Chapter 183: Intangibility Saves the Day
Livia, seeing that he was sinking back into his dark ruminations, decided that a more drastic intervention was necessary. She picked up a small pebble that was lying on the dusty floor of the corridor and weighed it in her hand with a mischievous smile.
— "Stop brooding like that," she said, aiming carefully. "You look like a tired old dragon hoarding its failures like treasure!"
She threw the pebble with teasing precision, aiming directly at his head. Mordred, surprised by this unexpected and purely playful attack, reacted instinctively. His reflexes, sharpened by years of combat, automatically activated his intangibility skill. It was a purely defensive gesture, almost unconscious - the kind of reaction that had saved his life hundreds of times in far more dangerous situations.
The pebble passed through him as if he were made of mist, but at the precise moment the skill activated, something extraordinary happened.
The universe seemed to suddenly change dimension. The runic walls that had mocked him for weeks transformed radically before his widened eyes. The symbols, once blurry and elusive, suddenly became sharp, perfectly visible, with crystalline clarity that took his breath away. But that wasn’t all, he could now see their connections, the energy lines that linked each rune to its neighbors in a complex and precise network that extended in all dimensions.
It was as if someone had suddenly turned on the light in a room plunged in darkness. The runes were no longer isolated and mysterious symbols, they formed a coherent language, a magical architecture of beauty and sophistication that left him speechless. He could see how energy flowed between them, how each symbol modulated and transformed the magical flux, how the whole created an effect much greater than the sum of its parts.
Shocked by this sudden revelation, Mordred immediately deactivated his intangibility, as if he feared this miraculous vision was just a hallucination caused by exhaustion. Immediately, the symbols became obscure, blurry, elusive again - exactly as they had always been.
But now, he knew. He had seen the truth behind the veil, and this knowledge changed everything.
— "Wait a second..." he murmured, his voice trembling with contained excitement. His analytical mind immediately went to work, seeking to understand and reproduce what had just happened. "Livia... I think I just discovered something incredible."
— "What?" she asked, surprised by his sudden transformation. The exhausted and defeatist man of a few seconds ago had disappeared, replaced by the Mordred she knew - the one whose eyes blazed with fierce intelligence when he was about to solve a mystery.