After saying goodbye to Professor Nico and leaving the airship, Lucien continued his search for the nesting grounds of the Norwegian Ridgeback.
High above the snowy winds, Lucien sat on Norbert's broad back, lowering his gaze to the little finger of his right hand. A new wave-shaped, sapphire-blue mark had appeared on the pad of his pinky.
It was an elementary Water Rune—something he'd earned by accidentally triggering a task these past few days. The job was simple enough that he'd completed it almost without thinking.
Raising his wand, he conjured a floating sphere of water and reshaped it smoothly into various forms.
Just like the Lightning Rune, this Water Rune boosted his water-based magic by about ten percent and strengthened his affinity with water-aligned elements—rather like boosting one's natural compatibility with a certain branch of magic, the way some wizards are simply better with Charms or Transfiguration.
But what caught Lucien's attention even more was the faint connection he sensed between this new Water Rune on his pinky and the advanced Lightning Rune inscribed near his thumb.
Following that subtle link, he released another arc of lightning.
Water and lightning intertwined in the air, like two magical creatures drawn to each other. Beyond the spectacle, Lucien could feel something far more interesting—the state where water and lightning coexisted felt… unusually stable.
It wasn't that different elements were incapable of existing together. Even in alchemy—an art as fussy and rule-bound as Professor Snape's N.E.W.T.-level Potions—every student had heard the classic problem of balancing earth, water, fire, and air. When mixed, each element normally consumed energy from the others, a factor alchemists always had to account for.
But here, with the water and lightning weaving around each other, their mutual consumption was slightly lower than standard.
Alchemy is a rigorous discipline, with precise guidelines for elemental loss rates. After testing it in multiple conditions, Lucien confirmed that whenever he activated an elemental rune, that element's loss rate dropped noticeably.
It was like watching two quarrelsome kids suddenly behave themselves the moment an adult walks into the room.
In this case, water and lightning were the kids—and the runes were the supervising adults.
And because his Lightning Rune was of a higher tier, his control over lightning was stronger, so lightning consumed even less energy than water.
Lucien's first thought was: If I can collect all four basic elemental runes—water, fire, earth, air—this could revolutionize my alchemy.
Reduce the loss between the foundational elements, and countless alchemical theories and techniques could be improved—or outright reinvented.
At least for someone like him, someone who actually possessed these elemental runes.
"And then there's compound elemental magic…" Lucien murmured, watching the water coil through the crackling arc of electricity.
As spell complexity increases, so does the number of elements involved. And the more active the elements, the more violently they tend to consume each other when combined.
That's why high-level compound elemental spells are so rare: even though they require enormous magical power and difficult wandwork, the payoff usually isn't worth it. Too inefficient—so research in that field has mostly withered away, much like many abandoned magical theories in the Hogwarts Library's Restricted Section.
But the subtle resonance between the Water and Lightning Runes made Lucien feel as though a door had cracked open. If he could keep raising each rune's level—deepening his affinity and reducing mutual elemental loss to negligible levels—then compound magic might become a completely viable discipline again.
"Looks like I've got a new field … to explore," Lucien said with a spark of excitement.
He suddenly remembered something from the system's previous evaluations: Collecting all elemental runes would trigger a 'special surprise'.
There were five runes in total—water, fire, earth, air, and lightning.
Judging from the current interaction between lightning and water, perhaps he didn't need every rune at the highest tier. Maybe simply gathering all five—even at basic or intermediate levels—would already cause some kind of transformation.