Sam looked at the firestarter and entered all the material information as well as the estimated power output into his database, then he started to attack the enchantment with his Words of Understanding skill.

He decrypted the first enchantment on the iron striker by just pushing all his mana to cover the entire striker. Sam realized later that this technique drastically sapped his mana pool, because he didn’t have any other words or context to help decrypt the original language. He focused on what he believed the enchantment could do, which was “create fire.”

The translated enchantment turned out to simply read “start.” His original guess of “create fire” was so far off from “start,” he theorized that it caused a higher rate of drain on his mana pool.

Sam rested and then focused on the “flint” iron’s enchantment, but he wanted to keep trying different methods. According to Joan, the Decks could make anything possible, but it would require a lot of trial and error.

“O.K. Kelly, this time I’m going to direct my mana through the lines of the runes and words only, and I know this part of the enchantment must have something to do with fire, explosion, or heat.” Sam thought as he tried to decrypt the true meaning of the enchantment.

His gut told him he was on the right track, and if he could just get the mana to push through every line of the enchantment… “Success! its true meaning is ‘Fire” he crowed to himself. “This technique is much quicker, and it only took about 10% of the mana as my original technique.”

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Sam was able to decrypt the enchantment as fast as he could mana-trace it. He believed it helped that he had already decrypted the true meaning for “start,” which he figured must have been developed by the same crafter who created the fire starter.

Next Sam recorded exactly the original enchantment for each of the words into his Excel database, and in the next cell over, the true meaning of the words. He believed the unrefined hunk of iron was able to withstand repeated use of the mana enchantment, but because it was such a poor conductor, it limited both the amount and flow of mana that could move through it, and as a result it was only a tiny flame instead of a fireball. “I could have made this simple enchantment with my own Words of Power skills, but….baby steps.” Sam sighed to himself.

Next, Sam pulled out the space ring, pushed his words of understanding, and 12 hours and 20 breaks later, he had the following true meaning, which turned out to be similar to computer language code that programmers used.

Now that he could read it, he had to understand it.

// size[] initial size array including

// W capacity of ring

Name[sam] current bond holder

static int Maximum size(int mana[], int n,

// items of size, maximum vector range / sort ‘I’ to retrieve

[channel size (M) mana-infused silver)/channel path*mana volume of (n)

Vector val = new Vector();

Vector wt = new Vector();

The code continued on for hundreds of lines.