Hello!
I've been cooking up a new story alongside The Ethersmith during my free time, and it's finally ready to start airing! It's quite a bit different from my previous works, but feel free to check it out if you like my writing!
The first few chapters will be free for everyone. The entire book will be available for Runesmith tier supporters without additional costs. Here are the details:
How much time do we have? Vivi asked.
“Around two days,” Lucius said. “Should be more than enough.”
Let’s hope so, Vivi thought. She was carving runes into the veins, while the crucible smelted her metals. But at this point… I almost don’t care about the competition.
“What?” Lucius asked. “You were so determined, and now you don’t care anymore?”
We completed the veins. That’s m...
2025-08-10 09:36:41 +0000 UTC View PostVivi felt like she was already perfectly warmed up. She hadn’t felt this focused and determined in ages. Vivi knew exactly what she wanted to craft, and she was ready to do anything to turn her vision into reality.
She slid an ether root into Angall’s vise. This proved to be slightly problematic. The usual vises Vivi used had flat jaws that could tighten around anything. A sword vise, however, was designed to hold a sword from the hilt for an outside-carver. Fitting an ether root in...
2025-08-09 09:52:19 +0000 UTC View PostThe uniformed organizer regarded Vivi with far less sympathy than Angall had. “What you start the competition with is what you have till the end,” he said. “We have no spare tools.”
“Can I go buy a new one?” Vivi asked.
“Stepping out of the competition’s premises will result in a disqualification.”
“Is there any way at all I could get a working vise?” Vivi asked. “Just for a few days.”
“I’m afraid your competition might be over,” the man...
2025-08-09 09:51:02 +0000 UTC View PostWhen Vivi woke up, she immediately reached for her sack of ether roots.
Except, the sack wasn’t there. Vivi woke underneath an open sky on a flat field of tall grass. In Paradise.
She rolled her eyes, laying on her back and facing the sky. “Why are we here, Lucius?”
“Don’t you remember what we talked about?” Lucius asked. “We agreed to go on a break.”
“We did,” Vivi said. “But I never agreed to spend rest hours here. Just focus on sleep, ...
2025-08-08 08:43:22 +0000 UTC View PostThe first thing Vivi did when she woke up was reach into her bag of ether roots to start another attempt. She drank a mug of water and readied herself.
“What about food or a bathroom break?” Lucius asked. “It has been hours since we last ate.”
Water has been exiting through my sweat, Vivi thought. I’m not hungry. Let’s get this done.
“Okay, then,” Lucius said, and the root was initiated.
The second day of any...
2025-08-07 08:43:30 +0000 UTC View PostRunesmiths around Vivi jumped into action. Frewell and his new dwarf friend warmed their base swords with heat guns. They sharpened their carving knives and readied themselves for long carving sessions. They sat comfortably in the shade of their canopies.
Vivi summoned her sack of ether roots. It was larger than the portable forge. Every root inside was at least a mid-tier ether root. Red mithril, rainbow-colored ensium, a few adamantite roots. The rarest roots she’d found were orange...
2025-08-06 08:04:01 +0000 UTC View Post“The bet is in!” Eli exclaimed, his voice echoing alongside a cling of the door chime. He pushed the door open with more force than the hinges of Vivi’s poor door would have liked. “Five hundred ether in the raindrops’ rise to top split!”
“Not quite a thousand, eh?” Owyn asked. He, too, was present in Vivi’s smithy for some reason. The three seemed to treat the Lost Raindrop as some sort of tavern.
“I did some research,” Eli said, “and found out that the la...
2025-08-05 08:13:23 +0000 UTC View PostThe weather was cloudy the next day.
That was the term locals used, at least, when the facets above calmed from a deadly scorch to a more regular hot. The sky was still brighter than midsummer in Fellwater, but the weather was surprisingly bearable. The upper levels of Shivenar’s noble streets had plenty of shade to hide underneath, and Vivi could always coat herself with a light layer of ether if the air got too hot.
As long as Lucius agreed to shape some ethe...
2025-08-04 08:51:02 +0000 UTC View Post“So this is the fabled Lost Raindrop?” said a voice accompanying the door chime’s cling.
“Fabled?” Lucius asked, eagerly greeting the customer. “Yes, fabled! Doesn’t that mean famous? Are we famous?”
Vivi rolled her eyes while working behind the curtains. A week had passed, and Lucius’s way of dealing with customers was distracting at the very least. Shaping veins was difficult when, even a week after opening, the door chime still made Vivi flinch. If ...
“Welcome to the Lost Raindrop!” Vivi said. She bowed. This could have very well been her first actual customer. Lucius hid within her to let her do the talking. “Shivenar’s first inside-carving runesmithing store.”
The demon scanned the store judgingly. Beneath his scars, his face looked young. Perhaps eighteen or nineteen. His outfit wasn’t particularly rich, but he was close to maxed out, and he did have a runesword in his scabbard. A broken one, but a runesword nonetheles...
2025-08-02 10:00:10 +0000 UTC View Post“Grandpa would shame me for these swords…” Vivi said. She examined yesterday’s work with mixed feelings. Mostly disappointment.
The first sword she managed to piece together was a single-runed steel longsword with strength runes on the hilt. The veins inside were simple with spike-like branches. The easiest and most basic branches that could be shaped—the types of branches Vivi crafted when she was nine years old. The sword wasn’t pretty, but it was operational.
... 2025-08-01 08:21:09 +0000 UTC View PostVivi switched from her dress back to her work clothes, her comfy raincoat, and spent the next few days refurbishing her smithy into something slightly more livable.
Nearly everything required attention from the splintering wooden facades, the old furniture and decorations, to the awful roof—not to mention another half a dozen more issues Vivi probably wasn’t aware of yet. The only light source she had was a crack in the roof that let a thin line of daylight inside.
She start...
“You wish to open a runesmithing store?” The accountant behind the counter adjusted his spectacles curiously.
“Yes, and I need a smithy where I can work,” Vivi said. “The building doesn’t need to be spacious, but it needs to have at least two rooms. One for the workstations, and one for the store.”
Opening a business, it turned out, was not as simple as building a shack and starting runesmithing. In Shivenar, space itself was expensive. For a business to be opened, t...
2025-07-30 08:06:08 +0000 UTC View PostThe Mauve Crown’s blade did not consist of a single piece of metal like traditional swords. Rather, the blade was a collection of dozens upon dozens of smaller knives grafted together. The knives jutted out across the blade, making the blade look like something a surge would spawn for a ravening troll.
Except, nothing about the Mauve Crown was random. Each tiny blade was covered in outside veins. Some were connected to crush runes, others to swiftness or
Vanhalla was closer to a fortified jewel store or treasury rather than a smithy of hardworking runesmiths. The entrance was more guarded than the city gates themselves—two maxed out swordsmen of the second elevation with two-runed swords examined every entry. Even the richest-looking aristocrats weren’t allowed in without a questioning. The store itself was built into the back wall at the very back of the city. Vivi felt like she was staring at a dwarven dungeon.
The further she’d...
2025-07-28 08:10:22 +0000 UTC View Post“Raincoat?” The saleswoman asked. “Like… a coat made out of rain?”
“No, no,” Vivi said. “A waterproof comfy coat. Like this one I have now. I’d like a newer one.”
The woman blinked, genuinely confused. “Miss, I apologize, but I don’t think anyone in this city is worried about rain.”
“Raincoats aren’t just about protecting you from the rain,” Vivi said. “They work for every situation. They’ll protect you from the sun, and they r...
“I can’t believe it,” Vivi said. “We’re actually here.”
Lucius laughed in her head. “I knew I chose the right human. Only you would be crazy enough to move through the blight and actually make it to Shivenar.”
Please don’t speak about the blight anymore, Vivi thought.
She stood by the mountaintop for over a minute, just watching. Something made her afraid to approach. Her beliefs about Shivenar had always been grand, whimsically so. Grandp...
2025-07-26 10:29:14 +0000 UTC View PostSenith let Vivi into the shade of her carriage, offering her a piece of bread and another mug of water.
Vivi was allowed to sit on a cushioned seat with the smoothest fabric she remembered touching. It almost felt illegal for her, in her roughed raincoat, to stay in a carriage as nice as this. Senith didn’t seem to care. The noblewoman was excited to have company.
I wonder what she’ll think when she learns I’m a Zand escapee, Vivi thought. Or when she lear...
2025-07-25 08:05:25 +0000 UTC View PostSo… Hot… Vivi cursed. Her steady trot had slowed to a crawl. Her throat felt like sandpaper. The thought of water was a distant dream, as distant as clearing her name and becoming a real hunter. Her head had stopped thinking. With each hour without water, a function of her brain had stopped, to the point where she was mindlessly walking forward with the power of desperation.
She had over fifteen thousand ether in her reserves after slaughtering countless desert monsters. Bu...
2025-07-24 08:02:47 +0000 UTC View PostBoblin the lizard, without warning, dove underwater.
Vivi nearly dropped off the ride, holding tightly to Boblin’s scales. She closed her eyes and blocked her nostrils and ears with ether. The pond’s water was far from clear. Getting any amount in her body could spread diseases. She focused hard on her sixth sense, blocking her nostrils, ears, mouth, any sports where corrupted water could enter.
The water pressure grew harsh. Vivi’s head was being crushed upon itself. She ...
The underground mudweed farm was three times the size of Antonio’s house. The stone wall were yellow-ish and undecorated. More water dripped from cracks in the ceiling. The ground was covered in red corrupted mud.
The plants that sprouted from within looked withering and dying. They were almost entirely brown with a slight reddish tint on the tiny bulbs growing above the withering leaves. Whatever the plants were, they certainly didn’t look like any miracle ingredient.
Antonio...
2025-07-22 07:44:31 +0000 UTC View PostThe demon, or whatever the being in front of Vivi was, stuttered a few incoherent noises. He was definitely not an amalgamation, but Vivi wasn’t sure if he belonged to a species of demon. His skin was red and crumbling. Some parts of his face lacked skin entirely, showing burned muscles. He had curled horns and a scraggly beard. Unlike the monsters, he wore clothes . A brown robe with a clue cloak on top.
“No horns?” the demon said. He wielded a rusting runic sickle with a defensi...
2025-07-21 08:06:31 +0000 UTC View PostThe next five days were some of the most miserable in Vivi’s life.
The blight got worse the further Vivi went in. More poison surrounded her. More screwed-up trees and vegetation. Less water. More inedible agarics and fewer tall-headed mushrooms. Surges were rampant and common. Oftentimes, surges spawned within her vicinity multiple times an hour.
Monsters stopped making sense. Reanimations turned into total amalgamations. Not the named amalgamations Vivi had fought in Zand, but...
2025-07-20 10:37:26 +0000 UTC View PostLucius didn’t speak for the next ten minutes, sulking in bowl form and waiting for the water to cool down. Vivi poked her finger into the water, testing whether she grew rashes. It seemed fine. She drank straight out of the bowl.
“Ugh,” Lucius said in her head. “Don’t we have any more elegant solutions?”
I can’t think of anything more elegant than drinking straight out of a demigod’s spirit.
Lucius’s emotions consisted of defeated...
2025-07-19 10:58:01 +0000 UTC View PostThe surge hit a small mound of mushrooms. Crimson wisps of ether shot from the ground, reaching all the way to the sky before bouncing back to the ground.
The wisps searched for something to reanimate. There were no host bones, and the mushrooms atop the hill were still alive. Even the soil itself was filled with worms, housing quite a bit of life.
But the redsoil was still the most dead thing in the surge-zone. The wisps flowed into the ground, and the mound bulged furth...
2025-07-18 07:31:54 +0000 UTC View PostThe sky lowered by several hundred feet, making the crimson forest appear dungeon-like. The trees had leaves—the blight was certainly more alive than the grey wastelands—but anything that was normally green was either black or a dark red. Ether oozed out of the forest.
Vivi approached the treeline. She wrinkled her nose. The ground was still some sort of dark stone, but the stone was steaming-hot and filled with cracks. Steam hissed out of the cracks, filling the forest in a light f...
2025-07-17 08:25:23 +0000 UTC View PostVivi blinked, then read the text again. Shivenar, Ancient City Of Runesmithing.
“No way,” she said. “This can’t be real.”
“Shivenar, huh?” Lucius said. “That could be a good destination. The city is its own country outside the Empire. It’s unlikely that Zand’s bounties make it that far. My old wielder liked the alcohol there.”
“You’ve visited Shivenar?” Vivi gushed.
“Yes?” Lucius said. “It’s a decent city.”
...
2025-07-16 07:56:35 +0000 UTC View PostA misty aura coated the guards’ swords. Their demonic eyes were filled with ether. As Lucius had said, they must have reached at least the first elevation. Vivi had just enough time to summon Abyss Destroyer to block the initial attack.
Behind her, the innkeeper held a crossbow. A wooden arrow with a steel tip was released at Vivi. Customers grabbed their weapons as well, wielding anything from knives to clubs.
Vivi reached into her void core.
The void wisps were already a...
2025-07-15 07:49:50 +0000 UTC View PostVivi asked Lucius to lead her to a river, to which he complied right away. He wasn’t happy, per say, but he followed Vivi’s ideas without his usual complaints and suggestions. Vivi guessed he was afraid that arguing with her would have placed her back into a depressing mood. So he decided to, for once, stay silent and let her do whatever she wanted.
Vivi didn’t complain. She followed the directions toward the river through some sort of instinctive sense of direction in her head, a...
2025-07-14 09:06:55 +0000 UTC View Post