Aster exhales through his nose. “Okay. So how do spells actually work?”

  Lena raises a hand.

  From her palm, a flower blooms. Just like that. No dramatic buildup, no sparks, no incantations—just pure, elegant magic. The petals unfurl with gentle precision, as if obeying some invisible script.

  “Take this flower,” she says, holding it out to Aster. “I use my Wood Spirit Aether to form the necessary runes. Then, I arrange those runes and apply them to the Wood-aligned Elemental Aether from the Growth, Transmutation, and Regeneration subtypes to replicate nature’s processes. The flower is just a manifestation of those runes working together.”

  She flips through the tome in her lap, stopping at a page dense with elegant symbols—no two alike.

  “These are the runes for Conflagration, a subtype of Wood. Every subtype has its own alphabet of around 150 unique runes.”

  Aster blinks, does some quick math in his head. “Forty-two, 150 each… that’s like a thousand runes.” He gives a low whistle. “That’s insane.”

  “Around six thousand, but yeah, it’s a lot,” Lena corrects him with a small laugh. “But lucky for us, we don’t have to craft spells from scratch. Not yet. At our level, we rely on Glyphs—predefined sequences of runes bundled under a single action.”

  “Like an app?” Aster blurts.

  “Exactly,” she says, pleased, flipping to the next page, a spiraling arrangement of strange, jagged runes forming a larger, simpler sigil. “What you’re looking at here is a Glyph. Just like an app executes a complex series of functions with a tap, a Glyph is a stabilized formula—a whole chain of runic instructions compressed into one command. It’s a bundle of pre-encoded instructions, written in the rune language of your element. These runes are shaped from Spirit Aether and tell Elemental Aether how to behave—like a software package, or an app.”

  Aster studies the runes, too tired to be surprised anymore. “And where do these Glyphs come from?”

  “We harvest them,” Lena explains. “Every creature that uses elemental energy—beasts, monsters, even some plants—develops their own glyphs through evolution. When we defeat them, we can extract those rune clusters and store them. That’s a Glyph. It’s like… copying a function from nature’s code.”

  “So I can just jack a fireball off a salamander?”

  “Basically, yeah. If you manage to kill it, buy a glyph extractor script, and feed it enough Faith to function, yeah,” Lena says. “You can only use the Glyph you harvested, though. Can’t share it. An NFT, if you will.”

  “But then, how do you have a book full of these Glyphs?”

  “Families like mine find ways to write spells from scratch,” she says. “They reverse-engineer the runes and create Glyphs that can self-regenerate. It takes generations of research and Spirit Aether from a dozen cultivators to make even one of those.”

  “And you’re just… letting me use one?”

  Lena shrugs. “I like you.”

  He stares. An Apple Watch. Definitely an Apple Watch.

  If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  She ignores him.

  “Anyway,” she says, flipping to another page. “Once you have the fuel—either natural or from a core—and a Glyph stored in your Mind Palace, all that’s left is to cast.”

  Aster blinks. “Wait. My Mind Palace?”

  Lena points to his forehead. “Like your Stomach Dantian, only the third Dantean, found in your head instead. Spirit Aether is shaped there. Your body fuels the spell through your core palace, second Dantean, or artificial core in your case, and then it’s assembled in your Mind Palace. You store Glyphs there like a library, pull them out when needed, power them with the borrowed Aether, and cast.”

  “Okay,” Lena continues, “let me summarize.”

  “One: the world runs on code—runic instructions made of Spirit Aether.”

  “Two: Elemental Aether is the building material. Spirit Aether tells it what to become.”

  “Three: Glyphs are pre-written programs—usually harvested from monsters—that shape the Aether.”

  “Four: Spirit cultivators can write in any code but don’t have fuel—so they use Faith and monster cores to fake it.”

  “Five: The Mind Palace is the operating system. It holds the Glyphs, shapes the spell, and launches it using the fuel from your body or a core.”

  Aster can’t help but add a sixth.

  “And six, I am horrifically underfunded for this shit.”

  “Also true.”

  Aster sighs, dragging a hand down his face. “Gods. No wonder rich kids dominate everything here. I need a damn Patreon just to light a candle.”

  “Good,” she says casually. “Now let’s craft a spell. You opened your Water Gate earlier, right?”

  Aster nods.

  Lena turns the page, revealing a new Glyph sketched in thick, radiant ink, circular at the base, then branching upward in jagged crescents like rippling water frozen mid-motion. It pulses faintly with a liquid blue sheen.

  “This is a beginner’s Water spell,” she says, tapping the page. “Technically, Fluid subtype. It’s designed to form a whip of high-pressure water for attack or deflection. You’ll be able to cast it using Water Spirit and a Current Core.”

  She places the glowing blue Core into his palm. It buzzes slightly, like a living thing. “This is your power source. You’ll use Faith to ignite it and generate Water Aether.”

  “First,” Lena says, scooting closer, “we need to access your Mind Palace. It’s like entering your Stomach Dantian, but instead of your stomach, it’s in your head, specifically near the third eye. Focus your Will. Look for the entrance.”

  Aster closes his eyes and exhales slowly, trying to do what Lena instructed—“Just reach out with your Will and locate the entrance.” As if that were normal. As if he hadn’t just reattached his head like a Lego.

  Fine. Reach inward. Locate the metaphysical gateway in your third-eye region. Simple.

  He exhales again, slower this time. Less sarcasm. More focus.

  He lets his awareness drift inward, sliding past the Dantian in his gut, past the throbbing ache of where the Void Wyrm curled up like some divine parasite and claimed squatter’s rights in his chest. It’s quieter there now, but the silence hums. A warning. Something asleep that could wake up with the wrong kind of whisper.

  He pushes past it.

  Upward. Into his sternum, up his throat, past the base of his skull—until he reaches a point just behind the center of his forehead. Pressure gathers there, faint but undeniable. It isn’t a wall, exactly. More like… a membrane. Thin. Flexing. And behind it, something vast.

  He presses forward—and reality tilts.

  For a moment, his body doesn’t exist. There is no Lena, no desk, no classroom. Just dark. And silence.

  Then the silence blooms.

  It unfolds around him like a cathedral—an infinite dome of starless sky. Aster stands in the center of it, weightless, barefoot, naked. The air smells faintly of ozone and old parchment. Beneath his feet: nothing. Just more void. But it holds him, like it knows him.

  His Mind Palace.

  Except “palace” doesn’t feel like the right word.

  There are no columns. No stonework. Just presence. Like a breath held by the universe. An emptiness that isn’t empty.

  “Good, you’re in,” Lena’s voice comes from beside him. She’s there too, just casually invading his brain like it’s a tea room. “Now, let’s start by pulling in some Aether.”

  Aster hesitates, not knowing if he should react by covering his nudity. Which is immediately followed by another prompt from Blenskop.

  ?? [Look at you, not ashamed to show the world your little Aster, another 5% off your shame Index, almost at the Red Pill Podcast Host tier, good job!]