**Chapter 44: Unfamiliar Traces**
After venturing deeper, Jie Ming casually found a spacious cave.
He had a heartfelt chat with the cave’s original occupant and smoothly settled in, even setting up a fire to roast some meat.
Gazing at the fiery cave owner, Jie Ming lowered his head, pulling out the previously used runic artifact from his bag and examining it carefully with alchemy.
“Hmm… as expected, the rune circuits are quite damaged. The base material isn’t too worse for wear, though. It seems that even with added rune redundancy, excessive activation still puts significant strain on the core.” Jie Ming shook his head regretfully.
He had pondered many solutions to the issue of runic artifacts getting damaged from overuse, but none were particularly effective.
Such problems were rare in the wizarding civilization. After all, ordinary artifacts had limited daily activations, and overheating or damage from overuse typically only occurred in the arrays of floating cities or large, stable structures.
But those artifacts had ample space for rune inscriptions, requiring little technical finesse. The issue could be resolved with excessive redundancy.
Some even took a simpler approach—modular array designs, where damaged parts could just be swapped out.
“Make the runic artifact larger? That defeats the entire purpose of designing it in the first place…”
As for inscribing runes more finely…
Finer inscriptions required stronger mental energy. For wizards, stronger mental energy meant greater power, which in turn demanded more potent sorcery.
And more potent sorcery required more complex runes, which demanded even higher precision in inscription…
“A complete dead cycle!”
After stewing in frustration for a while without a good solution, Jie Ming decided to set the issue aside and focus on a problem he noticed during his recent battle.
“That fire elemental beast was fairly strong, yet it withstood so much of my bombardment. It must have significant damage reduction against attacks of the same attribute. Next time, I should create attacks of different attributes… No, wait!”
A spark of realization hit Jie Ming.
Why be so fixated on attribute-based attacks? The greatest strength of his runic artifact was its ability to fire rapidly and continuously without draining too much of the user’s mental energy.
Since it was designed to overwhelm with quantity, there was no need to obsess over the slight advantage of attribute counters.
“I almost fell into a dead end… I can just use pure energy bolts as the primary attack method!”
The wizarding civilization didn’t have anything akin to “arcane” as a special attribute, but there were plenty of pure energy-based offensive spells.
Jie Ming noted the idea: “Secondly… for enemies who wield elemental powers, the environmental elemental vacuum caused by the runic artifact’s rapid casting isn’t just a drawback—it could even be an advantage.”
Take that fire elemental beast, for example. Because Jie Ming attacked so quickly, by the time it tried to counterattack, most of the surrounding fire elemental energy had been drained, drastically reducing the destructive power of its retaliation.
“In a sense, this could be considered a form of artificial magic suppression, though I’m not sure how useful it is yet.”
After resting, Jie Ming pressed deeper into the region rich with planar elemental energy.
His earlier combat tests had been thorough enough, so now he shifted his focus to searching for higher-grade material samples.
Ever since entering this wasteland of red ore, he encountered magical beasts with increasing frequency.
Thorned lizards that spewed toxic mist, ice crystal wolves that unleashed icy blasts, or rock giants hidden within stone, boasting formidable physical defenses.
Each encounter enriched Jie Ming’s collection, to the point where he had to discard some of the common beast materials he’d gathered earlier.
He also noticed that the deeper he went, the magical beasts—while not necessarily stronger—became more cunning.
Unlike the reckless beasts he encountered initially, these ones assessed their opponent’s strength and retreated early or even used tactics to ambush.
But these posed no real threat to Jie Ming, merely slowing his search for materials.
However, during these skirmishes with the beasts, Jie Ming began noticing unusual traces.
At first, they were subtle.
He found boulders with scratched surfaces, the marks appearing more orderly than natural wear.
In a seemingly natural rock forest, the ground occasionally bore strange grooves—not like the stomping of beasts, but more like tracks left by some kind of tool.
Jie Ming paused, crouching beside a groove and touching it with his finger.
The groove’s edges were smoothed by time, but the residual energy fluctuations within were subtly different from the surrounding elemental forces.
He activated his Analysis Technique, probing the grooves with his mental energy.
A jumble of information flooded his mind—a more organized, restrained energy fluctuation, clearly not belonging to the unrestrained power of magical beasts.
With this confirmed, Jie Ming moved more cautiously, actively searching for such traces.
Soon, he made more discoveries.
At the entrance of a hidden cave, he found a pile of beast bones, neatly stacked and some even roughly polished.
Deep within the cave, a faint scent of extinguished fire lingered—not the afterglow of natural fire elements, but traces left by an artificial flame.
However, the surrounding signs suggested the cave had been abandoned.
Further on, he came across a cleared patch of woodland. The trees bore fresh, clean cuts—clearly the work of a sharp tool.
He even found a cleverly disguised trap, not designed for large beasts but for smaller creatures… or perhaps humans?
Jie Ming studied the trap closely.
It was simple yet effective, made of twisted vines and sharp stone spikes, designed to emit a piercing sound when triggered.
“There are natives here,” Jie Ming concluded firmly in his mind.
He wasn’t too surprised. This plane’s environment was highly suitable for life, so the emergence of intelligent beings or even a civilization wasn’t unthinkable.
“When the wizards took over this plane, they should’ve already cleared out the local civilizations… Were these remnants deliberately left behind?”
It seemed more likely than the idea that the natives possessed special powers to hide from the wizards’ detection.