I spent the next few decades working on fleshing out my rune magic system. After Felix had made me such an incredible gift, I naturally had to take full advantage of it. The first thing I did was try to assess my ‘maximum number of runes’ that I could achieve in this life.

Based on my very rough estimates for essence count, I estimated that I would be able to form around 10 runes this time, after taking into considering the drastic increase in upkeep cost every three runes. I wasn’t that excited about recording my third rune - after all, I had created that rune ability specifically to help with forming the Artificial sun, and it wasn’t very useful in other contexts. However, at least for our return to the Market it would be better than nothing. I couldn’t have ‘piecemeal’ parts of the rune magic system - it was impossible to have a fourth rune without first forming a third rune - and I felt it was a much better idea to have a giant pile of runes ready when we returned to the Market. I simply noted to myself that next life, I would start out by copying the first two runes from my brand back onto my body, then ‘fix’ my third rune ability before I copied the rest of my runes back down. Even so, I was interested in seeing what my tenth rune was like. Thanks to Sallia’s accomplishments last life, I now had a pretty good idea what the tenth through twelfth runes in the original magic system did - but I had no clue what the thirteenth through fifteen runes did. Since my rune ability compressed my first six runes into three, that meant I would get my first taste of the next tier of rune upgrades quite soon.

Time continued to pass as I worked my way back through the rune system.

Power: Form Your fourth, fifth, and sixth Runes out of Absorption Essence

Achievement +1200, Achievement 1,500, Achievement +1,800

My fourth, fifth, and sixth runes didn’t differ much from my previous life. Just like last time, in addition to the stat boosts provided by the runes, I was also offered a chance to enhance one sensory organ with each rune. These enhancements deserved quite a bit of thought this time, because these sensory organ enhancements would also carry over when I used {Brand of Miria}.

I didn’t think about it for very long before I decided which organs I wanted to improve. The first organ I boosted was my eyes. I had already determined last world that enhancing my eyes was exceptionally useful - it would give me far more information, especially spatial information, than I would normally have access to. My eyes were already the most important sensory organ I had access to, since that was just how humanoid biology worked. It simply made sense to lean into that sense when it was already important.

The second improvement went to my skin. Being able to ‘feel’ the void, space, and spatial disruptions using my skin wasn’t just an improvement to my safety against hostile spatial manipulation. It could also give me a reasonable level of awareness for the space around me, which was sort of like a very light version of my second rune ability. This would help me react faster to surprise attacks, which would definitely be useful in future worlds.

Finally, for my third improvement, I locked in my ears as a useful third sensory organ to boost. This was mostly due to lack of other choices. I really only had my nose, tongue, and ears left by that point. While there might be some situations where I wanted to smell or taste space and spatial manipulation, being able to hear changes in space seemed far more useful most of the time.

After that, not only did my Achievement total soar, but I still had room to grow. As the years passed, I continued to push further into the rune System.

Power: Form Your seventh, eighth, and ninth Runes out of Absorption Essence

Achievement +2,100, Achievement 2,400, Achievement +2,700

Since my Ability outright removed the original benefits of the next three runes and replaced them, these three runes were quite different from the benefits Sallia got last time. My seventh through ninth runes granted me small stat boosts - but more importantly, they started attuning my body to the power of space. Last world, I had done at least some experimentation with this already, since I had reached my eighth rune last time. This time, my species had a significantly longer lifespan, so I spent a bit more time experimenting with each layer of ‘spatial attunement’ as my runes progressed. Just like last world, every single rune I created made my body more fluid. More graceful. Air literally interacted with my body less with every single rune, allowing me to overcome things like air resistance.

I also noticed something rather different from last world. Last world, I faintly remembered the teleportation abilities from attuning my body to the power of space as being… not very efficient. These teleportation abilities worked, but I found that they didn’t do everything that I hoped they would. However, in this world, coupled with my sensory enhancements, I noticed that the benefits of the seventh through ninth runes were a bit different, simply because space was more fragile and more active in this dimension than the last one. I could feel space bending and contorting itself to fit my needs more this time. It was hard to put my finger on all of the benefits this gave me, but I was certain of a few things.

First, teleporting via the innate abilities of my seventh through ninth runes was much cheaper in this world. Second, the boost to things like ‘reduced air resistance’ was weaker in this world. Third, in this dimension, being attuned to the dimension allowed me to sense and redirect space in ways I hadn’t been able to last time - particularly when it came to creating ‘micro tears’ in the world around me. These were pretty useless for most purposes - but they had great synergy with {Spatial Rifts}. It was even easier to set up a field of spatial tripwires with this ability than it was via portals.

Based on the fact that the actual benefits of these runes had slightly changed this time, I learned that the unique properties of each dimension could also heavily influence some of my Abilities. There was always some ‘core’ logic to how they worked - but even if the ability was the same, the exact way it manifested could be subtly different from one dimension to another. 

I also noticed that in this world, by the time I had built my ninth rune I could teleport myself much more easily than last world. Even though I could teleport myself by creating a portal with my first rune ability and then widening it via shaping magic, it was actually much cheaper to just use raw spatial manipulation. I could near-instantly ‘blink’ from one place to another at a relatively low essence cost, as long as I had a rough idea where I was teleporting to and it wasn’t too far away. Since my second rune ability let me use space and water vapor to ‘see’ my surroundings, this basically meant that I could teleport anywhere at any time for a low price. This was an incredible tactical advantage that I looked forward to exploiting in future worlds, if we ended up in other dimensions where space was fragile and easy to mold.

Once I formed my tenth rune, I confirmed that I had reached the edge of my maximum number of runes. I didn’t have enough essence regeneration to push to an eleventh rune without boosting my absorption stat. Since I couldn’t think of a good way to do that, I decided to just accept that this was the limit for now, and moved on to the actual benefits of my tenth rune.

Power: Form Your Tenth Rune out of Absorption Essence

Achievement +3,000

In total, forming all of these runes actually gave me a rather hefty essence payout. I got 14,700 total essence from all of these runes, which pushed my Achievement total from 305,430 Achievement to 320,130. In any other world, this amount of Achievement would have actually made a pretty big difference on my Achievement total - but because of how well our artificial sun project had gone, this was basically just a rounding error.

The tenth rune’s effects were interesting.

As Sallia and I both discovered when we reached this stage, the tenth rune didn’t offer benefits that were very similar to the original benefits offered by runes. Instead, my tenth rune allowed me to ‘bond’ with a certain type of weapon. This bond was on a conceptual level rather than a physical one - so I was bonding with a weapon type, rather than one specific weapon. This ‘connection’ to a weapon would allow me to do all sorts of things with weapons of a similar nature. I could strengthen weapons by holding them and infusing some absorption essence into them. I could control them at a distance. I could even use them as remote sensory organs, allowing me to temporarily connect my eyes, ears, and so on to the weapon as a kind of surveillance camera - though this did also REMOVE my ability to use those senses for my main body. If I connected my vision to my umbrella, my actual physical body would become blind until I disconnected my vision.

Overall, the sensory ability was odd, but useful - but the ability to strengthen and remotely control weapons was the bigger boost here. Sallia reported that the next two runes expanded upon this ability in odd but useful ways, so I had something to look forward to whenever I formed my own eleventh and twelfth runes - though that would have to be next life.

As I worked on my runes, time continued to pass. The sanctuary grew ever safer and more stable, and decades ticked by. Before I knew it, I had turned two hundred. Time continued to drift by as I worked on understanding and improving my runes and making the most out of the ‘quiet time’ in this world.