[0746] Living and Learning

Although Shyvana realized she probably wouldn't be able to figure out how Ixtal's elemental ley network worked anytime soon—and that the more she studied it, the more confused she became—she noticed that Karya seemed quite pleased about it.

Of course he was pleased.

In this age after the Rune Wars, when "magic theory" meant "archaeology," Karya rarely encountered anything new. If Ixtal had truly made a breakthrough he'd never seen before, he could only be happy about it.

As an old-timer, Karya naturally felt a longing for the past. But though he was old, his heart was still young, and compared with the weight of the past, he looked forward to the future even more.

Now that he'd put down the heavy burden of the past, Karya was full of anticipation for new things in and of themselves.

Over the next few days, Karya approached the Elemental Tower in various ways, surveying the mysterious structure from every angle and gathering a wealth of data.

Yet what puzzled Karya was that the meanings behind the data contradicted one another, pushing him step by step into a logical dead end. It was as if some special variable he could never observe was maintaining the Elemental Tower's operation in some unusual way.

During this time, following the principle of making bold assumptions and carefully verifying them, Karya considered the possibility that a World Rune Fragment might exist inside the Elemental Tower.

But unfortunately, no matter how he worked through the implications, he couldn't make sense of the overall logic of the Elemental Tower using a World Rune Fragment as its power source.

The energy of World Runes had an affinity, after all. People who used the power of World Runes were often enslaved by the runes themselves. But the elemental currents produced by