Nosphaleen was in too much of a daze to answer properly. It was only after she felt Sylas’ gaze on her that she responded.
“I…” she shook her head, stabilizing her mental state. “I can’t say for certain, but… what I do know is that F-Grade Runes won’t have more than 100 Foundations and E-Grade ones won’t have more than 1000. To be approaching 10,000, it would have to be a nearly D-Grade Rune. But…”
“But?”
“The way you described it, it’s hard to say if it’s really a D-Grade Rune. As talented as you clearly are, analyzing a D-Grade Rune would cause your soul to burst apart, that I’m certain of.”
“Hm…”
Sylas didn’t disagree with her; he wasn’t so arrogant. Maybe he had analyzed it wrongly?
“It’s possible…” Nosphaleen started somewhat hesitantly. “I can’t say for certain, but there are many Rune disciplines. I’ve heard of connecting Runes like this; they call them Rune Networks. It’s a method of using many weaker Runes to mimic the effects of a stronger Rune. The problem is that I’ve never heard of one being so complex.”
Nosphaleen gritted her teeth, one part due to the frustration of her hesitancy when facing Sylas, and another part due to the fact that it was getting clearer by the second that the Dogons really had received outside help.
There was no way they had managed to create these themselves.
Sylas fell into silence before he spoke out a theory of his.
“Could it be simplified, then?”
“You want to weaken it?”
“No. I mean that maybe this statue is a simplified D-Grade Rune.”
“If I was a higher existence and I wanted to help a lower existence accelerate their growth, I would need to use methods that gave immediate benefits and long-term benefits.
“With this statue here, on the one hand, it’s very clearly beneficial in the short term. But what if it also helps lay a foundation that could help you comprehend higher Grade Runes?”
It dawned on Sylas that this just might be a more robust version of what he had already seen before.
The first time he analyzed a Rune without any sort of foundational understanding, hadn’t he done exactly what this mesh, Rune Etching, armor-type, Rune Network was doing?
He had broken down the original Ice-Poison Rune into many pieces, designating what each piece did one by one.
It was only after that that he learned of Strokes, Foundations, and things of the like.
Here, it seemed to be the same thing, just on a completely different scale.
Nosphaleen’s eyes widened. “Yes, yes. That’s exactly how my elders taught me simpler Runes. But if that’s true…”
“It would mean that the help the Dogons received had to come from someone with not just an understanding of D-Grade Runes, but a deep one.”
Nosphaleen clenched her teeth.
Rune Masters, even at the F-Grade, were rare and highly sought after. She couldn’t even imagine how powerful a D-Grade Rune Master would be, let alone one that could distill the teachings of a D-Grade Rune into pieces that F-Grade existences could comprehend and digest.
But there was something else they were both intelligent enough to understand but didn’t dare to say aloud…
It was one thing for someone to be skilled enough to do this. But it was another matter entirely for them to be so casual about it.
This statue had no protections; it was available for everyone to experience, and it was only one of its kind.
It was more likely than not that every hidden Dogon city across Earth had at least one of these statues, along with an unknown number of lesser statues laying around.
This sort of casual dissemination of something they saw as so valuable could only mean one thing…
This enemy of theirs didn’t see these teachings as nearly so valuable.
It was possible that this existence, then, was even beyond the D-Grade.
But the shadow of even the E-Grade was so large and looming that it was hard for them to even fathom, let alone the D-Grade. Imagining something or someone above that…
It did them no good whatsoever.
Sylas had already tossed it to the back of his mind. Instead of trying to study the statue here, he instead began trying to find a way to take it away.
Over the course of his journey, he had learned many things in regard to spatial treasures. The fact they had limits to the kind of things they could store was well known to him now, and it made the value of the Madness Key around his neck all the more potent even if the sheer size of its capacity was ignored.
This statue was certainly a treasure of high order.
Although it seemed like a simple carving, Sylas could feel a clear power radiating from it. If it was placed into a normal spatial device, that device would definitely be torn to pieces.
Sylas wasn’t worried about the Madness Key. What he was worried about, though, was finding a method of digging this statue out of the ground. That could potentially be tricky depending on a few factors.
However, he had underestimated the carelessness of the Dogon’s benefactor. Whoever they were, they clearly didn’t care about their statue ever corroding or being displaced.
The statue wasn’t even nailed into the ground.
There were only two reasons Ragnar hadn’t taken it away. The first was because he didn’t have a spatial device like the Madness Key, and the second was that the statue was far too heavy.
For normal people without telekinesis, taking things into a spatial device was a troublesome effort of manipulating their Will into an intent that covered the entire object and contact.
But for those with telekinesis…
WHOOSH.
An odd vacuum formed in the region after the statue vanished into the Madness Key. It was as though a hole had been left in the world and the ground beneath them destabilized.
An uneasy feeling took hold of Sylas.
