Cultivation is Creation

The elder suddenly snapped the book closed with enough force to make Constantine the cactus jump in his reinforced terrarium. The muscular plant quickly recovered, flexing its spiky biceps as though to prove it hadn't been startled at all.

"Tell me," Elder Molric said, fixing me with one of his more penetrating stares, "exactly how many runes were you planning to add?"

I shrugged, trying to appear casual. "As many as I can manage, I suppose. The more options in combat, the better, right?"

The elder's laugh started as a low chuckle before building into the kind of full-bodied cackle that usually preceded either a brilliant insight or a catastrophic explosion. Sometimes both.

"Oh, my naive disciple," Elder Molric wiped a tear from his eye, "you clearly haven't done enough reading."

I frowned. "What do you mean?"

"What I mean," he said, his expression shifting to something approaching seriousness (though with Elder Molric, it was always hard to tell), "is that there are very good reasons why Skybound practitioners have specific limits on the number of runes they can safely maintain."

He began pacing, his hands moving animatedly as he explained. "At Rank 1, you're limited to three physical enhancement runes. No elemental runes at all - your Fundamental Rune simply can't handle that kind of energy conversion yet."

Apart from the restriction mentioned, the rest didn't surprise me; we had discussed it in the previous iteration.