17 - 2nd time skip, Portal

"Cultivation" referred to the storing and accumulation of energy inside the body.

In a sense, knight breathing was also a form of cultivation.

Asteroth's (failed) mana cultivation technique was inspired by the cultivation methods of the "warlocks".

Warlocks inscribed runes into a special mana core in their body, and channeling their mana through those runes allowed for spellcasting of an entirely different level.

Asteroth tried to do something similar with the mage's mana filled heart and blood, and technically it worked, but compared to what she wanted, which was a technique to become as strong as a demon king, like the one she used, it was very mediocre.

Asteroth's failed technique could only allow up to the level of strength of a greater demon, or plasmic mana.

In other words, it was only as good as the best knight breathing techniques.

And like knight breathing techniques, it was not very common for anyone to reach that pinnacle.

She couldn't incorporate a mana core into the technique, because that would just mean making the practioner a warlock instead of a mage.

Mages had their own progression system, and it'd be halted if a mana core was created with runes inscribed on it.

Moreover, a mana core could not be created while only inscribing runes on the heart.

According to legend, the mage progressed into the archmage, which was also when 11th circle magic could be cast, but it required a pure mana core, free from runic inscriptions like the warlocks.

Making a pure mana core without runic inscriptions on either the core or the heart, or anywhere, wasn't what Asteroth wanted.

Asteroth specifically wanted a cultivation technique for mages that incorporated runic inscriptions, but she couldn't find a way around these problems and gave up, throwing the technique aside.

After explaining all this, the book made fun of Asteroth a bit more before explaining the runes that needed to be inscribed on the heart.

Reading it all the way through, there were a total of 15 runes to inscribe, going from simple to tremendously complex.

To become a 7th circle mage, the practitioner would have to create their own 16th rune of a higher complexity than the 15th, and inscribe it. Moreover, the 8th, 9th, and 10th circle mage levels were not accounted for, making the technique a far cry from archmage level.

Taking a deep breath, I began trying to inscribe the first rune into my heart.

An hour later, I had succeeded.

If the guildmaster was still here, he'd be shocked.

Trying again to circulate mana, I found that I could let out a wisp of it through the rune without turning it into aura first.

Excited, I hurriedly moved on to the next rune.

5 hours later after that, I had 2 more runes inscribed.

5 more hours after that, the 4th.

The sun started to set before I could fully inscribe the 5th.

I tried to take the book home, but it resisted going out of the library.

Sighing, I copied the remaining 11 runes into an empty book and left.

Back home, I didn't sleep.

I could go a night or two without sleeping without any side effects now.

Ixtra, at a similar level as me, could go many dozens of nights without sleeping, seemingly due to his demonic physique.

I insribed the runes very carefully all night, and when the sun came up, I was finally done the 5th one.

They were clearly getting exponentially more time-consuming and harder to inscribe.

That was another thing. It was getting harder. Not just taking more time. The chance of failure was going up.

I had to maintain focus the entire time during the inscription process to make sure my mana flowed as I needed it to, and if I stopped to take a break, any shallow marks inscribed would fade away with the time it took to recover, so I had to painstakingly inscribe each mark over and over again until it became deep enough to not fade.

Of course, the "heart" I was inscribing the runes on couldn't handle deeply chiseled characters on its surface, if it was my normal human heart.

Thankfully, the way a knight's heart worked was different than a normal person's.

It could heal scar wounds of a decently large size, even if they cut all the way in, and by circulating the mana in the inscribed scar during the healing process, the healed heart tissue was infused with mana.

Then, as mana circulated through the heart, it would also circulate an extra time through the mana-infused tissue, strengthening the mana infusion further.

This would form an everlasting rune.

If the process was done wrong, it could kill me, and if I didn't layer enough mana-infused tissue over itself, it wouldn't strengthen automatically, instead fading.

This tumultuous process grew harder and more time consuming, and of course more dangerous, the more complex the runes.

In a sense, it almost seemed like all the runes up till any given point were just preparing the mage for the next one, to prevent doing an inscription that was too difficult from the get-go and dying. Of course, it just felt that way, so that was my personal hypothesis.

If that hypothesis was true, it should be possible to insribe the last rune all on it's own, without other runes, but I wasn't going to test that half-baked theory with my life on the line.

The days passed, and I inscribed more and more.

The 6th rune took a whole day and night.

The 7th, 2 days.

The 8th, 4.

The 9th, 10.

The 10th, a month.

The 11th, 3 months.

The 12th, 9 months.

The 13th, 2 years.

The 14th, 5 years.

And the 15th, 10.

...

Just kidding.

That's how long it would've taken, after I did some rough calculations after the 11th rune.

That was already enough for me to cast 4th circle magic. I was okay with that for now. I wasn't going to waste the most important years of my life practicing a failed technique. It was just enough to spend a few months to reach up to here.

In the meantime, I turned 25. Wooooo.

Moving on.

I had figured out what it was that all mages in the mage guild had that was a treasure by now too.

It was their heart.

The mage heart, enhanced with knight breathing techniques, and inscribed with runes, had become a treasure of sorts.

I didn't know what it could he used for, but that was definitely the treasure.

Then one day Ixtra said to me,

"What if you ate one?"

"What? Ate what?"

"A knight technique enhanced, rune-inscribed, mage heart. Try eating one, see what happens."

"Ixtra...what the fuck."

"What?"

Ixtra had his look of innocence again as he suggested something out of my nightmares.

"It's normal to eat strong creatures to grow stronger, isn't it? That's how I did it."

"...Ixtra, by any chance, mind telling me just how many fellow demons you've eaten until now?"

"Oh, I don't know, I could not say. It has to be in the thousands I think. I only learned later that eating the weak ones was inefficient..."

Once again, I looked at this demonchild from a new perspective.

"Putting the matter of cannibalism aside, I'm not going to murder innocent mages just to test if eating their heart does anything. Even if it does, I won't do it."

"Why not?"

"..."

Ixtra looked especially confused, and I could no longer be bothered to explain basic morality to a demon, so I just left it at that.

Whether it was the compass upgrade, which required treasure I did not know how I was going to get besides the mage hearts, or my cultivation, which I did not know how I would manage to increase to plasmic mana, or my lifespan, which there were still no clues on extending.

For all of them, I was at a standstill.

I decided to search for treasures around the kingdom while continuing my runic mage cultivation and my knight breathing cultivation.

After I was done that, there would always be time to consider these things later.

Also something that had been waiting until now to be placed on the table: spells.

The runes on my heart could not only channel raw mana out of my body to cast spells better, but they could also be used to more easily channel it across certain paths once outside my body.

Asteroth had made the runes so that the first few runes helped make the mana flow along the most common pathways for 1st circle spells, the next few for 2nd circle, and so on.

This made controlling the mana much easier.

I asked Ixtra if he used runes like this, and he said he just memorized each and every mana pathway required and cast it accordingly, no runes in sight.

It must've been his innate trait as a demon, he had great mana control from the outset, but along with that, I guess he had a surprisingly good memory?

Damn it. This demon that looked like a young boy only ever managed to make me feel like I had trash talent, even though I knew that wasn't the case.

Still, I managed to learn up to the same point as him in the sealing magic spellbook, and on top of that, the library in the Mage Guild's tower also had quite a few books on all sorts of spells of different from 1st circle up to 5th circle.

The 6th circle magic was hidden, as was any higher circle magic that the mage guild had.

I made some copies of the books I was interested in and finally left the capital.

I'd probably come back at some point, I thought.

***

So I was back to being a nomad in search of treasure, practicing mana breathing and runic inscription, while also learning spells, as I went.

Months turned into 2 years. I was 27 now.

I hired a coachman to drive me long term, since I wanted Ixtra to practice too.

There was nothing of interest in the Nyla kingdom across all its territory, at least that I could find, except an unusual silver cross pendant on a necklace with a ruby studded in the middle. I didn't know what it did, and Tom's best guess was it repelled something, but he couldn't remember or tell what.

I had 60 more treasures in hand by the end of it all, but nothing significant, just what I had come to call "basic treasures".

My count was over 200 now, but it was still a far cry from the 1000 I needed.

Meanwhile, I had fed Ixtra the meat of beasts that could use mana and he had sublimated at the peak of liquid mana. He could breakthrough any day now, but it seemed something was stopping him from doing so.

I had also reached the peak, and I didn't face the same issue. I could tell I would break through to solid crystal mana within one more year.

Both me and Ixtra had learned a large variety of spells as well, from 1st to 4th circle.

I had finished the 12th runic inscription, but not the 13th. It was truly slow.

Now, I was heading back to the capital while thinking of these things when an epiphany hit me.

'Wait...runes? Don't I have that one book?'

I had a lot of treasures by now, and it was getting hard to keep track of them all, so I had forgotten for all this time.

Looking through the several dozen treasure books in the library of the treasury, I pulled one out in particular.

[Advanced Runecraft]

I had gotten it back in the 10 empires of the western half of the continent.

Back then, I had thought of using defense runes to upgrade a material to mythril-level, and then using that mythril-level material to inscribe spatial runes and open up a path to another world.

Unfortunately, my skills hadn't been good enough to inscribe the runes well enough back then. Whenever I tried, my aura would be unable to achieve the precise control required for the tiny, miniscule runic characters.

However, now, with my raw mana I could use thanks to my runic heart, alongside my proficiency with runes due to inscribing them painstakingly into my very heart...there might really be a chance.

Hurriedly, I told the coachman to make a stop at the next city, that we might stay there for a while.

The coachman, of course, obliged.

'To start with, I should use the strongest material I can.'

When we got to a town, I asked around for if there was any steel. There wasn't, but there was a city nearby where there was, so I redirected our course there.

In the process, I practiced runecraft. Although I had inscribed incredibly complex runes into my heart, doing so outside my body was still a new experience.

Still, I gained proficiency in it fast.

By the time we reached the city, I was confident enough, so I immediately looked for a merchant to buy boatloads of steel from.

Then, I had all the steel moved to a barren hill far from the city. I didn't want to cause a commotion, especially if this failed.

Finally, the next day, I started inscribing the runes.

I cut the steel into palm sized bricks, and chiseled the appropriate runes into them. Defense first, then spatial, as well as all the auxiliary runes needed.

Then, I arranged the runes in a circle on the flat ground at the top of the hill, and moved back.

This was an array formation, created by aligning certain objects inscribed with certain runes in a certain way.

I didn't know jack about array formations, but thankfully [Advanced Runecraft] included a detailed description of how to set up this one.

The formation would activate if I broke a steel rune brick connected with mana to the rest of the formation.

One last thing. It required energy. A lot of energy. I had a lot of dragon scales, so I just placed one of them at a certain spot as the sacrifice.

This formation would open a "gate" to another realm, but to be precise it was only the realm of the author of [Advanced Runecraft]. You needed coordinates as well as a unique rune setup to go to a given realm, and some realms were harder to go to than others.

Global multiverse distance also mattered, and where you went in the new realm mattered too, and...anyways, there was a lot to consider. So, the author of the book had only managed to create a method to open a gate from another realm to his. And since I had the book now, I assume he eventually figured out a way to let the book come to this realm from his.

I had told the coachman he might not see us again, yesterday. I had paid him one last time, a giant amount since why not.

Ixtra was in my shadow, observing rapt as always.

I took a deep breath.

'Here it is, the big moment.'

I broke the steel rune brick in my hand.

BOOM!!

All of a sudden, a strong suction energy appeared above the center of the formation, before finally opening up a gateway.

Portal, gate, dimensional rift, it had a lot of names. The point was, it led to another place, and this time, that place happened to be another world.

Taking another deep breath, I took a step forward, followed by another, and before I knew it, I ran and jumped head first into the gate.

As soon as I did, the steel rune bricks in the formation began to crack and then broke apart.

I expected this to happen. The book said it would place extra load on a portal to bring something through it.

I fell out of the portal on the other side and it closed behind me.