Adrian stood amidst the room filled with parchnts and broken prototypes.
All around him, small formations flickered faintly on the floor, failed attempts, so still sparking with residual energy before fading away.
"It needs… awareness," he muttered, eyes tracing one of the still-glowing arrays. "Sothing to guide the runes. Otherwise, it's just a blade that cuts indiscriminately."
That was the flaw. The core flaw.
Every formation he made, no matter how advanced, lacked intent. It didn't know who to attack, who to heal, what to protect.
He paced, his thoughts circling. "Could soone guide it manually?"
No. That was absurd.
A planetary formation could span entire continents. Even a dozen simultaneous attacks from different vectors would overwhelm a single guide.
Worse, whoever guided it needed comprehension of every concept woven into the formation. It would be extrely rare for him to find a being like that…
This idea was hopeless.
He stopped, gaze drifting to the ceiling. "Then what else?"
His gaze shifted to the silent Node resting on the corner of the table.
AI…
Artificial Intelligences were commonplace in the galaxy. Starships ran on them, calculating warp jumps, adjusting gravity fields, firing weapons, optimizing fuel consumption.
If cold machinery could guide fleets across light-years, could it not also guide runes?
But AI was too limited. Just patterns, numbers, circuits. Still, sothing about the thought tugged at him.
Lexarians had built AIs that controlled things powered by runes. How?
How had they made the runes act with the controls from the machines?
His mind began to turn rapidly.
The Node. The Galactic Net.
He rembered the first ti he had held the Node in his hands, back when he had registered into their network. Even then, he had realized it wasn't technology.
It was inscriptions pretending to be technology.
He reached for it now, holding the small device between his fingers.
Its tallic surface glead faintly. "Let's see what you're hiding," he whispered, activating his Source Eyes.
Instantly, layers unfolded before his vision, not of tal or code, but of runes.
Thousands of them.
Before, when he had first examined this, it had been chaos, a storm of symbols overwhelming him. But now, with a good understanding in the foundations of galactic concepts, his mind didn't drown in it.
Now, he saw the order.
Outer runes pulsed softly, linked to communication interfaces, projection, holo-displays, command input.
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Middle layers twisted like filants of light, mana shaping itself to mimic circuits.
The inscriptions didn't conduct electricity. They guided mana in on/off patterns that mirrored computational behavior.
At the very core, buried deep, lay a web of symbols that connected the Node to the Galactic Net.
He saw the link runes that allowed the node to send and receive through that massive network.
But there was sothing else. Small, concealed symbols. Tracking concepts.
Runes that pulsed faintly in his Source's perception, embedding coordinates directly into the Net's flow.
"So that's how they always know where every Node is," Adrian murmured.
The Lexarian surveillance wasn't digital. It was linguistic. They didn't program location tracking. They inscribed it.
He spent hours tracing the layers, peeling them apart one by one.
To his eyes, every line revealed purpose, imitation masquerading as innovation.
And when he finally set the Node down, realization hit him.
"Lexaria didn't rge runes with technology," he whispered. "They made runes pretend to be technology."
He stood still for a long mont. Then the thought ford.
"If runes can imitate machines… then why can't they imitate instincts?"
If he could make the runes "think
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