The Runic Alchemist

The stone platform covered in runes was not just a decorated item. Damian could sense five distinct runic arrays inside it. They were weird though—something Damian had never felt before. The spells had.. Souls?

Whenever he tried to use his mana threads to probe one, it resisted and made all his attempts to decipher it ineffective. Living spells? Damian was shaken to the core just thinking about how those came to be. The stone platform.. Indeed, it looked like a sacrificial altar.

"Okay.. Let's see what it does," Damian said, taking a few steps back from the altar.

Without his sacrium mana cubes, his mana pool was probably not enough to activate the altar and all its inscribed spells, but maybe he could activate one or two. Damian used all his mana threads this time to power the stone's runic inscriptions. It sucked his mana like a black hole—no matter how much he poured in, it just kept seeking more.

At last, Damian stopped with 20% of his mana pool still intact. With over 30,000 points worth of mana, three of the five spells etched into the weird stone platform activated.

Damian could see the simple runic circles—they were more like simple runes on the stone altar, but when activated, they were legit runic circles and quite complex at that. Damian managed to copy the three before the altar lost the mana powering it.

One was a golden runic circle and had a structure similar to a healing spell, then a gold-and-red mixed runic spell—it also had something to do with a person's body. The last one was gold and dirt yellow; another one related to the physical body of a user. All three, if Damian had to make an educated guess.. Were enhancement spells.

The stone altar used the five spells inside it to make a normal person enhanced—whatever the species of this tribe was. They made strong warriors with this method. What was the cost though? Did these enhancements stay for a lifetime or did they have a time limit?

It was too dangerous to do on himself without fully figuring out what each runic spell did. He would have to though.. Assuming the trial was about enhancing his body with such five spells and fighting all the emperor-rank monsters present on this island.

Well.. He didn't need enhancements to kill the few emperor-ranked monsters. But would it still work if he didn't get any enhancements on himself?

The instructions said:

'Power without sacrifice is noise.

Inscribe five runes. Fuse their meaning into your flesh.

If you scream, scream with purpose.'

Inscribe five runes. It doesn't say which runes or to use those runes to kill the monsters. But it also doesn't give any instructions for killing the monsters. That part must come after he inscribed the runes—meaning killing them without doing the ritual will probably not work.

Well, he had ten days to do this. And it wasn't that complicated.

First, he just needed to be sure what the five spells did to a living subject. Damian closed his eyes and extended his mana sense. There were indeed many animals, small and big, present on the island—all with some trace amounts of mana in them.

Damian got down the hill. First of all, he needed to find some raw materials—ammonia and potassium—that were easy to acquire from decomposed animal guts and burning the hardwood trees to collect white ash. Damian had to search for any material he could use to inscribe his spells on and make a working liquid mana generator, however low quality it might be. If he couldn't power the full altar at once, this was never going to work.

After searching for hours, going around and ignoring the emperor-rank monsters while collecting the raw materials for liquid mana and capturing some animals like monkeys, foxes, and boars in wooden traps with wood-style spells, Damian finally discovered a cave. It didn't have any iron ore or metal, but it did have that strange condensed half-grey, half-white stone that the stone altar was made of.

If it could be inscribed with up to five spells, and those spells could be used for a while, then this was no ordinary stone. Damian broke a big chunk and brought it back to the top of the bald small mountain. It would have to do—guess he could cut it with his paper-thin aura blade spell.

The animals he had captured, he just let them be for a while.

He finished his mana generator working overnight, and in the morning, when it was finally bright enough, Damian took up his big capsule-shaped liquid mana storage and went down the hill to get the animals. Using a wormhole spell with his liquid mana to skip emperor-ranked monsters, Damian quickly gathered all 30 caged animals below the bald mountain. From here, he used a single wormhole to reach the top along with all his test subjects.

Now it was finally time to see how this would work.

First of all, Damian powered the stone altar fully this time and copied the runic circle of all five spells. There was also a weird mana node structure connecting all the spells and had some runes that assimilated them, but Damian ignored them after copying—he couldn't replicate the whole thing anyway right now. He was just interested to see what each individual spell did.

Damian used the first golden spell on the five animals in wooden cages. He somewhat had an idea of what it would do. After launching the spell, Damian made a small cut on each of the five subjects, and as he had suspected, they healed up on their own in seconds. And not just that—one of the subjects he chose, a monkey, had a finger missing.

The second he did the spell on it—the monkey fell unconscious immediately—Damian could feel all the mana in its body had been used up. The missing finger seemed to have grown slightly—which should not have been possible.

The red-and-gold runic spell seemed to make the subjects strong but for just a few seconds—once their mana was used up, they went back to normal. Some did manage to break the wooden bars on the cages though. Damian had to run behind them and get them back. They too fell unconscious after using it, so that made things easier.