The Runic Alchemist

Chapter 931: A Decade of Work

A day before the current time, on board Last Shadow, Damian.

“—but that will debunk the natural mana theory. Natural beings’ assumption will completely cease. All beings must be considered as reactive evolution-based. At that point, we have to wonder if this is something we should even decipher or not.” Orren Halvik said, seated on a soft couch with a stack of papers and books on the table.

Damian’s personal research room was filled with such documents, pieces of runic metal devices, and a pile of dungeon cores on the side. The whiteboards on all four walls of the room were filled with a confusing array of words and symbols.

“Not all beings. The mundanes and manaless animals are what I would consider ’Normal’ in this scenario.” Damian replied while watching the fast-forwarded video of the recent dungeon run.

One wall reflected the projection shot from the runic device. Damian, a young man, and Landbreaker were observing the footage.

“A world where all are equally weak..” Landbreaker commented, “That would indeed be a fair world, I say.”

“What of the irreversible stage effect? If it somehow works and we find ourselves in such a ’normal’ state, but our bodies can’t handle it?” The young boy named Nomai (Actually Steelweaver in disguise) added.

That was the thing Damian was worried about. Losing mana was not a big deal, but losing the addictive feel of power after being strong for so long would indeed break many minds.

In the last ten years, Damian had cleared over 8000 small and big dungeons. More than 12,000 dungeons remained in the database, though they were unclear and only partially explored. They were mostly the 75 and lower level ones since Damian made it a habit to finish the hundred-level ones first. But the number of unexplored hundred-level dungeons was still in the three-digit range.

Many dungeons that had released monsters in the wild for a long time were sealed by Damian after entering inside once. Many of those types of dungeons remained active even on the Wild Continent because he had yet to take a look at those.

All details aside, Damian’s two main goals for this Exploration Project had yet to be achieved. Even after entering eight thousand dungeons and killing thousands of Unfathomable rank monsters, Landbreaker had yet to ascend.

The experience points should be enough after that much constant killing. Landbreaker had honed multiple new techniques and achieved a significantly higher level of mana control through daily training with Damian. Having seen Landbreaker’s status, jobs, and skills, he developed several techniques himself and even invited many runic machines to assist in his training.

Becoming a God was not easy at all.

At present, they theorised that achieving godhood might require fulfilling one of the system’s most difficult requirements: killing another god. It was just a hypothesis though.

Damian had yet to find a method to achieve his second goal. A device that disrupts or even cancels the gods’ control over status. So they couldn’t see what the ascension truly required, or that Landbreaker had reached the point of receiving the hidden temporary Ascension skill.

The only thing they had was his levels. Landbreaker’s levels had stopped increasing after hitting 650. So clearly, Sun God was actively hiding the ascension skill and its requirements from Landbreaker. Damian even had him try the voice command skill activation that usually worked for him, but even that was somehow restricted. Or maybe it worked, but Landbreaker couldn’t see it.

After years of research to create a modified version of Steelweaver’s spell, which was capable of permanently removing a god’s control, he discovered its limitations for a typical Pathfinder and consequently changed methods. That spell’s whole foundation was based on the fact that one had divine mana, which a pathfinder did not have.

Other than to actually go find the Sun God and interrupt this control, Damian’s only hope of finding the answer to this problem was in the dungeon civilizations. Since he knew for a fact through the Pigman Sun God and Sunny that dungeons were a side reaction of a person becoming a fifth ranker. The civilization’s ruins present in the dungeons were more or less true events or some version of a true event that actually happened somewhere in the universe.

So his main focus shifted to dungeons and studying their civilizations with as much scrutiny and efficiency as possible. Over the years, he and the few people with him who took an interest in the dungeon studies had made several theories and conducted a lot of experiments.

Doing so much for Landbreaker had obviously not gone unnoticed by Astraea. She made a habit of visiting him several times a day to see what was going on with him. Once, she even warned him that his efforts of trying to help Landbreaker ascend would not go unnoticed by other gods, and they would not be happy about it.

To tell the truth, Damian expected the gods to interfere by now, but for some reason, Astraea had not told them. Through Orren Halvik, the Sun God could observe them as well, but that didn’t matter much. All the ascension things were kept secret between just him and Landbreaker, Astraea being in his mind, was hard to control, but for others it was easy.

This group aimed to find answers to the origin of mana, the creation of species, and deciphering stories of all these civilizations to learn and avoid a similar fate as them. Damian had revealed to the group that his goal was to somehow read the dungeon cores or use them with a waygate to visit those worlds.

That gave them something to work towards and an acceptable reason for searching for secrets of ascensions and godlike beings in dungeons. Especially how the relation of these beings to the common people of the civilization affected their world. Even the Sun God seemed interested in the theories they came up with and the experiments they did. He and Astraea would remain with them for hours-long discussions, and Astraea would even comment at times.