Stepping back into the center of the expanded dome, Lencar summoned a handful of glowing, floating orbs of light using basic fire and wind magic to illuminate the immediate area. The sheer scale of the space he had created was dizzying.
"If I die in here, I'm going to be really embarrassed," Lencar muttered.
He pulled out his Logoless Grimoire again, flipping directly to the freshly inked pages containing the High-Level Crystal Magic he had ripped from Mars. He hadn't truly tested this attribute yet, not as the caster. He wanted to see how it felt to shape it.
He raised his hands, focusing his intent. The ambient mana in the dome responded instantly.
With a series of sharp, punching gestures, Lencar began mass-producing ammunition. Pink crystal materialized out of thin air, falling to the stone floor in a noisy, clattering shower. He didn't just make simple spheres; he wanted a highly unpredictable, varied threat environment. He needed his brain to process different shapes, weights, and aerodynamic profiles on the fly.
He crafted hundreds of jagged, heavy crystal stones the size of cannonballs. He synthesized dozens of incredibly sharp, aerodynamic crystal broadswords, identical to the ones Mars had thrown at him. He made spinning, multi-bladed axes, and wide, blunt, heavy shield-like slabs designed to crush rather than cut.
As he worked, a thought occurred to him. Crystal is great, but it has a specific resonance. I need variety. He dipped into his older, stored spells. He channeled the ambient moisture in the air, instantly freezing it, and added a massive pile of razor-sharp, jagged ice shards to the growing armory on the floor.
"That should do it for the ammo," Lencar said, looking at the literal mountain of lethal projectiles he had manufactured.
Now came the tedious part. He needed a delivery system.
Using his Earth Magic, Lencar raised hundreds of small, hollow stone pillars and indentations all along the interior curved walls, the massive ceiling, and the sprawling floor of the three-kilometer dome. He created thousands of individual storage silos, effectively turning the entire spherical interior into a 360-degree firing squad.
With a wave of his hand, he used wind magic to telekinetically lift the thousands of crystal and ice projectiles, sorting them and forcefully slotting them into the earth silos he had just built.
"Now for the plumbing," Lencar sighed, stretching his fingers.
He jogged over to the nearest wall, which was over a kilometer away. He placed his hand against the stone beneath one of the loaded silos. He closed his eyes and began to meticulously, carefully inscribe a magical rune.
He didn't use Morris's horrific, soul-binding chimera geometry. Instead, he relied on the basic, fundamental runesmithing knowledge he had gleaned from reading countless dusty tomes in the Hage Grimoire Tower and deciphering the spellbooks of rogue mages.
He drew a basic, high-output [Projectile Propulsion Rune]. It was essentially a magical cannon mechanism, designed to violently eject whatever was stored above it when supplied with mana.
But a simple cannon wasn't enough. If the attacks were predictable, he wouldn't learn Ki; he would just memorize a pattern.
So, Lencar layered the magic. Directly on top of the propulsion rune, he meticulously carved a [Random Interval Trigger Rune]. This was a complex bit of logic magic he had pieced together from observing trap-making spells. It operated on a magical algorithm that would fire the propulsion rune at completely random intervals, ranging from every two seconds to every five minutes.
He finished the first one, wiping a bead of sweat from his brow.
"One down," Lencar grumbled, looking around the massive dome. "Nine hundred and ninety-nine to go."
It was an absolutely grueling, mind-numbing process. Lencar used his spatial magic to blink around the dome, appearing next to each silo to carve the intricate, layered runes into the stone. He had to be incredibly precise; one poorly drawn line could cause the projectile to explode in the silo or fail to fire entirely. He channeled his inner Tokyo data analyst, falling into a state of deep, hyper-focused, repetitive flow.
It took him an entire, grueling hour of continuous, strenuous magical labor. His fingers were cramped, his eyes ached from staring at glowing geometric lines in the dim light, and his mana was draining steadily.
Finally, he blinked back to the absolute dead center of the three-kilometer dome.
He knelt down and carved a massive, incredibly complex [Master Node Rune] into the floor beneath his feet. He then spent the next ten minutes extending microscopic, invisible threads of sensory mana, physically connecting the central node to every single one of the thousand trigger runes scattered across the walls, floor, and ceiling.
He was essentially wiring a massive, magical supercomputer, with himself standing directly on the CPU.
"Okay. Weapons loaded. Triggers set. Network established," Lencar said, standing up and brushing the dust off his knees.
There was only one final step required to make this the perfect crucible for awakening Ki. He had to blind his other senses.
He wasn't going to literally blindfold himself—that felt a bit too cliché, and he still needed his eyes to avoid getting decapitated while he figured the Ki out. But he absolutely needed to remove his hearing. If he could hear the whoosh of a crystal sword launching from the wall, his brain would rely on auditory cues rather than tuning into the life energy of the attack.
Lencar accessed his [Concealment Magic]. Usually, he used this to hide his own presence, dampening his sound and mana signature to blend into the shadows.
This time, he inverted the application. He cast the spell outward, blanketing the entire three-kilometer interior of the dome in a thick, suppressive field of absolute, unyielding silence.
The effect was instantaneous and deeply unsettling. The ambient hum of his floating light orbs vanished. The sound of his own breathing disappeared. When he clapped his hands together, he felt the physical impact, but absolutely no sound reached his ears. He had successfully created a total, absolute sensory deprivation chamber for his hearing.
Lencar felt his knees wobble slightly. The massive, sustained expenditure of earth, spatial, crystal, rune, and concealment magic had thoroughly emptied his tank once again. His Stage 3 Peak reserves were practically flashing a warning light.
He tapped his ring, escaping into the Void Vault for a second time.
He collapsed onto his plant-bed, gasping in the silent, thick air of the dimension. He lay there for a full twenty minutes this time, letting the Quintessence work its absolute miracles, feeling the exhaustion literally bleed out of his pores as the emerald energy refilled his core to the absolute brim.
When he finally felt fully restored, humming with kinetic readiness, he grabbed his wooden mask from the table and strapped it securely to his face.
He stepped out of the portal, back into the dead center of the massive, silent, pitch-black dome.
Lencar looked around at his creation. The floating orbs of light cast long, eerie shadows across the vast expanse. Hidden in the darkness surrounding him were a thousand loaded, randomized, completely silent weapons of death, all wired to a single switch beneath his feet.
He had essentially built a highly advanced, magical meat grinder. And he was about to lock himself inside it.
"I built all this in just two hours," Lencar noted to himself, feeling a very real, incredibly human surge of pride.