After Seb arrived home, and the initial excitement died down, Cara and I managed to bring Sebastian and the rest of the family up to speed on what happened in the tower and the story of the shadow creatures and the mages who had created them. Cara told the story of her people and how they ended up living in the tower and then everyone was asking questions of me and Cara for the rest of the evening. They still didn’t know that Cara was a leopard woman, but I didn’t think that they needed to know that just yet. I had also asked Cara to try to hide that as much as possible while she was visiting New York, purely as a safety measure.

Although I wanted to bring my family into my inner circle, I knew that that would also introduce a risk. I wanted to keep that risk to a minimum so I was planning on keeping them out of most of my tower related projects, at least as much as possible.

It was late when we finally went to bed. I ended up in my old bedroom, and my mom prepared the guest room for Cara.

I climbed into my old bed but had a hard time finding sleep. So much had happened over the last couple of days and it was all really hard to believe. I couldn’t shrug the feeling that I was in a dream and that I would soon wake up and realize that none of it was real. I also hadn’t had much time to reflect on what had happened, and what my future would be, and all the changes that would be happening in the world.

Up until now I had taken pretty much everything in stride but I realized that I would need a plan as well as some game rules to play by. I was an over powered battle-mage, but in New York I was little better than a circus clown. I could do some tricks to amaze and impress the crowds in Washington Square Park but anything more and I would probably end up in trouble.

In a way, I was like a guy with a Lamborghini living in a town with a 70 km/h speed limit. The laws in most civilized countries were so strict that if I used my powers, I could very well end up a wanted man; or even worse, I could end up drugged and captured and dissected in some lab.

If I wanted to achieve my goals, I would primarily need to rely on my intelligence rather than on my magic, at least for the moment. It was incredibly frustrating to feel all this power surging through my body and not to be able to use it, but for the time being I had to accept this limitation.

I already had an idea of the things I would need to accomplish before returning to the tower. The most important I had already achieved, healing my brother. The rest, was going to be much more difficult. I still needed to start an ascender’s association and a school or training facility for ascenders. This would be difficult as the tower was not even opened for the ascenders. And I needed to do this before towers starting popping up all over the planet.

The first part of my plan was easy: build a buzz around the tower, show people what they could find inside the tower and let that snowball. That part was moving along nicely. The next step was going to be much more difficult, namely, convincing the authorities to let me start the association and training center and opening the tower officially.

As I was having a hard time sleeping anyway, I decided to absorb the new memory stones that the dungeon had left for me in the box. The first one, was one that I was really impatient to learn. Runes. This would allow me to create magically empowered items and would be key to providing a solution for the villagers in the dungeon in case the shades visited them again.

I sat up on the edge of my bed and took out the box with the memory stones. Most of them were still dull, but there were still two stones which were still shimmering with power.

I took the silver stone and placed it to my head.

There was a steady flow of symbols rushing into my brain along with the meanings behind each symbol. There was also a massive flow of information logic behind the runes, the rules and guidelines. How to combine runes, which runes should never be combined, the theory behind the creation of runes, how to improve the strength of runes. The importance of the materials used and how to empower them.

When the flow stopped, I was blown away by the enormity of the power and potential that could be achieved using runes and I couldn’t wait to test out my new knowledge. To begin with, I chose one of the most basic symbols, light. And as my mastery of mana was one of my strongest assets, I decided to create a rune simply made from condensed mana.

I created a small rectangle of thinly condensed mana, about the thickness of cardboard, yet with the hardness of a hardwood. I then parted the mana, letting the symbol for light appear, completely transpiercing the milky white mana board. As the last part of the symbol formed, a bright light was emitted from the rune. The light wasn’t nearly as bright as the light which was emitted by my sword, but it was considerably brighter than the light given by a 600-lumen led lightbulb.

I let the mana dissipate and the light disappeared with it. I knew from the theory, that the harder the substance was, the more powerful the effect would be, so I took a quarter from my pocket and tried to use my earth-metal affinity to form the light symbol onto the quarter.

I was immediately faced with two problems. The metal was harder to manipulate than other earth substances, and the surface wasn’t very flat to start with. The solution though was rather simple. I used my fire mana aspect to heat the coin, and then I used my earth-metal affinity to flatten George’s face and create an even surface to work with. I then etched the symbol of light onto the flattened surface. Next, I fed a small stream of pure mana into the rune and it started to shine much more brightly than my first attempt when I was just using just mana.

The thing that bothered me though, was that I needed to feed it a steady flow of mana, unlike my sword which shown brightly all on its own. Of course, if I fed more of my mana into the sword, its brightness increased, it was still very bright all on its own.

I knew that gems had a very large capacity for storing mana, and that there were also runes which could gather mana from the surrounding area. As I had received quite a few gems of all sizes, I decided to perform a test using a small amethyst. As it was too small, and the surface too uneven to etch runes into it, I decided to just use it as a mana battery.

I first imbued it with as much mana as I could before embedding the stone into the quarter, with the leading end of the light symbol touching the stone. The effect was instantaneous. The quarter started shining as brightly as before, but I no longer needed to feed mana into it.

As an afterthought, I decided to create mana absorption symbols on the eagle side of the quarter, but allowing the end of the symbols to touch the part of the gem which was exposed on the underside. If we were near to the tower, where the air was now rich with mana, I was pretty sure the light would be able to maintain itself, but the mana from the tower had not yet arrived in sufficient quantity in Brooklyn, so I instead created a loose cloud of mana just a short distance from the quarter, and triggered the rune by imbuing just a spark mana to activate it.

I felt like jumping for joy when I saw that the rune started absorbing my cloud of mana and transferring it into the amethyst. My mind was going into hyperdrive just imagining all that I would be able to do using runes.

I was pretty confident that I would be able to create a solution for the villagers to deal with the shade monsters. Of course, the symbols used to dispel demons were not simply light symbols, but that was simply a question of increased complexity. With the knowledge which I had gained from the memory stone, and the simple tests I had just performed, I would be able to create a solution; at least for the shades, but maybe I would also be able to come up with a solution for their masters as well. I still knew very little about their abilities.

With that thought in mind, I put my quarter, which was still shining brightly, and the memory stone box back in my dimensional storage and went to sleep. I didn’t feel I was ready to absorb the demonology stone yet, so I left that for another day.

Even though my brain was going a mile a minute thinking of applications for runes, my most urgent problem was still the next steps of my plan. As I crawled back into bed, I let my brain hash through the next day’s challenges in background processing mode as I gradually fell asleep.

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When I woke in the morning, I still didn’t have a plan, but I had decided on the first steps that I needed to do.

On the late-night news the day before, we learned that Mayor Levine was interested in finding me, so I decided I would pay her a visit in the morning. I preferred finding her on my terms, rather than her finding me on hers.

I asked Ellie if she would do me a favor and take Cara clothing shopping and to show her around town. I planned on meeting up with them later. I borrowed some clothes from my brother as I had been wearing the same clothes for days and headed over to the town hall.