Adrian stood amidst the room filled with parchments and broken prototypes.
All around him, small formations flickered faintly on the floor, failed attempts, some still sparking with residual energy before fading away.
"It needs… awareness," he muttered, eyes tracing one of the still-glowing arrays. "Something 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 someone 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 extremely 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, something 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 remembered the first time 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 metallic surface gleamed faintly. "Let's see what you're hiding," he whispered, activating his Source Eyes.
Instantly, layers unfolded before his vision, not of metal or code, but of runes.
Thousands of them.
Before, when he had first examined this, it had been chaos, a storm of symbols he couldn't comprehend. 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.
Middle layers twisted like filaments 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 something 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 merge runes with technology," he whispered. "They made runes pretend to be technology."
He stood still for a long moment. Then the thought formed.
"If runes can imitate machines… then why can't they imitate instincts?"
If he could make the runes "think", not truly think, but react, then he could create formations that could sense who to attack and who to protect.
He didn't need to create awareness.
He needed recognition.
He moved quickly, sweeping away old parchments and beginning anew.
His brush danced over fresh sheets.
He began small.
A simple Filter Rune, one that "read" mana signatures of all entities within a formation's range.
Adrian's Source Eyes traced the symbol as it took form beneath his brush, watching the incomplete fragments he'd seen in Lexarian databases shift into their true shape.
The ink shimmered faintly, already responding to his intent.
Then, another rune beside it, one that compared the detected signature to a reference imprint. Just like the Nodes did when users registered their mana profile.
He paused, realization dawning.
"That's it. That's what Lexaria was trying to do."
He remembered the registration process, how the Node identified him by his unique mana resonance. The way it had catalogued his essence signature within moments, storing it somewhere in that vast network.
What Adrian didn't know was that Lexaria's original goal wasn't communication or surveillance. They began this project to solve the same flaw he faced now, how to give formations intent. How to give them awareness.
That was how they created these mana signature scans, but the problem they could not find a solution to was, how to make this awareness take control of their formation and attack the enemies?
The Net had evolved from their early attempts to give formations self-recognition.
Because even though they could detect identity, they could never connect who it was with what the formation should do about it.
They couldn't bridge the "awareness" with "reaction." Because the language of mana they had was fragments, even if they tried to add conditions as instructions into the formation, it never worked because of the broken phrases they had.
The symbols they had for if, then, else, were themselves broken, incomplete words that stopped them until now.
But for Adrian it was different. He drew deeper on his Source.
It guided his hand as he wrote the next layer of symbols, a connection rune, one that linked the recognition to the action. The brush moved almost on its own, following pathways his mind could barely comprehend consciously.
"If mana signature does not match registered ally, trigger burn."
His Source pulsed again, translating the conditional logic into the true language of mana. The symbols gleamed brighter than any he'd written before, carrying weight the Lexarian fragments could never hold.
Then he activated the formation with his essence.
The formation flared alive. Adrian stepped forward experimentally without imprinting his mana signature, and the formation erupted. Lines of fire surged upward, surrounding him.
Heat washed across his face, the flames responding instantly to his unregistered presence.
He quickly withdrew his essence and registered his signature through the scanning process in the formation, letting it catalogue his mana frequency. Then he stepped inside again.
Nothing happened.
No fire, no attack, just stillness.
The formation recognized him now, accepting his presence as though he'd always belonged within its boundaries.
He stepped back out and tried again without his mark. Flames answered.
A grin broke across his face.
"It works."
It wasn't perfect. It was crude and couldn't yet distinguish between more complex behaviors, but it decided.
A formation that could detect, think, and react.
He looked down at the glowing circle of runes, the first of its kind.
Somewhere, far beyond the stars, the Lexarian scholars were still trying to solve this problem, the same flaw that haunted inscribers for centuries.
And Adrian Blackwood had done it on his first attempt.
"This is it," he murmured. "The first breath of awareness."
And yet, this was only the beginning.
Adrian looked out toward the half-built towers of the Origin Capital, his voice quiet but certain.
"Let's see how far I can push this."