Back in his suite, Adrian laid out the ink, quills, and parchment on his desk.
He didn't start immediately. Instead, he pulled out his Gravity Snare skill book, the familiar parchment pulsing faintly with etched runes.
Curiosity burned in him. He had always used skill books, but never truly looked at the runes inside.
Now, with his pseudo-manifestation mist coiling around his eyes, he studied them. The white-grey energy flickered, enhancing his perception.
The Source stirred.
Suddenly, the runes weren't just symbols. They were words, fragments of a sentence written in the Language of Mana.
Each line explained a piece of the Gravity Snare's concept. pull, bind, crush. The meaning flowed through him.
Others memorized these shapes blindly. Professors lectured about "symbols with meaning," but they only understood fragments after decades.
But to Adrian, the words unfolded naturally, like a memory he had always carried. His breathing quickened as comprehension dawned.
Then he noticed something else, a different symbol, tucked at the end. A key, unfamiliar.
Not part of the concept itself. Something separate, distinct from the gravitational patterns. He did not see something like this in the rune scrolls in the rune district, but with the gravity snare, he could separate the concept and this different symbol.
He frowned, pulled parchment close, and etched a simple Barrier rune. His hand moved, each stroke deliberate.
Then, experimentally, he placed the odd symbol from the Gravity Snare book in this barrier rune. The addition felt wrong, foreign.
When he activated it, the parchment burned uselessly. Failure.
Confused, he tried again. This time, he etched the Barrier rune exactly as he'd learned in class.
But at the final step, he noticed that this also having an ending symbol, which he did not understand. A terminating mark he'd never questioned before.
So he swapped its "ending" symbol for the one in the skill book. His pulse hammered as he channeled mana into the modified rune.
When the rune flared, knowledge hit him. His mind filled with deeper understanding of Barrier's concept, just as when he first absorbed a skill book.
The sensation was unmistakable. Not just activation, but learning, comprehension flowing directly into his consciousness.
Adrian froze. "That symbol… it doesn't cast. It teaches."
Two keys. One symbol told the rune to cast.
Another told it to pass comprehension into the user's mind. The difference between consumable magic and permanent knowledge.
Adrian leaned back, stunned. "That's the difference between rune scrolls and skill books."
Rune Masters spent years to discover this. Adrian had deciphered it in a single evening.
His pulse quickened. He tested again, this time completing a Barrier rune without altering it.
Activated normally, it created a one-time defensive ward that shimmered briefly before dissolving. Standard commercial function.
"Incredible," he whispered to the empty room.
Excitement flared in his chest. He turned back to the Gravity Snare book, studying each runic line with his mist-enhanced vision. With his Source aiding him, he began to inscribe its concept on parchment, word by word.
But the moment his quill scratched the first symbol, resistance pressed against him. The very concept of gravity resisted being bound to parchment, fighting his attempts to capture its essence.
Adrian gritted his teeth, forcing mana through his hand and into the quill. His comprehension of the affinity carried him forward, each stroke a battle against the fundamental forces he sought to bind.
Sweat beaded on his forehead as he worked. The gravity runes demanded precision beyond anything he'd attempted, their meaning dense and layered with cosmic weight.
His hand trembled slightly as he reached the middle section. The parchment began to smoke under the strain of containing such power.
"Come on," he whispered, steadying his grip.
Stroke by stroke, he inscribed the uninscribable. The Source energy coursed through him, translating concepts that should have been beyond mortal understanding into crude symbols.
When the final line was drawn, he paused. Then, with deliberate care, he added the casting symbol, the "key" that marked it as a one-time use rune scroll.
The completed rune pulsed ominously on the parchment. Dark energy swirled around the edges, warping the air above it.
Adrian held it in his hands, breath steady, and fed pure mana first, but it did not activate the rune. Then he fed mana with gravity affinity into it.
The scroll ignited with purple-black light.
The parchment flared. A crushing force slammed downward, cracking the stone floor beneath his feet in a perfect circle.
Dust rained from the ceiling above. His desk groaned under the sudden pressure before the effect dissipated.
It worked. The gravity had manifested exactly as intended, focused and controlled.
He had just created and used a Legendary Rune Scroll! He had inscribed a rune most of humanity considered impossible.
Adrian stood amidst the settling silence, parchment ashes drifting to the ground. His eyes burned with certainty.
"This is the truth. Runes aren't mystery."
"They are language, pre-written programs waiting to execute with some activating conditions. And if you understand the words, you can write anything."
The Source pulsed within him, calm and absolute. He was no longer just a student dabbling in symbols.
He had stepped into a realm only Rune Masters dared to touch. And he'd done it in a single night.
But Adrian wasn't finished. His thoughts were deep.
"The Source isn't just letting me read. It's translating. I see runes, and it tells me the meaning. And if I know the concept… it translates back, writing my understanding in the Language of Mana."
He decided to test it.
Pulling fresh parchment closer, he thought of his modified fireball, the spell he had used till now, a white-blue flame born of his affinity control.
He had never seen a fireball rune scroll in the district, not even the basics. He had no "symbols" to copy, unlike in the case with the gravity snare, where he had the skill book, which had gravity symbols in it.
But if his theory was right, he didn't need them.
Adrian steadied his breathing, centering himself. The concept of his fireball burned clear in his mind, not the crude orange flames others wielded, but his refined white-blue fire.
He dipped the quill and began. As he wrote, the Source stirred again, guiding his strokes, converting his concept into the language of mana.
The first symbol emerged under his hand, meaning ignition. Then intensity, followed by heat-beyond-heat. Each stroke felt natural, as if he'd written these words a thousand times before.
Line by line, the Language of Mana formed his fireball on the page. The parchment grew warm beneath his touch, the ink seeming to pulse with contained energy.
Other students struggled for weeks to inscribe a single basic rune. Adrian was creating original fire magic in real time, translating pure concept into written form.
At the end, he added the key, casting, not comprehension.
When it was done, he tested it, first with pure mana, but nothing happened.
The rune lay dormant, waiting. He felt the resistance, the requirement encoded in its very structure.
He needed fire-aspected energy. Adrian focused, summoned the familiar warmth of his affinity, and fed it into the parchment.
The scroll ignited with power.
A white-blue fireball shot from the rune, striking the far wall with scorching intensity before dissipating. The stone blackened where it hit, a perfect circle of char marking his success.
Adrian's breath caught. "It worked."
He leaned back, parchment ash crumbling between his fingers, his eyes calm but alight inside. The scent of burned parchment and heated stone filled his nostrils.
"This is it. The Source makes me the bridge. I can read what others cannot. And I can write what they cannot imagine. Runes are no longer a mystery. They are my language now."