Lava Crystal Pit.
The second level.
Before a massive wall, Ian used the light of Principle Insight to peer into the stone. All he saw were fiery-red lines of varying depth flickering across its surface.
A few seconds later.
"Layered Form Rune advanced to Master Level. Talent +100!" "Talent: 3200 → 3300!"
"Finally, Master Level. That was the last Fire Pattern Rune on the second level."
Ian opened his eyes.
He felt a touch of emotion.
Over the past year,
he had finished studying the three remaining First Ring Fire Pattern Runes on the second level: Heat Dissipation Rune, Resonance Rune, and Layered Form Rune.
From a Wizard's perspective, they were all terrible.
One could even say that none of the three was a combat rune at all.
The core principle recorded by the Heat Dissipation Rune was the natural tendency of heat to spread from a concentrated point. Studying it was like studying "how to make a fire go out more evenly," the complete opposite of mainstream Wizards' pursuit of "stronger and more explosive" power.
The Resonance Rune was even more absurd.
It looked like layer upon layer of circular lines. Whenever fire elements swept past it on the stone wall, ripples of faint light appeared.
Ian guessed that this rune had formed from the local fire-element energy over long geological ages, shaped by periodic Earth Vein Tremors, gravitational fluctuations, and the like.
What it depicted was "a pattern of energy amplification and storage at specific frequencies."
The same went for the Layered Form Rune at the end.
It could hardly be called a rune. It was more like a record of the local fire elements' evolutionary history, containing all kinds of jumbled information and energy structures.
It shattered some of Ian's assumptions.
He had originally thought