Chapter 8

Spell Runes

With the arrival of the steampunk industrial revolution, the most dazzling thing was definitely the supernatural steam alchemy that carried the traits of the current era.

A large number of machines were continuously being created by alchemists.

Among them, the ones with the power to kill were “guns” and “cannons”.

When enemy troops carried sufficient guns, bullets, cannons, and tanks, it ended the age of knights and horses, replaced by the new era of steel and iron.

The rise of the supernatural steam revolution also brought a rise of interest in supernatural powers. Many new extraordinary supernatural classes had entered the stage of history.

Similarly, some ancient classes also stepped onto the new stage, radiating with light that had never been seen before.

Mages were such existences.

According to the different sources of power, mages were classified into four specializations: Elementalist, Summoner, Spellcaster, and Priest.

Elementalists gained their power from natural elements. They were able to sense and manipulate all sorts of elements. They could even use the natural power of the world to form powerful elemental spells. At this point, some would realize…

Indeed, in the olden days, Elementalists had been akin to mages.

The Summoner used contracts, spiritual bindings, summons, and other methods to call forth strong lifeforms from other worlds to fight for oneself.

Through the possession of powerful, peculiar, and mysterious spells, Spellcasters could use their own origin pool as the source of energy to unleash powerful and quick attacks.

And finally, there were Priests. Other than those devotees who were nurtured by the Churches, nobody would pick this path of their own accord. Priests relied on their contribution and faith to gain the power granted by deities.

Even though they could obtain extraordinary power in a short period of time, become extremely quick at recovery, or even have great strength granted by deities, borrowed power still had lots of limitations after all. Together with the suppression of the imperial ruler and other supernatural forces towards them, more and more people avoided the path of faith.

As for Gurney, he was obviously going on the path of a Spellcaster.

…

Sugar Supernatural Academy.

Ourock Tower, sixth-floor classroom.

Compared to the normal dome-shaped classroom, this Ourock Tower’s sixth-floor classroom was narrower and smaller.

There were only 16 students here.

Ourock, who had white hair, presbyopia glasses, and was wearing a gray wizard’s hat, was talking intently about the unified theory of spells.

“The most important core of a Spellcaster is to strike quickly and efficiently. As for how we can achieve this… Yulair, come and explain the three basic aspects.” Ourock’s gaze swept past everyone and landed on Yulair.

“Silent cast, quick cast, multi-cast,” Yulair got up and answered without having to think.

“Mm! This is the basics. It is also the truth that you must engrave into your souls.” Ourock nodded, waving his hand to indicate that Yulair could sit. “When a Spellcaster chants his spells, time is needed. If you do not want your enemies to approach you and slit your throat while you’re chanting, you need to use the soul power inside your soul and create sufficient silent-cast runes, quick-cast runes, and also multi-cast runes. That will be the key factor deciding your life and death.”

Gurney who was at the corner listened and wrote notes while thinking to himself,

Even though we all know that quick-cast, silent-cast, and multi-cast runes are important… The difficulty of creating these runes is not even close to easy at all!

The supernatural class, Spellcaster.

They wanted to use powerful and fast spells.

Thus, quick-cast, silent-cast, and multi-cast runes were all necessary.

Among which, silent-cast runes were the most important among the three runes; it was the core rune in fact. The effect of a silent-cast rune was to reduce the chanting of spell syllables.

A standard low-tier supernatural spell had four syllables, and each syllable took roughly 0.25 seconds to chant. Thus, a low-tier supernatural spell would take one second to chant, aim, and fire.

But if your mental strength was high enough and you had sufficient talent in magecraft, you could create a silent-cast rune.

Then congratulations were in order. This silent-cast rune would allow you to chant one fewer syllable of the spell. When you complete the chanting of three of the four syllables of this supernatural spell, the silent-cast rune would automatically light up and complete the chanting for you. Thus, you would only need 0.75 seconds to complete the chanting, aiming, and firing of the spell.

And if you had two silent-cast runes, in theory, your low-tier supernatural spell would only take 0.5 seconds to cast.

And if you went further to create three silent-cast runes, then this low-tier supernatural spell would only take 0.25 seconds.

It was already very fast to cast one low-tier supernatural spell in 0.25 seconds.

But if you went one step further on this basis…

Well, what would happen if a person had four silent-cast runes?

Indeed, their spell would cast instantly!

There would not be a need to chant the spell. With just a thought, the spell could be cast.

Instantly casting low-tier supernatural spells, it was something that every Spellcaster dreamed of doing.

But the problem was, were silent-cast runes easy to create?

The answer was, even though many Spellcasters wanted to achieve the dream of instant casting, it was too far beyond their sights.

Gurney thought to himself,

That incomplete supernatural spell scroll was damaged, so it had the effect of torturing and refining my soul, causing me to benefit instead and obtain an extraordinarily strong soul. It was also because I have a pretty good talent in magecraft.

These four months, after painstaking cultivation, I managed to create four silent-cast runes. In this classroom, other than those talented two, the affluent Yulair and Yanny, who had created one or two silent-cast runes, everyone else does not even have a single silent-cast rune. With sufficient talent and resources, they should be able to create one or two quick-cast runes. As for those without talent or resources, they can only walk on the despairing path of multi-cast runes and slowly develop themselves.

Yes.

Even those affluent aristocrats with sufficient resources could still face immense trouble when trying to create silent-cast runes. Furthermore, it got harder as they progressed.

There was still hope for one or two runes, but three or four of them was basically impossible.

Silent-cast runes were very useful without doubt, but they were also extremely hard to create. Compared to creating the highly difficult silent-cast rune, quick-cast and multi-cast runes were much easier.

The quick-cast rune. As the name suggested, it could increase the speed of casting spells. Each quick-cast rune could raise the speed by a certain percentage. More specifically, each quick-cast rune could raise the chanting speed by 10%. Ten quick cast runes could raise the chanting speed by 100%; that was the same as cutting the chanting time in half.

However, no matter how many quick-cast runes were created, it was almost impossible to reach instant cast.

Thus, the trait of the quick-cast rune made it inferior to the silent-cast rune, but this did not mean that they were not useful.

Taking the Spellcaster class as an example, quick-cast runes far surpassed silent-cast runes in practical use. Because in the Spellcaster class, low-tier spells had four to six syllables; mid-tier spells had six to 10 syllables, and high-tier spells had 10 to 14 syllables.

Evidently, even those high-tier Spellcasters or even the Grand Spellcasters who were tier seven and above could not create six or seven silent-cast runes, not to mention 10.

But if you had 10 quick cast runes instead, along with four silent-cast runes, then for a peak high-tier spell with 14 syllables, the four silent-cast runes would first eliminate four syllables, while the 10 quick-cast runes would raise the chanting speed by 100%.

Then, this peak high-tier spell would only need five syllables worth of time (or 1.25 seconds) to cast. That was quite good as well.

Runes were not independent of each other from the start; they were meant to be used together.