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The group sat comfortably and relaxed around a small campfire, over which wolf meat was roasting on several skewers. Linob, as always a little apart, was tending to his sword, sharpening and oiling it, while he kept casting attentive glances in the direction of the entrance to the cave and the stairs leading down.
"Patris, I think your meat is burning right now." Jen chuckled, and Dani paused briefly in one of her tales of a slime dungeon with various properties.
The warrior being addressed, who was twirling his new shield in his hands as if it were his precious child, suddenly jumped up and quickly grabbed the roasting meat, cursing, to save what could be saved.
"DANI! Couldn't you have paid attention?" He grumbled in an acted indignant tone and threw his girlfriend a pout while he cut away the burnt parts with a sharp knife only to immediately bite into the rest like a barbarian.
Judging by the ranger's sigh, she was at a loss for words about her companion's pranks and shenanigans and just shook her head, more annoyed at being interrupted than at his childish antics.
"Well, anyway... Where was I?" She tried to pick up the thread of conversation again. "Ah, right. Those green slimes were particularly nasty, and I swear the dungeon had a perverted streak! The acid contained in the green slimes ate through everything organic, EXCEPT skin and hair! And before we knew it, we were standing in the remains of the slimes we had just killed, and our own clothes that had melted away into puddles on the floor! Naked, with 3 men and two women. And I swear to you, we could hear a low laugh as we all turned away from each other in shame and cursed!..."
The corners of Avan's own mouth twitched slightly upward for a brief moment as he nibbled on his own skewer and mentally tuned out the others' conversations.
They had used the break to rest and eat, and he also suspected that it would probably be night-time outside now, but was unsure due to the lack of sunlight. His own sphere of influence had become more and more contaminated, and it reached just 100 meters upwards, while it did not reach 15 meters down into the dungeon, so much did the dungeon influence overlap his own in the meantime, the deeper the group came.
The communal campfire and shared meal of dead red wolves had encouraged the group to talk more about themselves, while Avan spun some half-truths into his past, which again seemed to be enough.
Jen, on the other hand, had kept casting sidelong glances at Linob, her guard, as she told the group where she had come from and what she had done before, almost as if she had to get approval for what she was allowed to say. This peculiarity was noticed by everyone, but only left Avan with the feeling that there was more to her story than she was admitting. Similar to himself, peppered with half-truths to appear as authentic as possible.
Jen said she was the daughter of rich merchants, but had always been less interested in learning the other women's arts, such as sewing, embroidery, dancing, manners, and so on. Instead, much to her mother's chagrin, while her father had simply found it amusing, she wanted to learn to ride and fight. Everyday home magic or magic only for defence had not been enough for her, and so in the end she had at least been able to convince her family to learn the art of healing magic from a priest teacher of the holy mother.
Healing of this kind, in contrast to the druids who used nature magic, for example, she explained, was based on the belief in a corresponding deity who had dedicated himself to healing.
A god of war, or of thieves, could not provide healing, no matter how much he was worshipped.
And when she was finally old enough, and before her family thought of silly ideas like getting married, she had begged and pleaded to wander the kingdom of Haipu as an adventurer for some time.
At first her family had vehemently refused and she had even been grounded for it, but some incident with a rival merchant family had finally changed her mother's mind, and Jen had been assigned the elite guard Linob. Under the condition of always being near her guard and staying only in the kingdom of Haipu, she was finally allowed out of the city with many protective magic rings and necklaces.
Meanwhile, the lives of Dani and Patris were relatively normal. The young warrior's family owned a store in the capital, and when his family tried to persuade him, yet again, to finally take over part of the store as the oldest of the siblings, he had stormed out of the house and signed up as an adventurer.
At the time, however, there were not many newcomers, and so he had first fought alone in the dungeon tower of Haipu, which proved to be very difficult as a tank without much damage.
In one of these tricky situations, Dani, who had also been registered as a new adventurer just two days before him, had helped him, and so the two had found each other and found common ground around the campfire.
The three of them had then, upon Jen's registration a few weeks later, found each other in the guild, and had undertaken some missions such as killing rats in cellars, until they longed for more in the surrounding countryside and had gone off.
And so, at some point, the three of them had found Aven in Tria, and were now sitting together at the end of the second level of the naturally grown dungeon, while they all ate red wolf meat from the dead alpha behind them in the room.
Apparently, the pack of the other alpha, which they had encountered outside, had found no place here, since only one alpha could be the floor boss, and thus cast out the other alpha along with the pack.
And while the other three attended to their equipment, telling stories of their adventures and laughing, Avan listened with only one ear, thinking about runes and their nature while nibbling on his own roast meat.
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He had not yet had time to try out other ideas for creating new rune formations, except for the flame ray, which he had been able to use outstandingly well here with the wolves.
A glance at his other active spells, however, following an intuition, left Avan with even more questions than answers.
His "Akkalon" spells, which occupied three of his active spell slots, did not appear to have any rune structures, at least not as far as Avan could tell. His new skill [Origin of Runes] was supposed to show him everything, but seeing these spells completely without anything made him wonder.
According to Jen's and the others' explanations, every spell was actually built up by such formations, even if no one had yet recognized the runes themselves with the clarity that Avan could.
So how his main ability could have no visible runes left him speechless, and he tried to find an answer to this riddle, but so far he just couldn't think of it.
Maybe because it were... Dungeon spells? Mana formed with will? But that would mean that runes are only a cornerstone, a kind of crutch to direct mana and give it a fixed shape and goals.
My Akkalon's forms are already developed after my debacle with the god of death, which suggests that I myself can develop these dungeon skills and reshape them according to my ideas. As with the runes also...
Can I use my mana so simply... to impose a new will to do something else?
With a thoughtful chewing on both his lips, and a pensive grimace that came mainly from moving his mouth from left to right and back again, engrossed in thought, he tried to impose a new will on part of his dungeon mana in an invisible and not so highly concentrated form.
Small threads of mana coalesced over the campfire, and Avan tried to let these bundled threads flow into the fire and amplify the flames.
All the mana did, however, was fly into the flames and deeper, through the charcoal and logs, into the ground.
He could still feel his mana, despite his weakened aura, but it didn't seem so easy to do what he wanted.
Not at all disturbed or upset by the first failed attempt, he sat there, took another bite of the last of the roast meat, and drank a sip of the steaming tea that this time Dani had prepared with her forest herbs.
In a few minutes, and with different angles, attempts and approaches, Avan went through more possibilities, but always came to the same conclusion; he could not simply give mana a new destination without using runes.
What he could do, however, was turn his mana into celestial mana and solidify it into his forms, or access his dungeon inventory or celestial storage, which also seemed to work without any runes.
His golden-silver mana simply flowed into one place and formed the familiar sphere of pure celestial mana, while the same phenomenon occurred when he crafted familiar materials he had collected and absorbed on his journey so far.
His mana, once it affected dungeon skills, simply flowed into the construct, creating it.
With a sigh, and certainly twenty minutes later, he looked at his comrades and glanced over with amusement at the snoring warrior who was drooling on the ranger's shoulders, much to her chagrin, even though she didn't seem to want to wake him up.
Jen herself continued to whisper with Dani and was chuckling when Avan looked over at them, earning a friendly nod with a smile from the young Ranger when she sensed his gaze and looked over at him for just a moment.
Okay, I guess I didn't miss much. Back to the more important topic...
He looked at the image of the fire ray forming in his mind's eye with the massive runes and sheer number as he tried to figure out what he could do about it with only the heat and repel rune in his repertoire.
Do I know any other runes? I still have the runes carved in wood in the inventory, but do not know what they do....
Curious to see if he could get more out of the completely unfamiliar runes he'd been carrying around for what felt like ages, he reached into his Wyrm backpack and summoned the pile of 8 stones, each carved with a rune.
Leaving the backpack to his left again, he looked at the small runes in front of him, which a normal person could actually only recognize as such when looking very closely. Each of the stones was about the size of his thumb and he held 8 of them in his open palm in front of him while he stared at them.
"...Does he meditate on stones?" He heard the giggles and whispers from Jen as the two women looked over and tried to figure out exactly what he was doing with the stones in his hand and his eyes closed.
In Avan's mind, unlike his first attempt with the spark constellation, the runes slowly appeared and took shape.
The runes for repulsion and heat were now stored as if in a dictionary, while these 8 new runes just hung bizarrely in the void of his mind and had no designation until he figured out what they did.
Avan curiously pulled the first of the runes closer to him and the others briefly to the side in the background, while he simply let mana flow into the rune again according to his first intuition. The small beam of imaginary mana flowed into it, leaving behind a blue glowing construct, but that was all; it glowed blue.
He sighed again, and turned the rune around to look at the three-dimensional thing more closely, and perhaps find out if he had to infuse mana elsewhere, but found nothing.
The other 7 runes showed exactly the same reaction, and just glowed in this beautiful blue pulsating supernatural light.
What am I doing wrong? The heat rune was glowing orange and red.... What am I missing? He thought about it and put the 8 rune stones back in his backpack to put them back in his Celestial storage.
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