Controlling Destiny

Ultrix sat in his new dorm room still dazed at the number of resources the Academy was suddenly bestowing upon him.

His current dorm was leagues better than his old one and there were even silver tier guards standing guard outside the main gate.

Of course, all of this didn't belong to Ultrix. He was currently staying at a dormitory building that housed all of the special guests of the Academy and it's best students.

Looking through all the runic creation tools yet again, Ultrix ultimately decided to hold back from any testings and headed straight to the main library.

Ultrix realized that his current understanding of combustion was too fundamental so he wanted to read up on some more research before attempting any magic circles.

Looking through the titles, a book called 'Fundamentals of Magic' caught his eye.

It was a fairly thick book and skimming through it quickly, Ultrix found that it had a basic understanding of all types of magic circles with a guide on the most efficient and effective means of drawing them.

Putting aside the book for the time, Ultrix went through the titles again to pick out another book to read. Ultimately, his gaze was drawn towards a book titled 'Combustion Control'.

Ultrix took the book off of the shelf and began reading it as well. Whenever he ran across a method that was mentioned in the book that he was unfamiliar with, he referenced back to his other book on magic fundamentals to compare notes.

After reading for a couple of hours and memorizing a list of do's and don'ts of magic circle drawing, Ultrix decided it was time for him to start applying his knowledge to practical use.

Picking up a piece of dry wood, Ultrix started carving a basic combustion rune onto it.

After a few seconds of carving, the rune was complete.

At first, nothing happened and Ultrix thought with disappointment that he had failed his first attempt. However, after a few seconds, a few sparks shot outwards from the rune.

Ultrix was ecstatic! Although he had not managed to start a fire, he felt like this was a better improvement from his previous attempts before he had read anything.

Reading more on the runic uses and combustion efficiency guide, Ultrix took a piece of paper this time and drew a runic circle on it with flammable ink.

This time the reaction was a lot faster, and hardly after he had completed the circle, the paper ignited and shriveled up quite quickly.

While this was a lot faster than his previous attempt at starting a fire, Ultrix ultimately still felt like it was too slow. He yearned for a method of faster casting but did not know how to improve.

After scanning all of the contents in the library again, Ultrix was just about to give up for the day when a glint in the corner of the room caught his eye.

Walking over to examine the glint, Ultrix realized that it was a book on 'Instantaneous Castings'.

Confused on what 'instantaneous' meant, Ultrix tried to open the book and read it's contents.

However, to his surprise, the book could not be pried open. It was as if all the pages were glued together and formed a solid block.

Feeling quite curious at this point, Ultrix examined the book more closely. Looking at the bookbinding, Ultrix realized that there was a runic circle faintly inscribed into the string.

However, it was a runic pattern that Ultrix did not recognize.

Scanning through the library once again, Ultrix took out all the books he saw which had anything to do with magical paper and books.

At first, Ultrix skimmed through the books, but a few minutes in, he realized it would be even faster if he knew what he was looking for.

Looking back at the design of the runic circle, Ultrix realized that he had seen the format before in the fundamentals book.

Looking through the fundamentals book glossary, Ultrix noticed that there was a section on magic circle encryption that correlated to the magic circle that he saw on the other book.

Unfortunately, although the fundamentals book covered the different types of encryptions, it did not go into depth on all of the methods of unlocking said encryptions.

Looking back through the books on books and magic, Ultrix finally found a chapter on magic encryption.

It turns out, magic encryption was quite a common usage in the world of magic. However, this was confusing to Ultrix as for some reason he had never heard of this term before.

However, after much thought, Ultrix realized that it probably made sense that he would not have known about such a method. After all, the departments that he had learned from were more practical and not very scientific departments.

It would make sense for there to be encryptions required on more important data, but for magic users like Ultrix, such encryptions seemed impractical.

Reading through the book though, Ultrix realized that the process of encrypting a book was not too difficult to learn.

However, there were different tiers of encryption, just like how there were different affinity tiers. Unlike the affinity tiers though, which were separated into bronze, silver, and gold, the encryption tier was simply given numbers with higher numbers meaning higher difficulty.

Luckily for Ultrix, the book that he currently wanted to unlock was only at tier 3.

With the highest tier mentioned in the book being a tier 7, tier 3 was still a relatively simple encryption code.

Without further hesitation, Ultrix started unlocking the book bind.

The process of decrypting a tier 3 was quite simple. All it required Ultrix to do was to rotate the rings of the magic circle in a specific order until they all lined up with each other.

At first, Ultrix was not sure what the book meant with 'turning the circles'

However, after a bit of messing around, Ultrix realized that once a magic circle was put onto an object, it would hover slightly above the original surface almost like a liquid skims the surface that it is on.

Ultrix tried to spin the circles in different ways, but he quickly discovered that the order to unlock the rings could not be done through brute force.

Anyone who simply guesses the order of the rings would temporarily lock the entire rune and the rings would randomize themselves again with a new combination code.

Luckily for Ultrix, the book on encryptions was quite detailed and he slowly solved the algorithm by turning the runic circles.

After turning the final circle in the correct order, the magic circle finally dissipated.

Ultrix was not surprised at all that the circle dissipated. After all, most encryption locks that were tier 3 were one-time usage only.

Once they were broken they had to be redrawn.

Ultrix looked at the book in anticipation. Something that required a tier 3 encryption surely was quite valuable, right?

However, before Ultrix could open the book, he suddenly realized that a new encryption circle had appeared again.

Multi-level encryption? Ultrix thought to himself.

He was not too surprised at this either, the book had mentioned that a lot of magic users liked to use multiple levels of encryption to secure their work in the case that the previous runic circle was depleted of its energy.

Upon closer inspection of the encryption runic though, Ultrix's face turned dark.

"Crap!" He said out loud.

"It's a tier 5 encryption this time?!"