Already, he could feel his Vitality starting to fix the issue, so Axl took a break to drink more water and eat, hoping the extra nutrients would speed the recovery process. It would be less than ideal to draw out the glyphs with his left hand, but his body seemed to have less of a difference between the two hands than back in his human one, especially after he got his Rare class. Maybe slowly becoming ambidextrous was another hidden bonus of a Balanced Path.
Regardless, he got right back to his practice, starting over with the water and ice spells, making sure he could cast each one twice with his left hand before trying the fire one again. Even if that spell was much simpler, it was still less forgiving of mistakes, so he buckled down and forced the entirety of his attention and willpower on the casting.
He barely made it, and a ball of fire charged from his outstretched finger and onto the wall, the small explosion creating a jagged dent in the rock and lightly shaking the ground. Axl was relieved when he got a notification
>>Technical Art unlocked: Glyphistry
>>Use of mental faculties to perform Mana-based glyphic manipulation.
He brought up his Status sheet, seeing a new section just below his skills.
Technical Arts: Glyphistry: Glyphic Spellcasting
They were in a separate section than Skills, which made sense, since it felt inherently different than using [Mana Shroud] or [Mind-Soul Bulwark]. It was also interesting that the system described it not as using glyphs to control Mana into having an effect, but using Mana to control the glyphs.
The description also confirmed that using these glyphs was a very mentally-intensive process, which is certainly how it felt when casting these spells.
The first step of this done, Axl was about to call Moxlin out of her hole, but decided to first look into his book for a while. He didn't want to do so when starting out, not wanting to get distracted by two competing sets of instructions, but now that he seemed to have at least some idea what the 256 basic glyphs were like and some examples of how they were used, it felt worth looking into.
Immediately, the very first page was much more legible, clearly a simple spell meant to get a neophyte started, three of the now familiar runes in a line to produce a faint source of light. It was strange, there were no words in the text, only glyphs, but somehow, he managed by knowing the glyphs and seeing them in a line what the spell's effect would be, as if the tome downloaded the information straight to his brain.
He probed the spell a bit more, hoping it would give him some tips on how to better draw out the glyphs and such, but no such luck, so he moved on. Indeed, a massive chunk of the subsequent entries were a variety of exercises to safely and carefully practice dealing with misdrawn runes of various kinds, listing spells specifically made to counter this in increasing complexity.
Axl scoffed aloud. It was like the writers of these books expected you to cast three different spells before casting the spell they really want to cast. How was this ever supposed to work in battle?
Disappointed with the spellcasting section, Axl flipped to the start of the sections relevant to talisman production, array inscription, empowerment, and many others, scanning through the first few spells to see which struck his fancy the most. It was as Moxlin had said, it would make sense to focus on one family of these to get proficient at, since focusing on even just two would be insane, given that spellcasting was by far the one with the simplest glyphic patterns. The first one in the array inscription section, for example, had a dizzying sixty-four interlinked glyphs.
He left one family of glyphic constructs for last, just to get him from committing before scanning all options: alchemy. And the very first recipe being for a healing potion felt like fate telling him this was the right choice.
Axl wasn’t even discouraged as he scanned through the long list of glyphs, the production requiring a spell for producing a certain kind of flame, an arrayed bowl to mix the ingredients, and preparation of ingredients with talismans. In other words, it seemed to have pieces of every other facet of Glyphistry. The heavenly art indeed.
But before getting started, he called back Moxlin and told her about his tentative decision.
"Hmmm," she started. "It's not actually a bad idea. I mean, it absolutely is a terrible idea, a genuinely unhinged way to start your literal first day with glyphistry. But it's actually more likely to get you the proficiency you need before our deadline. The more complex the school of the art involved, the more proficiency steps there are to each grade, so it might actually be more realistic to get two steps in alchemy than in spellcasting."
"Oh? It should be easier, then?"
"Not even a little bit, just less you need to prove. The fewer proficiency steps in spellcasting might require you to learn 30 spells and optimize them to even get the first proficiency, but even successfully making a potion might get you your first proficiency step in alchemy. Making a potion is certainly harder, but learning 30 spells will take a minimum of time, no matter how quickly you learn. At the very least because you don't have unlimited internal Mana, and while you clearly have a lot, it’s the lifeblood of any glypic artisan, and we never have enough of it."
Axl nodded. "Yeah, just unlocking [Glyphistry] cost me nearly two-thirds of my internal Mana."
Moxlin threw her forelegs into the air. "I don't—only… Fine, let's just get started. I presume that fancy book of yours has instructions? I literally don't know anything about alchemy other than that my workshop head forbade me from even dreaming about it until I was in the F-Grade."
Axl started to describe the glyphic patterns and steps, Moxlin soon taking out blank talisman paper that he could write on with a small bone she produced, a sharpened edge producing brown ink from apparently nowhere. It took nearly half an hour before a sprawling mess of over one hundred talisman papers carpeted their hideout. Moxlin chittered from one side to the other, examining different parts of the whole thing, occasionally asking questions Axl had to consult the book to answer.
This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
Realizing he could also use a break, he left the hideout and did some reconnaissance of the large cavern they settled in, an area even bigger than the lakeside cavern where he fought off the wolf pack. Except this one was entirely a rocky mess, filled with deep pits and jagged rock outcroppings seemingly at random from both the ceiling and ground, as if he were inside the toothy maw of a large mouth several kilometers wide.
There were no luminescent vines here, only baubles of blue light hovering in small clusters, making the area strangely well-illuminated. These balls were clearly creatures of some sort, since he saw them surge away from a large lizard in a decidedly swarm-like pattern, but their Mana was very dim, even less than what a crab had back in Piril.
The other creatures he saw were all single, solitary ones, a few lizards larger than him and several bat-like birds, all in early G-Grade. This was a relief, since Axl didn't want to set up camp next to anything that could pounce on him while he was busy focusing on his quest.
Still, he kept [Mana Shroud] going, using the dense rock's Mana to blend into the environment and keeping to the shadows. No need for unnecessary risks, after all.
Soon, he found a relatively flat area concealed from three sides, so he took to it, wanting to at least try out his new skill. As much as needed to focus on his time-sensitive glyphic quest, he still couldn't resist seeing what [Attuned Drill Strike] could do.
Taking a boxer's stance and pulling back his fist into a heavy haymaker, he activated the Skill onto the edge of his knuckles and punched.
Nothing happened.
He looked at his fist, not sure what went wrong. He knew that he had activated it, the feeling instinctive, and it should have produced two entwined currents spiraling outwards into a tip from his fist.
Three more tries became ten, and he started to worry that something was dreadfully wrong. As he looked deeper into the Skill, he noticed that the instructions that were explicit and clear with [Mind-Soul Bulwark] were foggier with [Attuned Drill Strike]. For instance, he just assumed it used internal Mana as fuel, but now he wasn't so sure.
He tried a few more things, like using the same kind of mental energy that went into the walls of his mental defense, as well as activating it with different parts of his body, but nothing worked.
Disappointed, he slinked back to his hideout and sat with his back to the wall as Moxlin continued her study, realizing all he could really do was regain his internal Mana, leaving the [Attuned Drill Strike] problem for another day. He activated [Mana Shroud] and started to absorb Mana from the environment, slowly stripping its attunement and using it to bolster his own regeneration rate. It didn't contribute a huge amount, basically just a twenty or twenty-five percent increase to his baseline recovery, but it also helped a little bit with recovering his injuries, so he continued for a few hours until his internal Mana was close to topped off.
He thought about maybe looking at the scroll that Olkan left behind, but put the thought aside, since a quick scan of the etchings outside listed the topics within, and none of them included anything related to the glyphic arts, so better not to get too distracted until the quest was done.
"Any ideas on a plan?" Axl started toward the spider that stood very still among the talismans, as if deep in thought.
Moxlin perked up, as if a switch was flicked. "Yes! At first glance, this is very hard, but there's an order to this that ramps up nicely. You should first activate the bowl, then prepare the ingredients, then set the fire before beginning the full cycle of creation with all the pieces in place. This recipe was brilliantly designed as a teaching tool, in fact, even if it makes the final product not even half as good as a normal potion."
Axl nodded, the sourness of not getting his Skill to work partially relieved by her enthusiasm. "Even half a potion is great, quest or no quest."
After a while of comparing notes on what to do in which order, Axl got started. He carved a stone into a crude bowl and began, the twenty-five glyphs on the bowl activated, then he processed the moss he got from the walls and an edge of one of the leaves Olkan had in his dimensional pouch. Luckily, the book altered the glyphs to account for what material he had lying around, a minor miracle, in his opinion, even if Moxlin didn't think it was quite so fantastical.
He barely made it through the spell to set the fire, a weirdly finicky 37-glyph spell, and held the bowl in one hand while using the other to mix in the processed ingredients from the neatly folded talisman paper, the paper seeming to dissolve into the ingredients as they went in. Another chunk of rock was used as an improvised pestle, and he crushed the ingredients against each other, straining to hold all the different moving parts together with very little success.
The fire wanted to sputter out or flare up in an explosion, the bowl had spots where the fire's influence was unevenly distributed to the ingredients, and the processed ingredients themselves just looked wrong compared to what the book said they should look like. Still, he managed to keep the entire carnival of glyphs from exploding on his face, and he ended up with a greenish paste at the bottom of the bowl.
"Uhhhh," he said. "It should absolutely not look like this."
Moxlin crawled out of her hole in the ceiling, looking positively surprised. "It's already a heavens-touched miracle that you even managed to complete the entire process in your first try! Oh, I can feel my new Skill already, it will be so great. I'm such a great teacher!"
"Yes, absolutely wonderful," Axl snorted. "Student bows before teacher's wisdom."
"You're very welcome!" she crawled back into her hole, waving one of her hindlegs. "Just keep trying! I'll study the talisman formations used for ingredient prep, they are oddly mysterious, and figuring them out should help you out more than any other part of the process."
Indeed, that was also his sense, that he somewhat understood at least roughly what the fire and the bowl was doing, but the processing of the ingredients was almost entirely a black box. He was glad to have the small spider to help him figure all this out, he'd take weeks to decode any of this implicit knowledge from the book without the basics, and it might have even killed him if he tried to use a fire-based something that monumentally backfired.
Still, Axl felt overwhelmed by the enormity of the task he'd given himself. Making the potion required so many different techniques synergized together, not to mention each one being non-trivial even on its own. But he knew better than to burn time feeling sorry for himself, so he got back to it.
The next attempt ended in an even more foul-looking slurry, making him throw away the bowl rather than waste water trying to clean it out, and the third time failed midway, the flame bursting outwards in a shocking conflagration as the bowl shattered in his hand.
Luckily, Axl managed to jump back in time, and the explosion only added a few surface burns to his face and arms. But he had to spend the next few minutes digging out stone shards from his increasingly messed up right hand. It felt like any healing his body performed was quickly replaced by another injury piled right on top.
Thanks for your hard work, Roken's body. Axl chuckled to himself, trying to shake off the failure. Needing a boost up in his internal Mana, he sat down with his back to the stone and used [Mana Shroud] to help him heal as the meditative state helped it regenerate a bit faster.
He was halfway done when he started to feel the weight of his mind sagging, and figured he might as well call it for the day. He'd been at it for nearly sixteen hours since waking up, after all, and since he was mostly using his mental effort, he realized it would be better to get a fresh start than to push through.