The way of Warding was an ancient profession.
Originating far in the past of the universe as a way to mimic the creations of the Celestial Artifacts granted to humanity by the architects, the art of Warding has developed thus far into one that was incredibly complicated yet retaining the streamlined nature needed to evaluate skill.
Circulating amongst the common populace as something that everyone could learn but little could master, the level of Warderswere separated into ten different levels.
Ranging from those you could see anywhere to those you would never be able to see in the average lifetime of a set two hundred years, the way to use glyphs became more complicated the more numerous they became.
And that wasn't speaking about the tertiary and quaternary glyphs formed out of several chains to make an even larger glyph or talking about the Combo Glyphs which applied different effects when placed adjacent to each other.
It was already rare for those to comprehend Glyphs as if they were another language, even rarer to construct them into legible sentences whenever needed.
Most Warders of the 2nd level usually memorized already established Glyphs, struggling to construct lines other than the ones that they had learnt
So safe to say that the Pale man who seemed as if he was foreign to the substance called color was mildly impressed when he saw the two students enrolled by the old man knew how to make Glyphed sentences albeit slowly.
Much to the dismay of the two unwilling students that were forced under his tutelage after being caught by the old senile man much to spry for his age.
Who knew that a man pushing his one hundred eighty's could run so fast?
Or break an arm and a hammer made of metal with pure grip strength for that matter.
On that note, currently Ester and Eva were working on a replacement for his arm, reinforcing the item with numerous Glyphed sentences as Jack, a friend/ uncle figure of theirs coded the runes responsible for the Arms multiple functions in the first place.
Thinking of it like an assignment, the pale man gave them a day to finish the arm as to evaluate their skill in engraving glyphs
Eva honestly wished there was nothing to even evaluate in the first place.
"Ugh..."
She sprawled out against the table, a tired look on her face as Ester hurriedly stopped the mug filled with a bitter brown liquid from falling to the ground.
"Hey! Careful with that!"
Making sure that the plant based awakening potion wouldn't ruin all of their work with a splash of its substance, Ester wiped the sweat off of his forehead and moved the mug to a place where it wouldn't be tipped over with Eva's antics.
"You could've made us do all of this all over again."
"Does it even matter? He's going to make us do it all over again anyways."
Rubbing his eyes, despite not answering, Ester inwardly agreed with her.
Roughly Five hours after they had been caught by the old man they were tasked to reinforce Ester's new arm until it could withstand Gramps's grip.
It didn't even need to be good, it just needed to briefly stop several kilo pascals of pressure for a single second.
Which honestly speaking was a harder task than it looked since the old man had once molded a blade barehanded after finding it not to his tastes
Staring longingly at the door which led to freedom away from this papery hell where they had to plan out a suitable glyph scheme, Ester soon forced himself to tear his gaze from the door.
Bringing his gaze back to the papery mess filled with several prototype blueprints which they had attempted and had to subsequently discard, Ester sighed when bringing his gazes to the three crumpled up arms.
Now resembling a pancake more than anything, Ester picked them up and tossed them into the smelter where they would be automatically separated and collected into different fractions of the metal.
"...Do you want to make the arm first so we can test the prototype schemes or do you wan-"
"Make more blueprints."
"Ok."
Rubbing his eyes, Ester picked up the pen before trying to recall all of the glyph schemes suitable for this endeavor and
"Now will you get up and help me? Or am I just doing it all by myself?"
"Wait..." Groaning, Eva pushed herself up from the table and picked up her own pen, parallel to Ester as she flicked the brown hair in her eyes away.
Grey eyes staring at the papers in front of her, her lips twitched before she got back to work penning down ideas which would be run through the both of them for any potential flaws.
They certainly didn't want to have to constantly melt and reforge the arm when it already was to much of a hassle to rearrange all of the parts into their correct places.
It was way to much of a pain.
Thinking of that, Ester looked at the glyphs necessary for reinforcement and a few other auxiliary glyphs and began to write.
The art of engraving glyphs was much more complicated than one would initially think.
Symbolising the major elements, the forces of the world and the phenomena of the world, glyphs were something like the basic building blocks of a world as they were visible in all of the aspects of life.
But to start things off, the Major elements of the world, the four states of matter and their four representatives.
Fire representing the state of energy, Plasma.
Wind representing the state of Freedom, Gas
Water representing the state of Flow, Liquid.
And finally Earth representing the state of restraint, Solid
When placing a fire glyph directly adjacent to a water glyph and it would extinguish themselves and become useless.
Place them far apart or diagonal from each other and they either produce steam or weaken each other.
And that isn't even talking about the delicate balance one had to uphold when using both glyphs as to many fire glyphs would overwhelm the water glyph and vice versa.
Adding Earth would contain the water and block out the flames while adding wind would cause the fire to become a blaze and the water to become a wave.
When taking all of these into account as one giant puzzle, although they were complicated, any engraver worth their salt would know the basic diagram of elements developed by Guo Pu of the Starmarked Dynasty.
There were additionally combination elements like steam, crystal, metal, sand, poison, plant, mist but for the time being, the arm didn't need any of them.
Besides the basic elements and their combinations however, there were the forces of the world and the phenomena of it.
The forces of the world were... more esoteric than the elements that could be understood intuitively.
They were the six cardinal directions, up, down, left, right, front and back.
The flow of time.
The measurement of distance.
The Push and Pull forces
The Stop and Go movements
And finally Direct and Flowing controls.
These forces of the world were things that were mostly different in every culture and thus had the most variations to them although most adopted the now widely spread metric in opposition to the imperial system of the Hamerican culture.
But in essence, the forces of the world could be instantly likened to the controls one would use to activate the Glyph Scheme although one could in theory make a glyph scheme entirely out of forces of the world although it wasn't recommended.
The ones that were being used here would most definitely have to be the stop and go movements, the direct and flowing controls and possibly the push and pull forces.
And finally, the Phenomena of the world.
These were the most exotic of all the discovered glyphs and was also one of the more undiscovered portions of it with Master Shapers theorising that they hadn't even uncovered 70% of the possible Phenomena of the World glyphs.
Being artistic examples of nature's possibilities, they were as varied as the lifeforms that inhabited the universe.
And seeing as there was the Uncolored Galaxy that the pale man had come from and the galaxy cluster where meteors carried natural habitats of their own somehow, it was pretty damn varied.
Not that Ester would be using any of these phenomena of the world class glyphs as they were not going to be of help in the arm.
Possibly.
Who knew whether there was a glyph out there in the universe that was capable of reinforcing the arm to insane lengths.
But nevertheless, even if such a glyph existed in this reality, there was no guarantee that it was easy to engrave.
Since one of the phenomena of the World Glyphs such as the meteor consisted of fifty lines, all of which have to be within half a degree of error, it was certainly possible for such a glyph to be extremely complicated to melting the mind of a lesser mortal.
And they couldn't even use machines either.
Maybe for some of the simpler glyph schemes, but with some of the more complicated higher tier glyphs one needed to personally adjust the flow of aether in the carvings to match that of their surroundings otherwise its quality would be below standard or would otherwise just straight up not work.
There was also the cost of the glyph scheme one had to account for as no one in this reality had the aether needed to constantly empower the glyphs.
In other words, it was mind melting even fifteen hours later of straight calculations, only aided by the strange substance that the pale man had brought from abroad.
'I think it was called coffee...?'
Taking a sip of the bitter brown substance that suspiciously looked purple for some reason Ester immediately face planted into the ground besides the unconscious Eva.
Several hundreds of paper parchments fluttering up from the rapid fall, the Pale man peaked in through the doorway and stared dumbfoundedly at the room that looked nothing like how he left it.
"Even better than talking to those guys my ass you senile man, what the hell have you given me?!"
Shouting to no one but himself, the pale man clutched his head in agony as he grimaced at the sight of the numerous papers dotting the ground, walls and ceiling.
"I don't even want to know how they got it on the ceiling"
Staring at the culmination of roughly 20 hours of the duos efforts, the pale man threw a few beads and snapped his hands, the beads transforming into two blankets as they did so.
Gracefully landing on the unconscious bodies on the ground the pale man's eyes soon dragged themselves towards the table that had been cleared of all debris.
And seeing what was on it the pale man couldn't help but laugh.
"So this is what they were doing huh?"
Shaking his head he instantly cursed the old man.
"Yeah damn right this any easier than talking to those old fogies."
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