[NR] Freehand Carving - Chapter 640

Though for then to have a use for any Energy materials, Jason needs to read those manuals. Of course, all he has to do is remove the manual from the pitch black room and take it outside. Except for the fact, he decided he would make a ritual plate. After all, he has had the manual for the light ritual for a while now and hasn’t properly used it yet.

The first step is to make the plate. Since this isn’t going to be a super precise or high tier ritual, means any chunk of stone will do. So Jason cuts out a square plate of stone about a two fingers width thick and as long as his forearm on each side.

Now, if carved optimally, you can probably manage it on a plate with each side equal to a hand’s length. Jason had no illusions about how well his carving would be. Functional at best.

In fact, the first three attempts weren’t even that. Two he couldn’t get the carvings small enough and the third, in his attempt to make the runes tighter together, had two runes overlap. Though it probably didn’t help that instead of a chisel, he was using his finger covered in Energy to carve the plate.

The fourth plate was the first that technically worked. With a few points of Energy it produced light. Sure, that light would be jealous of a mundane firefly, but there was light. So Jason went over the plate with a fine-toothed comb.

Though he didn’t need to go quite that far, if he was to be honest. There were critical mistakes obvious on even the first glance. Still, it was a good habit to get into, even when there are obvious mistakes. After all, just because something is obvious, doesn’t mean it is the real problem.

In this case, it was, at least partly, but it won’t always be the case. Now, most of the time, you can’t fix mistakes on a stone plate. However, besides a number of unfixable errors, Jason had been a light hand, or finger as the case may be, and had under-carved four sections. This was easily fixed by retracing the section until the grooves were of equal depth to the rest of the formation plate.

That finished and Jason got to find out the other reason people rarely try and fix plates like that. With the better flow of energy, other mistakes could compound, resulting in a more explosive result. The plate shattered, sending pieces of stone all over the area around him.

Good thing Jason had been doing the carving outside, what with this plate being his answer to getting light inside and so not viable yet. Though there was one annoying bit about this all, even ignoring the explosion. Despite having enough Energy to blow up, the plate still only produced the barest amount of light!

That was clearly the result of actual errors in his carving and not a lack of power. Jason brushed the dust and gravel off of himself and got right back to carving. Or as what little he could find online called it, the hard way.

Because who in their right mind would freehand carve runes? Even high-level rune masters will rough out their runes with chalk or similar. Except Jason knew he wasn’t always going to be in a position to carefully lay out his formations.

Sometimes, you’re in a heavy downpour with combat going on all around you. Not that Jason expects that to happen to him. However, he also knows himself well enough to know he won’t be some cloistered rune master with a fancy workshop and a bevy of tools. More likely he’ll be in the middle of nowhere, using his finger to scrape the runes into a plank of wood or a boulder he cut in half for a flat surface to work on.

So he struggled through carving out runes, working off of his manual and memory. Though mostly the manual at the moment. What annoyed him the most about this was that the System vehemently protested any attempt of recording a library of Energy runes.

It’s not like there wasn’t a set of runes that worked. The System simply destroyed any recordings that tried to put them all in one place. You better only record the specific runes needed for your formation and not one more. Even trying to design a formation that used as many as possible tended to end badly.

There were some hilarious videos online of players trying this back when NeoRealm was new. Well, funny in a “strange ways to die compilation” sort of way. Because, especially back then, the System couldn’t just kill you and destroy your work. It could, however, set up unlikely situations that do so.

Jason shuddered, yeah, some of those methods were, yeah. Good thing the System didn’t mind if you gathered a bunch of books on the subject or learned them yourself. Or rather, good thing the System was prevented from the specific loopholes it had used for the other events.

To put it out of mind, he focused fully on getting the light formation good enough to use. This took a day and change, which was actually quite fast. Sure, it was one of the simplest formations, only second to a formation for warmth. A formation that Jason was pretty certain could be made by removing three runes from the light formation.

Well, more like that would work, but be hilariously dangerous. After all, while the light emitting portion of the formation was self regulating, turning it into a heat formation would strip away those protections. So it might turn from a warmer to a face melter.

Then again, Jason didn’t seem to make all that much of a light. Despite him calling it successful, that was only in relation to being used in a pitch black room. It was not quite at lamp levels of illumination. However, that was enough to read the manuals, especially with his boosted stats.