The Runic Alchemist

Chapter 761: The Mirror of Khazuun

The second the tower glyph turned into an actual object, its size increased by some 50 meters. It wasn’t a blueprint but an actual tower. The dotted lines must be a hint at the actual size being different. Damian used his analysis spell on the thing.

It was called ’The Mirror of Khazuun’.

Reading the info on it made Damian smile like a lunatic. It wasn’t like the magic monitor relic from the Highsword—it was even better.

The metal was the same pink-and-gold mix as the Highsword monitor relic, but the functions described were largely different. It could do the same status-modifying and light-ray-emitting thing the monitor was able to do, but there were a few more added functions.

First was an old telephone-like design, connected to the tower with the same pink-gold metal but made flexible like a rubber wire. It could record audio and add it into the status like text. The tower only had one such telephone.

At first, Damian suspected this dungeon’s civilization to have some connection to the humans of Earth. The shapes of these relics were too similar to that technology to be a coincidence. Still, it was only shaped as such—the internal workings were far too advanced, with magical elements mixed in. Could the civilization also have had someone like him and the Emperor, who were from Earth? It was possible, and it would explain a lot of things.

Why were they—the humans that had no magical element in their control—able to cross worlds when no other species was able to do that? Well, Damian did not have enough knowledge to say for sure that only humans could do that. He suspected it had something to do with the lack of dungeons on Earth.

The Pigmen Sun God had told Damian the dungeons were like a call for help that an Overseer could send out on behalf of their planet. What if this was the system’s way of balancing the field? Since Earth had no Overseer, some of the people were chosen at random to enter other worlds, gain this unique magical knowledge, and somehow become Overseers themselves—returning to their world to start another magical civilization.

The existence of mysterious status tools common to both this world and the Pigmen world suggested a larger plan of some higher intelligence meddling with their lives. The system itself was something unexplainable by any logic.

Perhaps an advanced method for intelligent beings to have a chance to evolve into something unique? Like a genetic farm?

Damian shook his head—he was spiraling again. His overthinking mind was both a boon and a disaster catalyst for himself. On Earth, it only made him a nervous, anxiety-filled teenager. Staying for extended periods of time with others as a Keeper had made him realize just how bad this habit of spacing out was.

The telephone thing didn’t make the tower exceptional though—it was the dozens of detachable square cubes that made up the inner mass of the tower. The cubes all had glyphs etched onto them; using mana, they activated. The function was the same as the monitor relic, but the thing was, all cubes could access the center status screen that was recorded in the tower itself.

They were made for communication. Just like his idea that having two would allow communication, the tower was the centerpiece while the cubes were all separate individual receivers and modifiers that could be used to make changes in the status window from a distance. The good thing, however, was that the tower had more control over the status window compared to the cubes. The tower had levers and touch-accessed glyphs that gave each cube access to a specific section of the status.

That was pretty cool on its own, but the thing Damian felt happiest seeing was the runic circle each cube was etched with. The tower too had a few runic circles, but the purpose of those was not as clear.

The runic circles that activated with the cubes were the spells that gave the mana user access to the status screen connected with the tower.

Damian immediately tried using the runic circle to inscribe an ingot of Blazur to see if that was really the only thing he needed for this, and to his surprise, it worked. As long as he had this spell and was in range of the tower, he could modify the status screens as he liked. But his spells were only copies, so if Damian restricted access to the specific cube from which he had copied the spell, the runic tool he had made would be affected too.

The tower only recognized twelve distinct cubes as its official receivers; all Damian’s were just extensions or copies of those twelve cubes. But that was more than enough for him—he thought he would have to spend weeks trying to figure out how to make his communication work, but the tower relic made it very simple.

The tower’s range extended some 20–30 kilometers. But even that was solved by the spell the Highsword scholars and runesmiths had left behind. Damian just had to connect the pieces and he would have his very own network that was even better than radio waves. Unlike radio waves, these light rays were not interrupted by any kind of weather or magnetic field at all. The network would be quite reliable, and there were ideas related to it that Damian could truly expand on.

Damian stored the tower in his spatial storage and once again completed the dungeon, earning another white dungeon core before reentering it. He made another runic tool—this time a spatial storage—and tried to place it in the empty circle at the gate, but it did not take. Damian tried with another runic tool—did not work. Tried doing it after entering the dungeon again—did not work.

Guess one runesmith only gets the chance once.

That would explain why the Highsword monitor dungeon relic was so unique.

Maybe he could send other runesmiths here and check if they could do this. Damian exited the dungeon from the end of the first floor. He met the lord again and told the guy he was leaving. The man was pretty hospitable throughout the whole thing, so Damian gave him a freebie:

“It’s not revealed to the public yet, but I am going to hold a big event in the future. You and your family are invited by Sanctuary to visit. We will take special care of you. The First Dawn has been installed with waygates; they connect directly to the Sanctuary. Long travel won’t be an issue.”

“It will be an honor to visit Sanctuary, Lord Keeper,” the head of House Xel’Tharien said with a genuine smile. “It would be nice to meet my fellow colleagues again.”

Damian nodded and opened a waygate back to the Sanctuary. The head of House Xel’Tharien had said something that might put the man in trouble with the Emperor if revealed. It was a subtle way of saying he had not forgotten about the old nobles of the Dawnstar and that he still considered them his noble colleagues.

When he returned, the Blazur ingot production had resulted in quite some amount. The workers had worked nicely and had barely made any noticeable mistakes. Damian could indeed leave it up to them now. Einar had also made a perfect strategy for half their army to enter level 17 of the dungeon where the mecha lizard was and get the thing back successfully. Damian had to make many spatial storages for them, but that was just a one-time investment. If he added just a little Sacrium into the Blazur alloy, the result of the end product was beyond amazing.

But he could only do that for smaller runic tools; for big structures, the Blazur alloy alone was more than enough. Still, he could use Sacrium in the most-used spell sections of the giant construction projects and extend the maintenance period over decades.

The next day, Damian started his grand virtual network project. The tower he placed at the top of the Sanctum itself. He needed to remake this building with Blazur metal too—he could do that once he had enough supply of Blazur to use it on large constructions.

The tower was set. Damian took seven out of the twelve cubes and placed them all over the Sanctuary region. He constructed 20–30-meter-high Blazur pillars to keep the cubes at a certain height and protected from other people and beasts. The cubes were just placed at the top of these pillars, scattered all over the region of Sanctuary in key positions. Seven were actually more than he needed, but Damian still used seven in case he had to run emergency channels in the future.

With seven cubes, Damian had seven distinct connection paths to the tower—meaning he could make seven types of receivers that had different access to the main tower emitting information bundles.

If he managed to give shape to the idea in his mind, he would need a whole separate Sanctum department to look after these seven network channels. Leaving three channels for official Sanctum use, Damian wanted to make all four public channels: one accessed by a specific receiver that would have the whole library at hand, a channel for announcements and general communication for the public, a channel that maybe could be commercialized for entertainment, and so on.