"You are right and I know it." Solus said. "That"s the reason I brought you here. Every time we Forgemaster a magical item, I can feel something scratching at the back of my head. Lith"s the only one who performs magic, though.

"I want to Forgemaster something myself, but with a weak a.s.s core like mine, I can"t do it alone. I need your help to keep the mana circle filled with energy and I"ll do the rest. If I"m right, I"ll regain another chunk of my memories.

"If that happens, I"ll have no choice but to come clean with Lith. If I"m wrong, nothing will happen and we would have just wasted an hour of our time. Are you with me or not?"

"I"m with you, sister. No matter what." Solus was special for Nyka. She was an "immortal vampire", just like her, and was also the first friend she had ever had.

"Let"s do this. I always wanted to learn true Forgemastery." Tista said.

"What are we going to make?"

"A cloaking ring. Without it, Lith and I can"t ever go separate ways without risking that someone spots my life force. If that happens, our lives would be in constant danger.

"To make one, I need only basic ingredients. An alloy of gold and silver would suffice, but I"ll go with Orichalc.u.m instead of silver to achieve a stronger pseudo core than Orion"s.

"It"s a very simple pseudo core, so even with a deep green mana core like mine I should be able to make it. Even if I fail, it"s no big deal. The materials for one ring are negligible. Except for the mana crystal." Solus whispered that last part, but everyone heard it distinctly.

Tista knew how stingy her brother was and she doubted he would miss the disappearance. As for Nyka, she couldn"t care less. Her mother provided her for everything, so she had no concept of expensive or cheap.

Solus took the Bloom Hammer out of her pocket dimension. Both hammers had the same properties, but since she was going to use Bloom Forge for the ring, it seemed the proper choice to her.

Solus melted in a crucible a nugget of gold together with one of purified Orichalc.u.m and then she poured the liquid into a mold, giving the ring its shape. She cooled it with water magic, taking the still white hot metal with thongs and placing it on the Adamant Forge instead of the usual Obsidian one.

"In all of my memories I work with a silvery hammer, using a silvery Forge to enchant something. My guess is that it was all made of adamant, but since I don"t have any, Orichalc.u.m will have to do." Solus thought.

Another thing that bothered her was the runes of power engraved on all the enchanted items that appeared in her memories. Fake Forgemastery used them to create and stabilize the mana pathways, but they would disappear forever once the process was over.

The true Forgemastery Lith and Solus employed didn"t use runes at all, only pure mana. She was certain that master Menadion wouldn"t have all of her creations engraved with runes just to make them look cool.

The problem was that even if Solus was right and runes could help to step up their creations, she had no idea what they did nor how to engrave it.

"Carving random runes is bound to make a big boom. Let"s hope to regain some memories of them. It would be a wonderful anniversary present for Lith." Soon would it be the anniversary of Solus"s awakening from her slumber.

Lith considered it like her birthday, but for Solus its significance went beyond that. It was the day when she had gained her family, her best friend, and maybe even more. It was the day when their bond had evolved from the pact between an artifact and its master into a partners.h.i.+p.

She wanted both the secret of the runes and the ring to be her fist gift to Lith. To return something after only having taken from him for so long. Also, it would give her the courage she needed to reveal him her humanoid form.

Unlike Orion, she had no purple crystal. Solus could only Bond the ring with a small blue mana stone. Then, she created the magic circle and let the girls fill it. Solus had to take care of both the hammer and the pseudo core, there was a limit to what her focus could do on her own.

Gold proved to be incredibly resistant to mana, both during the Bonding spell and the Forgemastering process. Solus had chosen to use Bloom Forge because she lacked the raw power necessary to overcome the combined rejection effect of the gold and the mana circulatory system.

Finesse was her only route to success and Bloom Forge was the perfect means to her end. First, she created a small pseudo core and mana pathways, only using the hammer to increase their size once she was certain that she had shaped them to perfection.

Each strike produced a deep green burst of light, yet no memory emerged.

"This is odd. In my memories I was striking directly at the item, not at the magic circle. What significance could it possibly have?" Solus thought.

It took the girls almost two hours to complete the ring and by the time they were done, they were completely exhausted.

"You and my brother are two peas in a pod, Solus. If this is your concept of fun, remind me to take a rain check the next time you invite me." Tista was covered in sweat, her body aching like it was going to break.

To keep the circle powered up, she had been forced to use Invigoration non stop.

"I"m starving." Nyka said while trying to not look at Tista like she was a giant cheeseburger. She had no sweat but no Invigoration either. To do her part, she had gone dangerously close to a feeding frenzy.

"I"m sorry, girls. I never realized how hard is to do what I do with the mana geyser." Solus gave Nyka a jug filled with Lith"s blood that she kept in her pocket dimension for her undead friend.

Nyka smelled the delicacy, drinking it in small sips, using the Refine meditation technique in-between gulps. Vampires would get stronger over time by feeding. The stronger the source of blood, the more nutrients they would obtain.

Normal vampires would just drink blood that would be partially processed by their blood core, making it slowly grow in power each time they fed. Even though they were not Awakened ones, some vampires had discovered a technique to refine all the blood they ingested instead of just a small part.

They had shared their knowledge with Kalla and she in turn had pa.s.sed it onto his daughter. Thanks to Refine, Nyka was able to a.s.similate most of the mana and light energy inside Lith"s blood, allowing her core to grow at a faster rate than normal.

Unlike mana cores, the power of a blood core was determined by how much black energy they still held. The more powerful a blood core was, the less black streaks it had.

According to legends, a perfectly red blood core granted a vampire the ability to turn back into a red cored human at will, overcoming all the limitations of their undead status at the price of all their magic powers as long as they maintained such form.