Dago's Diary

``` [Runes studied: 200. Mental power progress: 64%. Preparing to condense a third Soul Imprint.]

[Two days ago, Steel delivered the resources I needed to reach the late stage of Second Ring: a bottle of high-purity Nightmare Spring extract that reeked of rotting sulfur.]

[I asked him how long remained until the Southern Wizard Prodigy Gathering. His corpse-like face betrayed nothing. He only kept silent.]

[Silence meant rules. It also meant I lacked the authority to learn anything at that level. In that case, I would use absolute power to pry the rules' mouth open.]

[Runes studied: 520. Mental power progress: still stuck at 64%. A bottleneck.]

[The third Soul Imprint still refused to condense. My Mental Space was like a stagnant pond. I'm writing this entry because, in some secular civilizations, the number 520 represents a base fascination with courtship and reproduction.]

[Unfortunately, I have no partner to share it with. But wizards need no partners. The hormonal secretion called "love" would only interfere with my cerebral cortex's precise calculations of energy particles. A woman would only slow my casting and destabilize my spell models.]

[The good news is that, after studying more than five hundred basic first- and second-tier runes with a monk's devotion, quantity finally gave way to quality.]

[I activated Overclocked Thinking and could finally make some sense of the runic logic inside the Mirror Dagger and the bell, complex as a star chart. This was not merely an accumulation of power. It was an analysis of the rules.]

[I could also understand more of the runes within the Dream-Reflecting Phantomglass Orb. Multifaceted Prism might be optimized further by factoring in the variable of light's refractive index.]

[I named the core rune inside the Miracle Tier Silver Staff Stasis. I've begun analyzing it. It is a