Magic flared between Inferna and me—my enchantments against her innate power.
"THE RUNES," she said. "YOU TAUGHT YOURSELF THEIR MEANING. NO ONE GAVE YOU THE KNOWLEDGE."
"Knowledge given is knowledge limited. I needed to understand, not just know."
"AND HOW LONG DID IT TAKE?"
"Longer than you can imagine. And not long enough."
---
Year 100-150. The enchantment table became my obsession. Fifty years might seem like a long time, but consider: I mastered a system that no human had ever understood. I did it without teachers, without guides, without reference materials. And I did it quickly—because when you cannot die, when death is just a minor inconvenience that costs you items but not progress, you can experiment recklessly. I could try dangerous enchantment combinations that would kill a normal player. I could test unstable symbol arrangements and learn from the explosions. Each death was data. Each respawn was a fresh start with all my knowledge intact.
After seven decades of silence and years of angry experimentation, I'd found something that held my interest: the symbols that floated around the table when activated.
They weren't random—I'd determined that much already. They were a language, each symbol representing a concept or effect. But I didn't know what most of them meant.
The game's enchanting system was a crutch for players who couldn't read the symbols/rune. Place an item, spend XP, receive a random enchantment. It was like rolling dice—efficient but blind.
I wanted to see.
---
Year 110. I began cataloguing symbols.
Every time I activated the enchantment table, I recorded the symbols that appeared. Thousands of activations, tens of thousands of symbols, organized into a massive database.
Patterns emerged.
Some symbols appeared more frequently than others. Some always appeared together. Some seemed to modify or enhance others.
Most importantly, I realized that the symbols weren't random at all—they were contextual. The symbols that appeared for a sword were different from those that appeared for a pickaxe. The symbols for diamond were different from those for netherite.
The table was reading the item and offering relevant options.
But offering was different from requiring.
---
Year 120. I touched the first symbol.
It was a simple experiment: activate the table, wait for the symbols to appear, and try to interact with them directly rather than through the randomness of a lapis offering.
The symbol drifted toward my finger like a leaf on water.
I could move it.
Not much—it resisted being moved far from its original position. But I could nudge it, adjust it, rearrange it relative to other symbols.
The next part was harder.
I tried to write.
Taking a blank book—the same type used for normal enchanted books—I attempted to write a symbol onto its pages. The process was like drawing, but with something more than ink. Something that tingled.
The symbol appeared on the page, glowing faintly.
Then it collapsed.
The book burned in my hands, the symbol scattering like startled birds. I lost thirty-seven XP levels in an instant.
Failure. But also—progress.
---
Year 130. I wrote my first enchantment.
It took a decade of failures to understand what I was doing wrong. The symbols weren't just pictures—they were connected to reality itself. Writing them without understanding that connection was like trying to copy a lock without the key.
I needed to understand what each symbol MEANT.
This was the hard part. There was no dictionary, no guide, no teacher. The symbols were a language that had never been written down—the game used them internally, never revealing their meanings.
So I experimented.
I wrote combinations of symbols and observed their effects. Most failed—collapsing, exploding, draining XP without result. But some worked.
Slowly, painfully, I built my understanding.
[Sharpness] was a symbol that looked like a blade edge, combined with one that meant "more."
[Protection] was a symbol like a shield, combined with one that meant "stronger."
[Unbreaking] was a symbol like a chain, combined with one that meant "longer."
Each enchantment had its own grammar, its own syntax, its own rules.
And I was learning to write them.
---
Year 140. My first manual enchantment.
I wrote [Sharpness I] on a blank book.
The process took four hours. Four hours of careful symbol placement, of checking and rechecking my understanding, of maintaining the delicate connection between the book and reality.
When it was done, I had an enchanted book with [Sharpness I].
The same enchantment I could have gotten from the table in seconds.
But that wasn't the point.
The point was that I'd CREATED it. Not through the game's system, but through my own understanding.
I could write enchantments manually.
And if I could write EXISTING enchantments manually...
Maybe I could write NEW ones.
---
Year 150. The discovery that changed everything.
I was experimenting with symbol combinations, trying to create a variation of [Protection] that would be more effective against explosions specifically. The symbols for "shield" and "stronger" were joined by a third symbol I'd identified as "blast."
The combination shouldn't have worked. The game didn't have a specific [Blast Protection] enchantment separate from general [Protection].
But it did work.
I created an enchanted book with a protection effect specifically against explosions—stronger than standard [Protection IV] but useless against anything else.
It was a new enchantment. One that didn't exist in the game's code.
I could create new magic.
And that changed everything.