The Old Wizard neither cursed at him nor dealt him a sharp knock on the head.
That meant he was doing it right. Simply finding that balance point would have been more than he and his Shadow Servant could endure. He even suspected that the Old Wizard had known how this would turn out all along, calculating that he would fall just short-not truly ruining the Black Heart, but damaging it a little. Perhaps the Old Wizard's experiment was bound to damage it, so he needed a young, ignorant junior, preferably someone brought in temporarily to help. If something went wrong, he would have an easier time explaining it to the old friend he had borrowed it from.
Ruger was not following that balance point now. He probed with the Word of Sharp Horns, making this seemingly living heart adjust itself, or, put another way, change the so-called balance point. This difficult-to-handle object had originally been designed with a fixed operating pattern. Clearly, such a rare thing would be borrowed by more than one person, so this was a conservative approach, and the safest one: a predetermined pattern that let users find their own balance point within a designed range. As long as they followed the principle of maintaining that balance, they would not exceed the range.
What Ruger was doing now was temporarily influencing the heart with the Word of Sharp Horns, touching the underlying pattern and bypassing it.
This heart, which had no consciousness, was becoming stingy.
Ruger controlled his mouth, trying to make his utterances as pleasing as possible.
This heart came from a demon, which made his Word of Sharp Horns more effective. Besides their mouths, another thing Four-Language Wizards had in common was exploring the uses of special languages, particularly those true Four-Language Wizards of