Creating a way to prevent oxygen from entering the warehouse holding the node and its fiery owner turned out harder than I initially imagined. The biggest problem was that I had no way of identifying oxygen magically, nor any idea how to refer to it within a runic formation. Hel, I had no idea how to imagine the physical structure, the closest I could get was remembering a model used during chemistry class, with two red balls connected by a pair of thin tubes, representing molecular oxygen. The models had been fairly amusing, allowing the teacher to plug together different molecules but at the end of the day it was nothing but an image to help us understand the concepts. In reality, it wasn’t as straight forward but reality was what I wanted to manipulate. And that was where I was drawing a blank.

I could get an idea of the emptiness between matter. While that gave me an idea of where matter was and how dense the material was, I was far from capable enough to differentiate between the different gasses that made up our air. Hel, I could barely feel the difference between air and water, making it obvious I had a long way to go.

Without a way to identify oxygen, the idea of filtering out the oxygen while leaving the pressure inside the warehouse untouched was impossible and I needed another plan. While thinking, I decided to give Alex a way to drain some energy from the area by carving a rune formation on the outside wall, composed of Darkness and Fire runes. Thanks to the Magic rune I had recently comprehended, I could set up the formation in such a way that the energy input came from a combination of Devour, Magic and Fire while using that single Fire Rune as the centre of the output, which was a triangle of pure Fire. The formation was a little clunky, I had decided to double up on the Devour and Magic runes on the input side, making it an asymmetric seven-rune formation but, all in all, it worked quite well.

The produced flame wasn’t as hot as Alex would have liked but there were ways around that. While I doubted I could directly link multiple formations together, I could place them close to one another. With multiple formations placed together but not connected, the output could be concentrated in a single area and that was where Alex had to place the material to be heated. At that point, normal physics began to take over, the additional formations raising the temperature further than the single formation ever could, allowing them to start working with hot metal. Additionally, I gained two points in Darkness Runes, bringing the skill to fifty-six and a whopping five points in Fire Rune Mastery, bringing the skill to fourteen. Now, I could learn another Fire rune but given the area we were in, I wasn’t about to immerse myself in the Astral Stream of Fire, that sounded like a good way to get burned. That would have to wait until we were back outside, maybe even until we took some distance from the Charland.

I had no idea how long it would take Lia and Alex to start producing useful things from the metal we had found thus far but they had their endless fire while I could start working on the runic formation to get rid of the oxygen supporting the elemental inside. Or consider whether I really wanted to invest hours upon hours into a task of questionable use.

Ultimately, the elemental didn’t disturb us at the moment, it simply sat there and occasionally sent out blasts of fire through the open door. As long as we kept away from the door, we were completely fine, leaving my intense dislike for Fire in general and the elemental’s form in particular as the only reasons to kill it. Well, and because it was an incredibly powerful foe, though that had just as much to do with the node as it had with the elemental itself.

During my considerations, I thought about a formation of Air and Water, using a combination of the Water rune Flow and the Air rune Pressure to reduce the pressure inside by having it flow to the outside but the problem was, that I didn’t have a good way to produce an insubstantial barrier that could withstand the fire it occasionally sent out. During my experimentation, I tried to use Darkness, only for the formation to get completely overloaded and crumble the next time the elemental sent out a blast of fire, burning away the Darkness. When I tried to use Mist as a medium, a similar effect occurred and the same happened when I tried to use a pure Wind Rune and a pure Water Rune. Neither had the durability to withstand the blasts of elemental fire our foe sent out.

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Thinking that I might have to use Fire to fight Fire, I tried to set up a fairly large formation to create a wall of Fire across the door, using formations similar to the one I had used to create Alex’s forge, only for another blast of fire to impact my wall, completely overloading it. The Devour runes I had used were simply gone, leaving nothing but molten and rapidly cooling rock, the shapes simply erased. This, clearly, wasn’t the way to go.

That part of my research went on for a few days. During the days Luna and I regularly debated what runes could work and what likely wouldn’t while our nights were spent either testing what worked on the door itself or hunting for more enemies in the seemingly endless Charlands. The experimentation got me points across the board in my less-developed Rune Magics, bringing Water to twenty-five, Wind to twenty-four, Earth to twenty and Fire, despite my recent success, to fifteen. Maybe the Rune Mastery got extra growth for working in an area clearly aligned to Fire, but I wasn’t sure and didn’t have a good way of testing it. Hunting also had some success, giving me yet another level and bringing me to seventy-seven but the growth there was slowing down as I, once again, outstripped the local enemies.

During the time outside the Charland, I delved into the Astral River and tried finding my next Fire rune, only to get scorched by the intensity of the Astral here. I would have to try again later, with less interference, leaving me with only the Earth Rune to find. That, I did, granting me the Stone rune, improving my control over, well, stones as opposed to normal dirt. I wasn’t sure what I’d be able to do with the rune, I seldomly conjured earth as opposed to using what was around me, but I had a feeling it would come in useful later. Conjuring shelter came to mind, Stone was the superior material compared to Ice, though I wasn’t sure where it stacked up compared to Hard Ice. Something to investigate later, and likely a question without a real answer as both materials were dependent on my own skills and magical affinities.

To continue growing, we might be forced to venture even deeper into the Charland. So far, we had focused on moving around the perimeter without entering, before moving in and staying somewhat close to the boundary, if we weren’t heading for the Fire Node. That way, we could cover a lot of ground without heading too deep into the dimensional weirdness that was the Charland, something I was still greatly hesitant about. I wanted to wait for a very clouded day, so I could use the shadows of the clouds to try moving scrying constructs into the Charlands during the day, so we were forewarned if the area became a lot more dangerous, as I feared.

The elemental bias of it was already obvious and if the Sun supercharged the Fire element within, it would get incredibly dangerous, especially given that Lia and I would be greatly weakened. That could be an absolutely lethal combination, which is why there hadn’t been any tests.

I had considered asking Silva to poke her head in during the day, she was the most durable of us and the one least affected by the Sun but so far, I wasn’t desperate enough. The monsters we could fight on the outskirts were still giving EXP, Lia and Alex had something interesting to work on while I had my own project. There simply was no urgency to take risks and get ourselves hurt, not while we could continue to grow, albeit slowly.

Maybe once we figured out the size of the Charlands, we could start exploring the entirety of it, or we might look for other nodes, as there had to be more than the single node relatively near the outer boundary. Those nodes might have different guardians, enemies we could hurt without what amounted to perfect and near-instant regeneration. Enemies we could force out of their comfort zone and kill or at least fight with, or maybe foes that I could weaken with some clever trickery. The guardian fire elemental was none of those things, so maybe we should look for another foe.