66: Reunion

Once it was all over, I felt… relieved. Sure, I’d need to cook more drake, but the pressure wasn’t as crazy this time—I didn’t have a three-day deadline.

I was also relieved that Liane was okay. Both because she ate the drake, but also because the cat didn’t get upset or notice she’d stolen some of its food.

“Well, are you going to cook the same or change it up?” Liane asked, now sitting next to me.

“Honestly, probably change it up a little. I want to try some of that Dawnroot myself, and I don’t know when I’ll get in the forest again to find more,” I said.

“Ohh, the shiny gold stuff. Yeah, I want to try that too!” she said excitedly.

With all the excitement of the cat arriving, I had nearly forgotten about the Grumfels. Luckily, Crisplet was on the case and had cooked them all perfectly. Pulling them over, I used Infuse, and then—before my eyes—one was missing.

“You were waiting for that, weren’t you?” I said with a chuckle, looking at Liane next to me, pretending to be innocent with her hands behind her back.

I knew I was going to lose some of these anyway, so I stored the three, leaving Liane with her stolen prize. I was trying to think up a plan for how I’d do the next piece of drake. I could try roasting the giant chunk, but that felt like a waste when I could get at least four or five more steaks from it.

I couldn’t make a stew because the cat had never touched a stew before, that I knew of, and likely wouldn’t trust it.

I’d sleep on it, but before I could get to that, I was interrupted.

“You need to do some studying before you go to sleep. You’ve been avoiding it,” Milo said, holding out the Runescribe book and the notebook to practise in.

He was right, of course. I hadn’t even looked in the notebook I got from Char, and I really needed to. I had a skill I hadn’t even used yet. So I took the offered books from Milo and got to work practising the basic structure again.

I went from the beginning because it had actually been a while. This time, I got it near perfect much faster, showing Milo my progress.

“Nice work. Now keep going with the same thing. Building muscle memory is all about practice. This should become second nature to you,” he said.

Once he was satisfied I had some consistency—

“Okay, before we look at Char’s book, we’re going to practise the basic barrier one this book provides,” he said, pointing to the open pages.

It looked fairly simple. I had to do the base rune circle, then there were three additional shapes and some letters that didn’t look like normal words. Milo explained that the shapes set the size, position, and shape, while the words were magical words and would represent the desired spell.

“How do you learn what the words mean?” I asked curiously.

“Well, that’s part of learning to craft your own runes. You’ll need to study the language, and then, as you’re writing the words, you will feel rather than see what they mean. It’s very difficult to describe, because what’s written there is not as simple as just saying barrier,” Milo began to explain.

“It’s describing a desired effect that will be interpreted by the mana in the rune to produce a barrier—which is a very complicated way to say you can’t simply learn the language of magic. You need to feel it, understand it, and then create it.”

I got some of what Milo was trying to tell me, but it also sounded really complicated…

“Well… couldn’t anyone create and make runes then?” I asked curiously.

“No, that’s just the thing. Unless you have a skill, you can use already crafted runes by injecting a small amount of mana. But if you attempted to create or craft a rune—even if you copied it exactly—the words you write wouldn’t be recognised as an actual rune by the System, so it won’t work,” Milo said.

“It’s why you can’t just go up to someone else’s rune and copy it exactly without understanding what it is you’re copying. You need to understand the intent, the actions to achieve the results,” he finished.

And honestly, that made sense. I hadn’t seen why another Runescribe couldn’t just copy a rune and sell it, but if there was more to it than simply copying the circle, then it clicked. It would also explain why Char had a full notebook of her basic runes.

Once Milo was satisfied with my shapes in the circle and my consistency with them, we moved on to the words. Milo said I was supposed to feel something—but there was nothing. It was just scratching what I saw using the quill.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

“Do you think I need to do this into a food item for it to count?” I asked curiously.

Milo swore under his breath. “Of course, that would be it. Yes, do you have anything you can carve into fairly easily?” he asked.

Looking at my inventory, I didn’t think any meat product would work—it was too soft to get a clean circle and shapes.

“Uh, I have tubers. If I get some of the larger ones, I think I can carve into the side of them?” I said. I’d need to buy some melons or something in the future.

“Perfect. Let’s do that. When you carve, treat the tip of your knife as if it were the quill,” Milo said.

I tried… and immediately failed.

The knife was nothing like the quill, and trying to stop it from going too deep or slipping off was impossible. It felt like I was learning how to use the quill all over again.

By the time we finished that night, I was defeated. I had carved into sixteen of the tubers—and ruined the base circle on all of them!

Luckily, I could still use the tubers later for food, or it would have been a gigantic waste.

“You’re doing fine, Trev, don’t worry. Once you get the hang of this, it’ll be second nature to you,” Milo reassured me as I was preparing to go to sleep. Even Crisplet gave me a reassuring burst of sparks.

“Thanks. I’ll get it, I promise,” I said before lying down.