He took the dust and pressed it onto the groove like he was writing with ink. While he was doing so, he used his internal energy to hold the shape of the run he wanted.
He held the rune in place with his mind and only let it activate after he was done drawing the rune. After activating, the rune flashed and then died.
The dust of the energy stone beneath the rune had been used up and turned into ashes. This was a sign that his enchantment had failed.
He sighed and got to work repeating what he did earlier.
This was just the application and expression of a single rune. Things become more complicated when two or more runes get involved.
Then things get mind-boggling when hundreds of thousands of runes are etched onto a single glass plate. He hasn't reached that stage yet. But he is beginning to understand why the identity card is difficult to make.
After working several times to make the earth rune work, he had to move on to other runes. There were a lot of them to go through, so it will take him a long time to finish them.
He was given an information crystal that contained more than ten thousand runes and their singular expression. He knows those runes now that he has acquired the knowledge, but he hasn't mastered them.
This information crystal is similar to a dictionary. Arthur is sure that it is a dictionary, as it lists runes and gives a brief description of what they do.
But knowing the words of a language doesn't mean those words will be used well. There is still a need to learn grammatical rules.
The best he can use the dictionary to do is read better. It will take a lot of work and practice to master all the runes. In order to get to the level where he can use all the runes well, it might actually take him an eternity because every word in the dictionary can be used together.
So instead of working on all of them, he only worked on the runes that are needed to master the Divine Lightning Armament. These are runes that have a lot to do with the manipulation of lightning and the transformation of energy.
After his decision was made, he had to compare the runes among the ten thousand runes with the runes in the textbook he was given for the Divine Lightning Armament. After comparing them, he chose to work on the runes that appeared in the textbook.
The dictionary helped him understand the textbook better. He was still far from mastering the knowledge in the textbook, but he was able to easily identify the core of the armament.
This core is what makes the armament special. It is a unique piece of knowledge that is not easy to copy. At least, the cultivators of the Five Veins region can't copy it.
Every sect knows that the Blood Skull sect is the most powerful sect. They might even know why, or at least they suspect that it is their special technique that combines the power of the body and mind.
Despite having this knowledge, they haven't been able to replicate the armament. They haven't been able to make a weapon that acts as a spell and uses both internal energy and life energy of the body.
He can understand why they haven't been able to copy this fear after seeing the core. It's so complicated that no one can stumble upon it by chance.
This complication made him dizzy looking at it. The blue light in his eyes flickered as if it was about to go out. His mind was strained to the limit.
He knew immediately when he saw it that it would be very difficult to draw this array and would be very difficult to use. But he didn't give up. He just sighed and got to work.
As he worked, he became engrossed in it. It was because he realized that now that he could read the textbook, understand that the strange symbols he was looking at were runes, and even understand what the runes did, his phantom minds could finally help him.
The phantom minds can't help him write runes or even understand runes, but they could help him produce expressions by making the expressions of runes that he understood combine into new ones.
In other words, he could understand runes while they could help him understand expressions. This made his interest in formation explode.
It was tedious work for his phantoms to combine runes and produce expressions. Even three runes can produce different states for eight expressions. So the more runes he gives them, the more complicated the expressions that they can come up with, and the more time it will take them to exhaust all the possibilities of expressions.
But he didn't mind this at all. He was glad that there was someone to help him do the tedious and brain numbing parts.
He simply allowed them to do the permutations while he learned the permutations of expressions that they produced in glee.
It was as if he was learning a new language that explained everything in the world and he wasn't bad at it as he thought. It was an immensely enjoyable experience.
The more he learned, the more he understood the formation lessons and the textbook on forging armaments. The more he understood these things, the more excited he became and the more he laughed. He was always laughing at some inside joke that made him seem mad.
His house became full of materials that he used to practice. There were beast carcasses everywhere and elemental crystals of various kinds lying about. Explosions happened from time to time, but that wasn't enough to make him pause his work.
Because he became too engrossed in his work, he stopped sleeping entirely. He would take concentration pills to recover his mental state when he needed to. Then he would return to work.