Bouncing on my toes, a pleasant, cool sensation coming from the icy planet of churning meat below. I smile thinking about the enjoyable feel of my newly advanced tendons.
“Although frankly, I can’t tell the difference between before and after except for the strange sensation of the Perfection spell taking some of my Inspiration,” I said.
Well, I can comfort myself that it wasn’t nearly as painful as last time, and it didn’t have that same crawling feeling of my very core being robbed from me. It just feels vaguely unpleasant, and by what Kailin and others have told me, it should grow back stronger than before. And over time, I might eventually patch over my damaged core with new growth.
Looking around, I see the strange and desolate surface of the planet, only adorned by my factory that constantly clangs out metal plates for inscribing, the little metallic hut I use for inscribing, my water park, my forge, and many others, but most importantly, right now, my crude water clock.
Approaching it in great bounds due to the weak gravity, I eventually drift down for the last time and pull out my infinite notebook, noting the approximate day from my clock, and then turning to my plans.
An obvious obligation of mine are the lessons, so I shall need to make a lesson plan for the next one soon. Additionally, after the required resting period between modifications, I’ll consult Kailin on the next steps and implement the next changes in my body.
Finally, I’ll be returning to Home rune studies since it's the only rune I’ve found in the spellbook with teleportation, and it would be foolish to rely solely on the charity of others to escape the Astral Plane.
—
Entry 25, Page 1384, Day 93?
I write this with great pain, mostly at the time/date. I have not been properly taking care of or even looking at the water clock on the surface of the meat planet. Note: Name the frozen meat planet.
So, it only registered that a day has passed and nothing else since all the water ran out. Similarly, my factory has fallen into slight disrepair due to the fact that I didn’t empty out the plates from their storage, and they piled up. As the plates over spilled it led to a pileup on the assembly line which led to them spilling all over the floor.
All my work making sure that the damned thing was self sufficient enough to not need constant supervision stabbed me in the back! I only needed to pick them up and dump them out of the factory, but it's still annoying that the mess was so large in the first place. Making sure that a small amount of neglect wouldn't shut the factory down, only allowed a huge amount of neglect to create a huge mess.
Although getting back to the date I estimate that it’s been around a month since my last entry, although I’m frankly guesstimating, especially since the page space on my notes suggests that it’s been months. But me spending months in what feels like a week is absolutely ridiculous, so I capped it at a month.
Thankfully enough, I’m spending more time downstairs than before, so I can properly notate the date now, useful or not. Additionally, I expanded the water clock by 7 so I could track an entire week rather than a day.
Although considering that this is a digression that itself spawned a digression, let me get back to my point. Since I spoke with Kailin last week, a horde of students piled in again. It was far easier to deal with them this time since it seems that most of the arrogant children were browbeaten into shutting up, but it was still a bit of a shock and interruption to my busy days of reading garbage faceslappers.
It wasn't a terrible interruption altogether, but it was one nonetheless. Even if it made me learn so many new fascinating pieces. Like the fact that what they are impressed by in my grand base chock full of weird magic and enchantments, the thing that resoundingly all of my visitors find most impressive is my cloth. Not even my complicated and near-impossible-to-sew clothes, but rather the cloth itself.
I think I remember seeing one jerk back when they accidentally touched one of the silk streamers attached to my throne. Which is frankly impossibly funny to me, it's like seeing someone ooh and aah over someone's breakfast cereal.
They kept mumbling nonsense about whatever creature the cloth came from being quite strong to have fur this soft. Which is a whole load of hokey since, for one, how does soft fur mean impressive to kill, and second, I didn’t kill for this. We figured out how to make artificial silk without harming the worms decades ago. And while some prefer to have the worms boil to death to get the authentic feel, I am perfectly happy with artificial silk.
Either way, the lesson itself was easy; I mostly just described and notated more runes along with bringing along effect chains. That being where you link two spells together to get a slightly altered effect. I don’t use them often, except for my sticky plate wand and the storage enchantments needed to make proper magic items that don’t run out of power. But they can be used to get some really, really weird effects without needing more runes.
They were quite excited at this, at least from what I can glean from listening to them chatter. They didn’t translate when they did so, but my deep stores of language meant that understanding them was fairly trivial, even if it was garbled.
Apparently, they had already figured out that sometimes other runes affected the output of other runes and used it earlier, but they didn’t know how effect chains worked or how to use them in more creative pursuits without incredibly exhaustive testing.
It’s not like they’re dumb; if there is an obvious phenomenon, they would note and react to it, but the knowledge of how and what the phenomenon was, or even did was lost, so they floundered in the dark.
It isn’t like my society hasn’t experienced it either. The burning of the Library of Alexandria led to a horrendous amount of knowledge being lost. Even to this day, historians scream in rage when they find ancient texts that reference incredibly important books that were burned to ashes. The Death of the Internet led to untold amounts of knowledge being lost when no one considered the need for a backup to the global network. Some of the most important information only survived through illegal copies and archaic paper records. The Nazi book burnings led to decades of research on sex, gender, and expression being lost. The truth is that it isn't strange at all that they've found themselves in a little dark age of enchantment knowledge, uncountable amounts of poetry, art, and research have been lost through chance and idiocy.
Although the current trajectory of the lessons lightly worries me simply due to the fact that eventually I will run out of runes to teach them and I can’t access many runes inside the book with my own perspective, lowering my gaze. And despite all my efforts and pestering the beings inside the book do not respond, even when I told them about their descendants! Which is frankly ridiculous considering what the book was concerned about when I talked to it.
Note:Consider showing the book to Kailin, in order to gain more runes in EXTREMELY controlled conditions.
Other than that, I am excited for the upgrades to my body coming up soon, I apparently need around a week and a day of recovery time in order for my body to adjust and continue.
Ending Entry.
—
Entry 26, Page 1402, Day 100.
This week was fairly uneventful; the lesson went well, I simply showed them some more runes, and then I did a Q&A on runework. Annoyingly, I found that they asked me questions that showed that they had spent far more time enchanting objects than I had. Thankfully enough, I had spent more time with a wide variety of runes, so my words were still insightful.
The only remarkable thing about the lesson was that the kid who tried to heckle me in the first lesson, Ujasiri, showed back up with a nasty scar. This time he was a lot more mature, and he asked some really piercing questions.
Who knew someone could change so much in just a week? Although I don't doubt the recovery changed some things. I didn’t ask, but I assume that with all this body-forging business, healing must be a breeze, so it couldn't have been long, but such a grave wound changes someone all the same.
This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.
Although the fact that they could heal it in the first place so quickly does make me wonder why they didn't get rid of the scar. Perhaps it is a cultural thing; I know that back in the day, scars were seen as attractive by warrior cultures. Since it proved that you had lived to fight another day, and considering the fact that someone received and healed a nasty scar within a week, I don’t doubt that there is considerable amounts of combat down there.
Other than that, I am pleased that I started working on the Home rune this week. Below is a copy of the notes.
—
Home Rune Teleportation Experiment 1.
Hypothesis:If the home rune is tied to a button, the plate attached to it will not return home automatically and continuously and instead only return home when pressed.
Instructions.
1. Carve a Button-Home enchantment into an hexagonal plate
2. Melt a similarly thick amount of iron dust onto the earlier hexagonal plate, creating a stamp
3. Melt off any blooms of metal on the edge of the stamp
4. Apply stamp to heated iron
5. Take the new hexagonal plate, mark it as it’s iteration.
6. Place paper onto the floor of experimentation room 2.1(Note:The 2 series of rooms has no blast shielding, take extra care).
7. Take that marked plate, and place it inside experimentation room 2.1
8. Then take that marked plate and press the button in the observation room 3.2.1 nearby room 2.1
9. Record results namely the location and effects of the Home rune
10. Repeat steps 4-9 2 more times
11. Note down and interpret results.
Results
Trial 1:I pressed the button and simply put nothing happened, it did not move to any place, the only notable difference being that I couldn’t move the plate or it would quickly move back into my hand. At this point, I was annoyed but already fairly certain what the answer to my experiment was, but I couldn’t just introduce new factors to the experiment without proving the original premise.
Trial 2:I pressed the button, and the second plate again stubbornly refused to move, although something strange that I noticed was that when I pushed against the active plate, it didn't phase through my finger or anything to stay in place my finger could just not remove it. My hypothesis is that the Home rune isn’t teleportation per se but extremely rapid movement to the designated home.
Trial 3: Much the same as before although when I tried to move the plate more forcefully with a steel rod, I found that the rod started to bend before I could even budge the plate.
Failure
Error:As was readily apparent in the first trial, it seems that the Home rune designates a place as home when it is first activated, and thus pressing the button for the first time when you plan for it to go to a certain place is utter foolishness. Which should have been readily apparent if I had ever wondered how in all that is above and below would the plate have known that it was supposed to go to the center of room 2.1 instead of where it was first made or where it had its first sandwich, because how the hell does a plate now where is home. Disregarding the earlier rant, I will first press the button in room 2.1, turn it off, and then activate it in room 3.2.1 in order for it to hopefully be transported to room 2.1, although this time I will leave the door open since otherwise the plate might smash through that very same door.
Home Rune Teleportation? Experiment 2.
Hypothesis:If the home rune is tied to a button, the plate attached to it will consider its home to be the area where the button is fully pressed, and rather than returning home automatically and continuously, it will instead only return home when the button is reactivated.
Instructions.
1. Take the stamp that was created earlier from below and place it inside room 2.1
2. Apply stamp to heated iron
3. Take the new hexagonal plate, mark it as it’s iteration.
4. Take that marked plate, and place it inside experimentation room 2.1
5. Press the button within the room
6. Then take that marked plate(Note:LEAVE THE DOOR OPEN), and press the button in the observation room 3.2.1 nearby room 2.1. Taking care to not have any body parts or items in the way of the plate.
7. Record results namely the location and effects of the Home rune
8. Repeat steps 2-7 2 more times
9. Note down and interpret results.
Results
Trial 1:I pressed the button, and when I did so, I was struck with utter fear as I saw for the briefest moment a grand breach bloom from all the walls of my base and a horrendous screech as presumably what was once that plate of metal tore through my entire base, rendering both itself and my base into rent and torn metal, before that base promptly reformed. I currently have the remains of the plate in my possession after it tore through three different heavily reinforced experimentation rooms, several of which housed advanced blast protection, before finally stopping on the larger outer wall. Fuck, I’ve seen my walls reform from damage so fast that they fling the option back to the sender. How the hell did the plate blast through an entire wing of those walls before it finally fucking stopped? Strangely enough, the plate did not go toward the activated location but instead went straight left from my perspective, which makes no fucking sense!
Trial 2:CANCELED, too dangerous to repeat the experiment without changing the parameters. Additionally, I need to clean up the mess that was made; thankfully enough, those rooms weren’t full, but the scraps floating in the air are quite annoying.
Failure
Error: Well, that was a fucking disaster. I have pretty much no idea why or what the fuck happened. I can’t exactly not do further experiments since this is so far the rune that has the best hope for me to be able to get out of here. But I’m frankly pretty shaken; my only idea was that somehow the plate being in the air instead of on the floor or in my hand caused something horrible to happen. Next time, the plate is firmly going to be on the floor, and I will be completely suited up in case it goes in a completely random direction again. Hopefully my armor will absorb the magic that's propelling the plate, and I’ll only get mangled instead of dead.
Home Rune Teleportation? Experiment 3.
Hypothesis:If the plate is first activated in a clearly marked spot, then the hexagonal plate will precisely arrive and stop at that marked spot. Instead of moving to an unknown location or not budging from its original spot.
Instructions.
1. Take the stamp that was created earlier from below and place it inside room 2.2(Note:2.1 got thoroughly destroyed)
2. Apply stamp to heated iron
3. Take the new hexagonal plate, mark it as it’s iteration.
4. Place paper onto the floor of experimentation room 2.1(Note:The 2 series of rooms has no blast shielding, take extra care).
5. Take that marked plate, and place it on the floor of experimentation room 2.1
6. Take a replicated pencil and then mark the area around the marked plate, to note where it was activated
7. Press the button within the markings
8. Then take that marked plate(Note:LEAVE THE DOOR OPEN), taking care not to smudge the pencil, and press the button in the observation room 3.2.1 nearby room 2.1. Taking care to not have any body parts or items in the way of the plate.
9. Record results namely the location and effects of the Home rune
10. Repeat steps 2-9 2 more times
11. Note down and interpret results.
Results
HRT E3
Arrived
Error
Trial 1
yes
no
Trial 2
yes
no
Trial 3
no
yes
Success
Error:On Trial 3, due to the pencil being smudged, the plate arrived off center. Otherwise, the experiment was a complete success; the plate arrived at near instantaneous speeds to the designated location, currently called “anchor points." It seems that this “teleportation” only works if the location is clearly designated. In order for this to be easier, the next usage should mark the intended location with more permanent markers, like indentations in metal. So that no smudging errors can lead to disastrous results like HRTE2. I still have no idea why that happened and frankly even I would be fine not knowing more about it, if it simply doesn't happen again.
Other than the main focus of the Home rune experiments, the body modifications are coming along nicely. I should have upgraded my stomach this week to make up for the vastly increased metabolism, but I haven't needed to eat a lick of food in what, at the very least, is a couple months, so Kailin and I decided that it would be safe to skip out on those modifications.
Instead, we’re replacing my bones with a helix structure that’s packed to the brim with marrow, which Kailin and I found while browsing the patents. It’s a good mix of sturdy and light, which is rare due to the relative peace of the Interstellar age. So there aren’t any combat-focused modifications open to the public, and many of the mods open to the public that had the required lightness were also delicate to the extreme.
Which is okay when you don’t really care about fighting, but considering that most of the ruins I delve into don’t exactly give their goods for free, I need some sturdiness.
Additionally, packed in with the bone modifications were a different bone pattern, and additional padding for my skull. We found the bone pattern in the patents, but the padding was Kailin's own invention. Apparently, one of the weird injuries those with superspeed get is a constant and horrific headache caused by your brain getting slammed into the back of your head through momentum.
It reminds me of that futile attempt to ban American football for its horrific danger five years ago. I make an amused shake of my head as I think that sometimes those above, despite their greatness, don’t quite understand those below. Especially when just making it safer rather than banning it would have been far more effective.
Regardless, Kailin apparently designed a fat-based padding that holds the brain in place around a decade back, that’s a bit better, although more magically expensive than what modern solutions offer.
I might shirk at using more Perfection magic for other uses, but the brain needs to be protected above all else, so I went through it. Thankfully enough, Kailin managed to budget the spell so that it didn’t dig into my core. And it’s quite invigorating to have the first modification that I can actually feel.
Now, I am quite literally lighter on my feet, I’m pretty sure that if there wasn't a planet below, I would simply float away with a stray astral breeze. And while the increased sturdiness is less apparent, I'm pretty sure if I punched a brick wall now, the brick would break before my fingers did.
Either way, I’m quite excited about the body mods and quite eagerly await next week!
Ending Entry.
—
He’s dead, the kid is dead.