Chapter 117: Phantom Challenge [1]
After he was done having an honest conversation with Heinz, he went back to forging, he hammered one weapon after another, he failed and succeeded numerous times.
After countless attempts of such, he had finally gotten the hang of it somewhat; now, in every single try, he would be able to produce a minimum result.
With that done, he finally jumped into the engraving procedure. Picking up the rune engraving pen, putting the sword on the engraving table, then fragmenting a basic rune into three, he chose one part. Injected his gaseous mana from the nexus core, started writing down the rune, directing the mana into that shape, and forming it into the proper concept.
The first one, a failure as the weapon exploded. But he had already made precautions beforehand, expecting that to happen anytime, when engraving a permanent rune on a proper weapon. Since engraving runes on mana papers makes it a temporary rune that loses its power after a few moments, it doesn’t explode even after failing, thus it is named as a temporary rune.
2nd try was a failure, 3rd a failure, 4th a failure, 5th a failure. At a certain point, he had stopped counting out of annoyance. The goddamn fucking world Will, it was as if the thing was absolutely vehement on not letting him succeed no matter what.
After an uncountable number of tries, the first success was achieved, Fortunately, he had already forged a high number of swords so that he could keep himself focused on the engraving part of the procedure without too many worries.
Holding the sword in which lightning cackled crazily, sparks of electricity flew into his arm, but it was unable to do anything. He examined the sword’s state carefully, the state of the pseudo rune in it, its stability, and power conversion.
There were flaws, many things which could be improved upon. So, he put that aside and took another forged sword, he started engraving on it again. While a forged sword could be melted and its materials could be reused a few times, that wasn’t the case for the engraving procedure. Once an engraving of a rune failed in the mid-process, it would explode.
You can’t break it down and try to use it again, because it will explode again on that attempt. So, time after time, he continued engraving one exact pseudo rune on every try, perfecting it little by little again and again. With every try, the world Will worked against him, a mind-splitting pain assaulted him every single time, his senses would become fuzzy the more he persisted, especially at the end of it when the rune was about to be successfully formed.
His runic eyes helped immensely in every part of the engraving procedure, and his ‘Absolute Runecaster’ title, these things kept him focused on the process no matter the pain or the type of distraction imposed on him by the world Will.
But no matter what the world Will did against him, he was unrelenting, he could not be stopped, the similar thing he went through in the trial world also helped in this case, since he was pretty experienced with it by now.
So, he continued making the same weapon with the same pseudo rune day after day, night after night. His situation with Lumina also returned to normal. While it wasn’t exactly as free as it was back then, it was almost close to it.
He also discussed with Heinz on how his forging was going, and as expected. The guy already overtook him in the pure forging process, he ended up receiving some bragging advice from the guy on how he could improve on his part. He was internally a bit jealous and grumpy that he overtook him on the forging procedure so easily, but brushed off that thought soon enough.
Eventually, Axel mastered one pseudo rune after another, and with each one mastered, the next one became harder and harder. Back in the trial, Axel would feel a subtle incremental improvement on his level with each rune mastered, but that did not happen here. His requirement on the 1st phase Seeker as a Runecaster was to master 24 pseudo runes from each of the 24 basic runes. In that sense, as a runecaster, he should advance onto the mid state of the 1st phase upon mastering 8 pseudo runes.
But that did not happen, of course for others who only needed to master 8 pseudo runes in total, they would advance onto the mid state for mastering only 2 runes, then another 2 runes to advance onto the late stage of the 1st phase, 3 more runes to be ready to advance onto the 2nd phase Seeker considering their other aspect is also ready to advance onto the 2nd phase.
Instead, after mastering 8 pseudo runes, what happened was that the extra door that was on his runic chamber opened, which he did not know the purpose of. Prime Nexus delivered the information to him promptly.
[Please enter the doorway while holding only one of your masterfully crafted pseudo runic swords.]
Axel was bewildered at the statement, this type of thing that only happened to select extremely strong individuals, so the world will would puts them through special challenges. Lucien and the Valkyrie were some easy examples of it, who each had their own unique challenges within their sanctum.
With some hesitation, he picked up the sword engraved with his first mastered pseudo rune, then slowly walked in. For a moment, there was a blinding white light, and then they appeared in a place that looked like an arena of sorts.
But as the details cleared with the white light receding slowly. He recognized the arena as the very one on which he competed in the competition between all the magic towers. He frowned, seeing that, then finally saw something walk out from one of the doorways that opened on the walls.
An identical replica of him came out, but it seemed more animated, somehow lifeless, but exactly the same looking as him in every way, even in posture, or the details of its runic eyes were exactly the same. The difference was in their swords.
50 Golden Tickets = 1 Extra Chapter
200 Power Stones = 1 Extra Chapter
1 Magic Castle = 4 Extra Chapter