Arthur placed his inscriber on the blackboard. The tool was made from some kind of metal and incredibly cold to touch, well below freezing if he wasn’t mistaken. Temperatures were hard to judge these days. It was also incredibly light, weighing about as much as an ordinary ballpoint pen. Arthur looked at Cyprus and then the rune he’d drawn. The old elf smiled at him, seemingly content to watch him work. Arthur glared suspiciously at the rune and then the apparently innocent elf. He’d recognise that look anywhere, someone up to no good. The rune looked simple enough and with his stats as high as they were, he didn’t need any artistic ability to perfectly replicate it. So what was the catch? Arthur sincerely doubted Cyprus wanted to check if he could copy a swirly line so what was it the old elf was trying to teach him here? Staring at the rune wasn’t going to give him any answers so Arthur put his finger on it and traced it from beginning to end. The rune had been carved into the astral rock, so lightly that simply looking at it wouldn’t reveal anything—at least with his relatively low perception. The starting point of the rune was carved a fifth of a centimetre deep, rising to a fourth near the middle, before gradually dropping to a single millimetre near the end of the rune. Cyprus nodded appreciatively at his investigations.Arthur still felt like there was something more to this, but nothing came to mind. Taking a deep breath, he placed his inscriber against the astral rock. Control was the name of the game here, he needed to carefully regulate his strength. Lightly as he could, Arthur applied pressure onto the astral rock.Two things happened at once. The inscriber sank a millimetre into the board before the mother of all rejections struck him. It was like he’d just tried to get the opposite ends of the world's strongest magnet to touch. His inscriber was pushed away with the force of a hundred kicking mules, but because of how carefully (...)