Chương 32: Etched in Stone

The morning routine hadn't changed. Boots striking in rhythm. Frost-white breath clouding the air. The same bellowed orders rattling our bones. Six months of this had carved the rhythm so deep into me that my body moved without thought, muscle and bone trained to obey the whistle before the mind caught up. But that morning drills ended differently. Instead of Survival or terrain drills, the posting on the wall read: Specialization Class – Rune Operations. Five hours. Two breaks.

The six months of general training were behind us. We had endured the cold mornings, the bruised knuckles, the endless drills. We had passed the academic exam that tested our reading, writing, and arithmetic. Now came the sorting, who would become scouts, medics, engineers, or rune operators. And now, I sat on a bench in a stone-walled classroom with four other recruits. From the moment I saw them, I understood what Farid had meant when he warned me about Rune Ops.

Their uniforms looked the same, but that was where the similarities ended. Fresh boots, polished to a shine. Skin soft and pale, hands free of calluses. Even their silence dripped with the kind of confidence only coin could buy. Just their gaze told me, You do not belong here. I looked down at my secondhand uniform, threadbare, stained no matter how many times I scrubbed it. I told myself I didn't care. The lie felt thin. The quartermaster arrived, arms full of thick leather-bound tomes.

He dropped them on the desk with a heavy thud that echoed off the stone walls.

"This," he barked, "is your instructor for the next fifteen days." Uneasy glances darted around the room. The quartermaster smirked.

"The rune masters are busy, fort duty, wall work, other things above your heads. We won't waste coin putting them in front of greenhorns who might wash out in a week. You get manuals. Survive the exam, prove you're worth the ink, and you'll earn a real teacher. If you don't, no shame, you'll be moved into another specialization. Scout, medic, signal-runner, plenty of jobs that don't involve runes." He left us in silence, in the smell of old parchment and mildew. The hours crawled.

Bent over a mildew-stinking tome, I copied circles, triangles, and slashes until my eyes blurred. The pages were dense, covered in diagrams that looked more like drunken doodles than any kind of language. At first, they looked like nonsense, scribbles from a mad mathematician. Slowly, patterns emerged. Something more precise. Five elemental marks lay at the foundation: Water: a circle enclosing curling lines shaped like waves, their curves flowing endlessly within the frame. The ink swirled as if it wanted to move.

Wood: a circle filled with three upright bars, one crossed by a smaller diagonal stroke like a branch with a single leaf. It looked rigid, but there was a kind of growth hidden in the lines. Fire: a circle containing a pointed flame, rising sharply in a teardrop shape that split into two inner strokes. The flame seemed to leap off the page. Earth: a circle wrapped around jagged lines like mountain peaks, angular and heavy, pressing upward against the border. It felt grounded, unyielding.

Metal: a circle divided by a shield-like cross, its geometry clean and balanced, a small center dot anchoring the design. It was sharp, cold, perfect. Then came the operators, the marks of control: ○ Circle: intake. It drew mana inward, a steady pull or sudden gulp, depending on how it was layered. △ Triangle: conversion. Its angles decided how much of one element became another, whether fifty-fifty or skewed unevenly. ∧ Upward V: activation. A channel opening, flow allowed. ∨ Downward V: closure.

The same channel snapped shut, energy sealed away. At first, they looked like scattered pieces of a puzzle. But when I looked at them long enough, the pieces clicked together. They were switches. Circles defined how much energy came in, single for a trickle, double for a flood. Triangles dictated what came out, water split into steam, fire bent into light. One crooked angle meant waste, loss, instability.

And when chained together, Circle to Triangle, Triangle to Fire, the pattern became a working design, a line of command telling the world: take this, change it, release it here. The others grew restless. Pencils tapped, chairs creaked.

"He's just staring at the page," one muttered.

"Maybe he can't even read," another said under his breath. One leaned over during break, voice dripping with false kindness.

"Need help with basic math, scribbler? Might keep you from failing when this class spits you out." I smiled without looking up.

"Thanks. But I'll manage." His smirk faltered, but he didn't push it. What they didn't realize was that math was the one part I didn't struggle with. These were blueprints for reality. Systems I had studied once before in another life, switches, channels, ratios, only here they were carved into stone instead of drawn on paper. Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings. And I understood blueprints. Fifteen days later, the exam arrived.

On paper, the instructions were simple. Identify twenty runes. Explain their functions. Outline how a circuit could be built. the test was designed to test whether we understood what made the marks work. The room filled with groans as recruits bent over their boards, trying to recall which symbol meant what. For most of them, the exam was a memory test. For me, it was something else entirely. Because runes were never just drawings.

A line carved into stone was dead until it was given the right body to breathe through. Grooves needed to be filled, coated, inlaid. The wrong choice of material, and the pattern collapsed. The right choice, and it lived. Take absorption circles: the simplest of all. They needed something porous, something that drank mana. Sandstone could do it in a pinch, though it leaked, cracked under strain. Powdered quartz mixed with resin, though, that was reliable. Stable enough to hold, strong enough not to burn out.

Conversion marks were trickier. The triangles that needed a medium that leaned one way or another. Fire-aspected crystal ground fine tilted the flow toward flame. Powdered jade gave it to wood, coaxed life and growth instead. Without a medium, a triangle was just geometry, useless lines. The fire symbols had their own quirks. The poor man's trick was powdered iron with sulfur dust. Cheap, easy to find, and it worked, once, maybe twice. It burned hot, flared bright, and then the grooves crumbled to ash.

Emberstone was the expensive answer, stable and glowing for years, but few soldiers would ever see it outside a noble's purse. And then there were the control marks, the switches. The upward V, the open channel, needed paths that carried current cleanly. Copper shavings if you were scraping for coin, silver if you wanted perfection. Its opposite, the downward V, demanded walls. Insulators. Ash rubbed into grooves, hardened clay, even beeswax. Substances that stop flow of mana. Each choice was a trade.

Too much conductivity, and the rune flared too hot, shattered itself. Too little, and nothing moved at all. Most recruits hadn't thought that far. They memorized symbols like children learning letters, never asking what happened when you joined one to another. By the time I finished, my fingers were stiff with chalk dust, the slate heavy with lines of cramped writing. Twenty runes, their functions, the materials they demanded. A final outline of a circuit: circle drawing in, triangle converting, fire spilling out.

When the results went up. Mine was one of them. I felt the quartermaster's gaze on me as I read. His brow arched, just slightly, a silent flicker of surprise. His eyes said, You weren't supposed to make it. But he said nothing aloud. The next day, our routine shifted. Instead of waiting in the barracks classroom, we were marched across the yard and down a narrow path toward a squat stone building tucked against the wall. The rune workshop.

Inside, the air was different, dust and oil and the faint tang of metal filings. Benches ran in neat rows, each scarred from years of carving, and the walls were lined with shelves of etched slates and broken fragments that glowed faintly where runes had once been. This was where Master Aldren Vey taught. As a Tier 2 rune master he was not part of army but contracted. His presence pressed down like smoke, sharp eyes and a sharper voice cutting through us the moment we stepped inside.

Along with us five recruits, five of his apprentices were already seated, tools neatly arranged before them. If I thought the rich recruits looked down on me, Aldren's apprentices didn't even bother pretending otherwise. One of them, Ronan, sneered the instant I sat at the end of a bench. Then he made a show of wiping the seat clean after shifting away from me, as though I carried dirt that would stain him. My fists itched. Six months of drills had hardened me enough to break him in half.

But this wasn't the field, and I wasn't a fool. Instead, I bent over the scrap of wood before me, driving the chisel down until the edge split the grain.

"Wrong," Aldren's voice snapped from across the room. He loomed over one of his own apprentices, jabbing a finger at the boy's crooked circle. Then his gaze flicked to me, to the rough but steady mark I'd made, before returning to the flustered student.

"This is why half of you never last," he said, tone like iron scraping stone.

"You mistake neat handwriting for precision. It isn't." The apprentice flushed red. I kept my head down, hiding the small spark of satisfaction that warmed my chest. Carving was harder for me than theory. Every line exact, every angle perfect. The manuals had warned us: rune work wasn't drawing, it was engineering. Aldren hammered the lesson home.

"A circle represent rate of absorption. Concentric circles multiply absorption. Triangles are ratios. Misalign an angle, and you waste mana or worse, rupture the circuit. Do you want a fortress wall to collapse because you were sloppy?" He stalked past my work, paused.

"Better. Still shallow. Cut deeper." Around me, the others sweated over crooked lines, corners that leaned when they should have held true. Angles defeated them; their compasses slipped, their triangles bent out of measure. I had an advantage. From memory, I sketched a quick divider from spare scraps, the way I once measured geometry problems in another life. With a divider and scale, the angles obeyed. And where their hands wavered, mine stayed steady.

Years of copying brittle texts as a trainee scribe had taught me control, the patience to guide a line without tremor. I understood. Circuits were wiring. In series: stronger but fragile. In parallel: weaker but redundant. Systems I had studied in another life, now written in mana and stone. By the end of the second month, the recruits had finally reached the expected standard in rune operations.

Out of the five of us, three managed to grasp the fundamentals within the initial two months, while the other two needed an extra month of drills and remedial lessons before they could keep up. None were dismissed; failure only meant more hours bent over the chalkboards, repeating symbols until the runes burned into their memory. Two months later, the five of us still filed into Aldren's workshop each morning. But by then, a divide had formed. Three of us, including me, had managed to meet Aldren's standards.

We could carve a circuit that held its shape, channel mana without bleeding it uselessly into the grain. The other two were still struggling, their angles shaky, their lines breaking under pressure. They'd need another month at least before they could stand beside us. Aldren never mocked them.

"Some of you sprint, some crawl," he said once, voice like stone against steel.

"But all of you move forward. That is enough, for now." That evening, after the others had gone, Aldren paused beside my bench as I scrubbed filings from my chisel. His gaze lingered on the cheap firewood I'd been practicing with, where a faintly glowing circuit still flickered in the grooves.

"You've a knack, boy," he said, gruff but steady.

"An uncommon eye. If you ever retire from the army, my workshop has room." I froze. My chest tightened, and I bowed my head to hide the sudden heat in my face.

"I… thank you, Master." When the others learned of it, their stares burned hotter than the forge. The apprentices in neat uniforms glared as if I had stolen something from them. Ronan, especially, his glare could have chipped stone. Maybe I had. But Aldren's judgment was clear. He valued results over pedigree. Endless hours of tracing glyphs, memorizing sigils, and copying old circuit diagrams had sharpened more than my hands. My reading and writing skills had surged, both reaching Level 25.

What once felt like stumbling through ink now came easy; books I had struggled to grasp before opened like doors, their meanings laid bare. That night, I laid down my chisel and studied the faint glow etched into cheap firewood. For the first time since waking in this world, I was doing more than just surviving. I was beginning to shape it. I was now qualified for the basics, maintaining runes, repairing circuits, and etching simple arrays like sparks, fire marks, and signal runes.

Nothing advanced, but enough to matter on the field. The next two months would take me into Field Sappers & Siege Tech. Where rune maintenance had opened a door into an unfamiliar world of symbols and circuits, siege craft promised something larger, bridges, walls, engines of war. Runes had already introduced me to a new way of seeing this world. I couldn't wait to see what the next specialization would bring.