Re: Tales of the Rune-Tech Sage

CH697 Alex’s Failure

***

One Month Later...

Sanctuary Pocket Dimension...

Alex lay beneath Lord Bonsai’s canopy, seemingly asleep in peaceful repose. In reality, however, his mind was anything but restful.

The past month had been filled with one setback after another.

Well... to be more accurate, they were not outright failures, but rather a series of incomplete successes.

Over the course of the month, Alex had successfully recovered and reconstructed everything he possibly could from the Interspatial Orb, ultimately managing to recreate the Interspatial Teleportation Grand Formation—or at least, he believed he had.

In truth, there was currently no reliable means of properly testing the formation without possessing the planar coordinates of another plane. Nevertheless, his intuition as well as the vague assurance of his Rune Sage True Name gave him confidence that the formation should function as intended.

Alex had even incorporated several additional functions into the grand formation.

One such feature allowed the formation to automatically decipher and permanently record the planar information of any world it travelled to or from.

His intention was to prevent a repeat of their current predicament—arriving upon an unknown plane with no accurate coordinates and a heavily degraded return coordinates back to Pangea.

Speaking of that... Unfortunately, when it came to reconstructing the damaged return coordinates to Pangea itself, Alex remained unable to reliably deduce the final missing section.

Using mathematical concepts of his previous life as an analogy—

Alex had managed to calculate the coordinates to roughly the nearest hundredth decimal place. However, accurate interplanar travel demanded precision approaching the hundred-thousandth decimal place.

The gap between those two levels of accuracy was astronomical for something as unforgivingly precise as interplanar navigation.

Even the slightest error within the same decimal place could result in completely missing the intended planar jump. A discrepancy of merely a single decimal place could mean materialising inside a star, colliding with a spatial anomaly, or drifting endlessly through the empty void between worlds.

Alex simply could not risk attempting travel with the level of precision he currently possessed. Yet despite that, he also felt he had already reached the best result he was capable of calculating for now.

And that was merely for reaching Pangea itself.

If he wished to target a specific destination upon re-entry—such as the DragonHold Enclave or the Fury Lands—he might require accuracy extending all the way to the millionth decimal place.

This level of precision was no less important. After all, arriving at the wrong location within Pangea could also easily prove catastrophic. In civilised but hostile territories, his status as a noble might at least buy him a degree of temporary reprieve.

However, if they were unfortunate enough to emerge within one of Pangea’s naturally hostile regions—such as the continents of Terra or Cryonis—then the consequences would be immeasurably worse.

Ending up anywhere upon either of those two continents would amount to certain death for the entire party.

Unfortunately, no matter how much he pondered or calculated, Alex could not find any reliable way to improve the situation beyond its current state.

During periods when inspiration completely eluded him, Alex had diverted his attention towards several of his other ongoing projects in an attempt to lift his spirits.

One of those projects involved the Theolonium and divine energy research initiative—which, unfortunately, had also ended in disappointment.

To their credit, Sugud and Eleanore had actually succeeded in discovering a reliable method of refining Theolonium without destroying its innate property of storing divine energy.

Naturally, they possessed no divine statue or comparable artefact with which to directly compare the storage efficiency of their refined material. However, the mere fact that they had successfully refined the ore at all was already considered a major breakthrough in Alex’s eyes.

Even so, despite the success achieved through the combined expertise of their respective fields, Sugud had firmly refused to allow large quantities of the precious ore to be refined recklessly.

The Forgesmith Mechanic had no intention of wasting such an extraordinarily valuable material upon an entirely untested concept.

As a result, the only thing Alex ultimately received was a single Theolonium container that Sugud had crafted to resemble a medium-sized jewellery box—something that would not appear overly suspicious sitting atop an ordinary table.

Though it outwardly resembled a decorative jewellery box, the object itself was essentially a dense block of refined metal measuring roughly thirty centimetres in length, twenty centimetres in width, and fifteen centimetres in height.

The moment Alex obtained the box, he immediately brought it into the Sanctuary Pocket Dimension, where Lord Bonsai successfully infused it with leftover divine energy extracted from a Wildlands monster deity statue.

Officially, in the public eye, Fortuna and the BattleBanes had entered into a formal partnership to eliminate monster habitats in and around BloodIron due to growing concerns regarding a potential beast tide threatening the city.

Naturally, those concerns had been deliberately amplified by the Black Scar Syndicate, which exploited the fact that many settlements and regions bordering the central Wildlands of BloodIron—such as Dragonstone City—had already suffered beast tides over the past several years.

A formal contract was eventually been issued through the city administration building and, thanks to Drumvale’s influence, the commission had been awarded directly to the joint Fortuna–BattleBane task force.

Over the course of clearing the monster nests, the task force had uncovered a considerable number of monster deity statues.

As a result, Lord Bonsai was now overflowing with stored divine energy after absorbing the Providence it needed from the statues.

Even the Nest Queen had become completely saturated and could no longer absorb additional amounts of divine energy.

With such an enormous quantity of divine energy merely sitting idle in the form of condensed fruits hanging within Lord Bonsai’s canopy, the metaphysical tree had been more than willing to cooperate with Alex’s experiments by transferring some of the excess divine energy over to him.

Anyway, after Lord Bonsai infused the Theolonium box with divine energy, Alex attempted every method he could possibly think of. Yet no matter what he tried, he remained unable to extract—let alone properly utilise—the divine energy stored within the box.

In the end, Alex was forced to temporarily suspend the project after it reached what appeared to be another dead end.

With so many failures—or at best, partial successes—among the major projects he had hoped to complete during this work session, Alex could not help but feel somewhat disheartened. As a result, he had decided to relax for a while beneath Lord Bonsai’s canopy.

Unfortunately, even then, his thoughts refused to settle. His mind continuously drifted back towards the unresolved projects and their countless complications.

”Argh!”

Frustrated by the relentless stream of thoughts preventing him from properly resting, Alex abruptly sat upright and roughly rubbed his head.

Eventually, he released a long sigh of irritation as his mind continued tormenting him with thoughts of problem after problem.

’I should redirect my thoughts towards something more positive,’ Alex mused inwardly.

He turned to look towards the bonsai tree, which now appeared far healthier and more vibrant than it had after their sabotaged interplanar journey.

’Thanks to the steady supply of divine statues from the taskforce, Lord Bonsai is recovering nicely. Although we’ve had to rely on quantity rather than quality, it shouldn’t take much longer before the tree fully returns to its original state,’ Alex thought, his mood improving slightly.

’And now that I know divine statues can accelerate its growth, I can continue ”feeding” them to the tree even after it fully recovers. Once Lord Bonsai absorbs the Providence contained within them, I should theoretically be able to utilise the leftover divine energy for myself.’

The moment that thought surfaced, however, his mood immediately sank again as he remembered that he still had absolutely no idea how to make divine energy practically useful.

Alex sighed once more before standing up and walking towards the Rune table situated within the workstation area of the Pocket Dimension.

A faint smile gradually appeared on his face as his eyes fell upon the rune scrolls scattered across the table.

These were not ordinary rune scrolls.

They were rune tattoo scrolls—five of them in total.

If one viewed the opened scrolls from above, they would quickly realise that the Greater Runes inscribed upon each individual scroll interconnected seamlessly, forming a single, vastly more intricate Greater Rune structure when combined together.

The identity of the five rune scrolls soon became apparent.

Alex’s very first completed Rune Tattoo Set.

The Guardian of Happenstance Set.

***