Despite his feelings, Sylas felt that he had grown a great deal after exiting the Secret Realm.
If he applied the rules of Rune construction, then he would be able to draw Runes twice as fast with half the effort. In addition, the struggles he had with dealing with higher Stroke and Foundation Runes would be greatly diminished.
Before, it took him a great deal of time and effort to master his Slow and Freeze Runes, and they both only had 50 or so Foundations. But according to Nosphaleen, the limit of the F-Grade was 100 Foundations.
If you factored in the large leap in difficulty there was every 10 Foundations, Sylas had a hard time being confident in drawing a 60 Foundation Rune, even if he was given several days, let alone 70 and above.
But what he never realized was that there were rules to putting Runes together, almost like nomenclature for molecular formulas and atoms. There was an order to how things were supposed to go together.
A single Rune might have dozens of “technically” accurate ways to put it together, but only one most efficient way.
Sylas had missed this because he skipped steps in his Rune Mastery. He went right from constructing Runes slowly to stamping them out in whole. But because of that, he forgot the importance of individual Strokes and Foundations along the way.
There were certain Strokes that worked best when incorporated first and certain Foundations that were more like cherries on top, as opposed to the root of a Rune.
These rules would change depending on the Rune in question.
For example, his Ice-Poison Rune had a Foundation that he had named something akin to sovereignty in the past. He had named it as such because this Foundation was very overbearing and it was responsible for suppressing and oppressing other forms of Aether it came across, making it difficult for an opponent to expel the poison from their bodies.
This was a core and foundational Foundation of the Ice-Poison Rune on the surface. But in reality, it was actually secondary in character. It was more important to draw the Ice and Poison characteristics first. In the case of the Slow Ice-Poison Rune, the Poison Foundations were more important. In the case of the Freeze Ice-Poison Rune, the Ice Foundations were more important.
Every Rune had to be approached in this way, and only by finding the most efficient configurations would you find the easiest method of drawing them.
Sylas held out a hand and stamped it down.
A Freeze Ice-Poison Rune took shape in the blink of an eye. Despite the fact that Ice Aether wasn’t prevalent in this dry and harsh climate, he hadn’t even needed to use his
The strain wasn’t great at all, and he didn’t rely on his Woodland Warlord Title to accomplish it either.
If he continued to draw Runes like this, his combat efficiency would reach an unconscious level. Skills would be like play putty in his hands.
After this, he would need to see if he could take the evolved Mana Path Wand for a spin again to see if he could incorporate the Wood Element into it.
But first… he wanted to enter the Rune Enlightenment Secret Realm.
It hadn’t even taken him ten minutes to clear the Rune Visualization Secret Realm. He had more than enough time, and he was eager to see what he might gain this time.
His interaction with the Clypsians at the Great Celestial Wall taught him that there was far more to Rune Mastery than just elevating it to higher Realms. If his foundation was even half as good as that Clypsian woman Elyndor, he would have shattered their protections in the first instant.
This time, it took Sylas half an hour to clear the Secret Realm.
When he stepped out, his eyes were glowing with a bright light as though they were still analyzing and thinking through something.
Rune Enlightenment was all about making Runes intuitive. Even if you hadn’t studied a Rune before, just observing one for a moment would allow you to have a general idea of its function and a guess as to how you might piece a similar one together.
This was the final layer of foundation for the coming Rune Breath Realm, which gave Runes life…
Well, this wasn’t exactly the right way to describe it. Rather than giving Runes life, it was more like Rune Breath allowed a Rune Master to sense the life of a Rune and communicate with it, making controlling, forming, and guiding them much easier.
This subtle difference was its own enlightenment to Sylas because he realized something else.
The burden of forming a Rune didn’t have to be on his shoulders entirely.
Strokes were the fundamental laws of the world, and Foundations were the natural and simplest configurations they could enter in order to communicate something about said laws.
Runes themselves would take effort to forge because they were more complex. The world tended toward chaos, but Runes were the epitome of order. A lot of work had to be done to form them.
However, if you could offload the effort of forming Strokes and Foundations to the world and only had to worry about bringing them together to form Runes after the fact, wouldn’t forging Runes become even easier?
If before Sylas could form Runes twice as fast, it was easily ten times as fast now. This wasn’t just because of Rune Enlightenment, but because he had a natural comprehension of how to incorporate Rune Breath into what he grasped as well.
This time, when he pressed a palm to the air, there was a rush of ice that surged around him. In an instant, dozens of Freeze Ice-Poison Runes took shape, and the entire room became a world of ice and cancerous blue Runes.
Sylas exhaled a breath that frosted the air, minor particles of wood in the air.
Just as he was about to see what the Rune Breath Secret Realm had for him, a notification caught his attention.
‘Cassarae.’
