Chapter 177. Crypted

Seven days.

That's how long the research lasted before Adom found himself sitting alone in the warehouse on the evening of the seventh day, staring at the rune spread across three different sheets of parchment like it might suddenly decide to explain itself.

Seven days of five different minds—healer, alchemist, three runicologists—all focused on a single objective: figure out how to save a woman who'd been unconscious for fourteen years.

It had felt... achievable at the start. Almost exciting, in that way complex magical problems sometimes were when you hadn't yet discovered how impossible they actually turned out to be.

The first day had been all energy and optimism. Kim had filled an entire blackboard with his initial breakdown of the rune's structure. Lysandra had contributed observations about the manipulation aspects. Maria had provided medical context about what kind of healing would actually be required. Mia had started compiling lists of alchemical compounds that might be relevant.

Adom had mostly coordinated, which was its own kind of exhausting.

Day two was when the optimism started cracking.

They'd hit their first real wall around mid-afternoon. The rune's activation sequence—the specific order and timing of mana inputs required to make it actually work—was encrypted somehow. Not in the sense that someone had deliberately obscured it, but in the sense that the symbols themselves seemed to shift meaning depending on which angle you approached them from.

Kim had spent three hours trying to trace a single pathway through the formula before admitting he had no idea if he was following the correct logic or just chasing his own assumptions in circles.

"It's like trying to read a book where every word means three different things depending on which sentence came before it," he'd said, chalk dust covering his hands and most of one sleeve. "And also the sentences are in the wrong order. And possibly upside down."

Day three brought the first breakthrough, which was also somehow the thing that made everything more complicated.

They'd been stuck on a particular cluster of symbols—nine interlocking glyphs that seemed to form some kind of regulatory mechanism for the rune's mana flow. Adom had been convinced they were looking at a safety feature, something designed to prevent the rune from drawing too much power and killing the patient. Lysandra had been quiet for most of the morning, just watching as he and Kim argued about interpretation.

Then she'd said, very calmly, "What if they're not regulatory at all? What if they're diagnostic?"

Adom had turned to look at her.

"Diagnostic," he'd repeated.

"The rune needs to know what it's fixing," Lysandra had continued, her eyes still fixed on the blackboard. "You've been assuming it reads the patient's original genetic template, but what if it doesn't work that way? What if these symbols are instructions for the rune to assess the current state of damage first, and then calculate what 'healthy' should look like based on that assessment?"

Something had clicked in Adom's head. Not a complete solution, but a shift in perspective—like tilting a puzzle piece and suddenly seeing where it might actually fit.

He'd spent the next four hours following that thread, Kim and Lysandra both contributing observations, Mia checking alchemical references, Maria occasionally interjecting with medical realities they couldn't ignore.

It had felt promising.

Right up until it led to a dead end around midnight when they realized that even if Lysandra's interpretation was correct, they still had no idea how to actually input the diagnostic parameters the rune would need.

Day four was mostly just exhausting.

They'd started trying to deconstruct the rune into smaller, more manageable components. Not literally taking it apart—that would have been phenomenally stupid—but breaking down the symbol clusters into isolated functions they could analyze separately.

Adom, Kim, and Lysandra did most of the heavy lifting on this part. Runic analysis was specialized work, the kind of thing that required both theoretical knowledge and practical intuition about how magical runes actually behaved when you fed mana into them.

It was slow. Tedious. The kind of work where you could spend two hours on a single glyph and still not be entirely sure you'd interpreted it correctly.

Adom used [Riddler's Bane] three times that day.

The artifact helped. Sort of. It didn't just hand him answers, but it gave him... directions. Gentle nudges toward productive lines of thinking. A sense of when he was getting warmer or colder in his interpretations.

But it was also slow. [Riddler's Bane] worked best with puzzles that the user understood already. This rune was neither clear nor particularly logical by any standard Adom understood.

Day five they brought in a consultant.

Not about the rune specifically—Adom was keeping that part quiet, for obvious reasons. A primordial healing rune wasn't the kind of thing you advertised before you understood it. But they needed expertise on long-term coma damage, so Maria had reached out to a colleague at the Magisterium medical wing.

The conversation had been depressing.

Fourteen years of unconsciousness did catastrophic things to a body. Muscle atrophy was just the beginning. Bone density loss. Organ degradation from lack of use. Neural pathways that had gone dormant for so long they might never reactivate even if you somehow restored the brain tissue that controlled them.

Sam's mother—Eryna was her name, though Sam rarely used it, usually just saying "my mother" in that flat voice that suggested he was trying very hard not to think about her as a person—was in about as bad a state as you could be while technically still alive.

She'd lost maybe a third of her body weight over the years. Her skin had that translucent quality that came from never seeing sunlight. The healers at the hospital kept her muscles from completely atrophying through regular movement spells, but there was only so much magic could do when the person inside the body had been gone for more than a decade.

Adom had visited the hospital twice during the research week.

Not alone. Never alone. Their old classmates had maintained a sort of informal rotation over the days—people dropping by to sit with him for a few hours, keep him company, make sure he ate something. Eren came by most frequently, but Damus made an appearance, and Karion, and Emma. Mia went almost every day since the research started, sometimes with Adom, sometimes on her own.

Naia had shown up once with an entire basket of food from her family's kitchen and bullied Sam into eating three sandwiches .

Sam had left his duties at the Magisterium. Just... stopped going. Sent a letter saying there was a family emergency and he needed time.

Nobody had questioned it. Sam's situation was well enough known that people generally gave him space when he needed it.

He'd been at the hospital every time Adom visited. Just sitting beside his mother's bed, sometimes reading aloud from whatever book he'd brought, sometimes just sitting in silence.

Adom hadn't told him about the research.

It had felt cruel to give Sam hope for something that might not work. That probably wouldn't work, if he was being honest with himself. Better to let him grieve in peace than to dangle a possibility that could be snatched away.

If they actually succeeded—if they somehow figured this out and the rune worked—then Sam could know. Then it would be a gift instead of a promise that might get broken.

Day six had been more of the same. Slow, grinding progress that felt simultaneously significant and completely inadequate.

They'd managed to isolate what they were fairly certain was the rune's power regulation system. Not the activation sequence, but the mechanism that would prevent it from drawing too much mana too quickly and just burning out the patient's entire nervous system in one catastrophic surge.

It was something. A piece of the puzzle.

Just not enough pieces to see the full picture yet.

Kim had left around sunset, frustrated and exhausted. Mia had gone with him. Maria had stayed until well past dark, but eventually she'd needed to get home to Ada.

Lysandra had been the last to leave besides Adom.

She'd paused at the door, looking back at him still bent over the parchment spread across the worktable.

"This rune was designed by someone who knew exactly what they were doing," she'd said quietly. "Whoever made this didn't want it to be easy to use."

"I know."

"But they also wouldn't have made it impossible. There's a logic here. We just haven't found it yet."

Then she'd left, and Adom had been alone.

Day seven.

He'd come back to the warehouse at dawn, before anyone else arrived. Kim had shown up mid-morning with coffee and a new theory about the diagnostic symbols. Lysandra had appeared an hour later. They'd worked through lunch.

Maria had stopped by in the afternoon to drop off food and check on their progress, taken one look at the three of them surrounded by parchment and blackboards covered in increasingly desperate annotations, and quietly left again.

By evening, Kim and Lysandra had both admitted defeat for the day.

"We'll try again tomorrow," Kim had said, though he'd sounded less certain than usual.

Lysandra had just nodded and gathered her notes.

Now it was just Adom.

The warehouse was quiet except for the distant sounds of the city outside. Somewhere a dog was barking. Cart wheels on cobblestones. The evening crowd at a tavern two streets over.

Adom stared at the rune.

Seven days of work. Five brilliant minds. They'd made progress—real, measurable progress. They understood more about this rune than Adom had managed alone in weeks.

But it still wasn't enough.

The person who'd designed this had made it deliberately difficult. The symbols were layered with meaning. The activation sequence was obscured. The whole thing felt like it was designed to be almost impossible to use without specific knowledge that Adom simply didn't have.

Except...

Law had made these runes. Law, who'd given them to Adom specifically. Who'd known exactly who Adom was and what he'd be facing.

If Law had given him the runes, that meant they could be used. They weren't just theoretical. They weren't meant to sit in a vault gathering dust.

Which meant Adom had been given the tools to understand them.

The only tool that helped him understand complex magical problems was [Riddler's Bane].

What if...

Adom looked down at the parchment in front of him.

Adom reached for his glasses and adjusted them slightly, activating the Riddler's Bane embedded in the frames.

The world didn't change visually. The warehouse still looked like a warehouse, the parchment still looked like parchment. But something shifted in how he perceived the rune in front of him—like his brain had suddenly gained an extra sense specifically designed for spotting patterns that shouldn't exist.

He started with the outer ring of symbols. The ones Kim had spent six hours analyzing on day two.

If Law had made this rune specifically for Adom—and that was a big if, but it was the only theory that made sense—then it wouldn't be decoded through pure academic knowledge. It would be decoded through Adom's specific experiences. Things only he would recognize.

He stared at the first cluster of symbols.

Through Riddler's Bane, they looked... different. Not in form, but in function. Like he was seeing the skeleton beneath the skin. The way they connected to each other, the flow of intent between them.

It reminded him of something.

The golems. Not the way they moved or what they did, but how their control runes were structured. When Adom had reverse-engineered them to take control, he'd had to wade through layers of encryption that looked incredibly complex until you found the right angle to approach them from.

Then they'd been almost embarrassingly simple.

Like someone had built a maze, but if you knew to look at it from above instead of walking through it, you could see the path was just a straight line with a lot of decorative walls.

He looked back at the healing rune.

The outer symbols weren't regulatory. They weren't diagnostic. They were noise.

Adom felt something click in his chest. Not excitement yet—he'd been wrong too many times this week to get excited—but recognition.

He moved to the next section. The diagnostic cluster Lysandra had identified.

With Riddler's Bane active, he could see how the symbols linked together. Not just on the surface level—that was obvious enough—but underneath. The actual flow of magical intent.

It was like looking at a river and suddenly being able to see all the underground streams feeding into it.

And there, buried in the middle of the diagnostic cluster, was something that didn't belong.

A simple symbol. Almost absurdly simple compared to everything around it. It looked like a plus sign, or maybe a cross, with tiny connective threads extending from each of its four points.

That was the anchor. The thing everything else connected to.

The same basic structure he'd seen in the golem control runes. A central command buried under layers of complexity that only looked important if you didn't know what you were looking for.

Adom started pulling the rune apart in his mind, following each thread of connection back to that central symbol. The more he looked, the more Riddler's Bane showed him details he'd missed. Little inconsistencies in how the surrounding symbols were structured. Places where the flow of intent doubled back on itself in ways that made no sense unless you understood they were intentionally obscuring the real pathway.

It was the same encryption method. The same logic.

Once you had the context—once you'd seen this pattern before and knew how to reverse-engineer it—it was almost easy.

Not simple. But easier than spending seven days trying to decode it the hard way.

Law had buried the actual functional rune inside layers of complexity that looked important but were basically just magical padding. You could spend years analyzing the outer symbols and never realize you were looking at the wrong thing.

Unless you knew what to look for.

Unless you'd already reverse-engineered this exact encryption method while trying to take control of very advanced golems.

Adom grabbed a fresh sheet of parchment and started sketching.

Not the whole rune. Just the parts that mattered. The plus-sign symbol and the six—no, seven—connective pathways that actually fed into it. Everything else was decoration.

It took him an hour.

By the time he finished, he had something that looked almost insultingly basic compared to the massive complex formula they'd been wrestling with all week. Just a central glyph with seven smaller supporting symbols arranged around it like points on a compass rose.

This couldn't be right.

Adom sat back and stared at what he'd drawn.

Seven days of five brilliant people breaking their brains against this problem, and the solution was to take it apart, then proceed to ignore ninety percent of it and focus on the one part that looked too simple to be the most important.

He wouldn't have gotten here without the others. Kim's initial breakdown had given him the framework. Lysandra's observation about the diagnostic function had pointed him in the right direction. Mia's alchemical research had confirmed which symbols were actually doing transmutation work versus which ones were just for show.

But he also wouldn't have gotten here if he'd been anyone else.

Only someone who'd reverse-engineered the golems' encryption would have recognized the pattern. Only someone with Riddler's Bane would have been able to see through the obfuscation.

Law had made this rune for him specifically.

The realization was both gratifying and slightly terrifying.

Adom looked at his simplified diagram. Then at the runic ink he'd brought with him—the expensive kind, meant for temporary tattoos that would conduct mana for a few hours before fading.

He was probably about to do something stupid.

But if he was right...

He rolled up his left sleeve and uncapped the ink.

The application took longer than the actual decoding had. Runic tattoos needed to be precise. One line out of place and the whole thing could fail, or worse, succeed in ways you hadn't intended.

Adom worked slowly, carefully, referring back to his diagram every few seconds to make sure he was getting it right.

The plus-sign glyph went on his forearm, about three inches above his wrist. The seven supporting symbols arranged in a circle around it, each one connected by a thin line to the central anchor.

When he finished, he had something that looked vaguely like a decorative bracelet if you didn't know what you were looking at.

He let the ink dry, then capped the bottle and set it aside.

Now for the test.

Adom looked at his right hand. Then, feeling ridiculous, pinched the skin on the back of it hard enough to hurt.

The skin reddened immediately, a bright angry pink that would probably bruise if he left it alone.

He felt vaguely annoyed at himself for that—everything for science, right?—but the annoyance faded quickly.

This was it.

Either he'd just cracked the primordial healing rune, or he was about to look very stupid and have a bruised hand for no reason.

Adom channeled mana into the tattoo on his left forearm.

It didn't take much. The rune lit up with a soft silver glow, the kind of light that felt warm without producing actual heat. He could feel it humming against his skin, active and waiting.

He touched his left hand to the reddened skin on his right.

The relief was immediate.

Not just relief—correction. The pinched skin smoothed out, the angry red fading to normal color, the slight ache vanishing like it had never existed at all.

Adom hadn't weaved a healing spell. Hadn't spoken any words or formed any complex magical patterns.

He'd just channeled mana through the rune and touched the injury.

That was it.

His eyes widened.

The whole process had taken maybe five seconds. The pinch was gone. His skin looked completely normal, like he'd never touched it at all.

Adom stood up so fast his chair toppled backward and clattered against the floor.

He stared at his hand. Then at the tattoo on his arm. Then back at his hand.

He'd done it.

"I... did it?"

He'd actually done it!

The primordial healing rune—simplified, decoded, and reduced to its essential components—worked.

Adom walked toward the warehouse door without saying a word, barely aware he was moving. His mind was racing too fast for coherent thought. He pushed the door open and stepped out into the evening air.

The warehouse had started to feel suffocating. Seven days of stale air and chalk dust and the weight of failure pressing down on him every time he looked at those symbols.

He'd lost hope, if he was being honest with himself.

Not completely. Not the kind of giving up where you stopped trying. But the quiet kind. The kind where you kept working because stopping felt worse, but you didn't actually believe it would matter anymore.

Sam's mother had been unconscious for fourteen years. Fourteen years of her body slowly breaking down, her muscles atrophying, her mind—if there was still a mind in there—trapped somewhere Adom couldn't reach.

He'd thought he could fix it. Thought this rune was the answer.

And maybe it was, but with every day that passed, with every dead end they hit, the possibility had felt more and more like a cruel joke. Like Law had handed him a puzzle box with no solution, just to watch him struggle.

But now...

Adom looked down at his arm. At the tattoo still glowing faintly with residual mana.

Now he had it.

He had the answer.

The thought was so big he didn't know what to do with it. His chest felt tight. His hands were shaking slightly, and he couldn't tell if it was from exhaustion or adrenaline or something else entirely.

A sound pulled him out of his thoughts. A soft cooing from above.

Adom looked up.

A pigeon was on the roof. Same one from a week ago—he recognized the pattern of grey feathers on its chest. It was preening itself, completely absorbed in the task.

He reached out with his druidic sense, mostly just because he needed to do something other than stand there vibrating with nervous energy.

Hey.

The pigeon's awareness flickered toward him, mildly curious.

You again.

Yeah, Adom said. Me again.

Did you bring food?

No. Sorry.

The pigeon went back to preening, apparently deciding Adom wasn't interesting if he didn't have food.

Adom should have left it at that. Gone back inside, or gone home, or done literally anything productive.

Instead he said, I just deciphered a very powerful rune.

The pigeon paused mid-preen.

What is... rune?

It's— Adom stopped. How did you explain runic magic to a pigeon? It's a way of doing magic. This one heals people.

Oh. The pigeon sounded vaguely interested but not particularly impressed. That is good, I think?

Yeah, Adom said quietly. It's good.

He didn't know why he was still talking to the pigeon. Didn't know why it felt important to tell someone—even if that someone was a bird who barely understood what he was saying.

Maybe because the pigeon didn't know Sam. Or the weight of what this meant. It was just... there. A neutral presence that wouldn't ask questions or expect anything from him.

I thought I'd failed, Adom admitted. I thought I couldn't do it. But I did.

The pigeon bobbed its head in what might have been acknowledgment or might have just been pigeon movement.

Then it shifted, and Adom caught sight of something wrong with the way it was holding its left wing.

He frowned, looking closer.

The wing was tucked awkwardly against its body, and now that he was paying attention, he could see the pigeon wasn't putting weight on that side properly.

Are you hurt?

The pigeon's thoughts turned wary. Hunt-cat caught me. Three days past. Wing hurts. Cannot fly.

Adom felt something settle in his chest. Not quite calm, but... focus.

Can you come down here?

Cannot fly down. Wing broken.

Right. Obviously.

Adom looked at the roof. It wasn't that high. Maybe fifteen feet.

The jump took maybe three seconds. The pigeon watched him the entire time, head cocked to one side.

When Adom pulled himself onto the roof tiles, the pigeon shuffled backward slightly, still wary.

I want to try something, Adom said. I need to make sure I'm not dreaming. Can I touch your wing?

The pigeon considered this for a long moment.

Will it hurt?

I don't think so. I'm trying to heal it.

...Heal?

Make it better. Fix the damage.

The pigeon's thoughts turned cautious but hopeful. It extended its injured wing slightly, still ready to pull back if things went wrong.

Adom reached out slowly and touched the torn membrane with his right hand. He could feel where the bone had fractured, where the tissue had torn. Not a clean break—more like the cat had grabbed the wing and wrenched it hard enough to do damage in multiple places.

With his left hand, he channeled mana into the tattoo.

The rune lit up again, that same soft silver glow. He felt the magic flow through him, through his hand, into the pigeon's injury.

The torn membrane began to knit itself back together.

It wasn't instant. Adom could actually watch it happening—the edges of the tear moving toward each other, the tissue rebuilding itself, the bone fragments realigning and fusing. Cell by cell, the wing restored itself.

The pigeon made a startled cooing sound.

Strange! Warm! Wing feels... good?

It took maybe twenty seconds total. When Adom pulled his hand back, the wing was completely healed. No scar, no weakness, like the cat had never touched it at all.

The pigeon extended its wing experimentally, then flapped it a few times. Then, apparently overwhelmed by the sheer joy of being able to fly again, it launched itself off the roof and did several celebratory loops through the air above the warehouse.

FLYING! FLYING AGAIN! Tall-walker is GOOD tall-walker! Very good! Best tall-walker!

Adom barely heard it.

He was staring at the tattoo on his arm, then at his hand, then back at the tattoo.

He'd just healed a living creature using a primordial rune he'd decoded himself.

A translucent system window materialized in front of him, the text crisp and clear in the evening light:

[Path Discovered Through Study and Practice]

Through dedicated research and successful experimentation, you have achieved true understanding of fundamental healing principles.

Path of the Healer (Novice) has been recognized.

Current Paths:

- Runicologist (Expert)

- Alchemist (Fundamental)

- Druid (Expert)

- Battle Mage (Expert)

- Healer (Novice)

Adom read the notification twice.

Then he sat down on the warehouse roof, legs dangling over the edge, and just stared at his arm.

The pigeon was still doing aerial loops above him, broadcasting pure joy into the evening sky.

And somewhere in Arkhos, Sam was sitting beside his mother's bed, probably reading to her like he did every evening, not knowing that everything was about to change.