Percy’s plan was multifaceted as he went through the index. Thinking back to everyday items on Remior, he made a list of runes and enchantments that he could bring back to upgrade everything.

  ‘Gathering runes… flow runes… these will be handy if we want to retain more ambient mana in the hive and settlement. They should also help with my artificial advancement,’ he thought.

  He would need the enchantments inside his core to fully automate his boosting art – among other functions – which meant replicating the Circulation pattern in his channels and pulling ambient mana into his body. Other than that, these runes would also allow him to fuel all sorts of enchantments passively.

  ‘Transmission runes… sound conversion runes… signal propagation runes… reception runes… communication enchantments…’

  These should allow him to replicate some of the functions of Kassorith’s spatial pin, though it would still take a space affinity to combine them with a storage device or enhance them to the point that they could transmit high-quality images in real time.

  That said, there was no doubt in Percy’s mind that they would be much better than the shoddy artifacts that Deimos and Jason had used to call each other in the past. If everything went well, communications on Remior would never be the same once these enchantments spread.

  ‘I wonder why Metatron is so open to selling me his runes…’

  Was the titan so confident that nobody in the universe would ever catch up to his magiscript prowess? Not even after they studied his own language? Or was he still hiding all the good stuff from Percy?

  Well, it didn’t matter. To a lesser spring with subpar runecrafting like Remior, even the basics were pretty much “the good stuff”.

  Shrugging his pointless concerns off, he continued browsing for things to buy. Considering how many credits he had earned, he had no intention of being thrifty this time. He wasn’t going to throw money away, of course, but he was more than happy to splurge on anything even remotely useful.

  Taking inspiration from things that he had seen in his travels, he thought back to the enchanted weapons that had been offered in the tournament’s prize pool on Thess’kala.

  ‘Hmmm… what were those enchantments called again? Amplification and… lightning resonance?’

  Going over the index, it didn’t take him long to find some information on the topic. Amplification and resonance runes had similar but distinct functions. The former could be used to supercharge pretty much every other enchantment.

  There were various other ways to do that, but there was a limit to what could be accomplished with each of them before one ran into diminishing returns. More importantly, all these approaches could be stacked for even better results.

  Many of them, Percy was using already. For instance, he could draw multiple copies of the same enchantment, linking them side by side, or overlaying them into intricate formations. This was the whole idea behind magiscript, unit cells and his Instantaneous Formation spell. Another method was simply to fine-tune the runecrafting language itself, to design runes that were more effective at certain tasks.

  Both were approaches where Metatron’s language excelled.

  Amplification runes were also rather common throughout the universe, though they worked in a slightly different way. If runecrafting was like whispering in the ears of the universe to gently convince it to behave in a certain manner, magiscript was the equivalent of having multiple people whispering at the same time, bullying the universe with sheer numbers. Having a potent runecrafting language was more like speaking clearly.

  Meanwhile, amplification runes allowed one to essentially yell their commands out instead of whispering.

  According to the material that Percy was reading, there was no point in going overboard with any of these approaches. Perhaps, Metatron could have further fine-tuned his language if he’d spent tens of thousands of years more, but it would have hardly made a difference.

  Percy had also experienced this, which was one of the reasons he hadn’t tried to fit even more runes into his Cloak, or why he’d never attempted to draw a formation with over three layers.

  Well, that, and the fact that his magical silk wasn’t thin enough for smaller runes, nor could he easily produce enough mana to fuel formations with so many layers. Even if he overcame those issues, the benefits would be small.

  By the same token, this explained why the demigods on Thess’kala hadn’t bothered to include more than three amplifications on the weapons. Not only would a fourth rune not help as much, but it would also take space that could otherwise be used to draw more copies of the enchantments, so it was ultimately a balancing act between various approaches.

  ‘That makes sense… I guess those people aren’t as stupid as I thought. But this is still useful knowledge for me, since I wasn’t using amplification runes before.’

  It would definitely be worth his time to upgrade all his equipment in the future. The difference wouldn’t be huge, but these would be some rather easy gains. At the very least, he most certainly wanted to include the runes in his cores during his artificial advancement.

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  Resonance runes, on the other hand, didn’t target other enchantments, but rather affinities. They worked by drawing out the latent potential of each mana type, making it even better at the things that it was already good for.

  It wasn’t anywhere close to the level of a blessing, but the effect was broader. For example, a fire resonance enchantment would make fire mana slightly hotter, but also brighter, and allow it to spread more easily. It would make earth mana heavier, firmer, and more durable, air mana sharper, softer, and faster, and so on…

  ‘Now, these, will be even more important to include in my artificial advancement!’ he realized, nearly causing Cassiel’s eyebrows to jump off the boy’s forehead.

  What better place to empower mana of a certain affinity than inside the corresponding core?

  After incorporating both runes into his entire arsenal, Percy estimated that he would grow about ten to twenty percent stronger. The benefit wasn’t huge, but his equipment was already phenomenal, and he was capable of comfortably fighting against people two to three grades higher – depending on whether he counted his Green beast core or not.

  Adding the runes onto his mental checklist, he kept browsing. He didn’t stop at simple runes, searching for interesting enchantments as well. Funnily enough, he didn’t know that many – other than self-repairs and structural integrity enchantments.

  His unit cells were mostly full of pseudo-enchantments, allowing him to tightly pack multiple distinct runes, but without really creating that many additional effects. It was quite inefficient, in fact.

  Finally, there was one other area where he wanted to focus.

  In the past, Percy had only bought one or two variants of each rune. After going over his affinities and intended applications, he’d selected the most suitable variants to master, never bothering with any others.

  It was understandable given his previous circumstances. He used to lack the required credits, time, or experience to spread himself too thin, so he’d focused on the best enchantments for his arsenal.

  However, this was the hallmark of a novice, not a true magiscript master. It wasn’t an accident that the Vault had hundreds – if not thousands – of variants of every single rune. They differed in all sorts of ways, from the mana types that they could be fuelled with, to the way they were drawn, the runes that they could more easily be paired with, and even the details of their intended effect.

  Runes that could only be fuelled by their creator’s mana – and out of a single affinity to boot – were more potent than those powered by multiple affinities, or any mage. The ones that accepted ambient mana were even weaker, but far more broadly applicable.

  The self-repairs on Percy’s equipment, for example, were perfect in battle, as they allowed him to regenerate and replicate his constructs rapidly. However, they couldn’t absorb ambient mana directly.

  Percy had found a way around that by converting ambient mana to his own through his boosting art and the soul affinity’s special properties, but he still had to be present for that to work.

  Meanwhile, the self-repairs in the Alchemists’ Guild were far more modest, but infinitely better at passively maintaining the buildings in the settlement for thousands of years, running purely on ambient mana and the dust in the air.

  The same was true when he compared his own cauldron with the general-purpose ones that could be used by anyone.

  Thankfully, there was a way for Percy to have his cake and eat it too. He simply had to buy a bunch of variants for each rune, and pick whichever was best at a given task.

  He still wasn’t going to get every single variant in the Vault – that would be overkill. Besides, he didn’t have nearly enough credits for that, nor the time to study them all. However, it was worth his time to identify four or five variants that covered the most important bases, broadening his options.

  Going through the index with a fine-tooth comb took hours, but Percy eventually felt happy with his selection. He’d picked around fifteen new enchantments, forty-three new runes, and over two hundred variants of both the new runes and those that he’d already mastered in the past.

  “Cube, how much do these cost?”

  “Evaluating request…”

  “Evaluation complete. The user has selected 238 items. Total cost: 7430 credits. Current balance: 37009.”

  Percy’s borrowed heart bled at the sound of that. In fact, he wouldn’t be surprised if his fellow clones and his main bodies had also felt something across space and time.

  Sure, he had tons of credits now, but this was still a huge sum to spend at once. Especially since he was also planning to buy three new spatial seals from Metatron. Spending another fifteen thousand credits on that was a lot, but he felt that it was an efficient use of his bonus rewards.

  Percy needed his seals to be multiples of two, so that he could combine all of them and maximize their capacity if necessary. This meant that he either had to buy one, three, or seven.

  One wasn’t enough, and he didn’t have credits to purchase seven. He could always just grab one and come back later for more, but buying them in bulk might save him two bonus rewards if the titan decided to charge him only once for the demonstration.

  ‘It’s fine. After this trip, I won’t need any new runes or storage space for a very long time,’ he consoled himself.

  “Do it, but don’t print them for me just yet,” he told the system. “Also, send me a message informing me of the purchase the next time I log in with a Red core, and another with an Orange core. And skip the warning – I don’t care.”

  “Choice confirmed. Deducting credits. New balance: 29579.”

  Hearing the reduced balance felt like a second stab in his chest, but there was no helping it. In any case, he’d done his job. The first part, at least. It would be up to the others to start absorbing the knowledge.

  Mastering even a single new rune used to take several days, but he was no longer the clueless teenager who had first visited the Vault by accident. By now, he was experienced enough to learn new enchantments several times faster, and this was without even bringing up his trait or increased mental prowess. Finally, there would be two of him working on this task for the next few months.

  He didn’t expect the other clones to read everything. Some of the more obscure variants, he’d only brought just in case he needed them in the future. He was going to bring many copies of the books back to Remior to refer to later, or share with others.

  However, the more knowledge he internalized, the more versatile he would grow as an enchanter and the more options he would have in his projects.

  ‘I still have a lot of credits left…’ he thought.

  It wasn’t like he got a kick out of spending it – quite the opposite – but he knew that it wouldn’t do him much good sitting in the Vault. He was going to keep his distance from the artificial world for as long as possible after he advanced, so it wouldn’t be a bad idea to browse the system for anything else that might be useful.

  ‘Let’s get the things I know I need first. I’ll decide what to do with the remaining credits and bonus rewards later.’

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