Five years passed.
Adelasta watched the memory continue shifting through seasons, storms and passing sunsets while time accelerated around Veneri and Melody in fragments. Rain came and went across Modernia while graves weathered further under time. Flowers bloomed and died and the skies changed endlessly. Through all of it, one thing remained constant.
Veneri never stopped working.
Adelasta sometimes forgot just how talented her husband actually was.
Watching these memories reminded her of something she often ignored because of how casual he acted around everyone. Veneri was the kind of absurd genius that only appeared once every few eras and somehow still acted like his achievements were normal inconveniences. The more she watched, the more she realized that he had always been extraordinary even before becoming Aeterium.
At ten years old, he reached the Master level of Weapon Mastery in only three years despite being physically weaker than almost everyone around him. At seventeen, he had already become capable in Magecraft while crafting Mystic Circles most Divine Rank mages could never dream of creating. Throughout the entirety of the First Epoch Cycle, he remained a First Phase Ascender and still fought enemies above his level so effectively that survival itself seemed unreasonable.
And now, he was creating an entirely new mystical language from scratch.
Adelasta watched him sit alone for hours inside the cave, surrounded by parchment from his Mystic Book of Altherion and glowing sapphire structures while he repeatedly wrote symbols over and over again. Melody had initially expected him to spend years simply understanding the foundation of language structure before attempting anything meaningful, but within only six months, he had already shocked her completely.
He started with letters. That was apparently the easiest part.
Back when he created the Control Mystic Circle at seventeen, he had already invented symbolic structures that only he understood, so creating an entirely new written form did not actually overwhelm him. Instead of letters resembling anything close to Spheran or Xinoraci, he deliberately made them geometric, looking almost like structured mathematical art rather than language.
He called the language Nepenthes. Melody nearly laughed when he first explained the name.
"You named your language after a flower?"
"I like flowers. Also, Nepenthes traps prey and slowly breaks them down, which feels appropriate for a Runic Language designed to control mystical systems."
Melody stared at him for several seconds.
"That is either poetic or deeply concerning."
"I prefer practical."
The first stage focused entirely on structure. Nepenthes consisted of twenty letters: six vowels and fourteen consonants.
Unlike Xinoraci, which functioned through inherited mystical meaning and interpretation, Nepenthes focused on intentional construction. Every symbol had geometric balance, every sound carried numerical logic and every word could theoretically be broken apart mathematically if someone understood the system well enough.
Adelasta watched pages and pages inside the Mystic Book of Altherion begin filling rapidly.
Veneri was thankful that his mage book still existed despite his cleansing because once his Magecraft vanished, the contents inside the book erased themselves completely. The once detailed archive of all his Mystic Circles, rune experiments and combat theories had become empty, leaving him to start from the beginning.
Fortunately, the pages were infinite which meant he could obsess endlessly. And obsess he did.
Within six months, he had already finished the numerical structure from zero to infinity, letters, sounds and pronunciation systems. Sentence structure followed afterwards, though he deliberately deviated it heavily from English and Spheran despite using them as foundations. Since Spheran was merely modified English shaped over generations in Spheraphase, he understood instinctively how language naturally evolved.
Still, he made Nepenthes deliberately difficult to decipher.
Its sentence structure twisted grammar differently, symbolic interpretation mattered almost as much as pronunciation and contextual meaning shifted depending on mystical intent. Even if someone somehow learned every letter, they would still struggle to understand how it actually functioned.
Melody had openly admitted defeat on trying to understand it.
"This feels illegal somehow," she complained one afternoon while staring at his notes.
"That is encouraging to hear."
"You made a language that looks like fancy geometry letters."
"Thank you."
"That was not praise."
The real difficulty began after that. Making a language was one thing. Turning it into a mystical foundation was another nightmare entirely.
Adelasta watched years pass as Veneri meditated endlessly across cliffs, beaches and ruins throughout Modernia. Sometimes he sat motionless for weeks beneath storms, writing symbols into the air repeatedly while trying to invoke meaning behind each one. Other times he spent entire months speaking individual letters aloud until the sounds naturally carried mystical intent.
Words alone meant nothing. To become a true Runic Language, Nepenthes had to possess power. That process took four and a half years.
With Xinoraci, he inherited centuries of development already completed for him. He only needed to study and understand it across his teenage years. This was creation so he had to meditate for weeks on end, invoking every letter individually until meaning naturally embedded itself into reality. Some symbols took months before they resonated correctly, while others rejected him entirely until he altered their structure repeatedly.
Melody mostly helped through guidance. Just as promised, she gave him foundations and he handled the impossible parts himself. By the halfway point of the decade, Nepenthes officially became a true Runic Language and only one person alive understood it.
Adelasta could actually see the difference.
When he used Nepenthes for the first time, glowing geometric symbols no longer resembled borrowed power like Xinoraci had. These runes felt deeply personal. Their structure was smoother and strangely more alive because they reflected the exact logic of the one who created them.
For the next five years that remained, he mastered Rune Speaking, Rune Drawing and Rune Creation. He rebuilt himself from absolute nothing until he could finally use Nepenthes the same way he once used Xinoraci, except now there were no inherited restrictions limiting him anymore.
Runes themselves remained categorized the same way Divinities were. They came as Conceptual, Spiritual. Elemental and Physical.
Conceptual Runes usually consumed monstrous amounts of energy to invoke because they interfered with abstract systems of reality itself. For ordinary mages, using them frequently was close to impossible. For Veneri, the energy consumption had been cut in half.
His own language resonated too perfectly with his soul for reality to reject it efficiently. Even battle restrictions disappeared.
Back when using Xinoraci, runes during combat required immense concentration, stillness and careful precision because disrupting focus risked backlash or failure. Nepenthes changed everything because he no longer needed to mentally translate intent into foreign structure.
The language belonged to him. Its instincts aligned with his own. For the first time in his life, Rune combat became natural.
He could speak runes mid-fight without losing rhythm. There was almost no backlash because every word felt like speaking his own thoughts. At one point, he even attempted to summon runes entirely through imagination alone without speaking, drawing or shaping.
The result failed miserably. Melody laughed so hard she nearly cried.
"You thought you could skip ten years of training?"
"I thought Stellar Rank cheating was real," he muttered bitterly.
"You are still cheating."
"Not enough."
Still, the difference became obvious. Veneri had never felt stronger.
His Rune Manipulation now cost half the energy because he created the system personally, similar to how Circlecraft became easier when using his own creations. Combined with his evolved Base Tether, Limitless, which had grown significantly stronger after Hansel's intervention during ascension when she gave him the Aeterium Demesne, his growth became monstrous.