The Runic Alchemist

Damian breathed in. He could sense the others nearby. He flew up and headed toward the nearest person, which was Lucian. She was just getting up. Sam and Maelor were also nearby. They saw him and slowly headed toward him and Lucian.

When Damian looked back at Lucian, he saw her eyebrows raised in amusement as she stared at his body—only then did he realize he was buck naked.

He quickly formed a runic circle for the Green Vines spell and wrapped himself from the waist down to his thighs. Lucian coughed—it was clearly fake—and walked toward him, her lips curled into a smile.

Sam and Maelor also reached them at that moment and noticed the green vines. Seeing their faces, Damian eyed them while Lucian beside him couldn’t help but chuckle a little.

“Are you okay?” Lucian asked him.

“I’m fine.. What happened?” Damian asked.

Sam said, “Do you not remember?”

“I fell unconscious after explaining the scenes. Everything else is a little blurry,” he answered.

“The Demon Lord found us,” Maelor said hurriedly. “I thought he would be here after leaving through that black portal, but maybe he’s outside waiting for us.. or maybe he already killed us..”

“No. We would already be dead if he did that,” Damian interrupted him. “The chief had to be Shadecaster. He’s gone because I killed him.”

“Then why did he spare us?” Lucian asked.

“Maybe he didn’t..” Sam said, and all of them looked at him. He continued, “Think about it. We’ve been in that white room and then in this place for a long time—but he only came to us when we were inside a memory trap. He can’t interfere here because the skill or whatever was activated by Shadecaster—not the Demon Lord himself. It’s like.. a subordinate of a subordinate is technically your subordinate too, but you don’t control every little thing about the guy. You can only order your man to keep his men ready.”

“I hope that’s the case,” Damian agreed. “We’ll find out soon enough anyway..”

The others followed his gaze and noticed the illusion world crumbling apart from the edges. It was slowly but surely coming near them too. Still, as just a distant possibility, Damian tried to activate a Waygate spell.. it didn’t work. All they could do was wait as the black-and-white world crumbled around them.

They walked near the village to let the villagers go free in the last minutes of their world, but to their surprise, all the villagers had already freed themselves and were sleeping soundly in their homes. It was the weirdest thing ever—but maybe it was for the best. No one wanted to know their world was about to end. It was better to be lost in dreams, held in their loved ones’ arms.

Soon, the end reached them, and one by one, they too became nothingness. Darkness. It was once again darkness. Damian had no idea what he would do if someday this darkness became a permanent thing and never disappeared—fortunately, that day was not today.

Damian woke up in his own body inside the white space. Sam, Lucian, and Maelor were right where he had placed them. Shadecaster’s dead body was also exactly where he had left it. Either there was no flow of time here, or they had only lived a few minutes in the world of illusion compared to here.

The others got up, moving their bodies groggily like they had slept for hundreds of years and just awakened. Damian’s brows narrowed—the mana in their bodies was low. Good thing they woke up early, or this mana-sucking place would have put them in a coma. Damian tried to activate his Sacrium mana cube, but it didn’t produce any mana—there was no mana in the environment to convert into his own.

Damian checked the other Sacrium storage accessory he wore on his right biceps—it contained runesmithing materials and all the runic tools he didn’t use much. That only filled 12% of the space, though—the main thing Damian had stored here were mana stones. Full chests and chests of them—30% of the full spatial space was filled just with these chests.

He had experimented with mana cubes in his free time on Earth and had even made versions of mana generators that worked with mana stones as a power source. He mainly kept the chests of mana stones because of his Elder Runebreaker job, but their situation was such that these could now be better used to power the mana generators for all of them.

Damian could just crush the mana stones to get mana directly—after becoming a Transcendent, his tolerance for pain had skyrocketed, and it barely tickled him anymore to absorb mana this way.

It wasn’t without limitations, though—mana stones had only one element in them. He had chests of all the different ones, but still, there was no such thing as a mana stone that could produce all kinds of elements. And so Damian pulled out six mana generators powered by six different mana stones.

Liquid mana produced by one element’s power stone would only give that one element’s mana to the user. A person needed all seven elements to truly replenish their own mana pool. This elemental mana could only be used with mana threads—if one absorbed single-element liquid mana, their mana pool would stop being filled after a certain amount.

It wasn’t a good replacement or an improvement over the already-built mana generators he had—but it would keep them alive and prevent their minds from falling into unconsciousness. He had fire, water, wind, and land element mana stones in large quantities—that should at least give them nearly 50% of their mana pools back.

They could survive on it while they figured out a way out of this place.

The Waygates didn’t work, the dark cocoon was gone. There was no sign of the Demon Lord anywhere—but he didn’t need to do anything to kill them if they couldn’t find a way out of here.

Damian had thought about a possible solution—let’s see if this works.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!