After spending a bit of time getting in the right mindset, Villin began reading the book on warding he got.

The first thing the book explained was the difference between true wards and fake wards. Well over ninety percent of the existing wards were in the ‘fake’ category. These were pretty much wards created by spells.

Unlike enchantments and magic arrays, wards weren’t all that affected by their surrounding area. Wards would almost always be created in the air, hence there was no need to worry about things such as the shape of an object or anything of the like.

The only things that could influence wards were the temperature and the density of magic elements. Still, even so, in this art, it wasn’t as important as an object was in enchanting and a large array of fake wards existed. All you needed to cast fake wards were the right spell blueprints and good control over your magic.

Even though it was overall still pretty hard, it was substantially easier compared to other arts such as enchanting and magic arrays.

The book made it very clear it would be talking about the creation of true wards instead of the fake ones.

Only around two percent of the wards in the world were true ones and the reason given was extremely simple.

Creating true wards was extraordinarily difficult.

In essence, when creating a true ward you would be sending out magic power, form it into hundreds to thousands of runes, and lock them into space itself.

Wards were nearly always hemispherical, and even when the creator left it would remain there, if not interfered with a well-made true ward could exist for hundreds of years.

There were two steps in the creation of true wards that were extraordinarily difficult.

The first was creating the runes in a way it would be able to continue to absorb magic power even after the creator leaves. Luckily, this step could be skipped using certain spells.

Even though this would make it so that the ward would only exist for a few months, the author of the book heavily recommended everyone to learn these half-fake wards first. This would allow you to focus on the second extremely difficult section.

The second main difficulty was connecting the runes into space itself. At first, many would try to connect it to the first thing they could feel in the air around them, oxygen. But oxygen moves and disperses, if you connect to oxygen your ward will become ineffective within just a few hours.

The author also said that being skilled in enchanting, magic arrays, and spell constructs was almost a must in order to try and create true wards.

Sadly though, Villin didn’t know how to create spell constructs yet, he was still waiting for professor Crumb to give him a book related to that runic art.

While it was on the topic of difficulty, the book mentioned the abysmal passing rate of those in the classes relating to creating true wards.

In Mafoli and Graesa, the two schools that are most skilled in the art. Only five percent of those who follow the course manage to create a decent true ward by the time they graduate.

And that wasn’t even talking about the abysmal number of people that joined the course.

After passing by the first ten pages that all talked about the difficulty of the art and the requirements to try and learn it, the actual book finally began.

The book was made by the white magic tower itself and the author changed multiple times. Still, it was all extremely clear, after a bit he got to the first ‘assignment’.

One of the authors stated that at this point in time you should stop reading until you were capable of writing runes in mid-air using your magic power, using nothing but your finger.

Once he got to this point, Villin paused. The information in this book was immense, even though he only got to the first step he knew it would be very hard to complete it.

After reading the first section of the book a second time, Villin finally put it down and tried creating runes made of magic power in the air.

In reality, this was probably the easiest step among all of them, yet still, Villin found it extraordinarily hard. Villin was already quite skilled at using magic power outside of his body, but it was always connected to himself. A rune consisted of multiple individual lines. Every time he finished a line, he would have to cut off the line that connected it to himself while keeping the created line intact.

When it came to creating a single line, it was very doable. The problem was that no rune consisted of one line. Those used for warding used ten lines at the least, this made the task very daunting.

After noticing that this wasn’t something he would be able to do consistently anytime soon, Villin decided to spend three hours every day on wards, spending the rest of his time on other skills, for one he picked up his passion with studying the web up again. Figuring out more and more of the uses of every node. Additionally, he also began working on more derivatory spells since you would never have enough of those.

Yet, only a month later professor Crumb came to visit Athena’s Forge. As soon as Villin opened the doors and saw the professor’s serious face he knew why he had come.

He had known this time would come ever since he got back to The Academy. The professor asked for him, Ruby, and Kayley to follow him and so they did. The group used the halls that were used less frequently as they were led somewhere by the professor. After walking for a few minutes Villin couldn’t help but ask where they were going, just in case he had it wrong.

He didn’t.

After he asked the question the professor looked at him with a serious gaze before responding, “We are going to war boy. Prepare yourself.”