The Runic Alchemist

Damian emptied the whole of Sanctuary’s steel and iron trying to make 50 waygate points—ten of which he placed in each direction of the Sanctuary city and connected them to major towns with dungeons, at increasing intervals, ending the last one with a connection to the border in all four directions.

Damian also wanted to make a giant wall all around the border so the issue of small territorial battles would be solved in a single move. But that needed a lot of steel—just like many of his projects that he had planned for the Sanctuary. Before he could get a good place to mine iron or steel, he would have to stop making anything new.

He still had ten extra dungeon waygate points left, though. These ten he had made with extra care—it had not just the blocking spell that wouldn’t let any runesmith or mage get a sense of the spell inside, it would actually zap anyone who tried doing that. Damian had not inscribed the waygate spell in them yet, but the plans were ready. Only two people could touch the lever on it to activate: one was Damian himself, and the other mana signature was left empty by him.

These ten waygates he was going to use to connect his borders and the three kingdoms. He thought about putting in safety spells that would root out weapons, but designing such a spell was a hassle, and it wouldn’t be easy to support either. Steel was already a poor material to make waygates out of—overloading it with such complicated spells would make them unusable in less than a month.

So finally, after a short discussion with his ’Brilliant house of Lords’, the most viable solution that came out was to make a security check area where the people from other countries would come out on the border. Damian could make some tools that would help them find anything suspicious going through their borders. And stop people in case they tried doing anything funny.

After a sleepless night’s planning, Damian made a few new runic tools from the suggestions he had received and his own thoughts on the matter.

First was a simple spell that he put in a scanner-shaped steel tool—the shape was his own fancy. Once activated and pointed at the spatial storage device, it would show the user what was inside the spatial storage in his or her mind. One could do that with simply their hands too, but that would use their own mana—his tool could work for more than a day if the small liquid mana tank was full. If the spatial storage was locked—which only happened in rare cases—the entry into Sanctuary borders would be denied.

Second, Damian made something akin to a metal detector. In reality, it would check the mana levels of each individual and suggest a rank of the man or woman. For pugilists, it would check their aura—Damian had reverse-engineered the aura-enhancing spell to determine how much aura a guy was exuding, to determine the rank based on that.

Along with that, Damian had planned implementing rules such as: the opening of the waygate would happen only for a fixed hour every day. Nothing bigger than a wagon with horses could go through. All people who want to go through the waygate must submit all their details before the waygate is activated—like name, occupation, address, and destination—to the person responsible for activating the waygate in each country. If anything looked sketchy, Sanctuary officials had the right to send the person back.

When the hour of travel would start, this list had to be sent first before anything. It was just an experimental thing—there was no way it would work to stop spies and other rogue elements from entering, but that was the best Damian could think of before he could make some spell that could make a special passport-like ID, with pictures and all, to recognize each individual in a unique way.