Weeks and months passed like a dream, and the new year found Avery still unwaveringly carving rune after rune. His penmanship had become excellent, and he regularly crafted perfect runes worth ten points, but his life saw very little variation.

He had gradually become incredibly bored by this repetitive lifestyle, and was craving any distractions. He had walked thousands of kilometers this year, but the scenery was still as unvarying and somber as ever, a shadowy corridor extending forever in the distance.

His exploration of the ephemeral energy wasn’t going anywhere either, it had become another part of his life that was stalled in an unchanging limbo.

He had managed to accumulate a little above 10 000 points, but at the current rate it would take millions of years to buy an item that could help him escape. The system said only immortal ranked entities could survive here, and he didn’t even have the authority to see the price of those items. He did know they would be absurdly expensive, as the cheapest teleportation scroll already cost trillions of points.

He had reached the point of crafting perfect runes at every try months ago, but he had made no progress since then. Getting a perfect evaluation already required to produce a rune flawlessly, as a single mistake would drop the grade to superior. What was left to improve when the system claimed his work was flawless?

He imagined better grades existed, like dao runes or Chaos runes? After all, this was a nonsensical magical world with an absurd level of power escalation. Perhaps he needed to infuse intent into his craft, giving it an artistic conception, or perhaps he needed to discover some kind of profound meaning in the rune, but his fumbling around in the dark had so far led to nothing.

There was nothing interesting about an uneventful life without progress, where the only change was a number slowly going up day by day. Unable to bear it any longer, he decided this could not go on. Glancing at the system mall, he found the package that had been tempting him and spent most of the points he had been religiously saving buying it.

Ding, congratulations on purchasing the 1 000 runes package. -10 000 Points

He was unsure if different runes would give him more points, but at least this would provide him some much needed variety. He also hoped that having more examples for reference subjects would help him predict the next level of chirography.

He briefly looked through his new runes, but was disappointed when he found no descriptive title. He was hoping for them to be named or be ordered somehow, like “rune of swiftness” under the category of "wind". Unfortunately, there were no such details, so his plan of comparing the runes to each other according to their uses failed before it could begin. He might still be able to understand something about how runes worked by comparing their design, but his motivation had already been severely hit.

In the situation he was in, with very little information and nothing to distract him, he could only motivate himself to keep going and work to avoid starving by placing his hopes on the system. However, that meant that anytime he was disappointed by the system, he would feel betrayed and lose a lot of faith in his eventual escape.

It was all he could do to force himself to start studying the new runes. Even if it didn’t amount to anything in the end, at least it would give him something to ponder on to pass time.

Avery didn’t have any plans or a research methodology, he just practiced inscribing the new runes. He had no idea how long it would take him to escape, but it would probably be enough time for him to thoroughly exhaust all the research material he had just gotten. In light of that, it was probably in his best interest to be as inefficient as possible to make the investigation last longer.

As expected, some glyphs took longer to make and cost more than others, although he was disappointed to find out that they all gave the same amount of points.

With a year of calligraphy behind him, he made very fast progress, but it still took more than a week to become flawless at engraving each rune, and it would take 20 years to perfect them all.

In between learning each rune, he would also come back to his initial rune, trying to apply whatever he learned and make sure he did not forget his skills.

Apart from learning a lot of miscellaneous runes, which would surely be useful whenever he got out of this hellhole, and drawing something different for a change, Avery was trying to improve his fundamental knowledge of runes by comparing them to each other, trying to decipher a pattern. He quickly realised that there were a lot of recurrent strokes in all of the glyphs. Slightly disgruntled, as this seriously diminished the novelty he was expecting, Avery compiled a list of all the different strokes.

Making the list was harder than anticipated, as he had no way to write something that would stay in existence for more than a few seconds, and was forced to do all of it in his mind. He would have been incapable of doing this on earth, but he guessed years of absorbing rune shards must have immensely strengthened his mind, as after only a few tries, he was able to create a mental sheet of paper upon which he could draw the strokes in his imagination.

Despite his enthusiasm and hard work, Avery didn't actually get much out of this. He found that every rune he knew started with a circle in the middle, on which each rune would add complicated patterns using combinations of 10 different strokes. Those ten strokes were composed of 5 unique designs, and their mirrored versions. This was all well and good, but it really didn't help him draw better or faster, and he was having immense difficulties doing research without being able to write anything down.

He kept all this information in the back of his mind, certain it would be useful one day when he understood rune better, but for now he decided to stop playing around and go back to accumulating pints with his initial rune, leaving the rest of the unlearned runes for the next time the boredom would become unbearable.

To avoid getting demoralised by the time passing by, he stopped looking at the system stats and calculating the time with used time warps. He knew he had been in this gloomy purgatory for almost three years, and that had been enough for him to almost sink into a deadly depression several times. Unfortunately, there was still no escape on the horizon, and it would take a million years for him to discover if his only hope of buying a miraculous item from the system was justified. Faced with these cruel numbers, it was best he forgot all about the future, and lost himself in the current repetitive task.

In an attempt to set a clearer goal, Avery swore to himself he would not stop carving the rune he was best at until he had 500 000 points, after which he would take another holliday learning other runes.