The Runic Artist Chapter 16: Chapter 334 - Blood in the Water

Read chapter 16 of The Runic Artist by Ellake on NovelPedia.

Chapter 334 - Blood in the Water Nate had spent over a week underwater and in that time he had learned one thing - he was not made for the depths. There had been interesting sights of course. An underwater volcanic range that had glowed a sullen orange and stretched further than his eyes could see, even with the light from the cooling magma. He’d been pulled into a deep current that had blasted Lady Ocean and himself, along with the painted goblin-shark army, across the oceanic depths and felt himself float free for hours inside of a slip-stream. Those had been the only pleasant experiences. The rest of the time, it had either been dark, with eyesight almost useless except in creating light sources to bait in their enemies, or it had been bloody battles. His army had fought multiple types of sentient fish, often in schools of thousands. The mythic creatures were summarily eviscerated by his goblin-sharks. Then there had been a Greater Divine jellyfish that was the size of a mountain, its ‘children’ like spores that floated around it. He was pretty sure that thing had been some sort of hive-mind, or at least the spores were somehow contractually bound to the Greater Divine, as they had been flagged as mythic but had thrown themselves to their deaths in an attempt to save the Greater Divine. As for the Divine itself, it had used some odd merger of Poison and Lightning. Useless against his painted army, especially when he was actively interfering with its Skills. Its novel Concept use did give Nate some new ideas though. With plenty of downtime spent floating in the depths, Nate had managed to complete his initial designs for a device that could measure the nature of mana and what it was made of. Nate was certain that his first version wouldn’t work, but he fully intended to iterate on it until it functioned properly, even if only to satisfy his curiosity. The designs hadn’t taken up all his time and Nate had started focusing on a secondary purpose. His Nascent Vessel development was slow going, and, since it required basically none of his attention most of the time, he had started coming up with plans for improving his Abilities. He’d be a fool not to see how Art Imitates Life and Life Imitates Art shared a lot of similarities, almost like two sides of the same coin. Merging them into one Ability would make future improvements a lot simpler and more cohesive. As for his Created Space , he’d drunk from Deep Blue’s oceans like a man parched to fill his miniature world, while also checking up on Vicoli. The Void aspected Greater Divine had seemed perfectly fine in his little cage and Nate was honestly beginning to wonder if the being was cracked in the head somehow. The complete lack of complaints and agreeable nature of the Void Disciple had Nate a little on edge, but, for now, the Greater Divinity was yet to give Nate cause for concern. As for his Created Space Ability, while the world itself was fine and progressing slowly, mostly due to Nate’s many other focuses, there was an opportunity to revisit an effect from a Skill he’d lost. The world he had created was following the same laws, like Gravity and Time, as Reality. Nate’s next step would be to improve the Skill so that he could redesign those Concepts for his Created Space . For Conceptual Sight , he wanted to incorporate the Concept of Knowledge and Soul so he could start storing all the information he learned or even use Kiri’s Ability to copy in new information. He wasn’t oblivious to the fact that what he was considering was basically having a mini-System to back his Conceptual Sight . Though, doing so was only the first step. He could then make the same information available to others who were no longer bound by The System. Perhaps even using it to automatically help him build and power his painted armies, as he wasn’t foolish enough to believe that there would be no more challenges or obstacles to his goals once he’d finished denying Arikanvil the items he needed. His