For the past few nights, Helan had been watching Joshua and her younger sister Ciri busy themselves with the development of "Hearthstone." She had also provided some technical assistance from the sidelines.
In truth, Helan had never imagined that this Magic Mechanical Device would bring her any financial profit. After all, it was hard for her to imagine anyone willing to pay a hefty price for a pile of storage units within runes.
Even if there were such people, they would be looking for high-level runes engraved with things like "Teleportation" and "Conversion." Runes like hers, which could only store images, had no market at all in Nolan.
But she enjoyed the process of creating "Hearthstone" with Joshua and her sister Ciri, because Joshua's understanding of runes was unheard of in her eyes, even more profound than the lectures given by the finest instructors at her school.
Operators, statements, logical expressions—these things had completely overturned Helan's understanding of runes.
In her view, runes had always been simple. A rune that granted the air the attribute of "Freeze" could create ice, and granting that ice the attribute of "Shatter" allowed one to cast a simple "Ice Burst Spell."
The complicated spells she had learned at the Advanced Magic Academy required mastering no more than a hundred runes, while even higher-level spells needed, at most, a few thousand runes to cast.
Yet the rune application method Joshua taught Helan, called "programming," required thousands of runes just to carry out a very simple function.
It was complicated—so complicated that after following Joshua around and learning from him these past few days, Helan had only grasped the bare surface of it.
But the game "Tennis for Two" had sparked Helan's interest in this entirely new way of applying runes. Even the academy's greatest archmages