Chapter 28: Chapter 27 – Revisiting the guild.

Time passed and Roland was busy with his work. He had moved past his rudimentary understanding of runes. He didn’t need to rely on copying his pre-drawn schematics to get his runic spells to work. He was even able to partially affect the spells, changing small things like their output, area of effect and even some of the elemental variations

He had managed to single out some of the basic elements that were the easiest to work with. Fire, water, wind and earth. He had compiled them into his notes and could now tell them apart from the others.

This was still just a surface-level understanding as he wasn’t able to change the internal algorithm. What he could do now for instance was to change a water spell into a fire one while working within some restrictions.

He was mostly working with the basic types of spells like the mana arrow, mana bolt, and mana shield variations of them. He could now successfully create the lesser versions and with them as a base add elemental values that boosted their power output.

His mana arrow could change into one from wind, fire, or water. The same with his shield spells that could transform from a semi-transparent blue sphere into a tightly formed wall of earth. This wasn’t something he had achieved in a couple of days, no. He had already been working for another six months which added up. He had already been in this city for over a year and his research was showing some promise.

‘Wish I wasn’t limited to only cherry-picking these parts.’

Roland leaned back in his chair that had improved over this time frame. He had a new quill above his nose and he was balancing it, the magic ink didn’t really leave stains like the normal kind and it also didn’t leak.

He had gone through his entire stash of runic spell scrolls that he could find in the city. They were mostly similar in the way that they created a magical force that rammed itself into its target. There wasn’t much variation, he wanted some that could levitate objects or ones that affected your body in some way. These were buffing spells and debuffing spells, he had managed to procure a limited variety of them.

There was also a plethora of runes that were used on equipment. This would be the next stage of his research. The runesmith territory, he had one worry though. He still needed to get his blacksmith class and without the runecraft skill he wouldn’t be able to further his research. This skill supposedly only became learnable in the later stages of the blacksmith class.

The scrolls he was working with were far too fragile. After the runic spell activated it would burn away at the magic ink. The ink would then seep into the scroll and finally make it crumble into dust. He needed to constantly rescribe everything onto new spell scrolls wasting precious time and resources. He had already tried scribing on some metal but the magic ink had an adverse reaction to it and he wasn’t able to progress with it.

He had runes like the impact rune that when activated while a warrior was swinging their weapon increased the weapon’s weight. He couldn’t really experiment much with a spell-like this. The paper scrolls weight increase was very meager and he wasn’t sure what good adding weight to an attack spell would do.

‘Maybe you can make the magic arrows increase the weight while flying down at the monsters?’

‘But there is no human element to activate the spell at the right moment, I’d have to somehow pre determinate the arrow's trajectory and make it heavier during the descent.’

‘Otherwise, the added weight might make it fly slower, could just make it heavier at the beginning and just add more mana… call it a Heavy Magic Arrow?, or Heavy Impact Arrow?’

It was fine to speculate, but the scrolls that he was using did cost him some coins. He could make fifty iterations and see if one stuck and burn through his whole stock in the process. 

The best way would be if he could create some kind of reusable item that could fire off these spells. Like a magic staff, the problem was that he would only be able to do that after he achieved the runesmith class.

He took his time to look at his status screen, he had progressed through the levels and was now on the 20th. This all while scribing many runic spells and crafting various schematics that pushed him forward.

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