Chapter 108 — Runes and Formulas

Drawing magic circles and inscribing runes is work of a highly technical nature. As a product unique to this world, it is not, as many imagine, mere "drawing"—though copying an original design faithfully is indeed simple enough, becoming a rune master requires far more than learning to trace.

If all one had to do was copy a magic circle from a diagram, then any ordinary person could do it; even a commoner utterly insensitive to magic could produce a magic circle, once told how to draw it and with what. That is simple "production and reproduction" work.

But beyond such production and reproduction, a rune master must also possess the capacity to create and to improvise: they must help mages craft magic implements, or inscribe magic circles upon all manner of complex magic-conducting materials—and since every magic implement and every conducting material has its own distinct properties, and their combinations admit of countless variations, this dooms them to never work strictly from the diagrams in books. They must, according to the carrier material and the purpose of the circle, alter the arrangement of the runes upon it, or fine-tune the position and connection of each individual rune.

In short, what a rune master produces is a "blueprint"; every drawing is the drawing of an original master copy, an act of creation.

And this process necessarily calls for the ability to sense magic, and the ability to "attune" runes.

The former allows one to determine, while drafting a blueprint, whether each rune will function properly, and to sense whether there exists interference between runes beyond the threshold; the latter is the skill of injecting one's own magic into the runes for practical testing. Though a rune master often lacks the power to drive an entire magic circle, testing a localized group of runes remains within their reach.

To manage both, one must at minimum be a first-rank formal mage; a mage apprentice could never do it, for an apprentice simply does not possess the ability to sense and manipulate multiple runes at once, nor can their magic be precisely controlled and projected outward. If they could—well, then they would have graduated.

And Jennie's file stated plainly that she was a mage apprentice.

This time Jennie heard Gao Song's question clearly, yet she had no idea how to answer. After hesitating and weighing the matter for a long while, she chose to lower her head and speak in a small, stammering voice: "It's luck, my lord."

"Luck?" Gao Yang raised an eyebrow, his tone dismissive.

"Yes, luck," Jennie said, still with her head down. "My intuition is very good—I can always find the correct arrangement of runes. You must know, my lord, that rune arrangement follows certain rules; with enough experience, plus enough intuition, one can accurately arrange those..."

"If it were truly luck, you would have died in an accident long before accumulating enough experience," Gao Yang cut her off. "I may be a knight, but I understand the basic principles of magic. In a magic circle, the position and connection of every rune are quite strict. Unless you have already grasped the laws governing every rune in the world and all their combinations, you could never place each of them correctly. Rune arrangement does follow rules, yes, but I have never heard of anyone who has worked out the arrangement laws of all runes—and it is precisely because humanity cannot analyze every rune combination that the two abilities of 'sensing' and 'attuning' are needed."

Gao Yang paused, fixing his eyes on the silver-haired girl before him. "Lift your head and tell me the truth. Without the ability to sense and attune, how do you know where each rune ought to go, and what effect each rune will produce?"

Perhaps Gao Song's tone was too severe, for Jennie could not help but tremble, and dared even less to speak. Seeing this, Hedy recalled the roles Gao Yang had instructed her to play—one stern, one gentle—and so she spoke in a soft voice: "There is no need to be nervous. This is not the capital, with its rigid rules, nor the dull, hidebound Arcane Council. We welcome and encourage anything that can contribute to building this territory—even if it runs against convention, that is no matter."

Jennie finally raised her head and looked toward Gao Song, who gave a grave nod. "I can assure you that creative ideas are protected here—because I am the law in this land."

"It is not really a creative idea," said the silver-haired girl from the capital, a fourth-rank rune master who had begun as an apprentice. She finally relented, speaking softly, then rose and fetched a very thick book from beside her bed. "It is logic and calculation."

Gao Yang laid a hand on the book, but still asked: "May I look?"

"Of course, my lord."

Gao Yang opened the large, evidently quite old book and found it was in fact a handwritten notebook. Its yellowed, curled pages were filled with runes, numbers, formulas, and diagrams; some strokes had grown faint from wear. Flipping through at random, he discovered that the handwriting throughout was not uniform at all: at least four distinct hands appeared on the pages, and they followed one another in sequence from front to back. Clearly the notebook had passed through no fewer than four owners, each of whom had left records of their own upon it.

The book seemed to confirm the vague guess Gao Yang had been forming. He flipped through the pages almost in a fever of excitement, so that Jennie, sitting across from him, began to worry that this precious notebook might be damaged by such rough handling. And in that rapid flipping, Gao Song's gaze was suddenly caught by a loose sheet tucked into the latter part of the notebook.

The sheet had been pasted between the pages, apparently as an additional annotation or summary, and what was written on it made Gao Yang's breath catch:

The ratio of the energy level of all secondary runes to that of the next higher rank of rune is constant at one to three; secondary runes connected in succession advance one rank for every three, and are regarded as a single complete higher-rank rune;

The number of connections between any rune and runes of the same rank, same position, but different affinity shall not exceed eight; the number of connections with runes of the same rank, same position, and same affinity shall not exceed four;

Any rune forms a "knot" from its starting character to its ending character; the connecting fields that may be filled within each knot-rune must be an even number; every two connecting fields count as one "pair"; let the number of pairs in that field be, then the energy level produced by each knot-rune is (+1) squared;

Within a region of magic interference, two rune-knots of identical structure that are adjacent are defined as an "interference knot"; the total interference value produced within the region increases sharply with the number of interference knots. .35, with the number of interference knots being n, *n3. (Note: avoiding the adjacency of rune-knots of identical structure as far as possible can greatly reduce the generation of interference knots.)

For magic-conducting materials, copper is taken as the "zero" grade; those weaker than copper are regarded as negative, those superior to or equal to copper as positive. On a positive magic-conducting material, the theoretical interference value that rune connections can withstand is set as, the number of rune-knots set as, the number of rune attributes set as, and the interference value produced by interference knots as the constant t, +*) *t, .66...

Under all circumstances, it must be ensured that the actual interference value m is less than or equal to the theoretical interference value...

In composite magic circles, the formula for calculating the "self-interference" produced within a rune-knot is...

In composite magic circles, the optimal arrangement of each rune should follow...

And there were more records after that.