I didn’t sit there idly. I worked through it the only way that made sense to me.
Before I touched the scrolls again, I went back through what I already knew. Every time I had invoked Absolute. Every time the Right to Insight had answered without explanation. Every instance where Essence had responded before conscious intent fully formed. I wasn’t interested in how those moments had felt at the time. I was interested in how they had functioned.
So I revisited them deliberately, slowing them down in my mind and stripping them to their mechanics. When Absolute enforced an outcome, Essence never surged blindly. It arranged itself first, forming stable pathways before execution ever occurred. When Insight delivered information, it didn’t arrive as a flood. It came constrained, ordered, filtered to the limits of what I could process in that moment.
That meant structure had always been there.
I traced those internal movements carefully, comparing them against what I had learned from the scrolls. I followed the flow of Essence from entry to stabilization, watched how intent transitioned into instruction rather than raw force, and noted where everything locked into place. The alignment was immediate and slightly unsettling.
I hadn’t been bypassing rune systems.
I had been recreating them instinctively, without terminology, without formal boundaries. Structural foundations formed first. Operational flow followed naturally. And finally, something deeper anchored the whole construct into reality.
Conceptual binding.
Once I understood it that way, the pattern stopped feeling obscure. It became something I could repeat.
That was when I reached for the scrolls again.
This time, I didn’t read them as instructions meant to teach me something new. I read them as confirmation of something I had already been doing blind. I went through them from the beginning, slower than before, committing each framework to memory until I could reconstruct it without reference. Structural runes came first, the simplest category, but also the most unforgiving if misunderstood.
I didn’t memorize them as symbols on parchment. I memorized them as relationships. Where Essence entered a configuration. How it circulated. Where pressure built and how it was dispersed. What failed first when tolerances were exceeded, and what endured regardless of strain.
Then I moved on to operational runes.
These demanded more focus. Activation conditions. Sequencing delays. Conversion and modulation matrices. These runes didn’t simply respond to Essence, they interpreted it. A minor misalignment didn’t just break the function. It caused backlash, feedback loops, sometimes outright collapse. I traced those pathways again and again until I could sense where instability would form before it ever manifested.
Only after that did I approach the conceptual runes.
I took my time here.
These weren’t shapes so much as declarations, assertions written into reality that only held if backed by sufficient Essence and stabilized by soul energy. They were dangerous not because they were violent, but because within their defined scope, they were absolute.
When everything was finally locked into memory, I stopped reading.
It was time to test.
I cleared the table with a thought and raised my hand, palm upward, working directly in the air above it. Essence flowed out smoothly, violet in hue, responding immediately as I shaped it. Circular runes formed first, translucent rings layered one over another, each inscribed with shifting geometric patterns. Triangles interlocked with arcs. Lines curved back into themselves, forming closed systems that hovered inches above my skin.
These were structural runes.
I formed several variations, each responsible for a different aspect of stability. One regulated flow. Another prevented leakage. A third distributed pressure evenly across the construct. A final anchoring rune tied the entire configuration together. I held them steady, watching how the violet Essence settled into clean circulation, no turbulence, no resistance.
Once the foundation held, I added operational runes.
New symbols unfolded between the existing rings, more intricate, more dynamic. Activation sequences spiraled inward. Amplification paths branched outward before looping back into the system. Conversion matrices shifted rhythmically, responding to my will. I adjusted their timing until the transitions smoothed out, then fed a controlled pulse of Essence into the construct.
The response was immediate and clean.
Essence entered, circulated, transformed, and returned without loss.
Satisfied, I dismantled it and began again.
This time, I altered the function.
I reshaped the runes in my palm, the violet constructs reassembling into a wider lattice. Structural containment expanded. Operational layers shifted toward dispersion and propagation. When I introduced the conceptual layer, the intent was clear and narrow.
Ice and its spread.
I bound the construct with a thin thread of soul energy and released a pulse.
Cold flowed outward instantly, crystalline patterns racing across the air above my palm before extending beyond it, frost forming in delicate branching lines that spread until I cut the flow. The system held perfectly, no backlash, no instability.
I released it and let the runes dissolve.
By the third attempt, I no longer needed to consciously visualize every symbol. My will shaped Essence directly into stable configurations, familiarity replacing deliberate effort.
That was when I stopped.
This wasn’t something that demanded time so much as understanding, and I had more than enough Psynapse to support it. Runes weren’t foreign to me. They never had been. My domain, my laws, even the way I commanded Essence had always followed these same principles.
The only difference now was that I could see them, name them, and reproduce them deliberately.
And so I sat down and turned my focus to the teleportation anchors, working directly from the knowledge I had absorbed from the memory crystals. The patterns were still fresh in my mind.
I intended to dismantle them.
I began breaking the structure down piece by piece, tracing every connection to its smallest component, isolating each interaction until nothing remained hidden behind complexity. The anchors relied on elegance and concealment, but elegance always came with tradeoffs. Given a few uninterrupted hours, I was confident I could reduce the entire construct to its fundamental logic and rebuild it on my own terms.
Deathmist wouldn’t be a limitation.
The Star of Origin within my Dawn Core stirred faintly as I considered it, a reservoir deep enough to supply whatever was needed.
I also felt the familiar pressure of growth hovering just out of reach, the Generator talent was also close to level up and I was looking forward to the upgrade.