After thoroughly mastering Primordial Rune, which was in charge of defense, Ian focused on the second piece, Divine Artifact, which could create clones. However, this rune was surprisingly difficult to crack because it was not a single rune at all, but a composite matrix forcibly smelted and superimposed by multiple esoteric runes.
Faced with this hard bone, he had to patiently dismantle it bit by bit and reverse engineer it piece by piece. In order not to be slowed down by this huge project, Ian decisively separated out a Shadow Clone to do this boring dismantling work, while his main body devoted all his computing power and inspiration into another grand project - a comprehensive upgrade of his Arcane Rune System.
The first step Ian took was to try to "animate" all Arcane Runes. He followed the core equation that awakened Primordial Rune's consciousness before, and modified and reduced its dimensions until it could be perfectly integrated into the underlying architecture of Arcane Runes.
The research and development process went surprisingly smoothly, and not long after, the first truly living Arcane Runes was born.
"What do you think?" Ian asked.
"Kazuma is similar to Primordial Rune. This kind of Living Rune has indeed experienced an astonishing increase in potential and power limit. However, if tedious storage and preprocessing are not carried out in advance, they are actually quite useless in actual combat."
Ian agreed. If you want to carve a Living Rune out of thin air, it would take too long. What's more terrible is that every time you successfully create such a rune, you need to draw a huge amount of soul strength and willpower from the caster! It is absolutely stupid to seek death in such a huge consumption in the ever-changing life and death struggle.
Therefore, this thing is currently perfect for use, either to create top-level magic alchemy items, or to carve it in advance and keep it as a backup like an expensive high-level magic scroll.
"Your assessment is accurate, but that is not its core value. The most outrageous thing about it is that it raises Arcane Empire's energy utilization to an incredible new level." Living Rune weak The consciousness of Self gives it an instinct - never waste even a trace of magic power. It is precisely because of this characteristic of Living Rune that the underlying energy utilization framework of the entire Empire magic system has ushered in an epic leap.
Ian casually activated a basic Arcane Rune Spell--Fireball. However, at the moment when the spell was formed, he felt as if two connected selves were cooperating to cast the same spell simultaneously! Living Rune's micro-control consciousness accurately ensured that the magic power output of Ian's body did not cause any unnecessary internal consumption. At the same time, it even actively extended its tentacles outwards, frantically absorbing massive amounts of free magic power from the surrounding environment, and performing a terrifying secondary increase in spells like the top arcane source magicians.
"How far has the calculation progress of embedding this Living Rune Technology into the three-dimensional magic model been advanced?"
"It's still only 10 percent completed," Morgana reported helplessly.
In the system of the Arcane Empire, only the experienced high-level Arcanist can release the terrifying Transcendent Magic by constructing the complex Three-Dimensional Runes. Of course, most of the current three-dimensional rune technologies are luxuriously applied to the production of the top magic Divine Artifact.
Although the progress is slow, Lin An is still eager to know how desperate the upper limit of its destructive power will be if super-level magic perfectly integrates the characteristics of living runes.
Moreover, his ambitions go far beyond that. As Legendary Arcanist, he can also use Law Spell, which is even more powerful. He wants to know what qualitative changes will happen when Law Spell also uses Living Rune. So what if Law Spell is built based on the three-dimensional Living Rune?
All these research topics are just the tip of the iceberg of his grand future scientific research blueprint. So far, he has only reproduced one of the main features of Primordial Rune.
"Remind me to find time to upgrade my Grimoire."
Ian has always kept the Grimoire brought back from the <Black Clover> universe. After returning to the Empire, the direct improvement of Grimoire to his combat power has been minimal, so he decided to transform it into an extremely powerful "magic scroll storage book".
He plans to seal countless taboo spells in it that have long casting times and harsh release conditions. In this way, in actual combat, he only needs to summon Grimoire to instantly cast these killer weapons. But now, with the in-depth analysis of Primordial Rune, this Grimoire will usher in a more terrifying potential limit.
"No problem."
Subsequently, Ian focused his energy on the other characteristics of Primordial Rune and its reproduction work. Without much effort, he successfully made his Arcane Runes resonate with a certain Authority, and successfully borrowed the power of Cosmic Will Klonai.
However, when he tried to replicate Primordial Rune's incredible ability to "directly link and extract World Origin", he hit a wall of sighs.
The limit of what he can achieve so far is to create an extremely complex energy conversion center, so that his Arcane Runes can be compatible with absorbing the energy of countless different systems for activation. But he knows in his heart that compared to the direct connection between Kazuma and World Origin, it is simply a cloud and mud difference.
"As long as Empire discovers any new energy in the future, we can quickly mass-produce the corresponding energy converter by studying its rejection reaction with Primordial Rune. However, the underlying logic of Primordial Rune's direct access to World Origin is definitely not that simple."
"Why don't you just try to use your huge willpower to force open World Origin's door?" Morgana suggested. Since this simple and crude gangster method can forcefully seize Authority, it might also work for World Origin.
"Let's try it."
Ian instantly mobilized terrifying willpower and carved another rune in the air.
"It failed." Ian's face darkened, "The resistance that came back was hundreds of times stronger than usual. It felt like... If I dare to continue to force my way in, Klonai will definitely fight me to the death without hesitation."
"If this is the case, then you probably have to raise your willpower to the level of Tenth Tier to have any chance of succeeding in forcing the knock on the door." Morgana analyzed.
"That's true, but even if you get to that level, it's definitely not an easy process."
Morgana nodded. "Then what should we do now? Do you have any other clues?"
"No. It seems that Primordial Rune does have some kind of special status protected by the underlying rules of the universe. Their transcendent status as the first and most perfect magic language in the universe cannot be shaken at present. Therefore, our strategic goal at this stage should be to analyze and master as many of them as possible until we accumulate enough information to finally drag it down Divine Altar with our own hands!"
"It would be perfect if we could have a copy of <Encyclopedia of Origin Runes> in our hands." Morgana said with emotion.
"That's a good idea."
Ian immediately connected his consciousness to Akashic Records and began to search for relevant entries. However, when he saw the exchange price at the back of the encyclopedia, he closed the interface without hesitation. He estimated that even if he sold all the knowledge reserves in the Arcane Empire's treasury, he might not be able to afford one-tenth of that thing.
'Primordial Rune's value is so high?' Ian sighed helplessly, "Ancient Magekind must have compiled a similar encyclopedia back then. We asked the intelligence department to expand Search the scope and see if we can dig it out in major ruins. During this period, we will first reversely convert all the semi-finished runes in the Empire database into the real Primordial Rune."
Those incomplete runes recorded from the Empire Awakened Ones can, at best, be regarded as the poorest imitations of Primordial Rune. What Ian needs to do now is to restore all of them to the originals through reverse engineering, so that Empire can completely master more types of Primordial Rune.
"What are Orochimaru doing recently?" Ian suddenly asked.
"He is hiding in the laboratory working on his private project about the perfection of flesh and soul Fusion."
"It sounds interesting. Inform him to immediately put down the work at hand, fully take over and participate in the in-depth research and development of Chakra System. Now that we have confirmed that chakra has an amazing potential upper limit in the underlying logic, we must devote more resources and efforts to this project."
"Yes." Morgana immediately sent the command. After a few seconds, she shrugged helplessly, "He refused. His original words were: He is too busy now to take on new jobs."
"Tell that snake exactly what you said: He'd better figure out who is strangling his scientific research funds."
"... He agreed, although I could feel the resentment in his teeth through the screen."
"As long as he works obediently." Ian nodded indifferently, "Give Tsunade a copy of the relevant top-secret information and ask her if she is interested in returning to her old career and continue to study the ultimate form of chakra."
After explaining these complicated chores, Ian reinvested his energy into the study of Primordial Rune and the comprehensive innovation of Arcane Runes.
He divided the brand-new Arcane Rune System into strict levels and types. First, there are the regular runes at the bottom of the pyramid, which cover basic spell-casting units from simple to complex; one step up, there is Three-Dimensional Runes, which is used to build Transcendent Magic.
Further up, there is Sub-Law Runes integrated into the underlying logic of High Dragon Language; this rune can barely resonate with a certain Authority. He intends to use these runes as a stepping stone, allowing high-level Arcanist to touch and use the next level of ultimate power: Law Runes.
As the name suggests, Law Runes is specially designed and modified for Law Archgod, which allows the caster to arbitrarily directly mobilize the rules of the universe that he has completely controlled to release the forbidden spell that destroys the world.
In addition, he also independently opened up a special category called Will Runes. Their function is to forcibly borrow the power of Cosmic Will; this kind of rune is a perfect match with the "Will Entanglement technology" developed by Ian in the early years based on <One Piece> Haki System.
Finally, there is the one that stands at the absolute top of the pyramid - Perfect Runes. This is the ultimate crystallization of all the above characteristics of Fusion. It is also the new rune system created by Ian himself and is the only one that can compete with the real "Primordial Rune" in terms of personality!
During the deduction, which was all about sleep and food, time passed quickly. Ian raised his head and stared deeply at the Netheril Floating City holographic design floating in front of him.
After successfully analyzing a large number of Primordial Rune and creating countless Perfect Runes, Ian decided to carry out an unprecedented ultimate transformation of Floating City. Moreover, the scale of this transformation was crazy - he tried to forcibly elevate the status of this steel behemoth to the legendary Eleventh Tier!
His plan is rough and direct: replace all the core power sources of the city with Primordial Rune and Perfect Runes, and completely "living" the entire Floating City! With Living Rune As the absolute core, can connect all the tens of billions of rune consciousnesses in the city into a huge swarm network, thus completely transforming this huge super city into a mechanical life form with huge Self consciousness!
As long as Netheril has a complete soul and independent Self consciousness, he can logically upgrade it into an ultimate entity of the Eleventh Tier rank. Unfortunately, this perfect grand plan currently faces a fatal flaw - he himself has not figured out the correct path to advance to the Eleventh Tier rank.
Therefore, even if Netheril really becomes a living being that can Self practice and Self evolve like Arcanist, it still cannot complete the final dimensionality transformation before breaking the shackles of the plane.
"But even so, this comprehensive upgrade will still make Floating City's comprehensive combat power usher in a qualitative leap."
If the previous Netheril's firepower output was only comparable to that of an ordinary Tenth Tier god who controlled more than a dozen subordinate planes; then after completing the upgrade, it will have enough terrifying heritage to crush those top-level Tenth Tier Ancient Godss who control hundreds of subordinate planes!
'More importantly, once I figure out the experimental theory that hits Eleventh Tier, I can use Netheril as a guinea pig for fault tolerance testing!'
"Sir, it's almost time, we should set off."