When his mana was most of the way full, he carved out the final version of the [Diffused] rune on the artifact and then moved on to practising the final setting rune—which the process of elimination told him was none other than the ‘medium’ rune. Once he’d carved the squiggly mess four separate times, he thought he had finally produced a decent enough match for the outline. He hit it with a [Analysis] to see if it would take, and sure enough, the description appeared.

A rune that has been etched into wood with mana.

[Medium] Unlocked.

August placed his palm flat against the mana battery while he flipped through the rune library to find the entry.

A setting rune that describes the general potency of the output.

Which was pretty much identical to what Melon had said it was—so far, she’d been right on all accounts, and her hesitancy about how effective she would be in passing on her knowledge seemed to be entirely ill-placed. Maybe that would change if they tried something more complicated than what she’d described as the foundation of the craft but for now. Once he had enough mana back to bring up the [Etch] skill, August carefully carved the [Medium] rune onto the artifact—which left him with two blank spaces left. The emission rune, which he hadn’t unlocked yet, and the [Break] rune that he had. He did some practice with the emission rune while he waited, the cost of [Etch] fighting the increased regeneration brought on by the mana battery just enough that the bar was hovering at something of a standstill, the frequent pauses giving it a chance to tick upwards towards the threshold ever so slightly. Once he thought he was comfortable with carving the unknown rune, he waited for his mana to return before hitting his most recent practice with [Analysis].

A rune that has been etched into wood with mana.

[Emission] Unlocked.

August nodded at the success of it before taking a moment to pull up the entry, wanting to make sure he didn’t miss anything.

A rune that outputs a defined effect.

That was all of the new runes unlocked, and as he ran his eyes down the length of the artifact, he made an effort to cross-reference each symbol with the amorphous pressure of the mental blueprint. In both this and the mana battery, the reference runes seemed to come before the setting runes—[Ambient Mana] and [Light] being frontloaded. In each system, the setting runes came afterwards, working to inform the runes that actually had some kind of effect on the external world—more specifically, the [Contact Absorbtion I], which drew in nearby mana and the [Emission] rune, which projected the output of the entire system out into the world. The final blank space at the bottom of the artifact stared up at him, waiting for the final rune, and after a few more moments of trying to really understand what was really happening in the system he’d just copied wholesale from someone who actually knew how it worked, he moved to carve the [Break] rune.

“Don’t mess it up now,” August muttered.

By far the simplest rune of the bunch, he was still wary of making a mistake, so he took his time making sure it was as perfect as he could manage, and when he was finally done, he planted both of his hands on either side of the bench. August stared down at the finished artifact, and despite knowing that his previous attempt was working perfectly fine, he couldn’t help but find it hard to envision it actually doing anything other than just lying there. The idea that here, on this alien plant, a few esoteric symbols were somehow enough to imbue something like this with a supernatural force was just hard to accept. Maybe if he’d used an object that was more dignified, like the [Efkini Core] cube, or something, instead of the messy scrap of wood that he’d done a pretty poor job of cutting to begin with.

“Whatever,” August sighed, “It’s not like I’m being graded on presentation.”

August picked it up off the bench, twisted it until the [Emission] rune wasn’t pointed at his face in case he’d messed it up enough to make the whole thing explode or something, and then carefully touched the tip of his finger against the [Activation] rune—cool white light erupted from the symbol, fading from existence less than a foot away from the artifact as it was caught, and then blended into the natural ambient daylight. August turned it around to face the darkest corner of the undercover area, where the walls were tall, and the ceiling was covered in palm leaves. It was kind of hard to get a read on how effective it actually was, but there was a distinct change in the brightness, noticeable even in the middle of the day.

Either way, he was pretty sure it would be more than bright enough to illuminate the area during the night. August leaned back against the bench for a moment, staring at the thing in his hand and unsure how to really feel about it—it felt too easy, if anything, compared to how difficult everything else had been up until that moment. Building a fire, going through the process of actually lighting it, and maintaining the fuel to last throughout the night—all of that effort and something like this had existed the entire time; he just didn’t have access to the expert knowledge needed to use it. How many other problems could be alleviated or processes optimised by making proper use of Melon’s knowledge?

From humanity’s first real source of light to an advance, constantly recharging, and semi-permanent source of light—they’d leapfrogged dozens of technological steps in a relative instant. But for all of the marvel, it left him wondering about all of the missed advancements in between; candles, lanterns, lightbulbs, and all of the intricacies involved in their creation of them—making wax, wick, oil, glass, and learning how electricity actually worked—if these kind of leaps were common in Gaian society, due to the nature of runes being present in everything, just how uneven was there overall technological advancement, in comparison to something like his own worlds slow, but persistent crawl upwards?