With his major project finished Azrael suddenly found himself with a lot more time on his hands. Lacking a focus he found incessant itch at the back of his mind returning, urging him to do something! He drowned it out, by keeping busy with his daily routine.

Training with Alena continued on as usual and life in general was pretty good. While Alena had yet to kill something her overall progress was good. Her Thief code was taking leaps and bounds, but it was in [Dagger Arts] and [Stealth], where she showed the most proficiency, while her [Trap Making] was also to be feared. Quite often they either had to let the creatures go, or gift them to the villagers, because she simply caught so much. Sometimes, even he had to be careful not to get caught in one of her traps or snares, but he didn’t mind. It was basically a free anti-intruder system.

The two of them still spent the mornings and afternoons together, first for meditation, then breakfast. And again later for sparring, or hide and seek. These days she was becoming harder and harder to find, so he incorporated some light sparring into the game itself. It turned into an ambush game, with mock weapons. Considering that he didn’t have to talk and she couldn’t, he almost found those afternoons enjoyable.

Free time was dedicated to some smaller beauty projects for his house.

His house now had a small, neat pathway leading from the front door to the entrance of the barrier. The two raised stones that had originally marked the entrance to the barrier had been shaped into simple stone lanterns.

Investing a mana stone into each of them he’d engraved each with a ‘light’ rune, before adding a rudimentary manual switch. There was no real purpose, but he thought it was a nice addition, should he ever feel like it.

That wasn’t the only rune he’d added around his house. Linking parts of his house to the accumulator array he’d pretty much modernised his house. Due to the ever-colder nights he’d added ‘heating’ and ‘cooling runes’ to the walls, while modernising his stove top to work with a ‘heat’ rune. He’d even managed to add more ‘light’ runes to the rest of building, extending the day. These conveniences were powered by a simple switch and mana stone, so that even Alena could use them.

Since mana was lost as it travelled down the stone lines to his house, he’d experimented with some mana stones to see whether he could fuse or shape them into a better mana conductor.

Pouring mana into one of the mana stones he’d tried to replicate [Stone Shaping]. Unfortunately, the mana stones seemed to resist his influence, not allowing him to find a metaphorical grip with his mana. Instead, he’d gained a different skill, called [Mana Transfer].

[Mana Transfer]

Few give, while many take.

You are able to transfer mana into other beings, magical constructs, structures, spells and rituals.

It wasn’t the result he’d been trying to achieve and even with further experimentation the mana stones refused to be influenced. He was forced to watch as the additional injected mana leaked out and became trapped in the magic dome.

Another convenience he’d installed was a warm shower out the back of his house. It used runes to pump and heat water from the lake. He linked the plumbing to the kitchen sink as well, so that Alena didn’t have to fetch water from the lake every morning.

While the sink had been a planned project, the shower had been a spontaneous decision. He’d built it after waking up one particularly chilly morning to a feeling of shock via the soul link. Rushing outside he’d found Alena returning to her room, wet and shivering. When he asked her where she’d been, she’d pointed to the lake.

“I-wash-me. I-clean” She’d signed.

He found out that she’d been regularly washing herself in the lake to keep clean. Azrael built the shower the next day, commanding her to wash there from now on. As an apology for this oversight he made a simple hand torch for her, imbuing it with a mana stone. The first time she turned it on and off, her jaw had nearly dropped to the ground. It had been hilarious.

Sure, he’d added all these runes to the house, as well as made a massive, practically invisible, barrier (you could sometimes see it shimmering in the sunlight), but she’d always accepted that as a part of him casting magic, like the [Fire Bullet] he used to use to light the morning fire, or [Stone Shaping] to fix a broken plate. With the hand torch being operated by her it was a completely different experience. She’d been in complete control of when the light turned on and when it turned off.

Through the soul link he knew exactly what she was feeling, He remembered the feeling from when he’d gained magic. For her however it was many times greater.

For him this was a fantasy game, where gaining magic was a matter of course. She’d lived her entire life never even dreaming that she could one day use magic. And here she was with a stone cylinder making light appear and disappear almost at will. It was like a child discovering gravity for the first time, and that if it dropped something it would fall down. For the rest of the evening, she would not stop starring at it, while turning it on and off.

Despite all of these indulgences, most of the mana stones continued to be invested into the accumulator array as additional batteries. He wanted the thing to be as secure as possible. More batteries meant more mana, which meant less chance of failure. Of course, he kept a few spares in his room for other things, such as projects.

He was working on one such project right now. Emboldened by his success with the barrier and in dire need of something to distract him from that nagging urge to do something, he decided to see if he could push the limits of what he could do with rune structures.

Curious about Alena’s stats and skills, he was trying to make an external status system. He knew the principles from creating the status system and was trying to recreate something similar to read the soul structure.

Due to the success of linking the rings to create a ‘single’ barrier he was now using multiple layers of runes to code his new experiment. In truth the barrier was still four separate spells. He hadn’t actually found a way to merge them into one, but each ring complemented the next, effectively creating a ‘single’ barrier. He used the same principle for his current project.

This caused his project to look like a big cube, or a square stone cake with many layers. Each square plate was built upon the other, the information compiling and building upon the information of the previous plate, even if they weren’t able to work as one. In a way it was like a magic Rube Goldberg Machine, where one action led to the next, except that this one actually had a purpose.

He’d already been in and out of Sera’s room several times during the process, but the problem was he was trying to use the runes to show the information of the soul. In the simplest explanation possible, he was creating a program that read and displayed soul information. Not impossible, just hard. Really hard. Especially since he didn’t have a translator to translate soul into Common.

Fixing a rune, he slipped the plate he was working on back into the cube and used [Lord’s Insight] on Alena, before calling her over.

Name: Alena

Class: Villager (Lv. 2)

“Put you hand on here” he said.

She placed her hand on the top of the box and a familiar blue screen appeared as a holograph above her hand.

Status

Name: Alena

Class: Villager (Lv.2)

HP: 60/60

MP: 49/50

STR: 6

END: 6

DEX: 4

AGI: 5

INT: 5

WIS: 4

Titles:

!%#*@(*&@ ?<>#*(&*@

Skills:

Dagger Arts (Lv.6), Meditation (Lv.2), @#!*)!*^@^ (Lv.#), Stealth (Lv. 6), #(@^!)#%^ (Lv.%).

He sighed as he saw the corrupted title and skill. He could fix most of the errors as it was information or a skill that he had, but her only title and her third skill were obviously ones that he hadn’t acquired. Nodding that she could take her hand off, he watched the blue screen flicker and disappear.

He let out a defeated sigh and pulled out the plate he’d just been working on. The fact that Alena no longer acted like a little kid at Christmas every time she saw the blue screen appear was a good indicator on how long he’d been working on it and how many time’s he’d gotten her to test it. At least the status screen was no longer yellow. He shivered. A status screen should never be allowed to be yellow, not even in his nightmares.

Interestingly enough, it seemed that villagers started out with a base stat of 4, while the [Villager] class gave out 3 stat points; 1 to Strength, 1 to Endurance and one to a random stat. Considering that [Villager] was usually the base class, if he put it into tiers, then [Villager] with 3 stat points would be first tier, a class with 4 stat points would be a second tier, [Sorcerer] and [Enchanter] with 5 points would be third tier, [Runist] with 6 was fourth tier and his Lord class with 7 stat points would be fifth tier.

He currently he had third, fourth and fifth tier classes. With a single level in each of his classes, plus his higher starting bonus, he would have a total of 15 stat points more than a [Villager] with the same amount of levels. He let that sink in. No wonder the villagers seemed so weak. He had the same amount of strength as a Lv.11 [Villager].

Shaking his head in disbelief he picked up his stylus and began his work again.