Avery had suspected for a long time that a superior level of rune must exist, and that it was probably related to intent in some way. In light of that, he had made many tests, but none had ever resulted in any noticeable effects.

  He had concluded that either intent wasn’t a thing, it had an effect unrelated with the rune quality, or he had not found the correct intent to match the rune he was drawing.

  Now, with the sudden reaction of the flow of mana, he guessed he had coincidentally stumbled on to the correct intent, which must have something to do with imprisonment.

  He was still confused as to what a rune destined to adorn a spearhead had to do with imprisonment, but now that he had a clue, he was confident he would eventually figure out all of the rune’s secrets, and then all of mana’s mysteries.

  His depression was temporarily gone and forgotten, vastly overweighed by his drive for improvement and curiosity. He had stumbled on the very thing he had been hoping for, a chance of mastering mana. He would grab that chance with all his might, and with a direction to follow, it was only a matter of time until he became an expert on the art of magic.

  Full of motivation, he tested all kinds of ideas, eager to finally learn more and find what worked and what didn't.

  At first he thought he needed to convey the idea of inescapable confinement, binding the enemy by unbreakable chains, but he found it was better to visualise a low-security prison full of inmates than an inescapable cell holding a single prisoner.

  He was having a hard time expressing a clear idea through images, and kept getting distracted by all kind of possibilities of what else the true meaning of the rune could be.

  He started to feel a need to be able to better describe his ideas, as they were too vague for accurate analysis. In an attempt to be more precise, he stopped picturing images, but rather tried to convey intent through words. It wasn’t as effective, but it was more specific.

  He performed a multitude of tests, and found that the word with the best result by far was “containment”, followed by “imprisoned” and “captive” while words like “shackled" or “chained” had almost no effect.

  He also checked whether the same intent could have a different effect depending on when he thought about it, or if he could use multiple concepts. For example, he would start out focusing wholeheartedly on the word “prison”, but when his drawing was approximately halfway done, he would instead concentrate on the notion of a “trap”.

  His logic was that runes might represent something that could not be boiled down to a single notion, and have a structure more akin to a sentence than a single word. Perhaps stringing together many concepts in the right order could lead to the best results.

  Thinking about it carefully, Avery remembered he had gotten the rune to put on a spear. He really couldn’t see what spear had to do with some kind of restraining enchantment, and he found it more plausible that imprisonment was only a small part of its nature. Presumably, its full name would sound somewhat like this : “strike the enemy, cut his flesh and seal his qi”?

  Saying this, Avery was suddenly struck by inspiration. He had so far limited himself to imagining restraints applied to humans, but was it not more likely it would be related to the suppression of the qi of cultivators?

  Unfortunately, none of those ideas panned out. Mana always reacted the exact same way to his intent, regardless of when it was channeled, and while the words like “seal” or “suppress his qi” did make the mana flow quicken, it was no more pronounced than all of the other concepts he had tried before.

  Unresigned, and determined to find what the glyph truly symbolised, he tried to forget his new discovery and once again list all the effects that seemed to fit with a beginner's first spear rune, but his mind kept coming back to “restrain” and “imprison”. He had finally decided to give it a rest and go back to visualising pictures when he had an inspiration.

  What if instead of confinement, the pictogram symbolized storage? He immediately tested the word “storage”, which had an average effect, but when he specified “mana storage”, he was elated to find the ephemeral energy was roused and practically gushed out of him, enabling him to finish inscribing twice as fast as usual.

  He carried out a few more tests, and became reasonably certain he had found the correct use of the rune, so he moved on to investigate if the method of visualisation affected anything. He had previously noticed that projecting images had better results than words, but what about a descriptive sentence?

  He experimented a little, and found the more descriptive he was, the better, as long as it was relevant. “Bountiful mana storage” was better than “mana storage”, but “beautiful mana storage” was worse.

  Next, he compared the effects of conveying intent through words compared with pictures. As the saying went, a picture is worth a 1000 words, so he was not surprised that he was still better off exercising his visual imagination. He was uncertain of how to picture qi, so he got the best results imagining a huge pile of spirit stones.

  As with words, the more clear and complete the picture was, the better, but he eventually realised that although words and images got reactions from the arcane energy, they were not the focal point.

  The words were only a conduit, or a support for intent. To craft a storage rune, he needed to have the feeling it would store a lot of things, and visualising was only a way to project his intent. A single word filled with the sentiment of boundless abundance would be more effective than a 3000 word essay he recited while thinking of something else. The ideal of course being 3000 words full of intent.