During his time in the library, the LunaBots had finished upgrading Joshua's soul world. Thus, he had enough energy in stock to rank up. Due to his rapid progress, he had already discussed the matter with Catherine. Their conversation went as follow:

"My lovely Master, your humble Guardian should be ready to advance soon. I would, therefore, request your guidance upon my advancement," he told Catherine, in his usual silly tone.

"That's good to hear, however, I won't be able to a.s.sist you as much this time," she started, "The first two levels are mostly similar for everyone: first you learn how to manifest your soul in the outside world, next you learn how to have it take physical form. Those are the foundations of strengthening one's soul. For the ranks above, the path diverges from person to person."

"Hmmm, if it varies based on the individual, I suppose how their soul world looks like is important?"

"As usual, you catch on quickly. You have to form a clear picture of how your world can evolve further. This path is difficult and making wrong a.s.sumptions is quite common."

"So, you're saying that if people imagine an evolution of their world that turns out to be incorrect, they might get stuck?"

"Precisely. A wrong evolution can be undone with time and practice, but such a matter usually ends up wasting decades, as the person has to first develop the evolution, evolve their world into it, realize it doesn't work properly and revert back to its previous state.

Frankly, the progress you made since we met is monstrous. Honestly, I would normally advise you to wait a few years before attempting your next evolution, but I'm afraid we don't have that luxury. Still, no matter what, do not rush it."

"I see, thanks for the warning," he said, a bit disappointed.

Catherine saw that and placed her hand on his shoulder.

"Don't get me wrong, it doesn't mean you can't start thinking about it now. I know you're very creative. I'm sure you'll find a path that suits you. We can discuss it together once you got an idea."

"OK Boss! I'll think about it and I'll let you know what I figure out first."

Catherine's suggestion made sense, after all, he didn't want his soul world to end up full of Betamax tapes. There were many directions he could take to develop his world. For example, he could use his affinity for lightning energy to develop power electricity based techniques but while that sounded extremely cool, Joshua was a programmer through and through.

There were two domains that he wanted to keep developing moving forward. The first was obviously Luna. It was his life's work and while it was already quite the achievement in its own right, there was always room for improvement. Lately, he had been mostly adding small functions to the system as new needs appeared. While those new functions were useful, they couldn't be considered an evolution. As for how he wanted Luna to evolve, he had a long-term plan, even back when he was alive. To call the definitive version he had in mind ambitious would be the understatement of the year. When he was directing the Luna project on Earth, he doubted he would see it realized in his lifetime and unfortunately the whole idea died with him, as he never had the chance to elaborate on it apart from a very vague concept. Now, due to a bizarre twist of fate, he found himself in a position to continue working on that project. But even with his improved soul allowing him to work at an inhuman speed, he didn't expect the project to be done for at the very minimum a few decades.

He obviously couldn't wait that long to evolve his soul. Catherine had told him to be patient, but he didn't think their enemies would be. At the very least he needed a plan. Which bring us back to the second item of interest: runes. While he was reading book after book, he established a list of all the new designs by their utility. Slowly but surely, he added them to the library he had built back when he was designing the body training rune. Those more advanced models had much stricter requirements in their use. For example, the rune that had exploded in his face a few days ago was used to make some variant of nitroglycerin. The amount of energy inserted had to be strictly regulated or else… well, Joshua saw what happened when he was careless. After adding the last rune, he now had a much more robust set to work with. It was time to start thinking about evolving his world.

Joshua was sitting in his lab, watching the basic fire rune he had used many times by now. The rune was behind the gla.s.s wall emitting a faint fire aura. The flame had a very relaxing effect on him as he was reviewing everything he had learned in the last days. He had seen beautiful patterns capable of exceptional capacities, one after the other. He even had a general idea of how to apply runes and objects to people in a relatively timely fas.h.i.+on. And yet, despite all this, he hadn't found the answer to what he was looking for. He couldn't help but wonder:

'What exactly are runes?'

An old meme popped into his mind, 'It's magic, I ain't gonna explain s.h.i.+t!' Obviously, an answer like this didn't satisfy him. If you explained an unknown phenomenon like that on Earth, people would laugh at you. For starters, what was 'magic'? As far as he had learned, magic was the application of using the energy gathered in one's soul world. He imagined a scientist on Earth discovering this, they would most likely give it some complex latin name that people would never use and most people would just call it 'soul power' or some other thing. Of course, Joshua preferred the term magic, after all, saying 'I can use magic' sounded bada.s.s.

How were runes and magic linked? Well, the explanation Catherine had given him was simple: 'Runes are magic symbols that do stuff when activated.' This was correct, sort of. However, an explanation like this was vastly incomplete. A couple of questions should come to one's mind upon hearing this explanation: 'Who made those symbols?' 'Why does each symbol correspond to a particular effect?' What came first, magic or runes?' 'Is there a rune that allows elephants to transform into kangaroos?' OK, maybe Joshua is the only one who would consider the last one, but all the others were questions were valid and no one seemed to have a clue about.

The only logical conclusion he had arrived to was that runes were some sort of language. As for who had created, who knows. Runes were one of the 'gifts' that freaking Crow had given Leonard but that d.a.m.n bird had told Joshua he was a seeker of knowledge and wanted to add his competence in artificial intelligence to his library. It was, therefore, very possible and even likely the Crow did not create the runes himself but instead absorbed that knowledge from someone else, willingly or not. That fact might sound biased but it would be a euphemism to say Joshua didn't have a good impression of the Crow, it wasn't surprising he would think he stole that knowledge rather than creating it himself.

He augmented the amount of energy he was sending into the fire rune, causing the flame in front of him to grow at a rapid pace. It wasn't a coincidence he had opted for this particular rune as its meaning was very symbolic to him. One of mankind's first discovery as a civilized species was fire or rather, how to use it for their own benefit for heating and cooking rather than being scared of it. People back then had no idea how it worked, yet were still able to use it. It wasn't until millions of years later that people understood what fire exactly is and why it's burning.

There is a term used in computer programming and engineering referring to the situation at hand. Runes were a 'black box' for him, a type of device that can be viewed in terms of input and output but without any knowledge of its internal working. The rune in front of him was one of the simplest design that existed, just pour energy into it and fire comes out. Why? Who knows! Catherine had told him his soul had an affinity for lightning energy and yet thanks to this rune, he had no problem creating fire. Joshua was biting his nails thinking about it. There had to be an explanation! There had to be!

While observing the rune was pleasant, he began to feel he was wasting his time. In the end, he only saw one way to solve this mystery. He had to reverse engineer the rune.