Chapter 90: Rune Number Four, Ansuz

Joan made up his mind and first turned his spellbook to a blank page, where he neatly copied down the twenty-four runes, leaving ample space beneath each one to write his own understanding of its meaning.

The runes were the common root from which the vast majority of writing in the world had sprung. Behind those twenty-four seemingly simple signs lay boundless knowledge, and when joined together they could express every mystery in the universe. Joan had only just begun to touch this profound and immense discipline, still far from the realm of freely combining multiple runes. What mattered most at present was to grasp the meaning behind each one.

Lost in meditation, Joan studied the runes before him one by one, skipping over whatever he could not yet make sense of and jotting down any sudden inspiration. When his gaze fell upon the fourth rune, Ansuz, his eyes lit up. He realized he had found the rune that could be used to identify magical items.

According to Joan’s shallow understanding, the basic meaning of Ansuz was prophecy and revelation, symbolizing wisdom and reason. The magical nature contained within this rune was very similar to that of divination spells. Joan was certain that Ansuz could not only serve as the activating character for most divination spells, but might even directly evoke magic with the effect of prophecy and revelation. And identification happened to belong to the school of divination, its chief function being to expose the hidden mysteries of magical items.

On the basis of this analysis, Joan concluded that the fourth rune was the key element in unraveling magic. So he lifted his quill and drew the character upon the outer wall of the bulbous copper bottle, then focused his thoughts upon the rune and examined the potion through it.

He fixed his attention on the rune Ansuz engraved upon the bottle. In some indistinct way, he felt every letter that composed it begin to shine with magical brilliance. Beneath that silver-white radiance, emblematic of the school of divination, the copper bottle suddenly turned transparent as glass. The orange potion within stirred with faint ripples, and lines upon lines of elven script surfaced upon the liquid, flashing and vanishing in an instant, just as when Joan had once hung upside down from a tree and saw the blood from his right eye fall into the water of the Fountain of Wisdom, sending circles of ripples across its surface.

Joan tried to copy down the spell text that appeared within the potion bottle, but the formula was too intricate and too fleeting; he could not record it in time. Frowning, he raised his concentration to the limit, his pupils shrinking to pinpoints. The higher focus worked indeed. With the aid of the rune Ansuz, Joan’s gaze pierced through the copper bottle, and the incantations surfacing on the potion’s surface nearly solidified, giving him ample time to decipher them.

He scanned through it quickly, then relaxed his mind a little. The text on the water’s surface dispersed at once, only for new lines of script to emerge in its place. Joan immediately concentrated again, using the power of the fourth rune to pin the newly appeared formula in place so that he could read it at leisure. After that, no more text surfaced. The spell covering the water was tiny and densely packed; if copied into a spellbook, it would take up an entire page, which represented one spell level. The magic contained in this potion would require two pages to transcribe, making it unmistakably a second-level spell.

Joan’s extraordinary intelligence gave him a superhuman memory. He copied the spell glimpsed within the copper bottle into his spellbook in full, relying largely on rote imitation. He knew every word individually, yet once they were joined together, the whole became incomprehensible. After all, he was only a first-level mage who had just begun to study first-level spells. Failing to understand a second-level spell was perfectly normal. In any case, there was no need to worry overmuch. He would memorize it first, and once he advanced to third level and gained second-level spell slots, he could take the time to study it properly.

A mage who obtained a spell beyond his current casting ability was much like a student who got hold of a textbook from an upper grade: complete understanding was impossible, but total ignorance was unlikely as well. At the very least, one could still recognize the title and the subject, could one not? For example, the second-level spell Joan was copying at this moment contained many details he could not yet comprehend, but it was not difficult to identify its name, school, and basic function.

“Second-level evocation spell, Scorching Ray,” Joan murmured, his eyes bright with excitement.

Scorching Ray was a highly destructive second-level spell. When cast, it fired a concentrated beam of searing heat that could deal four units of fire damage to its target. As the caster’s level increased, the number of rays increased as well, up to a maximum of three scorching rays at once.

Since the magical potion in the copper bottle had been made using Scorching Ray, it was easy enough for Joan to understand why drinking it allowed one to breathe fire.

After putting away the so-called fire-breathing potion, Joan rested briefly and then used the fourth rune to identify the potion stored in the wooden bottle. The result showed that its effect was the exact opposite of the fire-breathing potion: it was specifically made to resist fire damage.

Following the same procedure as before, Joan extracted the second-level abjuration spell Resist Fire from the potion in the wooden bottle and copied it into his spellbook as a reserve, then corked the bottle and put away the fire-resistance potion.

Having identified two magical potions and, incidentally, copied two very practical second-level spells, Joan was quite satisfied with the day’s harvest. He stood up from his desk and stretched his aching limbs, only then noticing the darkness gathering outside the window. Before he knew it, the whole day had passed. Lost in his study of spells, he had forgotten lunch, which was no wonder, given the weakness in his limbs and the quickness of his pulse.

Joan went to the kitchen, cut himself a piece of bread, and made a rough meal of it with cold tea. Then he returned to his desk, raised a hand to cast Light and illuminate the candlesticks, and, with the magic orb casting its glow over the open notebook, decided to sort out his thoughts and list all the tasks he needed to complete before the start of the school term, arranging them by importance and urgency so that he could allocate his limited time, energy, and money more sensibly during his studies.

Unless he was copying magical formulae, Joan could never bring himself to use the expensive bottle of abyssal squid ink for ordinary writing. Instead, he opened a bottle of regular ink that cost only five copper coins, dipped his quill pen into it, and wrote the first item on his list: analyzing magical devices.

From today’s attempt, Joan had already gained some insight into the use of the fourth rune, Ansuz, and decided to continue focusing on this subject tomorrow. At present, his approach to the fourth rune took two forms: first, identifying unknown magical items; second, stripping away and recording the spell used to create the item so that he could study it. He no longer had any unidentified objects in hand, but there were still three magical items from which he could pursue the second approach and extract new spells for study: the belt of agility, the wizard’s hat, and the face-bearing shield.