John went to the next class. As everyone filled up the classroom.

People began to talk about their progress in memorizing all of the lines of logic.

"Dude, I was having dreams about those books! It was insane..."

"I had a nightmare... where there were a thousand more books to read! And I couldn't leave the classroom until I read them all..."

People laughed and joked.

Then the teacher walked in.

He was carrying a square board about 25 millimeters thick.

He was mumbling to himself.

He placed the square of material facing the classroom on the board.

"Alright. Last lesson was just the introduction. Now it is time to really get into the grit of things."

"When creating a formation. One must pay attention to the material as well as the runes. One is the form, the other is the function. It is similar to the concept of yin and yang. A crappy material will have bad Qi conduction."

"There are three grades we give materials. Mortal, Legendary, and Immortal."

"Mortal metals are things ordinary people can acquire. Think bronze, copper, gold, steel, tin, iron, nickel, aluminum, tungsten, lead, and the list goes on."

"These materials are generally common and while you can inscribe formations with them. They won't have a long lifespan. They also will have crappy specs. Worse processing speeds, worse everything."

"You then have legendary grade. This is the mythical metals. These are mythril, adamantium, etc. These are rarer. These metals tend to have supernatural abilities associated with them."

"You then have immortal grade. These are xylo, fotia, gi, metallo, and nerono."

"They are called immortal grade because they are made by cultivators. They are not found in the environment naturally."

Someone raised their hand.

"How do we make them?"

"Good question. We have those unimportant do such task. You must stress your spiritual roots and extract the element. If you have wood type spiritual roots. You can naturally produce xylo by condensing your Qi into a physical form."

John was a bit interested. When had he ever cared about damage to his spiritual roots? He could instantly repair them!

John raised his hand.

"What if you have space spiritual roots?"

The teacher frowned.

"If you try to condense Qi from your spiritual roots. It'll likely just combust into energy. Perhaps if you were a true immortal with a vast amount of Qi. You could then perhaps form a theoretical material with attributes related to space. But as far as I know, nobody in history has done this."

John frowned.

"Don't be discouraged! The Qi you have refined doesn't take on the element of your spiritual roots. You can still use Qi from your dao pillars to form spiritual stones. You just won't be able to make immortal grade materials. This isn't a job you would want either way."

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

"The material I present to the class was refined by a waste for us to use. It is immortal grade! Metallo. Made from metal element Qi, fresh from the spiritual roots!"

"Now that you are familiar with the form of things. It is time to discuss the function!"

"There are 52 'value' runes. These runes are used for declaring variables, objects, and arrays."

The teacher wrote on the board a list of characters.

'Aa, Bb, Cc, Dd, Ee, Ff, Gg, Hh, Ii, Jj, Kk, Ll, Mm, Nn, Oo, Pp, Qq, Rr, Ss, Tt, Uu, Vv, Ww, Xx, Yy, Zz'

John then realized something.

"Isn't that the alphabet?"

He was quite familiar with these 'runes'!

The language in this world was different and definitely wasn't english. But why was the value runes written in an eerily similar form as english?

"Value runes are used as placeholders and variables."

"Allow me to demonstrate."

He tapped the metallo board.

Qi was sent through it from his dao pillar.

It lit up like magic circles going off.

A screen appeared.

"This screen is called the console. As you can see, it is completely blank, despite all of the 'runic' library's logic being inscribed. We must tell it what to do."

The teacher went into the closet and brought out a tray of gold disk.

"You will be using mortal grade materials in future exercises."

"I want you to inscribe the entire 'runic library' into the blank material. Use your admin ring for this!"

Soon everyone was practicing. There were many failures. John failed his first attempt as well. The disk had to be thrown away.

It wasn't until his 10th attempt, that he inscribed all 12 million lines of logic perfectly.

The teacher looked at his disk.

"Perfect. Now you're going to need to run Qi through it. You can use Qi from your dao pillar. But the Qi must match the runes internal logic. In other words, your dao pillar needs to have the same library and be consistent with the operating system. We call this local and global environment."

"You need to have both local and global rules synchronize."

"Since you don't have a forbidden dao pillar yet. You will have to guide your Qi through the admin ring. It'll be converted into Qi that matches the rules."

John did as he was told and a console popped up as a screen in front of him.

"Good job!"

The teacher left and checked on the other students.

After a few hours, everyone had caught up to John.

"Now we will write the first program."

"First, I should explain some core concepts that the program pulls from the runic library."

"You have variables. These are values that can change. You have objects, these are variables that are an instance of a class. You have arrays, these are a collection of variables. You have functions, these are just chunks of logic that can be used repeatedly. You have known loops, these are functions that are done a known amount of times. You have unknown loops, these are functions that are repeated an unknown amount of times. You also just have an infinite loop, that is repeated forever. You have If statements that trigger a chunk of logic if a value meets the criteria. You have else statements that do the opposite of this. You also have and or not gates of variations of this."

A lot of the class was confused as this was the first time they were hearing this terminology.

But John wasn't confused at all.

"Isn't this similar to programming?"

He had done a bit of that in his life as a scientist!

"Alright, let us write our first program!"

"Besides the 52 value runes, we also have active runes."

He wrote some more characters on the board.

"Firstly, you have math runes. Some of these are:"

'+ is for addition'.

'- is for subtraction'.

'* is for multiplication'.

'** is for exponentiation'.

'/ is for division'.

'++ is for increment'.

'-- is for decrement'.

"Second, you have logic runes. These are:"

'= is equal to assigning this'.

'!= is equal to not this'.

'== is equal to equals this'.

'&& is equal to and'.

'{ and } are equal to parameters'.

'( and ) are equal to value testers'.

'; is equal to end of line'.

Lao then opened up the console of the metallo board.

He used Qi to write out on the screen as if he was carving runes into the air. He spoke to the class while doing this.

"You write the program into the console. Once you are finished, you compile it. The formation parameters will change, this does a few things. Firstly, it executes your program as well as gives it an output. It also shifts the foundation of the formation. Making it hard for others to understand what exactly was changed."

"Follow along with my movements."

Everyone began to copy the runes he was inscribing.

They then used Qi to compile the program.

As for the program they wrote?

var x = "Fellow daoist greets the world!";

log(x);

The output:

Fellow daoist greets the world!

"I did it!"

Everyone was excited...

John was trying very hard not to laugh at the excited looks everyone had.

He was looking forward to mastering formations.