Irrationally, Avery felt humiliated thinking he was incapable of hanging on, and was wasting the points he needed to accumulate carefully by resting every few hours. He saw the decrease in the efficiency he had spent so much effort achieving as a failure on his part.

  He slowly got into a new rhythm, one much less stressful than before, but while his situation had improved, his will and motivation were still slowly being drained, especially with no achievable goal to aim for.

  He hoped he could eventually buy a life-saving item from the system, but right now he wasn’t even storing his points, but rather squandering them on unproductive resting strolls.

  He hoped he could learn magic by studying the energy powering the runes, but so far he didn’t even have a hypothesis as to how he might control it.

  There was no deadline or rush, only endless monotony, and that repetitive lifestyle was a challenge of its own.

  When he was racing to improve before time ran out, he had endured a tremendous amount of stress and made immense efforts, but he was able to impose his will and force himself to continue chasing his goal.

  The week following that saw him ripping himself out from the jaws of death, during which he had been so worn out he feared he would die of exhaustion, but his existential terror and hope of success had kept him going.

  In contrast, right now, as far as his escape and survival went, he was standing still, waiting to either discover something about magic or slowly improve to the next quality of runes, at which point his life of tediously collecting points would begin.

  What was being tested was no longer his mental fortitude, but his endurance, with despair waiting at every turn for the opportunity to engulf him.

  Even his restful strolls that were meant to let his mind recuperate, thinking about nothing, had become a battlefield.

  The more he grew more accustomed to his new life, the more active his thoughts became, and in this bleak environment with nothing much to think about except contemplating how disastrous the situation was, active thoughts were a disadvantage. There simply were incredibly few positive things to rejoice about, so each time he let his mind wander, he kept sinking into self-defeating thoughts and getting depressed.

  Retreating into his happy place and remembering fond memories just made him homesick. He wasn’t sure he would ever be able to return home, and even if he did, it would probably take hundreds of years, and the earth would have long become unrecognizable.

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  Concentrating on improving his craft wasn’t feasible either, as he lacked the necessary drive and urgency to make an effort.

  Slowly, he started to reduce the amount of downtime he took. While at first engraving was incredibly hard and had required all of his concentration, he had gotten much better in the last few weeks, and now he had a lot of brain power to spare, and therefore needed less breaks.

  With his rising proficiency, engraving had become a repetitive and undemanding job, which quickly led to boredom.

  Eager to occupy his mind, he directed his thoughts to the mysterious energy he sensed leaving him when he forged, reminiscing, sinking into the feeling and attempting to build an elusive connection with it.

  After each rune, he would talk to himself, elaborating theories about its nature and debating the results of his rudimentary research.

  He knew that stuff came from inside him, and he knew that it could be controlled, so he wanted to figure out how to do so without the help of external items. If he could understand the elusive feeling he got when crafting, perhaps he could learn to control it, or at least to hasten it.

  He experimented with how the order in which he drew the rune affected the energy flow, and found that one particular way, starting from the central circle and gradually expanding outward was slightly faster than otherwise.

  Along the way, he got annoyed at constantly referring to a “flow of energy” so he decided to name it. It was a mysterious energy capable of powering magical runes, but it looked very different from Qi, so “mana” seemed an appropriate name.

  He also experimented if he could improve his crafting with intent, so he made sure to have a clear mental image of a spear when he made a rune, but he felt no different. Following the same logic, he attempted it with a lot of relevant concepts, such as “fire”, “sharpness”, “strong” and “speed”. Anything he felt could help a spear be deadly or durable, he applied to his crafting, but in the end he got no results.

  He found it very surprising that intent did not change anything, as it was often mentioned back in the sect. Most likely, he was either not skilled enough to make a noticeable change, or he was improving the runes effect, which would be useless as runes were immediately destroyed by the surrounding dragon power.

  On that note, he was now relatively certain that was what was happening. Being able to layer functioning runes on top of one another didn't sound reasonable, and neither did being awarded two points for failed products. Obviously, his engraving was successful, and the runes were only shattered after being completed.

  He had no reason to believe a rune could be destroyed by being applied on an unsatisfactory host, while on the other hand he already had an example of something getting ruined by dragon power in a roughly equivalent manner.

  Admittedly, there was an inconsistency in that theory. The rune was composed of stuff that came from inside him, so why was he fine while the glyph got disintegrated? Maybe it was his physical body protecting him or isolating both powers from coming into contact, while the glyph was 100% magic with no defenses?

  This was the frustrating state of his research. He knew so little, and each time he thought he glimpsed an answer, it would only lead to more questions. It was only natural not to become omniscient after pondering on shallow truths for less than a month, but he wished there were practical applications to his mental gymnastics.

  All in all, his research wasn’t very fruitful, but it served to keep boredom at bay, and maybe he would eventually discover something to give him control over mana.