Guild Wars

As expected, the Expert designs were things he didn't have much affinity with. His Avatar had worked on a few of the useful ones but ignored the rest, which led to a rather unstable foundation if he wanted to become a Grandmaster, much less a God in this Tradeskill.

Draco did not check what came next and knuckled down here to begin. He brought over his tools and equipment to the wasteland planet, so that when he finished working, he could dive right into his Refinement practice without having to waste much time.

Taking the Advanced Personnel Identification Device first, Draco's brows furrowed. He managed to craft one of these in a matter of seconds, his hands moving like a blur as he assembled the parts together based on the design's specifications.

However, he felt clueless as to how it worked, which was fatal for an engineer. Rather than call Draco a Magical Engineer, you should rather call him a magitech assembler, because that was most of what he did so far. This was not necessarily a crime, because until the peak of the Master Rank, that was what all Magical Engineers mostly did anyway.

Only a few geniuses could understand the heart of crafting in this tradeskill and begin making their own designs from scratch before even becoming Grandmasters. Anyway, this was a Tradeskill, of which purpose was to ply a trade, so using other designs to craft and sell for money was definitely the standard operation.

But in that case, don't ever expect to ascend with this tradeskill!

Draco crafted a Basic Personnel Identification Device, this time moving slowly as he gathered the parts and assembled them. There was an element of blacksmithing to Magical Engineering since raw materials had to be processed into the necessary parts for assembling, especially for the metal parts.

He held the completed Basic Personnel Identification Device in his left hand and the Advanced Personnel Identification Device in his right, casting his gaze between the two back and forth. As he inspected them, he thought back to their manufacturing processes, mostly focusing on the fundamentals compared to the improvements.

Draco then asked himself, that assuming a Master Personnel Identification Device existed - which should likely be present - could he craft it right now without the design in hand? Could he intuit the next step of this simple device based on his knowledge of the rules of Magical Engineering as well as the special nature of this device itself?

This was what was meant by 'foundation'. Foundation was the necessary baseline of accumulated knowledge, skill, and experience a person had in any discipline that allowed them to practice or conceptualize within that discipline without relying on external aid.

For example, two programmers work for a company. Programmer A is a graduate of a coding course with a degree and can build all sorts of engines if given time and while he is not the best, he has the basics down pat. Meanwhile, Programmer B only had some patchwork knowledge here and there from various places, mostly relying on something like ChatGPT to complete the engine building process.

If the team leader called both of them to the office to quickly make a basic engine within a time limit for the CEO to see, who would perform well? This was the essence and necessity of foundation.

The better the foundation, the higher one could eventually climb. Foundation was usually emphasized at the lower ranks of any discipline because while it was not necessarily hard to improve one's foundation later on, it was a waste of time and very annoying.

Just imagine you were playing a dungeon crawler game and had cleared the first 3 floors of ten, but when you reached floor 4, you were beaten to death by the boss because your stats were lacking. So you had to return to the previously cleared floor 1 and continuously strike the weaker enemies in the parts of those floors you skipped due to laziness.

The worst part was that the exp gain would be severely reduced compared to if you had honestly killed them at the time you first explored, so you would have to do work you avoided and gain less from it than you would have gotten otherwise.

Not fun.

Draco was currently in this state. He thought his foundation was pretty good since he crafted a lot of stuff from the first two ranks and knew what each item did, but he realized at this moment that he actually knew jack shit.

Take the Basic Rechargeable Lighting Device, the simplest of all devices from the Common Rank and the entryway for every Magical Engineer. To an earthling, this was basically just a magical lightbulb, easy to make and even the biggest idiot knew how a lightbulb worked, right?

Wrong. If you did not work in mechanical or electrical engineering, how do you know which material to use for the wiring in the base of the bulb? How do you know what material best works for the filament if you want to achieve a certain intensity of brightness?

Along with that, if the bulb is brought to you for maintenance, how can you tell which part is broken and more importantly, why? If you just replaced broken parts with new ones, you were not an engineer, but a low-skill assembler.

Some repairmen out there when dealing with various devices would only take one look, open the device, tinker with some things, and end up restoring the problematic part back to full health. He could do that precisely because he understood intimately what each part did, why it existed, and how it worked at the deepest level.

So the question was; how to fix this problem?

Draco put his hand on his Divine workbench and pondered with an amused smile. He thought back to Blacksmithing and Alchemy, and understood that the reason he excelled in these two was his horrific foundation from singlemindedly practicing them in the previous timeline, while also being taught theoretical and practical knowledge from Happy Saint as well as other sources in the game.

So that was the problem. He did not have systematic knowledge of Magical Engineering, of the fundamentals and how it worked. He could either learn it himself by purchasing a book and reading, or applying for a course from the Rank 7 Academy in Vita Capital City which taught all these things.

Hmm, Draco decided against it. He didn't want to create a scene akin to Adam Sandler and sit in a classroom full of kids as a grown man while also being the God King of their entire kingdom! Draco was shameless, but there were some things that even he could not do, and that was one of them.

As such, he decided that it would be better to obtain a tutor that could specialize the teaching process for him, and for that, Draco had a list of many candidates in mind. The famous Diad family that had been somewhat forcefully Incorporated into Vita during the Extinction War, the Tradeskill Association who were kept around because they were an important system mechanic for players, the Goddess Descendants who were the current global masters of all Tradeskills, etc.

Personally, Draco was leaning towards two choices.

One of them was his own concubine Goma, who was a half-goblin beauty that was previously a Grandmaster of Engineering but upgraded to a Magical Engineer after giving birth. She ascended to a True God of Magical Engineering recently, and was even one of the reasons he decided to come back to Tradeskills.

The other option was his former best friend from the previous timeline, Intellectual Monkey, Armonia. The fellow had been busy managing his family's grand empire in reality as they tried to merge their biotech and chemical tech with the magical of Boundless while also officiating his marriage with Killer Queen Keira. This fellow had a Divine Class that made him a veritable deity of all Tradeskills and even more as a teacher that could easily impart knowledge.

Draco was not sure. Goma had a thick rump despite her diminutive height, so if she bent over the workbench to try and demonstrate something to him, it was likely that she would end up catching some pounding, which would be detrimental. It would be too easy to get distracted.

As for Armonia, Draco would normally have never agreed because in the previous timeline, their relationship was that of frienemy rivals, so even though Armonia would have agreed to teach him, he would naturally rub it in endlessly for Draco by taunting and smirking.

In this timeline though, the fellow did not have a rivalry with him, rather worshiping him as a pseudo-master. Even though Draco had never taken him in officially, Armonia played down his own enormous talent and attributed a lot of his achievements to Draco's help.

He would naturally be very glad to offer Draco his help and even put in his best effort to it, seeing it as an honor.

Naturally, Draco chose to bring over his former best friend rather than his concubine, because Goma also had her own pursuits. When Draco went over to explain his situation to Armonia, the fellow was naturally more than happy to help.

Armonia also had his own work area which he took Draco to, and began the in-depth teaching from the ground up. From the very basics of engineering itself, how items were designed, crafted, and what purpose they were supposed to fulfill.

Then Armonia began to highlight the special nature of magitech and how it influenced Magical Engineering to be as special as it was. During this time, Draco would spend 16 hours learning with Armonia and his allotted 8 hours working on the God stage of Refinement.

The progress was rapid and as the days passed, Draco's foundation began to become solid like a steel framework. He began to even discuss and theorize with Armonia on the various devices, finding ways to cleverly alter them to either enhance or augment their functions.

The two also moved to the Tradeskill Library that was brought over from Norma's Treasury to find various Epic and Legendary grade Magical Engineering techniques like the 'Galvan Method', which was able to increase the chances of success for all crafted devices below the Epic Rank by 25% and their default quality by 15%.

It achieved this by utilizing the special procedures for material selection, cutting and joining, welding, and melting propounded by Robert E. Galvan. By focusing on a strict methodology for production by increasing mechanical accuracy through memorization, the final product would struggle to be of a low quality.

There was even the 'Unique Assembling Technique', which was able to increase the chances of success for all crafted devices below Epic Rank by 30% as well as their default quality by 10% while also greatly increasing the speed of manufacturing by 40%.

This one worked by utilizing a bunch of special procedures for joining, welding, and connecting when assembling prepared parts of a device that were developed by the Old Era's Confederation of Engineers' top student, Jennifer Lisan.

At the time, this was a great breakthrough in the field of speed assembly, winning Jennifer the title of 'Holy Hands' among Magical Engineers as she basically instigated the first non-automated assembly line. From some records in the library, most magical engineers even used portions of this technique to this era, which was why they were glorified assemblers rather than engineers.

Well, the fact that Draco largely opened the Tradeskill library to the public in exchange for Umbra Points and merit also didn't help. Most who would take Magical Engineering had to make some money back, and this technique was the most practical for that, even if it would lead them astray.

Like this, the time passed rather uneventfully, with Draco practicing daily, not even having time to play with his wives. Luckily, his formerly dependent children had now hit puberty and were thrust into various positions of responsibility, so they also did not have time to disturb their father.

Like this, an entire year passed.