Tiagon squeezed it, its texture remained the same, it was still as hard as a rock.
He held the tough branch of wood in between his index and thumb and applied force against it, breaking it.
It crumbled like stone and the shapeshift spell became undone reverting to its previous state, the concentrated Mana trapped in the glyph burst out into a blue glow and became one with the environment.
Tiagon took back up the grimoire.
His hands had felt like tentacles and wings when he transformed them respectively. Although different rules guided shapeshifting one's body and object, the basic premise of shapeshifting was to emulate the wanted result as closely as possible. He was doing something wrong.
He flipped to the page he had last read and continued, his golden eyes darting back and forth.
"Results may vary in the first trials and the spell should be done as many times as needed to imitate perfection."
He stopped and looked again at the shapeshift glyphs. He had used the simplest glyph previously, it was time to experiment with the others.
He took yet another stone and drew a different shapeshift glyph this time and he injected Mana into it.
In a few seconds, the rock writhed and then became a little branch as he had intended. He felt it again and squeezed it and again, it felt like a piece of rock–a failure again.
His brows furrowed and he squeezed the branch mimic into crumbles in mild frustration.
He picked yet another rock, a smaller one this time and he thought of doing something else.
'What about making the rock into grit?'
A plant branch might have been seen as something closer to the living thus enabling his spell to fail.
He was going to reduce the form of the object, perhaps it would be much easier.
His claw went over the rock and the glyph was written and Mana was injected. Tiagon then envisioned grit and in a turn of events, the rock transformed into grit like he had visualized. He pressed his fingers against it and he felt that gritty feeling.
A smile crept up his face.
He had changed the structure of a thing that wasn't attached to him, this was only the beginning.
He poured the grit on the ground and they scattered. He squatted in observation.
Seconds just before the mana he had poured ran out, the particles separated by a little distance were pulled together by a force generated by the present mana and they pulled into each other in a clump and with a low flash of light, the grit reverted to a rock.
"Interesting." Tiagon commented, his hand on his chin.
Still with plenty of energy and mana, he proceeded with his experimentation.
He picked yet another rock and drew on it the simplest shapeshift glyph, his intention was to make it into a little bar of copper.
The spell activated and the rock did turn into a bar of copper just like he had envisioned.
There, he made a hypothesis.
'The glyphs all perform the same spell, a shapeshift spell in accordance with the thoughts of the mage. However, the Mana intake of each glyph is slightly different with the simplest requiring less Mana and consecutively more as the glyph gets larger and harder.'
'Although it's not written, a knowledgeable mage would realize this.'
He had only tried out two of the four glyphs but with his previous knowledge of glyphs and magic, he knew it to be the case.
'The stronger, harder glyphs store more mana to foster a stronger magical reaction both in transformation and reversion.'
"This is interesting. Over time, a person should be able to craft deviating glyphs with higher mana holding capacity and maybe a longer transformation will be possible and the transformation of living creatures will be nothing too difficult. There's a large potential here, I see it."
He picked a rock again. He drew the second simplest glyph and he envisioned a tree branch and positively, the rock became a tree branch.
Although he was someone with astronomical mana reserves, he noticed that shapeshifting does require a ton of mana, too much for an average mage to sacrifice. That was also a factor why shapeshifting wasn't particularly largely practiced, magic affinity aside.
He continued, moving on to the third glyph and this time, he picked a larger target.
A massive boulder sat not far from where he stood. He walked up to it and drew on it the third glyph largely.
He flooded in mana and because of the size of the glyph, more mana was required.
He stepped back, the glyph now gave a bright blue glow, it was ready.
The spell activated and a large dead tree stump appeared in place of it not without letting out a flash of blue light.
Tiagon crossed his hands in elation as he observed. He stood for about five minutes and strangely it was still a tree stump, the previous ones became undone in mere seconds.
In his moment of wait, an epiphany dawned upon him.
"The grimoire never made mention of how to revert the transformation if the time doesn't get exhausted."
He pondered and flipped through the grimoire looking for the page with the possible instructions to undo the spell in its process, but there was none. All one could do was wait and coincidentally, the tree stump shapeshift spell ran out of mana and became the rock again, the marked glyph gone.
"Just how much research was done?! So much for an All-knowing grimoire." He scoffed, not like he had taken the name literally but, he certainly did expect more from it, it was a massive grimoire after all.
He then proceeded to use the last and the most complex glyph and as expected, it took a large amount of Mana.
The spell activated with a violent gush of wind and blasted up the soil beneath it clouding the area momentarily in dust.
There was a golden shimmer and revealed was a massive coin of gold.