This one was significantly thicker, and in much worse condition. The cover was rotting, and several chunks of pages were missing entirely, torn out or eaten by time.
"…Lower structural integrity on this one," Lencar noted grimly.
He opened it anyway, carefully peeling the damp pages apart.
The diagrams inside this volume were fundamentally different. They were vastly more complex. They were far less geometric and sharp, and much more organic. They featured sweeping, curved structures. Flowing, overlapping patterns that looked like the intricate root systems of an ancient tree, or the veins of a living creature.
They looked almost—alive.
Lencar studied one mostly intact page in particular, his eyes widening slightly as he traced the flow path.
"…Now that is incredibly interesting."
This specific rune wasn't designed to be a static, one-and-done trigger. It didn't just fire a spell and end. It described continuous, perpetual motion.
It was a cycle.
Mana entering the primary node. Transforming and amplifying as it passed through the complex curves. Exiting as a spell. And then, crucially, catching the residual, wasted energy of the cast and feeding it right back into the intake node. Repeating endlessly.
"…It's a closed-loop construct," Lencar realized, his heart beating a little faster.
He immediately used Replication on it.
The complex, organic pattern transferred flawlessly into his waiting grimoire, glowing a deep, vibrant green.
This time—the reaction was instantaneous and explosive.
The page physically trembled in the air. Without Lencar even supplying it with his own power, the ambient Quintessence in the room was violently sucked into the diagram. Mana began circulating rapidly within the rune itself, glowing brighter and brighter as the loop accelerated.
"…It's entirely self-sustaining," Lencar said, leaning closer, mesmerized by the glowing machinery of the magic.
But the awe only lasted briefly.
The organic structure whined, the light turning a harsh, angry yellow. After barely five seconds of circulation, the loop overloaded. The structure violently collapsed in on itself, the green lines shattering into magical dust that faded from the page, leaving it blank once more.
The infinite loop broke.
"It becomes instable due to a missing external anchor," Lencar deduced, leaning back heavily in his chair and rubbing his chin.
"So that's the ultimate limitation."
The ancient mages who had painstakingly crafted these runes had understood something incredibly fundamental about the laws of the universe. They knew exactly how to create autonomous, self-feeding magical structures that could potentially run forever.
But, without complete, massive external systems to ground them—like a large-scale mana zone, a geographical leyline, or a massive, physical magic stone—the constructs simply degraded and tore themselves apart from their own internal friction. They generated too much power for parchment or a human soul to safely contain without an exhaust valve.
"…Still incredibly useful," Lencar concluded, pulling his grimoire closer.
Even hopelessly incomplete and fundamentally flawed—these diagrams were the raw, foundational pieces of something far, far greater than anything currently taught in the Clover Kingdom's noble academies.
Lencar continued his work. He opened one book after another. Reading, scanning, replicating, and debugging.
Each fragile, crumbling page offered new, tantalizing fragments. Alien concepts. Half-formed, brilliant ideas that had been lost to the ages.
Most of them were fatally flawed. Some were entirely useless in modern combat.
But a few—a select, precious few—were unimaginably valuable.
Time passed in the Void Vault. The outside world didn't matter. There was only the code, the mana, and the endless pursuit of perfect structure.
Eventually—hours or perhaps days later—Lencar finally stopped.
He closed the last book, his eyes bloodshot and burning, his neck stiff with tension.
His thick black grimoire hovered proudly in front of him. It was no longer blank. Dozens of fresh pages now contained highly intricate, glowing blue and green rune structures.
He had successfully stabilized them. Refined them. Ironed out the ancient flaws and improved their efficiency using modern, pragmatic logic.
"Initial integration phase is complete," Lencar whispered, his voice hoarse from disuse.
His dark gaze shifted slightly across the pristine white room.
It landed on Garrick.
The smuggler was still deeply unconscious, completely dead to the world, snoring softly on his cot. His chest rose and fell in a steady, powerful rhythm, completely healed by the Yggdrasil crystal.
Lencar's eyes drifted back to his open grimoire, specifically to the highly volatile, organic loop construct he had just mapped out.
"…I have a viable test subject right here."
But he didn't act immediately. He didn't just walk over and start carving runes into the man's soul. Lencar wasn't Morris. He wasn't a sociopath who viewed people entirely as disposable lab rats. He was a tactician.
Instead—he sat perfectly still, observing the glowing rune patterns in his book, running complex, hypothetical simulations in his mind, analyzing the biological and spiritual compatibility.
Not all of these ancient structures could be applied directly to a living, modern human without killing them. Some required heavy, physical modification. Others required complete, ground-up reconstruction to avoid organ failure.
"…Garrick's cursed water affinity…" Lencar reasoned silently, tapping his fingers on the desk. "…It has inherent decay properties. It's a heavy, fluid medium. It naturally resists structure."
His thoughts aligned rapidly, forming a terrifying hypothesis.
That one particular rune stood out among the rest. The organic loop construct.
If Lencar could successfully stabilize that loop, find a suitable biological anchor, and surgically graft it directly into Garrick's tethered grimoire—
It could continuously, passively circulate the smuggler's mana. It would exponentially amplify his raw magical output without requiring conscious effort. It could sustain his massive Abyssal Rot Tide spell for hours, pushing him far beyond normal human limits.
"…A massive, exponential potential increase."
But—
There was an absolutely monumental risk.
Incomplete or slightly flawed integration of an infinite loop could catastrophically destabilize the host's entire spiritual foundation. It would physically burn out Garrick's mana pathways, essentially turning his veins into boiling acid. Or worse—it could permanently, irrevocably corrupt the very structure of the man's soul, turning him into a mindless, rotting abomination.
Lencar paused, his hand hovering over the glowing page. He looked at the sleeping smuggler. Garrick had fought hard. He had evolved. He was becoming a genuinely useful asset and a subordinate.
Then—
"Not yet," Lencar decided firmly.
He snapped the Logoless Grimoire shut. The glowing runes faded instantly from view, securely stored and quarantined within the infinite depths of the black book.
Waiting.
Further, intensive refinement was absolutely required before human trials. He needed more data. He needed a deeper understanding of how the Diamond Kingdom had managed to anchor their own runes without killing Mars instantly.
He stood up slowly, stretching his stiff back until it popped.
The white space around him remained perfectly silent. Unchanging. Entirely controlled.
His gaze shifted once more toward the sleeping form of Garrick.
"…Growth confirmed, however," Lencar noted with a faint, satisfied smirk.
The smuggler had already vastly exceeded all of Lencar's initial expectations. The organic spell evolution on the ship. The sudden, massive mana expansion.
All of it had been drastically accelerated. All of it had been directly influenced by the tether to Lencar's own overwhelming power.
Lencar turned away from the desk, walking toward the center of the vault to begin his own physical training.
The next phase of his grand plan had officially begun. It was no longer just about pure combat. It wasn't just about frantic, bloody survival in the mud.
It was about fundamental, magical development. He was building an army, one tether at a time.
And somewhere, far, far away—
Standing on the freezing, ice-covered deck of the Abyss Serpent, a certain Spade Kingdom mage stared out across a massive, completely frozen sea.
The sun was rising, casting long, bloody red shadows across the miles of jagged black ice he had created. There was no sign of the Gilded Eel. No sign of the smuggler. No sign of the terrifying spatial rift.
Kael Vortigen slowly lowered his hand, brushing a flake of ash from his pristine black cloak.
He wasn't angry that his prey had escaped. He wasn't frustrated.
He was smiling.
It was a wide, unhinged, deeply thrilled smile that didn't reach his cold, crystalline eyes.
"I don't know who you are," Kael whispered to the empty, freezing wind. "But I am going to find you. And I am going to break you"