For certain special wizards, incomplete world runes were an even better opportunity than encountering true world runes.
Barry Danton, for instance, could use world runes to train and stimulate the growth of his mental power, entering the stage of the Semi-Detached Meditation Method ahead of time and resolving his predicament once and for all. Or there were even more unusual cases, like Wizard Jillian. Her combs were special enough that, once nurtured to sufficient strength, they could be considered a special kind of fairy. Yet even after their owner had painstakingly raised them to that level, merging them with true world runes remained impossible. That presented a dilemma: there was a chasm between their current strength and the level at which they could touch true world runes.
Without improvement, they could not touch the runes; without touching the runes, they could hardly improve. The vast distance, coupled with their increasingly slow progress at higher levels, widened that chasm until crossing it became something ordinary wizards could only dream of. The appearance of these incomplete world runes solved that problem perfectly. If the affinities were favorable, and each comb could find an incomplete world rune compatible with itself, the difficulty of fusion would fall even further. With a wizard's assistance on top of that, everything would be different.
Compared with them, an ordinary wizard like Ruger was merely broadening his horizons. Incorporating them into spells was only a basic application, something anyone could do. He had not truly reaped the greatest benefits of incomplete world runes. But that also meant he had no deficiency that needed an incomplete world rune to fill it. Only those whose deficiencies had nearly driven them into a dead end could gain such enormous benefits from finding a rare solution.
That was how Ruger consoled himself.