Next: Of Kobolds And Arcane Magicks, p2

Okay, let me preface by saying that I'm only telling you guys because I trust you to not jump into this world and start ruining my life, and I trust FA to keep you at bay if my first bit of trust is misplaced.
.... and also because I've been itching to share this because it's super freaking cool.

I'll start with the basics. This world is saturated with mana, which has a chaotic influence on its reality and causes dimensional rifts and things popping into and out of existence. More on that later. It's possible to alleviate or completely remove its effects in a given area, but otherwise it's everywhere, like gravity (roughly speaking). The good news is, mana also enables magic.
For reasons yet unknown, mana favors conductive materials and living beings - meaning, it accumulates in, and readily propagates through them. Living beings can manipulate it by default, but creating magical weapons is more involved - you need a custom-etched byconite* core (which basically turns raw mana into pre-programmed magical effects), mana storage and a moderating harness (usually gold, silver or copper) to direct the effect.
Regardless of who or what's casting, the principle of it is the same - you charge up the necessary amount of mana and then use it to manifest the effect you want. Simple.

Now, that's all more or less common knowledge. What isn't widely known is that there is a different type of mana. I'm not aware of any agreed-upon names, so I've decided to call it archmana. Its existence is sometimes postulated to explain some of the more powerful magical artifacts known to exist, but no one has ever come out with concrete proof (and no wonder, this is some serious stuff).
What I've found is that it is indeed responsible for their unusual properties, and that's because archmana is in itself very different from regular mana. While regular magic works on a "charge and cast" principle, archmagic is channelled. Thanks to this, it's impossible to "run out" of archmana, only to max out the available power; the spell can be cast indefinitely. But archmana can still be bound like regular mana, it just doesn't happen on its own.

And here's the fun stuff. Archmagical artifacts are certainly nice, but they're still just a trinket with a certain amount of archmana bound to them as a source of power. What you CAN do, however...
is take that arch-mana and bind it to YOURSELF.

Mind you, the process is much, much more finicky and complicated than even crafting an archmagical artifact. I had been fortunate enough to stumble upon a manuscript detailing the creation of a particular such weapon, which provided the basis necessary for my research. Also, archmana isn't found naturally, at least as far as I know. The only sources of it are the existing artifacts, although occasionally a new one pops into existence through dimensional shenanigans. But once you have them, you can salvage the archmana and...
Well, then you use your imagination.

Mind you, said artifacts do become useless, but I've been trying to only drain the "bad" ones. Like a staff that bombards the target with bona fide meteorites from above. I mean, there's already enough ways to break stuff and BOY, that thing had SO much arch in it.

* Byconite is a high-temperature superconducting crystalline material rarely found in natural underground formations.

- R