The following weeks were something else. I could hardly find any time to be myself except for my nightly rune sessions where I worked with diligence to settle on what would be my first set of runes.

  That, and I decided to do some experiments.

  For all the good work he’d done, Master Gerard ultimately prepared a basic guide for me that couldn’t be considered deep. He ensured I would have enough material to learn the runic alphabet and get a hang of the basic runes. Above that, though, I guessed there was only so much he could write under the threat of a Celestial Knight’s blade, which forced me to improvise.

  Normally, a Runemaster would work on his soul energy and work his way up to the higher-grade runes. The process wasn’t that complicated. More energy meant bigger and stronger runes, and the higher you could go the better a patron you could entertain.

  It was a simple business.

  Well, not really.

  I focused on my soul energy as it seeped coldly through my arms, down my torso, and into my legs. Slowly, the chilling sensation spread across my body, and turned the warm room into a broken cottage left out in the middle of a blizzard.

  My fingers twitched. I could barely hold my teeth from banging into each other, yet I pushed on, dedicated to making use of my whole reserve this time as the invisible energy spilled aimlessly from my pores.

  Somewhere around mid-point, my skin stretched painfully tight across my body. It felt as though all the moisture and the elasticity vanished, leaving me parched and completely dried.

  That was when I circulated my internal energy.

  The Undying blared to life like a furious fire.

  All nine of my energy channels roared into action like a giant engine running on quality fuel, my back prickling, my body convulsing, the cold giving way against the sheer pressure my Manual provided to my internal world. The process wasn’t smooth since I didn’t have a Core yet, but it still worked wonders.

  Parts where my skin had cracked healed themselves as I completed the first circulation. I wasn’t done, however, since there was about half of my soul energy reserve left untouched. I tapped into that with teeth clenched and back drenched in cold sweat.

  By the time I was done, I looked like a boxer who’d just suffered three rounds of brutal torture.

  That wasn’t so scholarly of me, was it? Kinda different than scribbling runes with my legs crossed and my mouth stuffed with pastries.

  This was the other side.

  The side of being a “true” Runemaster.

  Now, what was I supposed to do with this insidious energy?

  I glanced down at my papers, then to the side where a couple of magical leathers were stacked for practice purposes. Without the runic alphabet, the leather itself couldn’t house the energy for too long. The whole idea behind using runic sequences was to charge the host through the characters.

  So what if I used the characters for a different purpose?

  I pulled myself, wincing, up to my feet, rounded the table, and picked one of the quality leathers. It was an expertly cut square, no bigger than my chest with plenty of room to write on, the sides having already been sanded to perfection. Dipping my pen into ink, I placed the leather on the table and wrote a simple word.

  Fire.

  I poured an equal amount of source energy into the character as a Grade 1 Strengthening Rune. That should be enough for a test. I didn’t want to risk myself either since I used most of my soul energy to try and see how long I could endure the pain.

  The whole leather exploded into a burst of flames the second I finished inscribing the word “fire.” It was like watching a box of fireworks go off right from your hands… straight into your eyes.

  My face illuminated with the sudden stab of sparkling lights, a searing pain shooting up from my hands and into my neck. My whole front side went alive with heat so intense that I actually heard, more than felt, my eyebrows being burnt in a millisecond.

  Stumbling, scrambling, and a little bit screaming, I banged my back against a sidewall, trying to put out a particularly stubborn flame that had splattered on my shirt. Once I tapped it off, I froze at the sight of my hands.

  I could see layers of skin about to peel off.

  Yet all I could think about was the books.

  The damn leather was still in flames somewhere around the table, sparks of it threatening to blast Belfray’s book collection to ashes.

  …..

  By the time the pain dulled and my hands stopped screaming, it was already deep into the night. Once I managed to put down the fire, I circulated my internal energy until the skin on my hands began showing signs of recovery. As a Bronze Undying Knight, my regenerative powers were not at the stage where I could instantly heal from damage.

  But hey, this wasn’t all too bad, right? I could heal with some effort, after all.

  Gotta say, however, my slowly growing tolerance to pain did great work there. I would’ve screamed like a baby had I been the same miserable guy I was in my first life. Now, though, I could take the burning of my hands with my chest and only a small squeak.

  That was courage, alright.

  Without noticing, I’d become something of a man.

  Huh.

  Still, what the hell was that explosion? And what about the room? Why did it feel like the walls were closing in on me?

  I just wrote “fire” in some leather, and it burst into flames. I didn’t even want to think what would’ve happened had I written “explosion” or something like that.

  Better to pay more attention to your words in a magical world, I guess. You can’t be clumsy with these things.

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  So there I was, staring at the result of my little experiment, the legs of my table half-broken and about to plop down. Most of my papers were gone, but the leather I piled in the corner was somewhat in good condition.

  Should I go tell Belfray about the wreckage I caused here?

  Or should I keep poking the bear to see how far it’d go?

  I chose the latter and picked another leather before opening the door a slit to let out the smoke in the room. My coughs left me once the air cleared. We didn’t have an AC here, but this worked, too.

  That done, I picked up my pen and my spare ink bottle. It was a little foolish of me to start my experiments with fire. I could’ve written earth or air, but then… Were those things actually safe at all? A storm or a flush of a humongous cascade could be worse than a sudden explosion, as well.

  Which was why I decided to be deliberate with my words.

  If a single word could birth a damn fire, then what if I were clear with my intentions?

  This time, I wrote a full sentence down on the leather and powered each letter with soul energy. Once you got the hang of it, the runic alphabet wasn’t that different than a normal language except for the fact that I only knew how to write it. I didn’t know if it was actually spoken in any way or used in some places, but I guessed Master Gerard didn’t see any particular reason to go down there.

  There was some logic there. After all, the runic alphabet didn’t mean anything for people who lacked soul energy. This was a magical language likely created by Runemasters for Runemasters.

  Moving on, this time I threw the leather away toward the table the instant I completed the sentence and backed off… just in case.

  Nothing happened for a while.

  Then exactly five seconds after, a small gust of air shot up from the middle of the leather, splashed wide across the ceiling and scattered harmlessly about the room.

  I let out a relieved breath, my chest tightening with excitement.

  Holy Planar System!

  That worked?!

  Without waiting, I inched my way close to the leather and picked it up, glancing down at the sentence I wrote before this whole deal. The material had quite the number of tears and holes on it, likely because I had to pour an ungodly amount of soul energy to charge each character in the sequence.

  So, what did I write on the leather?

  It was simple, really.

  “Wait five seconds, then shoot up a gust of air in an upward direction.”

  And it actually worked.

  My dear generous Master Gerard, why the hell would you keep something so decisively extraordinary from me?

  There was literally nothing that I couldn’t do with this.

  …..

  Deep in the night, the mansion was a house of ghosts. Everywhere I looked creepy shadows glared up at me, the dark corners seemingly all pregnant with twisted promises. I stepped silently around the arena, up through the stairs, holding my breath somewhere around my chest.

  Once I cleared the so-called training complex, I worked my way up to the ground floor where the former flamboyant decoration welcomed me with a slight change. The candelabras hung lifelessly from the walls, the faces of unfamiliar figures watching me stalk forward from their bright paintings.

  The halls were wide, and the corridors stretched for who knew how long, but it took me only a few minutes before the high double doors of the mansion greeted me.

  My soul vision active, I decided to give a look back to the giant ante-chamber, up toward the silver railings, and the possible locations to see if I was being tailed or not. I didn’t see any colors in the otherwise gloomy interior, which told me there was not a single soul here.

  I was alone.

  And to think Belfray called himself a good butler…

  Well, to be fair, I didn’t know much about Celestial Knights or Celestial Mages. I didn’t know if I could actually spot one even with soul vision. There was also a chance—a good chance—that they had some great skills that allowed them to watch over, I don’t know, the whole mansion? The whole world? There wasn’t much written about Celestial figures in the books I read, and Mother hardly talked about her powers, but I at least knew Heralds were pretty scary people.

  Opening the giant doors proved way harder than I thought, but on the plus side, they seemed recently oiled since they refused to creak even though I clumsily pulled one side all the way back.

  Once I was out, the chilly night air welcomed me. I ambled onward with one hand clenched around a bunch of leathers, the ink bottle in my shirt’s pocket banging softly against my pen. I needed space for further experiments, and I needed it to be empty for safety reasons.

  That thought instinctively guided my hand to my face.

  I had no eyebrows.

  I had some parts of my hair missing.

  I had holes in my shirt, and my hands were still not yet fully healed.

  Which meant I had to postpone tomorrow as much as I could because there was no way Mother and Belfray would give me a pat on the shoulder for trying to burn the whole mansion.

  Don’t think about that, now.

  Focus on the present.

  Right.

  The mansion became a large dot in the back as I continued forward and stopped by one of our large ponds. The fish were scarce in supply here, and other than a bunch of flowery bushes, there were no big trees around.

  It was as empty as I wanted.

  I sat down and began thinking before ultimately deciding that going deep was better than going wide. As in, I had to first see about the limits of runic spell casting, and how soul energy could imitate or even change into real elements.

  On that front, I started with that gust of wind by changing certain things to test out the limits.

  First, I increased the waiting time to a minute and changed the direction of the spell. It would shoot downward to the ground, which should make it safer. Secondly, I made it stronger by adding “slightly stronger” to the sentence.

  Every added word meant I had to charge more soul energy into it. That, by itself, wasn’t a problem. The real issue was the quality of material in hand. As I’d witnessed earlier tonight, my leathers had trouble dealing with longer sentences. I was sure Mother had the means to buy better stuff, but she’d probably never thought her little son would try anything but basic runes at this age.

  You can’t blame me, can you, mum? You’re not the most normal woman, either, right?

  So, adding that “slightly stronger” part took a whole chunk of my soul energy, which was a chilling process, to say the least. My internal energy took care of the shivers, and by the time I was finished my inner reserve was down to a quarter.

  Then I stepped back and waited. After a long minute, the leather suddenly jerked upward like a leaf falling down from a long tree. It came to a stop around twice my height, then fluttered gently back to its place while shedding parts of it in the process.

  When I picked it up from the ground, it hardly looked like quality leather anymore.

  It was nearly torn into pieces.

  Worse yet, against the sheer amount of soul energy I poured into the sequence, a single use was all it took for it to be spent completely. It wasn’t exactly efficient.

  Still, this wasn’t about being efficient. This was about seeing the limits, so I moved on.

  The second turn, I upped the waiting time to five minutes, using a new square of leather this time. A part of me was already regretting not coming here with a full tank.

  Not much I could do there.

  Putting the leather on the ground, I retreated to a good distance and again, waited. I didn’t have a watch in my hand, but I was pretty sure I circled the whole pond a total of ten times without seeing a single reaction from the leather.

  That wasn’t good.

  I wasn’t disheartened, however, though my dwindling soul energy was a problem. That was why rather than managing a new sequence, I simply altered the sentence and changed the “five minutes” deadline a bunch of times.

  Ultimately, the limit proved to be around two minutes. Two minutes and twenty seconds, to be exact.

  Cool.

  I could think of a few reasons as to why there was such a bottleneck. It could be that the quality of my soul energy was a limiting factor, or it could be that I underestimated the amount of soul energy I had to employ for such basic spell work. Or maybe it was about the nature of the intention, as in, perhaps there was more at play when you tried to work with wind as an element.

  With growing expectation, I glanced back at the pile of leathers I brought here, sitting beside the pond.

  Would I dare to try my hand with fire again?

  It probably was a bad idea.

  The pond gave me enough inspiration, though.

  Water was a cool, harmless, and tame element, right?

  A little trickle of it couldn’t hurt me in any way.

  The main question then was how it would work. Just thinking about it sounded absurd. I mean, would water just come out of the leather? Wasn’t that a bit strange, not to mention unrealistic?

  In the end, I decided to try.

  I should’ve been more careful with my wording.

  I should’ve clarified from where I wanted the water to spill into the pond.

  Because the instant I finished that sentence, dark clouds gathered right above my head.

  ......

  Patreon Plug: