Replica Swordmaster - 25 Elemental Runes

Closing the last book, Kyle sighed in defeat, learning the magic language isn’t as simple as he thought. There were many runes, and each of them has many different uses and interpretations, not to mention fusing runes in order to create new effects.

Sadly, this library only had information about a few basic runes, not to mention he didn’t have months or possibly years to spend sitting in this dusty small room.

However, not all hope is lost. Although he can’t become an official inscriber or enchanter with these books, he might be able to use the limited knowledge in order to achieve his current task – creating an earth sword spell.

Let’s see, in order to make the sword he would need to shape the mana to a sword, similar to his flaming sword spell. However, this time he needs to increase the length of the sword, and because he is using earth to create it the mana required to sustain it will decrease.

Overall the mana cost should be the same for both spells, one focused on damage while the other on range.

Secondly, he needs to convert the mana to the earth element and consistently provide mana to maintain the spell. Although he doesn’t need to sustain it as much as he does with the fire element, earth isn’t indestructible.

When using a spell like ‘Earth Wall’ the mage doesn’t need to sustain it, once it breaks the mage will simply cast another one. However, he can’t let his sword break, that would make the spell useless.

After forming a complete plan in his head, he knew exactly where to start, thanks to his attentive reading. The book ‘Elemental Runes – The Basics’ describes the basics of each rune of the four elements.

Luckily, the book used spells for reference in order to showcase the uses of runes in battle. The author even theorized about creating a moving version of ‘Earth Wall’ and even explained why it wouldn’t work, or rather would be useless.

One of the traits of the earth element is its immovable nature, in order to create a moving wall you would need to either create it in the air, which would require you to consume a lot of mana in order to defy gravity, or instead destroy and reform the wall in order to create the illusion of movement, and calling that a waste of mana would be an understatement.

However, the discussion about the latter helped Kyle immensely, since reforming the sword is exactly what he needed to do.

Thanks to his previous experience with inventing the flaming sword, he knew what he needed to do, it was time to test his theory.

Although he has yet to read most of the books here, he believes he would have his chances to return. Not to mention, reading all the books in one go without having the chance to implement the knowledge would only result in the majority of it being wasted.

Giving the dusty room a final look, he stepped on the teleportation platform, and waited for it to do its job, and kept waiting.

Ten seconds later he realized waiting might not be of much help. The stone platform still looked the same, with no reaction at all.

It’s probably a test, the shameless old man wanted him to figure it out on his own. Who locks a kid in an ancient dusty room? This geezer must be out of his mind.

However, his hours of reading didn’t go to waste. He recalled there are different ways a formation can be activated. The common one for platform-related formations is standing on them, but there are still other methods.

It could be a switch, an activation word, or even multiple conditions at once. Luckily, it didn’t take him much time to solve it, after looking at the inscribed runes thoroughly he found a point that didn’t fit in.

After pressing it, information appeared in his mind.

“Please state your destination.” A female voice sounded in his mind.

He wasn’t that surprised, it was similar to the character creation one, that must be the default voice for verbal information.

The game usually transmits information in one of two ways: Verbally or directly to the mind.

The first one is commonly used in system announcements and the latter is how he receives information about monsters, NPCs, and more.

After all, it wouldn’t be convenient if an information window blocked his vision when fighting monsters. Imagine what would happen when fighting ten or more at the same time!

Coming back to reality, Kyle chose the garden and vanished from the room.