The next day arrived without the news of what happened on the wild side of Dragos. Lana was with Primus still shaking from what happened to her.
I was in the chamber assigned to me, a bare space with nothing in it but a stone table. The celebration from the night before had finally burned itself out, leaving the rest of Dragos quiet, its people resting or recovering in their own ways. I had already sent my summons back to the core.
A low stone table stood in front of me.
Four memory crystals rested at the center of the table, each faintly luminous, their surfaces etched with thin, precise runes. Beside them lay a stack of scrolls, old but carefully preserved, their bindings marked with demon insignia.
Steve had handed me the crystals after finishing his quest. Primus, on the other hand, still hadn’t received his.
That bothered me.
He was already sitting at level 299, close enough to feel deliberate. I couldn’t help but wonder what the System was waiting for. Was it planning something? Was this hesitation connected to the fact that I had ignored its suggestion and killed the Eternal anyway? Or was it something else entirely?
The thought lingered longer than I liked.
Did the System have hard rules governing quests, or could it simply decide to withhold one indefinitely? Could it stall someone’s progression not by force, but by omission?
I exhaled slowly and let my thoughts calm down.
Speculation wouldn’t help right now.
I reached for the first crystal and let a controlled thread of my Essence seep into it.
The crystal shattered instantly.
There was no flash. No sound.
Just impact.
Information slammed into my consciousness in a raw, unfiltered surge, images and structures overlaying one another until my Psynapse adjusted and began sorting. I leaned back slightly, letting the flood pass through me instead of resisting it.
Anchors.
Not just their existence, but their architecture.
I saw how they were embedded, not merely attached to flesh, but woven into it, layered between muscle fibers, threaded alongside Essence channels without disrupting natural flow. The placement was deliberate, exploiting biological redundancies, hiding beneath patterns the body already expected.
Deathmist was the key.
It didn’t suppress fluctuations outright. It drowned them.
I understood then why normal detection methods failed. Deathmist didn’t conceal the anchor by masking it. It normalized it, smoothed the surrounding Essence so thoroughly that deviations vanished into the background. Like hiding a scream inside a storm.
The anchor wasn’t foreign.
It was assimilated.
I reached for the second crystal.
Space and runes.
This one was more structured, less violent in its transfer, but no less complex. Spatial runes weren’t symbols of movement alone. They were constraints. Definitions. Instructions that told space what it was allowed to do in a given context.
Fold here. Lock there. Ignore distance under specific conditions.
I saw how anchors bypassed conventional spatial resistance, not by overpowering it, but by redefining local rules for a fraction of a second. Not enough to destabilize the body. Just enough to allow passage.
Elegant and dangerous at the same time.
The third crystal focused on structure and materials.
Runic alloys. Essence-reactive materials. Bone-integrated materials. The crystal walked me through failures as much as successes, showing what cracked under strain, what corroded under prolonged exposure, what resonated destructively when paired with incompatible laws.
I noted everything.
By the time I absorbed the fourth crystal, my head was already heavy.
Deathmist again.
But this time, integration.
Not just with flesh, but with runes themselves.
Deathmist wasn’t written into runes as a symbol. It was embedded as a condition. A persistent environmental modifier that dampened external observation, distorted causal tracing, and interfered with predictive perception.
That was why anchors survived scrutiny.
They didn’t resist detection.
They invalidated the premise of detection.
When the crystal finally crumbled to dust in my palm, I sat still for several breaths, letting the knowledge settle, letting my Essence redistribute evenly.
"So that’s how they did it."
Next, I turned my attention to the scrolls given to me by the Demon rune master.
The first set detailed foundational rune theory.
Runes, according to Dragos classification, fell into three broad categories.
Structural runes were the most basic. They defined form, stability, containment, and flow. Individually, they were simple, almost crude, but they were everywhere. Every artifact, every array, every defensive construct relied on them. They were the syntax of runic language.
Without structure, nothing held.
The second category was operational runes.
These were more complex, modular, capable of variation. Activation, amplification, conversion, sequencing. They told Essence what to do once it was contained. These runes could be chained, layered, conditional. This was where craftsmanship began to matter, where intent and precision separated functional artifacts from exceptional ones.
Operational runes were flexible. And dangerous.
The final category was conceptual runes.
These were rare.
They didn’t describe actions. They described meaning.
Identity. Termination. Authority. Destruction. Preservation.
Conceptual runes interacted directly with laws, not by enforcing them, but by providing a framework for them to manifest through an artifact or array. They were unstable unless supported by both structural and operational layers, and even then, they demanded soul energy to sustain.
This was where rune masters earned their reputation.
This was where failure killed the creator.
As I moved through the scrolls, comparisons formed naturally.
Runes weren’t magic circles or mystical symbols.
They were code.
Languages written into reality itself, compiled through Essence, executed through will and soul. Structural runes were syntax. Operational runes were functions. Conceptual runes were permissions.
And laws were the system kernel.
I leaned back slightly and exhaled, letting the tension drain from my shoulders. Instead of reaching for the next scroll, I turned inward.
I went through my memories of every moment I had come into contact with runes, especially within my own domain. Even before I had fully comprehended Absolute, before the Right to Insight had taken shape as a formal authority, the same patterns had always been there. Runes. Not abstract symbols, but structured instructions responding to intent.
When I activated Absolute, when Insight unfolded and delivered answers without explanation, it wasn’t raw power acting alone. It was runic logic executing beneath the surface, translating the world for me.
I began isolating those impressions one by one, committing them carefully to memory. Each pattern, each response, each structural echo. Then I cross-checked them against the classifications in the scrolls, mapping what I had instinctively used onto formal rune types.
Structural foundations I had never consciously written.
Operational sequences I had triggered without knowing their names.
And, more troubling, traces of conceptual runes that had formed on their own, answering authority rather than design.