Chapter 27 Compound Runes
Although Mark had promised to mentor Sol, he wasn't going to waste all of his good morning on this level 1 newcomer; level 2 apprentices were also heavily tasked with learning, especially since they were going to be tested in a month.
Instead of Mark teaching Saul, it would be better to say that Saul would first delve into it on his own, and when he encountered difficulties in figuring out what to do, he would then ask Mark about it.
Unfortunately, even with Mark's explanations, Saul still had a half-understanding of many places, and couldn't figure out the logical relationships at all.
Before leaving at noon, Saul made another request to Mark.
"You want to borrow that puppet doll for testing mental strength?" Without hesitation, Mark went directly to the cabinet in front of the lab and opened the cabinet door, rummaging through it and pulling out a puppet doll at random.
The moment Mark opened the cabinet door, Saul couldn't help but take two steps back.
Looking at Saul's vigilant appearance, Mark felt funny again, "Afraid, and still want to borrow it?"
"Just scared, so I need to borrow it." Saul was careful not to let himself and the puppet doll meet eye to eye.
Saul reached for it and Mark casually placed the puppet in his hand.
"Friendly price, 5 magic crystals for 10 days."
"Then I'll borrow it for 2 days."
Mark black-faced, "No borrowing for 2 days!"
Saul simply said, "I only have 3 magic crystals in my hand."
The current magic crystals were also exchanged by him with credits and Cori.
It could be cheap for a friend, but it could never be cheap for an enemy.
In the end, Mark took away three of Saul's magic crystals and warned Saul that research was fine, but if he damaged it, he would have to pay 2 credits to compensate.
Wrapping the puppet doll in layers of cloth, Saul carefully put the doll into the pocket of his apprentice's outer robe.
"Take me away, take me away ..."
Saul motioned, "You heard that, Padawan?"
"Hmm?" Mark had sat back down at his desk and buried his head in his research.
"No, nothing ..."
Saul was pinching the pocket of his outer robe with one hand, like he was afraid something might come out of it.
He picked up his book and turned to head out of the lab.
On the way back to the West Tower, someone stopped Saul.
Saul knew her by sight, knew she was a first class recruit at the same time as him, but forgot what her name was.
"Saul," the little girl looked a little shy, "I have something I want to tell you."
She pinched her dress, her index finger twirling the grips on it over and over.
"Can you finish in five sentences?" The girl came out so suddenly that Saul nearly rushed into her.
The other girl froze, her expression slightly aggravated.
"Sorry, I'm in a hurry."
"But I ..." The girl's eyes suddenly reddened.
Saul simply stepped around the other man and mumbled aloud, "It's over, it's over, it's too late, it's too late."
The girl stood in a daze, and did not catch up.
It didn't seem to be anything important.
But Saul still didn't make it out of the passage.
At the end of the passage, another man jumped out.
"Hey, Saul!"
This person Saul recognized as Dozer.
The newcomer who used to run after Korrie and later hung out with Duke.
This time he wasn't followed by the Rocky who didn't have much of an opinion.
Already since finding out that Sol's magical talent was low, Dozer hadn't come to him of his own accord for a long time.
"Sorry, I'm really in a hurry." Saul tried to go around Dozer again with a turn of his feet.
But Dozer raised his hand and directly sealed the passage.
"I'll finish in five sentences."
Saul could only stop in his tracks.
"Senior Rokai led a portion of the freshmen to form a mutual aid society. There everyone can learn from each other and discuss with each other. Today at two o'clock in the afternoon is the day of the second gathering of the mutual aid society, do you want to come?"
"Do you want money?"
"Uh, regular students are charged ..." "I don't have any money." Saul finished with a polite nod to, then pushed Dozer's hand away and headed out the door.
Dozer turned to Sol in a hurry and shouted, "Korie has promised to attend today."
Saul stopped in his tracks, looked back at Dozer's smug expression, and said sincerely, "I'm really broke."
He hurried away, and finally no one stopped him again.
After a hurried lunch, Saul went to the corpse room on the second floor of the East Tower.
This place had been turned into his study room, and the dormitory was only used for evening study and rest.
The outermost corpse room had been reorganized by Saul, and in addition to the teleportation table and two long tables a cabinet had been added, which contained some of the essential supplies for experiments that Saul had exchanged.
These instruments and materials had cost Saul all the remaining credits in his hand.
If it wasn't for the fact that the Wizard Tower provided food and shelter, Saul would have to drink the northwest wind.
In the cabinet, apart from the things Saul had bought, there was also a portion of the alienated materials he had taken from the corpses.
An accident made Saul realize that if the materials he had taken down were not put into the empty box on the long table, they would not be taken away the next day, but would remain in their original place.
And after studying Grimm's Perception of Sorcery Alteration and Guide to Corpse Alteration, Saul already knew how to use some of the basic materials.
So every time he worked, if he could acquire more than two materials, he would leave one behind.
As for whether he would be recognized as stealing?
Saul didn't think it would.
The book Mentor Katz had given him to study corpses wasn't just for testing residual properties on corpses.
The second half of that book was all about how to preserve the material, some simple applications, and a little bit of exploration about the soul.
Since his mentor had allowed himself to study this book, he must have had the idea of letting himself learn the knowledge in the back as well.
However, even the containers that Saul had bought specifically to place perishable materials in would still be difficult to stop the natural decay of the corpses.
Luckily, there was also a 0th order sorcery – preserving organs – mentioned in that book on Corpses.
In order to learn this sorcery, Saul had to first master that complex dark attribute composite rune.
This was the reason why he was desperately studying day and night these days.
It was just that the difficulty of this dark attribute composite rune was beyond Saul's imagination. Even with his high spiritual talent, he still couldn't quickly figure out the principles.
That was why he had spent magic crystals to seek advice from Senior Mark, only that unfortunately, although Senior Mark had given him some ideas on how to solve the problem, he still hadn't found the correct answer.
Saul used an absorbent pen to carefully trace the basic figure of the compound rune on a piece of white paper.
"Through the coordinate axes it can basically be determined that the graphic I traced is consistent with the original rune. But why is it that I still can't activate this rune when tracing it with my spiritual power?"
This composite rune was already one of the simplest composite runes.
He looked like two basic runes overlapped together to form a new pattern.
Only one of the runes was scaled down in proportion.
"Senior Mark said that composite runes aren't just the overlapping of two base runes, but also to pay attention to their proportional relationship. But I also distributed the magic power proportionally, yet something still seems wrong?"
"Senior Mark also said to pay attention to the angle, what is the angle of angular observation?"
Sol held the white paper up in front of him at eye level.
Suddenly he had a flash of insight.
"Could it be the perspective?"
Saul immediately put the paper down and took a grid ruler to find the center point to draw the perspective drawing, trying to explore the distance between the two diagrams by calculating the proportionality.
"No!"
After half a day's work, he still couldn't inspire the rune.
"I should have done the math correctly a dozen times, so it's not a perspective drawing."
Somewhat exasperated, Saul threw the composite rune, which he had already drawn out of shape, into a ball and threw it into the trash can.
He stared at the waste paper in the trash can.
"What exactly is wrong with my understanding?"
The runes in the trash can were crumpled and pinched, one concave, one convex, one vertical, one flat.
It was as if there were countless little runes dancing and jumping in front of Sol's eyes.
"Wait!" Saul's eyes suddenly lit up as he raised his hand and snapped his forehead, "I've already thought about the possibility that the two runes might not be overlapping, but rather that there is a spatial distance, so why haven't I thought about the fact that the planes in which the two runes are located are not necessarily parallel?"
Saul took out a new piece of blank paper and put pen to paper on it first and drew a three-dimensional coordinate axis.
(End of chapter)