Chapter 108 — Runes and Formulas
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 3
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?"