Entry 16

Yep, the effect those journals had on me is wearing off. I don't feel as excited as I used to be when I was writing them three days ago. So this will be my last journal for a while.

My name is Adam Clay, and if you are reading this, I am already dead.

(Cause ain't no way I'm letting someone read my corny ass writing, not in a thousand years… which I assume is when you are)

After what felt like an eternity of sleep, which was actually 13 hours, I woke up with a splitting headache and a body full of spasms. Fortunately, Megan had some physical therapy knowledge, and Biscuits had left me medication to counteract any side effects from the AdreMax shot.

Once I went down from my bedroom to my downstairs work area, I already had a guest waiting and fiddling with my stuff, my second bff so far, Captain Solomon Creed.

In one hand, he held the small metal strongbox where he stored the Seed of Light from the Wolf King; in the other, a Banneret Paladin miniature that I painted to perfection.

He had a demand to make, and I was in the mood to deny him his dearest wish, as I had hardly recovered from the crazy day of work yesterday and needed to prepare for the summoning by resting all day. However, fearing that I was going to be dragged somewhere and told to do the summoning under threats like the good old days, I took the Seed of Light from his hand and told him I would do some research and preparations.

Yes, preparations. My preparation involved sitting back, relaxing, and using my tools to shave bones into shape, carving miniatures from human bones all day long. I had almost every known Rune arranged in neat piles of human bones, extracted and dried by the Urdmen squad I had assigned to rune recovery duty.

Now, I am going to make bone puppets using every Rune I can get my hands on. They wouldn't be simple puppets. Instead, I am making my own squad of Espers and summoning them before I summon any Paladin.

My reasons for this involved my newest plan to shield the team I was sending to nuke the Jotnar Rift from the Freeze, since the nerds in the Command Center had estimated the Rift's origin in Montreal while I was dead asleep.

A mission so far from home was vital to end the threat, and for that I turned to the Command Terminal in hopes of finding the answer among the hundreds of recipes and tons of open positions that could give us the tiniest edge in the coming battle.

There, I saw it at the edge of the resources bar, the Holy Furnace capacity meter showing that we had garnered a good amount of Solymer Ash, the Solarium's toughest material ever… after it was processed, of course.

Would Solymer, a product of the Holy Furnace, shield something from the Freeze? The answer was unlikely, since it was only a byproduct, but as I opened the tab that showed all the recipes involving Solymer and Runes, my eyes landed on an option I considered to be the top contender for the most useful item to craft.

The Convergence Cube.

I waited for the Monks to finish discussing that matter over the past few days, but their stance regarding the Cube was a house divided, and, to be fair, they hadn't had time to look into it. From what they told me, which was something I had never learned about in the Lore, the origin of the Cube predated all SolTech Designs and was a relic from the Great Stellar Age, the golden age of mankind.

But here's where it gets funky, and I am not getting to the purpose of the Cube just yet, because that's even funkier. Right now, the Cube's two main ingredients are both Solymer Ash and Runes, namely the Mind Rune and the Force Rune… and you see it, right?

Why would something that originated in a fictional universe like Wartopia need components that originated from the Rift? I mean, it is obvious, right? The Rift gave the Runes, which gave me Wartopia, but in order to expand upon the concepts I was bringing to the world, it had to add lore from its own end as if it was reacting to me.

I had read most lore books back to back, and if there was something I didn't know, Kave and Megan would usually have run into it, but none of us had heard of Convergence Cubes, so it had to be this.

The Rift World, or the World Tree or whatever hosts the Runes, was telling me, "Adamant, I got your back, buddy," and giving me new concepts to patch what was missing.

It was a big "IF" currently, but whatever that Convergence Cube did, it must have been important since I had gotten it after the Captain Trial, which brings us to the Cube's purpose.

According to what the monks could answer, the Convergence Cube could break the barrier between Realspace and Cyberspace.

Did this mean physically? The answer was no. The way it happened was that it could draw the myriad unfiltered thoughts of Cyberspace according to given criteria and return them to Realspace as Data. A concept similar to the internet or the cloud, yet fundamentally different, it allowed the use of Cyberspace as data storage.

Not just that, it could analyze data with the help of a computing chip, put it together in all sorts of shapes, and return it as SolTech Designs for various machines. Basically, a technology generator.

So if I wanted the technology to harness Rifts, discover Runesmithing, or shield my devices from the Freeze, I would have to build the Convergence Cube and pray it could do that in real time.

That's why I was doing what I was doing: making bone miniatures from human bones into Esper puppets. Why? Because I needed not only Runes, but even Espers, since the only ones who could extract Solymer from a Holy Furnace weren't Solarium Paladins or Monks, but rather the ones they hated the most: Espers.

The major complication of creating Solymer constructs was the fact that Solymer Ash couldn't get out of the furnace and be worked on by hand. If it went out, it cooled off, and if it did, it would never be returned to ash ever again, not even with a Holy Furnace.

It was a one-way, done deal.

It could also be contaminated if someone went in while it was still in ash powder form, since the Holy Furnace gave it matter purity of 100%, meaning it was a super-hot clean room that turned anything into one thing, and that was it—no further negotiations.

The only thing that could get in were Esper powers that couldn't be burned with Holy Fire and could manipulate Solymer Ash in its powder form easily, which led the Solarium to train Armamenta Forge Espers, ones with powers similar to the Bending Rune.

But what about me? Couldn't I do it with my Bending Rune?

Sadly, that would be a no. I tried it back when we sacrificed a few captured Neanders to the Furnace, but to manipulate anything with the Bending Rune, I needed to be able to see or feel it. But since I couldn't see inside a Holy Furnace as it burned, the Esper Puppets could utilize their Extrasensory Perception for me.

Operation Torchlight

While it was technically part of Project RuneTech, most of these steps fed into Operation Torchlight, a multi-layered plan for dealing with the Freeze and breaking away from the darkness it brought, hence the name.

I studied the Convergence Cube designs a few times just to make sure everything was in order, then I headed out to the Holy Furnace.

By that time, most of the monks were busy with the sanctification process of the nuclear warheads in the War Factory, so I had to operate the internal terminal on my own, trying to grasp how much I could control the Holy Furnace, which was running on low settings.

As mentioned earlier, I had almost all the most important Runes with me, including Mind, Force, Bending, and even Power and Essence if needed. They were all shaped into Esper puppets, in order to access the inner parts of the Holy Furnace from the outer chambers, which was the main goal.

I even tried summoning them before I headed out, just to make sure I wouldn't get dragged in by a nostalgic Runic Being to talk for long hours.

Anyway, the terminal showed me the estimated amount of Solymer in the underground furnace silo. Using the puppet with the Bending Rune, I used my Puppeteer Rune to gain complete manual override and activated its ESP ability, Psionics.

I was rather fearful every time I got too close to that "fictional" Wartopia power, but as I thought about it, it turned out to be mostly a sort of application of the Mind Rune if we were to follow the idea of the Rift World Tree thing doing supplementary conceptualization for my summons.

Also, since it had none of that agonizing feedback that assaulted the human mind when an Esper used their power, I realized my Puppet was taking all the damage while sending me just the feedback, which was pretty damn neat.

So as I focused and gave orders to the Esper Puppet to look into the Holy Furnace, I had that strangest feeling when I looked towards the underground furnace silo. It felt like as long as I kept looking in that direction, I would be able to see what my puppet was seeing, even though all my eyes were seeing was the ground and the Holy Furnace building.

It felt like a complete mind fuckery, but it actually worked, and I was able to confirm the existence of Solymer inside.

Step two was much simpler. I tried to make my Bending Rune Puppet try to manipulate the Solymer Ash directly, but as I switched focus, Psionics got cut off, so I rerouted and used my own Bending Rune.

It irked me since I felt my mental energy being drained, but another thing I noticed was that if I gave any of the Puppets a command and told them to continue doing it, they would do so without the need for me to focus, as long as the order was static in nature, like "hold this", "focus on that", or "act and repeat."

So I restarted the situation once again: one puppet focused on revealing the Holy Furnace underground silo to me using Psionics (the Mind Rune Puppet); another on keeping the Holy Furnace energy at bay (the Force Rune Puppet); and the last one sent the Bone Fragments bearing the required Runes inside (the Bending Rune Puppet). I controlled all of this with the Puppeteer Rune from behind them, as if we were performing rituals.

For the first time, it was all perfect, and I wasn't planning on jinxing it.

The Bending Rune puppet sent the Bone Fragments in through the open ports in the building while the Force Rune puppet made all the burning flames steer away from them.

So far, it worked well, but my next step was the gamble.

As the fragments were taken into the underground furnace silo, I knew I wouldn't be able to hold it together with the Essence Rune shielding the fragments, and the moment I cut off the power, the furnace would disintegrate the bone fragments into specks of Solymer Ash.

And so I did.

This was the die throw I was now willing to cast, and as I watched the fragments break into dust via Psionics, something remained in place, suspended in the air, with no power of mine holding it up.

When I looked closer, it all made sense.

It was them!

Runes!

Runes not attached to anything, simply suspended in space by the power of the Holy Furnace, shedding off their physical shells and maintained in an environment supported by the existence of the Seed of Light powering the Furnace, the only thing with the same origins as the Runes.

With them sustained and suspended, I tried probing them with the Force Rune and then the Essence Rune puppets, but they showed no reaction.

Disappointing, but still very interesting!

The Mind Rune was just the same, so much for being the parent Rune and all that.

This reminded me of how Lord Kaimu did it in front of me: he used his Elden Force to push the Rune out, then caught it with another item.

This gave me the idea, and I immediately started using the Puppeteer Rune to call out Solymer, form it into square plates, and suspend them.

Since I was making a Cube, I needed six of those Solymer plates, but each wasn't just a simple square plate, as depicted in the Convergence Cube designs; rather, they were similar to PCBs in design, and I wasn't talking Sacred Geometry; I meant actual printed circuits.

However, the shapes were simple, and it had many parts that still needed installation, so I kept shaping plates and suspending them deep within the furnace until I finally got all I needed. Then came the moment of truth.

Solymer and Runes: how much of a match were they?

The answer put a smile on my face—a huge grin, actually.

The moment they touched, the Rune accepted the Solymer almost instantly and merged itself into it; then it happened with the second Rune, and as I took them out of the Furnace, I felt the biggest joy coursing through my veins for days.

On this day, your homeboy made Runesmithing for Mankind!

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