Vol. 2 Ch. 31: First Lesson

Author's Note:

Recurring Characters:

Peter: The protagonist of this novel.

Mariah: Peter's mother. You can find her picture in the Art collection.
Branna: Appeared in chapter "Dream and the Past".
Jason: Branna's father.

Recap:
“Alright. A week should be sufficient to tell that.”

…End of Author's Note...

...

(A few hours later, in cult lair)

“What is the abyss?” The hooded teen asked, voice tinged with curiosity.

The Arch Priestess, seated cross-legged across from them, chuckled softly, clearly amused. “Not what, child. Who.”

The teen tilted their head, the shadows of their hood shifting with the motion. “Who is the abyss?”

“…Abyss,” The priestess folded her hands in her lap, her back straight. “There is no meditator like the Abyss.”

“Meaning?”

The priestess exhaled deeply, a soft smile on her face that somehow made her appear gentle despite her state. With ashes covering her limbs, her hair braided like a mess before being folded into a bun, she wasn’t pleasing to look at.

“If one is to be a meditator, let it be like the abyss,” she remarked, raising her left hand and taking a puff from her rolled stick made from hallucinogenic herbs.

“Beyond thoughts, beyond desires,” she said, eyes half-closed. “Neither memory nor imagination –true meditation is dissolution.”

She leaned forward, voice dropping to a whisper. “…dissolution of the mind itself.”

“Dissolution?” the teen asked, listening intently.

She nodded. “Meditation is the death of the mind, the silencing of desire, the end of thought. That is why the abyss is known as the bringer of death, dissolution, and destruction. There is no meditator like the abyss.”

The teen frowned under the hood, their young brows knitting together. “But isn’t destruction…bad?” they asked, uncertain.

Lady Nyara laughed. “Is it really? No, it’s not.” She said, taking another puff from her herbal stick. “This unfair world that you think you live in…is nothing but illusion—a cage of imagination. Only when it burns away, only then, the self that we all are part of will awaken.”

“Do not be afraid of letting go. What she destroys is not life—not soul, but the waste—the noise that clings to it. All this craving, of greed, of lust, of hunger, of envy, of fear.” Lady Nyara’s eyes glinted through the rising tendrils of smoke. “She burns illusions, not truth. She peels away the rot until only the eternal remains.”

The teen swallowed, gaze dropping to their knees. “So… it’s like dying.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth. The death of who you think you are. End of thought, crumbling of desire, and what’s left will not be emptiness, but stillness. Unity. Clarity.”

She leaned back, exhaling a slow plume of smoke that spiralled up beyond eyesight. “But the path towards it isn’t easy. To end the order, there must be chaos. Those who benefit from this order will continue to stand in our way, but they’re all fools. They don’t realise the greatness of Abyss, her depth.”

Her lips curled into a mocking smile. “They pray to these gods, thinking them to be absolute, but they aren’t as great as her. Chaos will come. We just don’t know when.”

“And,” she whispered in ecstasy. “When it’ll come, try as they might, none would be able to stop it.”

…

(Next day)

The door creaked open with the faint jingle of a bell as Mariah stepped inside. Peter followed closely behind.

She gave the place a quick once-over and exhaled deeply. “Never expected her to be this bold,” she said, smiling to herself. “How did she manage to convince Jason to convert the entire place into this?”

Peter tilted his head toward the softly glowing chandelier. “It’s flowing with mana… much more than needed if the objective is just to emit light.”

“Must be Jason’s work,” Mariah said, stepping further in and gesturing for him to follow. “No matter what he says, he’s quite fond of his daughter.”

“Well, well.”

They looked toward the counter to find Branna standing there with a grin on her face, sleeves rolled up and a smear of flour across her apron.

“Look who’s finally decided to show up.”

Mariah smirked. “Feel grateful to lay your eyes upon me.”

Branna scoffed. “Please. I see prettier things in the mirror every morning.”

Mariah placed a hand on her chest, mock-offended. “Ouch. And here I thought I was your favourite.”

“You were,” Branna said, wiping her hands on her apron. “Until you decided to run away one day with that lover of yours. How could you?”

Mariah laughed, then glanced around. “You really changed everything.”

Branna’s eyes softened as she looked over the café. “Took a while. Dad didn’t want to let go of the forge. But I told him—I prefer feeding people good food and quiet corners rather than tools for killing.”

Mariah hummed. “Still hard to believe he agreed.”

Branna shrugged. “He complains, of course. Grumbles every morning about how the place smells like yeast instead of molten steel.” She smiled. “But he built the room for me without saying a word. That was his way of accepting it.”

“So…where can I find him?” Peter asked.

“Can’t wait?” she asked. “He’s in the back, finishing up a piece.” She leaned into the countertop. “He said you’re expected. Don’t keep him waiting too long, or he’ll assume you’re not serious.”

Mariah gave Peter a light nudge. “I’ll sit for a bit. You can go ahead.”

“Yeah, we’ve a lot to catch up too.” Branna nodded.

Peter moved toward the door leading to the workshop and opened it. A long corridor welcomed it. On the left was a staircase that led upstairs. He began climbing. At the top of the stairs, a heavy wooden door stood ajar. He pushed the door open fully and stepped inside.

The room beyond was quiet. A wide, curved table stretched across the centre. The walls were lined with shallow shelves stacked with rolled parchments, glass jars filled with colourful liquids, metal ingots, and jars of powdered reagents, all sorted by size and material.

Jason stood beside the table. He didn’t look up as Peter entered, too engrossed in whatever he was currently doing. With a steady hand, he drew the tail end of a rune using a narrow silver stylus over a bracelet, pausing only when the tip lifted cleanly from the surface.

“I half expected you to change your mind,” he said flatly, still not looking at him. “At least you didn’t disappoint me from the beginning.”

Peter closed the door behind him. “I don’t quit before I start.”

“Hmph,” Jason grunted, picking up the bracelet and putting it inside a case. He turned toward Peter, giving him a proper look for the second time. His eyes, sharp and narrowed, lingered over his figure for a moment, either judging or measuring his worth. “We’ll see how long that holds.”

He moved away from the table, sitting down on the only chair available in the room. “So,” he said. “What do you know about enchanting?”

“Not much,” Peter said. “Just a few basic things like it’s done using runic magic.”

Jason nodded. “Good. That said, enchanting’s not just about scratching runes onto things and hoping they stick. Runic script is a written language of power—structured and deliberate—but it’s useless without intent and meaning. That’s not to say that you can get it wrong. Every curve, every spacing, every stroke needs to be perfect. Get one of them wrong and the whole thing either fizzles or explodes.”

“Do you understand?”

Peter nodded slowly, still standing. “I have a question.”

“Ask.”

“That bracelet that you’re working on…it had a small surface. You said that every curve, every spacing, every stroke needs to be perfect. How do you fit a lot of runes on a small surface while ensuring that?”

“A nice question with a simple answer,” Jason said, a phantom of a smile on his face. “Runic script is quite vast and complex, unlike the language that we use. Some of its advanced alphabet can represent a bunch of lower-level alphabets. Despite that, writing too complex a runic enchantment on a small surface is next to impossible without relying on system skills. The tools also need to change. Instead of a stylus, you’ll be using mana directly.”

“Mana Sense and Mana Manipulation,” Jason said. “That’s the bare minimum. If you can’t feel mana, and you can’t move it, you might as well be carving nonsense into wood.”

Peter nodded slowly, absorbing it.

“If you’re serious about enchanting as a profession,” Jason went on, “then you’ll also want a sight-based skill—something that lets you see fine details clearly. Even tiny flaws in your lines can ruin a working.”

“And motor control?” Peter asked.

Jason gave a curt nod. “Exactly. A skill that steadies your hands—lets you make precise movements without slipping. Enchanting’s all about control. The better your foundation, the more advanced your runes can get.”

“I have the first two,” he said. “No sight or control skills yet.”

“That’s fine. Try to raise their levels as much as you can,” Jason said, standing up and walking towards the side to pick up a book, a slate and a chalk before returning and passing them to him.

“For now, we’ll first work on making you memorise the basic runes. If you can draw them clearly, without the skills, that tells me you’ve got potential.” He paused, then added, “And if your work’s a mess, well…then I’ll have to turn you down.”

Peter didn’t answer. He just nodded, opened the book, and started to read, setting the chalk and slate aside for now.

“Take your time,” Jason said. “And if you need to ask anything, feel free. But I hope you only ask when you’ve run out of all the other options.”

Peter gave a slight nod, already immersed in the first page.

The book was a treasure trove. Each page featured a carefully inked rune, accompanied by its name, function, and structure. Margins were filled with notes, some printed, others handwritten in a tight, angular script. Besides, the more complex glyphs were short explanations about their mana flow behaviour, common mistakes, and combinations to avoid.

From what Peter could tell, each rune functioned like a keyword in a programming language. Concise, powerful, and dependent on context. A single mark meant very little on its own. But when placed in the right sequence, next to the right shapes, with the right spacing, it became something entirely different. A command. A binding.

His fingers hovered near the edge of the page. He turned the pages until he found a foundational rune called: Begin, which was similar to a main function.

“It says here that this rune needs to be present at the very beginning,” Peter muttered.

“Yeah, what about it is hard to understand?” Jason frowned.

‘That looks like a procedural paradigm,’ Peter mused.

“Well…can we not define something before this rune and invoke it after the Begin rune?” Peter asked.

“That…” Jason paused. “I never tried it to tell if it’ll work or not, but what purpose will that serve besides just increasing the runes you’ve to fit on the surface?”

‘It’ll decrease the runes instead of increasing them,’ Peter thought to himself. ‘It’ll be interesting to see if I could use functional and object-oriented paradigms with runic scripts.’ He didn’t voice his thoughts out loud.

“Don’t try to be over smart. You haven’t even an hour learning, and you’re trying to invent new methods of writing script,” Jason said, shaking his head. “Kids…Just do as I say. It’s good to think outside the box in most scenarios, but enchanting is a very rigid art. It has its rules that need to be followed, or you’ll end up destroying things. Rigidity brings robustness. Remember that.”

For the next two hours, Peter focused on memorising the runes, studying each one carefully while also copying the pages into his IDE to use as a reference later. At one point, he had asked Jason if he could take the book back with him to the inn, and was immediately turned down.

Once he had finished memorising the basics, Jason instructed him to draw the runes on the slate.

Jason proved to be a strict teacher, correcting even the smallest mistakes the moment they appeared. If a curve was slightly off or a line uneven, he pointed it out without hesitation. It was exhausting, but the constant feedback helped Peter improve steadily.

According to Jason, it was important to call out errors the moment they happened, before they could become habits. Peter agreed. Repetition without correction was worse than no practice at all.

…End of Chapter…