Sylas didn't bother cutting the entire sack. If the effect was so potent now, who was to say what would happen when the rest of it came out to play? Instead, he felt around slowly, observing the Runes, watching how they interacted with others, and piecing together how it was that he might be able to help the Basilisk King.
He sat there in silence for hours. Every time his stamina ran out, he would run in perfect stillness for a few minutes before going back at it again.
The Ice-Poison Rune was extraordinarily complicated. In this particular case, it seemed to be formed of 12 parts.
The first part was cold, the second was rigidity, the third was piercing, the fourth was needling, the fifth was cancer, the sixth was fragmentation, the seventh was surrounding, the eighth was fearlessness, the ninth was sublimation, the tenth was suppression, the eleventh was separation, and the twelfth was oppression.
These 12 names were probably meaningless to everyone but Sylas. And even for Sylas, they barely had subtle differences that differentiated them.
For example, piercing and needling were two that he had thought were the same thing when he first started. So were fearlessness and oppression, and so was surrounding and cancer.
However, the more he observed, the more he felt that there were subtle differences that had to be outlined.
Piercing was deep and singular, while needling was numerous and shallow. Cancer fed on the energy of an item and used it to grow, while surrounding was a deployment of how that stolen energy was used. Fearlessness reversed an energy's tendency to go from areas of low concentration to high, instead forcing the Runes to do the opposite, while oppression was an act against that concentration of energy itself.
Because of this, Sylas had gone from thinking that there were just two or three runes that made up the Ice-Poison Rune, to thinking that it was five, then seven, all the way to his current estimates.
It wasn't until several hours passed without him deciphering any more that he fully comprehended it all.
Finally, he understood.
If he wanted to help extract the poison from the body of the mammoth, he needed to first decide which of the runes that he would need, then he would need to replicate them.
'I think I will need… suppression, separation, oppression, and sublimation…'
Suppression would stop the poison from fighting back, separation would allow him to break it down into pieces without it acting like a single whole, oppression would make that process easier, while sublimation would move it into the easiest phase to extricate it.
Now… he just needed a method of how…
After some thought, Sylas used again and returned to his peak strength. He wanted to attack this with the very best that he had.
Once his state was adjusted to his peak, he took out the mammoth corpse.
It was in the same exact state that it had been in back then. The good thing about the Madness Key, although he couldn't put living things into it, was that it kept everything perfectly preserved. He had ended up testing this out on a small animal after he left Archibald to Lucius.
That aside, the reason this was important now was because it meant that the poison inside of the mammoth hadn't had a chance to spread more than it already had, leaving its corpse in the same state it had been when he had initially taken it out.
Sylas knew how dangerous this matter would be, but focused himself. He had already decided from the moment that he attacked the pig demon village that there was no going back now. The only way was forward, and if he wanted a piece of this world to call his own, he could only take risks.
He formed the Rune in the air. After analyzing it for so long, he was able to form it with a single stamp just like he had learned through the trial. It was thanks to his confidence that he took out the mammoth now instead of waiting.
The Rune reflected a delicate green light, different from the harsh blue that the full Ice-Poison Rune was capable of.
Sylas had already come to realize that whenever his Will was involved, his Aether would become tinged with green. He didn't know if it was a coincidence or not, but the shade seemed to be identical to his own eyes.
With a breath, Sylas pressed the Rune into the open wound of the mammoth. He was starting with one of the smaller ones, and his target was the very same wound that had allowed the poison to infiltrate its body to begin with.
Quickly, Sylas' eyes brightened.
It worked, it really did.
A part of him wasn't certain because all of these ideas came from a vague intuition of sorts that came from his Legendary Path. But now, he couldn't deny it at all.
With Enchanted Scribe activated, he could see the changes to his Rune, and he could see the purple-green poison begin to sublimate out of the wound. It bubbled up, diffusing through layers of flesh and being pulled into the Rune.
Thanks to the suppression and oppression aspects, the poison was bottled up inside the rune, causing it to slowly change color. When Sylas felt that it had reached its limits, he stopped.
He put the mammoth back into the Madness Key so that the poison wouldn't spread any further, and then he turned to the window to throw it out.
However, just as he was going to, he paused.
His gaze flashed over to the Arctic King Cobra's venom pouch. Runes danced across its surface and he saw something special within.
Part of the runes he had grown so familiar with were swimming within it. The moment Sylas saw it, he knew what to do.
Instead of throwing his infected Rune out of the window, he pressed it into the Arctic King Cobra's venom pouch. Then, after recovering, he pulled the mammoth out once more to repeat the process again and again.