The Runic Alchemist

Damian flew up using his own mana. He couldn't maintain the flight for long, but going straight up with just one wind rotating spell was okay. There was no end to the barren land.. In any direction. Damian could choose one direction at random and walk towards it, but he knew from experience that the space was limited—he wouldn't be able to go far before an invisible wall stopped him, like it did in his Second Ranker Trial.

What now?

Damian thought, sitting under the shade of the big red rock in the middle of nowhere.

'Show me how you create worth where none exists.' He repeated the instuctions in his mind again and again.

In the situation he was in, it could only mean he had to somehow create a runic tool without anything in this land. Iron and other metals did exist in sand in the form of fine grains of magnetite, hematite, or ilmenite—Damian knew that. But knowing and using that had a vast gap in between.

Damian looked down at the reddish land. The color could also mean the land had rust particles of iron oxide present in it. With a deep breath, Damian extended over ten mana threads and placed his hand on the reddish land, sensing the terrain below with as much accuracy as he could spare. It was dirt, though.. It wasn't his first time doing this. The only thing he could sense were loose particles of dirt with many different substances in between—all with gaps so wide whole spells worth of mana nodes could be placed inside.

That's how it was. The massive gaps in its structure were the reason why it could never be used as a material to inscribe spells. But.. The particles. Sand, glass, some other metals, and things which he had never sensed before.. They were there. Could he..? Oh no, that was pure insanity.

Usually, Damian only focused on less than a square centimeter of any metal or materia at a time when he used his mana threads to analyze it. He had to reduce that into three parts too before he was finally able to sense individual particles of the land. And even in those, over hundreds and hundreds of such particles were present.

Technically, he could find tiny minuscule particles of black sand like this.. But it could never be enough. The particles were too small, and by the time he gathered enough that he could use his most basic spell on it.. it would take.. Years? Damian looked up toward the stone pillar a few meters away from him—standing straight with a timer on top—it was still 1000.

Definitely days.

1000 days.. Just a little off of three years. Three years for one tiny runic inscription. What sadist designed these trials?

Come on, there had to be another way. Should he just find some solid rock and use his Archscript Sovereign skill to inscribe a tiny spell on it? It wouldn't be anything of value though.. Barely even usable once, if it didn't crumble in the middle of it.

The more he thought about it, the more it seemed like that was his only option. That wasn't transmutation—that was just simple filtering and gathering. He only even thought about it because he was from Earth. A person from a magical world wouldn't even think it was possible. What was transmutation even? Wasn't it magically transforming one thing into something totally different? What if a transmutation skill simply allowed the user to make a few atomic-level changes and that transformed one molecule into something completely else? If dirt—with all its glass and other impurities—could be considered part of its molecular makeup, simply extracting iron would look like he was transforming dirt into metal.

It was simply impossible to do this by hand, but with his mana sense and little mana threads he could gather iron from the dirt and sand. If he did this, it might not be exactly what the trial wanted, but the iron would still be a damn valuable thing, and he would pass the trial.

If he did it, he would get a skill that would do this automatically for him. And who knows—he would possibly even get a physics-defying skill that actually changed whole structures of molecules, not just separated them.

With that thought in mind, Damian started it. His mana was limited, but it was not really a mana thing. Covering more ground would not benefit him much since he could only focus on a limited area—so it was better to use less mana in a small area. He just had to pick a good spot with more black sand than red rust. Damian traveled for days after confirming that the timer was indeed days, and found some dark grey patches in the land.

This should have more iron particles. Damian sat down and started using his mana threads to extract iron particles for hours and hours. He had to sense the black particles—it felt slightly different from the rust and the numerous dirt and glass particles. After making mistakes for a couple of days, he had a pretty good grasp on what he was looking for.

Surprisingly, he never felt hungry. He drank conjured water, but when he forced his mind to forget about it.. He didn't crave it either. Were the Third Ranker Trials different, or did he seriously not need to eat or drink in his other trials too, and he simply did it out of habit? That was mighty stupid of him.

Bit by bit, Damian gathered the iron particles. He had made a wooden box, inside which he directed all the small clouds of particles he separated throughout the day. It was a small box with a tiny opening to save the collected particles from getting rusted.

After a week of doing this, Damian realized it was really inefficient. If there were more particles of iron in the dirt, it would be worth it, but he barely found a few after hours of separation. Then an idea came to his mind, and Damian went on a little resource-gathering journey. He went as far as he could in all directions. Same as before, he experienced an invisible wall that stopped him after some 40 kilometers.