing better flintlocks, paper bullet cartridges, and learning how to power basic machines with mana. The first thing I built was a turning gear. Then I slowly built a clock around it.

  While I could technically combine disciplines of crafting by using the information downloaded into my head from the system, using books on the subjects was so much easier and more efficient. Besides, just like normal learning, it allowed me to learn how to make things I didn't know how to make yet.

  When I first started this journey, I wondered if this would be a max level system or a hard work system. With this I've proven that it is in fact a hard work system which is far more logical than a max level system.

  This discovery made me happy to live in this world. I was starting to enjoy my stay here. With my siblings safe and sound, a decent amount of money in my pocket, and a badass partner in Valda, things were looking up for me.

  After a week, I had completed my new guns, paper cartridges, and a brand new clock powered by mana. Rather than using my mana on my Manufacture skill, which would have alarmed many of the other blacksmiths in the space I was renting, I manually crafted everything.

  In my off time, when I wasn't tinkering or blacksmithing, I poured my excess mana into the mana stones I had gotten from the wizard. They could store a tremendous amount of mana each, and I had twenty of them. They each could hold about 10,000 mp.

  This was mana I could draw from personally to refill my own mana reserves as well as use to power machines. They were each the size of a pebble. Larger mana stones existed, but they were rarer and thus more expensive.

  They generally came empty and the magic user would have to fill them with their own mana through uninterrupted prolonged meditation. It took me just over two hours to fully charge one mana stone.

  I couldn't do it while working or even sleeping. I had to stay awake and concentrate on the mana transfer. A lot of magic practitioners didn't use them because of how expensive they were, the amount of time you had to spend charging them, and you couldn't use them to cast spells directly.

  You had to enter the same concentrated state to pull mana from the stone back into your body, and you could only do that when you weren't already full on mana.

  It was very hard to concentrate in the middle of a battle. So most practitioners just used mana potions. They took effect immediately and required no concentration. However, in artifice, they were very useful. They could be used to power the magical effects of weapons, armor, and golems.

  And apparently, clocks. I built the clock with legs so it could stand up without having to hang from a wall and Valda walked in.

  "What's this?" She flicked the metal clock.

  "It tells time like a sundial, but it doesn't need the sun, so it can tell time all day and night."

  She stared at it at the second hand ticked by. She ended up asking me what all the different hands meant, and I explained how a clock worked.

  "Cool!" She leaned down and kissed me on the cheek. "I'm going to bed. I've been training at the adventurers' guild all day and I'm exhausted!"

  "Fine by me. I have to do some meditating and then I'll be in bed too."

  "Good. I hate going to bed alone."

  "Since when? You never told me this."

  "Well, I didn't have the right to complain about it until now, so."

  "Right. Ok, I'll join you in a bit."

  I meditated for about ten minutes and then went to bed because I couldn't concentrate. My brain was so fried and I just wanted to sleep. Valda put her arms around me and I held her arms and we went to bed.

  When I woke up at 8 am according to the new clock, I realized getting rest rather than filling another mana stone was the right decision. This was the beginning of the last week before the fair. Now that I had completed my first invention with tinkering and artifice, it was time to bring in enchanting and see what I could really do.

  I had finished the guns and bullets but I felt like getting fancy. I got out my fine tinkering tools with files and chisels and engraved a small enchantment circle on one side of the barrel of one gun and another one on the other side.

  One of the enchantments made the gun barrel glow and shoot out a circle of light so that it would put a circular glowing targeting reticle on whatever the gun barrel was aiming at.

  The other enchantment just made the bullet shoot straight, increasing the gun's accuracy and range. I did the same for the other gun. Then, to permanently power the enchantments, I set a small chunk of mana stone in the center of each magic enchantment circle. Now, I had some truly impressive guns that I could operate effectively, even with a low proficiency in ranged weapons.

  That took an hour per enchantment circle, which took up four hours of my blacksmithing time. With another four hours left, I started working on black powder based bombs. I worked tirelessly to create uniform shell casings, fuses with predictable burn rates, and multiple type of filling.

  I made a mixture for smoke bombs, a mixture for flash bombs, and one for maximum explosive strength. I carefully filled the shells and properly seated the fuses. I carefully wrapped each of them in dry cloth and placed them in a crate. I made two dozen of each type.

  The shells I made were small so that I could set them off on the fairgrounds without injuring or killing anyone. I'd have to throw them fifty feet away from anyone, but at that range and with the size of the bombs, it would be safe. I'd make sure to test them out before the fair, just in case, though.

  Before heading back to the inn, I went to the adventurers' guild to secure space for my demonstrations at the fair. They made me buy twenty booths worth of space, but I had the money. It was only 2 gold per booth.

  When I got back to the inn, I started working on a music box that combined tinkering, artifice, and enchantment. It took all night to make it halfway through the creation process, but I was rewarded with a level up to level 9, which was a pleasant surprise.

  I put the stat point in charisma, bringing me up to 4 charisma. I figured I'd need at least 4 to have a decent chance of accompanying my inventions with decent showmanship and sales acumen. Then I put another level into my tinkering proficiency, which brought me up to expert (5).

  I didn't get a perk that time because I didn't put the stat point into any stat at ten or above. My new ability was called Impressive Crafting.

  Impressive Crafting: The ability to impress anyone with equal or lower skill proficiency to you in the skill you demonstrate to them verbally or physically.

  Valda called me to bed when it got late. She wanted me to get good rest. She could tell I was making good progress for the fair, but she didn't want me haggard in the morning and unable to make further progress the next day. She had been putting in a ton of time preparing for the fair competitions, and she didn't want to see either of our efforts go to waste.