'I feel like I'm forgetting something.'
Jane tamed the remaining mana still lingering about his core, then started feeling around his bed. He felt a lump through the bedsheets, and tore them aside to reveal his familiar book of runes. With the distracted nature of his training lately, he had neglected to look through the rest of the runes in the book.
Feeling a little curious, he flipped to the very last page and looked at the rune. Compared to the one on the previous page, this one was a lot simpler. However, its placement at the very back meant that it had to be fairly powerful.
Jane's heart was racing wildly as he copied the rune in midair. But for the first time since he first tried magic, the rune failed. He was a little embarrassed, and immediately tried again. He tried again and again to make the pattern as seen in the book— and he really thought he had done so— but the rune would still come apart. Having wasted a good chunk of his mana, Jane decided to cut his losses and give up on that rune. Since it didn't have an effect, he didn't name it, either.
He then looked at the rune on the previous page. This one was three-dimensional, and the different angles from which it was drawn took up a total of three pages. Jane looked over them, visualized it in his head, and then began shaping it with mana. This time, though, he made sure to build the rune outside his window.
As the rune became more and more refined, Jane began to notice a strange smell coming from it.
'Is that... blood?'
Bits and pieces of flesh started coming out of the center of the rune. It didn't seem like one particular region of a creature— instead, organs, skin, and muscle were all released in one homogenous mixture. Despite his resistance to gory things, Jane had the urge to vomit. He quickly released the spell, and began running downstairs to clean up the mess he made.
'Damn it, what the hell kind of spell is that?'
Jane stepped outside, and quickly found the place where the flesh had ended up. He then ignited a 'Fire' inside of a few 'Amplify' runes, and scorched the area until all of the matter was burned away. As he looked at the jet-black hole in the ground, he decided to name the rune 'Flesh'. Not that he had any plans of ever using it again.
Jane walked back up to his bedroom, and flipped to the second-to-last rune. This one was also three-dimensional, albeit less complicated than the next one. He once again visualized it, then manifested it outside of his window.
As he refined it, he began to smell... freshly-cut grass?
The rune produced increasing amounts of plant matter, seemingly without any direction. Just like the 'Flesh' rune before, the mass produced consisted of a mixture of leaves, roots, stalks, and petals. Jane watched the rune work for a little longer, before dispelling it.
On top of the charred region of the ground outside his window, there was now also a blob of unmoving green pulp. It seemed he wouldn't need to clean this one up. Jane began thinking over the runes he had just learnt.
'What is even the point of these runes? It doesn't make anything usable, and all the stuff produced dies right away. Wait, it dies?'
Jane began thinking up a plan. The rune he just dispelled, named 'Pulp', was reconstructed outside of his window, but this time enclosed inside of a circle. Jane also began constructing another rune right next to it.
As his second rune took shape, the jumbled mass of plant matter stopped looking completely shredded, and started to form distinct leaves. This time, Jane's experiment was a success.
'When I used "Grow" on myself, it made skin and bone in the right places, and healed damage... Then, this means that 'Pulp' and... ugh... make incredibly damaged living matter.'
Jane dispelled the 'Pulp' rune, and began thinking. Suddenly, he slapped himself across the face, and shouted into the air.
"Fuck! Are you crazy!? Even I have standards, you know?"
Despite his expletives, Jane had already began constructing another rune where 'Pulp' was before. He looked away slightly, not wanting to admit to what he was doing. As his runes were completed, he once again smelled a bit of blood, albeit much weaker.
The mass of flesh looked a little less like a mass of flesh this time, and instead looked like some horribly deformed organism. It was as if a bad explanation of what creatures were supposed to look like was used as the template for it. Its muscles were covered in skin, and organs worked tirelessly within its body. However, it had no arms, no head, and no definable features whatsoever. It was a solid sphere of living flesh, like a child's crude attempt to create life.
Jane hurriedly dispelled the 'Flesh' rune and focused on moving the 'Grow' around. The mass of flesh ballooned up in size, and it's skin began to look nice and healthy. It still didn't look like any existing creature, however. Jane was once again overcome by revulsion. From where it laid on top of the pile of plants, the mass began sagging softly into the ground. For some reason unbeknownst to Jane, it had failed to form bones.
'Oh god, oh god... Wait.'
Seeing as the mass of flesh was in good health, Jane dispelled the rest of his magic and began thinking. From what he felt, there shouldn't have been a soul within the mass of flesh. If there was, his mana used for healing and creating it would have been tamed by it. While it probably had nerves, there was no central brain to process their signals.
'Isn't this a totally fine way to collect meat?'
Now that he knew it didn't have a soul, Jane's disgust towards the mass of flesh began subsiding. Watching it die quickly without being able to breathe, he made up his mind. That night, he and his brother would be having meat.
---
While chewing on the tender flesh, Jane began reflecting on the results of his experiment. When used correctly, the two runes he learned could be used as infinite sources of food. It was completely harmless, too, since the effects did not create beings that could suffer.
While it was nice and all that the mass of flesh he created didn't have any bones— it was composed of organs, muscle, fat and skin— there was a tangible difference in how 'Grow' acted for him and for the mass of flesh. After all, in his experience, the healing rune was more than capable of growing bones. Jane quickly realized the reason.
'Bones aren't alive. Since the living things that make the bones grow are alive, "Grow" will cause them to also heal the bones, but bones won't grow out of nothing.'
It would indeed be too simple to create a functioning being with only two spells.
'Hold on. If I used this while it was near a skeleton, would it succeed?'
The last vestiges of Jane's common sense forced him to bury that thought. After all, humans were infinitely complex creatures, and so he would likely never be able to create one without significant amounts of study. He didn't even know if it was possible, either.
'Hold on, what species is this meat even from?'
Jane stopped eating for a second, and stared down at the grey flesh in his plate. The fibers of it's structure betrayed no clues at all as to its identity. He soon realized that he didn't really care what animal it was from. Meat was meat, after all. Who cared as long as it tasted good?