Chapter 24 - Forsaken Branch (1/2)
Four hours later, inside Jeremy's house basement...
After finished eating dinner, also dealing with a phone call from Charlotte and chat messages from his 'subordinates' in a group chat.
Jeremy came down into his basement and started to inscribe the planned diagram right away.
The diagram's name was 'Enchantment 2-633', of which number 2 was derived from stage 2, and number 633 was the number of series of the diagram, which had more than 3,000 diagrams for stage 2 alone.
Right now, it was around 9 p.m., and Jeremy was almost done with the diagram inscription that spanned the entire doormat.
It was filled with strange lines here and there circling around the 'staff' at the center of the doormat. At the same time, it also left many interior areas empty.
Those empty areas would be filled later with the 900 or so runes he had recalled from his sea of consciousness.
In a simple explanation, the diagram would act akin to a layout of a house which was consisted of countless empty rooms inside. Meanwhile, the runes would act as furnishings that would be filled inside those rooms later on.
Soon...
Instantly, right after Jeremy had connected one end to another end of the last line of the diagram. The whole diagram, which looked like a mess yet orderly at the same time with countless weird curves and sharp angles, suddenly lighted up in a glowing white light.
The whole basement got brightened up with the white light constantly.
After Jeremy had completed the diagram on the doormat, he looked at the now white lines with complex patterns altogether with different sizes that were composed of using various diagram inscription techniques.
When Jeremy saw that nothing went awry, he nodded his head in satisfaction of his own accomplishment.
Now, he had just finished setting up the layout, and the next step was to fill in the corresponding runes from his memory into the empty areas inside the diagram according to the process and sequence of the Enchantment 2-633 for it to work up and combine the materials of the staff together.
Not wanting to waste any more time for fear that he might have to go to bed late tonight, he went on to inscribe the runes right away.
Still, the process of runes inscription from now on would really pose a real challenge for him, for he couldn't use his own mana to inscribe those runes.
Because...
His mana was insufficient to inscribe even 50 runes, not to mention that he had to inscribe more than 900 runes within 4 hours before the diagram went out of energy and changed itself back into wandering mana particles in the air.
Then where the required mana used to inscribe the runes came from?
The answer was simple...
Jeremy brought out a small glass bottle from his backpack. It was actually a bottle of leftover mana fluid collected from the ancient trees around the world.
That's right...
He would use the mana from those trees to create a 'staff' of which its materials were derived from those same ancient trees.
To be accurate, this was quite a common yet ingenious method to enchant an item.
Reasons?
Because Jeremy didn't have enough mana to enchant a staff, he decided to collect the external mana to enchant it instead. However, he was currently inside a 'supposed' mana-less world; the problems about materials arose after that.
That caused him to think more about the materials used to create the staff. He had to think about many things, and one of the most important factors of them all was 'synchronization rates' of materials, mana, and runes.
Consequently, he decided to use one of the most orthodox ways of mages on Ortus.
That was... using both materials and mana from the ancient trees. At the same time, he would also use the rune sets that gave out the highest synchronization rates with the materials and mana.
As a result, Jeremy had finally come up with this strategy...
The mana was extracted from the trees...
The materials were also bits and pieces of the trees...
The elemental-less runescripts were also closely related to the trees...
Currently, the bottle contained around 45 mL of mana fluid due to him combining the two bottles altogether. While one bottle was from when he used it to create the 'gloves' for his subordinates, another one was the primary storage of mana fluid that was kept carefully to make this 'staff' especially.
'Even with this 45 mL of mana fluid. Still... a total of 933 low-tier runes and 4 middle-tier runes. This is gonna shake my sea of consciousness so badly. If I slipped up for even a single moment, my house is gone for real...'
*Sigh*
Jeremy sighed tiredly at his fate...
After bringing out the bottle, Jeremy sat cross-legged nearby the doormat at the same place as when he had tried to enter his sea of consciousness.
Then he opened the lit of the glass bottle. Unsurprisingly, the mana fluid, which should have evaporated instantaneously into the atmosphere after it met with the air, stayed at its place with only some movements left and right from Jeremy's jerking.
That was actually a result of Enchantment...
In fact, the bottle was enchanted with a simple stage 1 Enchantment method, 'Enhance'. In this case, it enhanced the property of 'containment' of the glass, causing it to be able to hold the mana fluid within.
Also, if stage 1 was called 'Enhance', then the upgraded stage 2 that Jeremy would implement to create the staff would be called 'Render'. As for what it could do or what it was, that was a topic for later discussions...
After Jeremy had opened the lit, he raised his left and right index fingers and pointed them in front of him. Then he started writing some strange characters in the air, or it should be said that he started inscribing the low-tier runes in the air of which, in each hand, they were inscribing different runes.
That's the case... Jeremy was actually drawing two different runes at the same time!
Meanwhile, he was using his mana techniques together with a mild help of mind power from his sea of consciousness to draw out the mana from the bottle as fuel for his rune inscription process that was commencing at both hands index fingers.