The fourth level of the tower looked different from the previous levels. It looked like a bright castle with a dome on top. It did not seem like it was in a tower, but it was more like a place that had nothing to do with a tower. Lin Huang was slightly surprised by the new environment, but soon he got back into the zone.
The charcoal grey stone tablet looked exactly the same as before, but the pattern on it was now different. The maze-like golden lines were now a complicated image formed by the 36 basic rune lines. Lin Huang frowned as he had no idea how he was supposed to pass this test. The gigantic face appeared on the dome on top of him, grinning as he noticed Lin Huang's knitted brows.
After staring at the image for a while and not seeing anything happen to the stone tablet, Lin Huang then realized that the way to activate it was different from before. He placed his palm on it but nothing happened. After giving it some thought, Lin Huang inserted Life Power into the stone tablet, but still, nothing happened. He then attempted to insert telekinesis and spirit energy, but nothing happened to the stone tablet at all.
"Alright, stop trying. No matter what you do, the result is the same. It's a sealing rune. You'll have to unseal it to enter the stone tablet's consciousness," reminded the face on top as he could not bear to watch him fail anymore.
"You were given rune lines on the previous three levels. On the fourth to the sixth levels, you'll be tested on the performance of the rune. Sealing and unsealing is a basic performance of the rune. If you want to go higher, you'll have the learn the rune diligently, but I think you won't be able to get to the fifth level in this short period."
"I'll learn then. I won't lose anything if I learn one more skill," Lin Huang thought to himself. Since he planned to stay there for a couple of days, he figured it would not hurt to learn. It was never too late to give up if he figured out that he had no talent.
He then turned around and walked a distance away from the stone tablet. He found a place with the sun shining and sat with his legs crossed. He then closed his eyes and started studying the rune secret skill that he had gotten earlier.
Lin Huang read the first level of secret skill over and over again. After memorizing all the 108 basic rune lines, he realized that there were just too many things to remember for each of them. There were tens of thousands of words that each rune could be combined into, so the total combinations came up to almost four million words. With his memory, he could definitely memorize all of them if he were given the time, but the thing was that it would be redundant if he could not understand the meaning of each term.
After all, not everyone could understand the dual-vector foil manual directly without learning. It was the same as the basic rune lines whereby some of them were hard to understand and there were some specific terms used in Witchcraft that Lin Huang could not understand at all. After failing to grasp it, he decided to summon Bloody. As he shared his memory of the rune with Bloody, he sat aside while waiting for Bloody to tell him more about it.
Bloody took two to three minutes to study it and suggested to him to read a dictionary that was specialized in Witchcraft. Helpless, Lin Huang then asked for the gigantic face's help.
"Sir, could you get me a dictionary that's specialized in Witchcraft?"
"That's simple." The face tossed him a crystal ball. "Look at it yourself."
Lin Huang brought the crystal ball to Bloody while it extended its tentacle to read the contents of the crystal ball.
"Kid, what's that summoning monster of yours that looks like a cotton candy? Why haven't I seen it before?" The gigantic face could not help but ask.
"It's a new type of monster that I call Violethaze."
"This fella doesn't look like it could fight. Why would you want such a useless monster?" The face could not tell that Bloody was a threatening parasitical monster.
Of course, Lin Huang would not tell him the truth.
"Although Bloody isn't good at fighting, it has an ability called Enhanced Intelligence. It has an extremely high intelligence and it can decide things for me whenever there are issues that I can't solve."
"A monster with Enhanced Intelligence. That's rare." The gigantic face was interested in Bloody now.
"Are you selling this summoning monster?"
"No," Lin Huang rejected directly.
"Alright then." The gigantic face knew that Lin Huang would reply as such, but he was just testing him.
"So, are you planning to get it to use its Enhanced Intelligence to learn the basic rune?" The face observed Bloody for a while before speaking again.
"Yes, there's just too much to learn. I've taken a rough look and found that it's hard to understand. If I were to learn it by myself, I might not be able to master it in a month. Bloody learns so much faster than I do, and it'll be easier for it to learn and teach me later."
Lin Huang had come up with a plan. He even planned to let Bloody share its memory with him if he could not understand the rune after Bloody simplified it so that he could just memorize them directly.
Bloody took almost half an hour before giving back the crystal ball to Lin Huang. It then started learning the Witchcraft Rune by itself. Time passed by on the fourth level of the tower. The gigantic face brought him some food in between, thanks to Bai Gu who had instructed the people to prepare food for him.
Bloody finally opened its eyes when it was 4 p.m.
"So, how is it?" Lin Huang asked immediately.
"Almost there." Bloody nodded and shared the simplified programme that it had concluded with Lin Huang by using one of its tentacles. Lin Huang then started to learn the rune. The simplified version was much easier as the descriptions of many words were truncated in short sentences. The four million words were consolidated into 120,000 words.
Bloody had also arranged the combinations of each line since it had found more than 50,000 combinations for the 108 rune lines.
"This is only the preliminary step and I've only managed to come up with more than 50,000 runes. I might be able to make 80,000 runes if I'm given more than those lines. There'll be more for advanced and high-level rune lines. I'm still figuring them out and I need more time," Bloody explained.
"Let me memorize those that you've come up with first." Lin Huang nodded. Memorizing was the simplest way to learn.