The Ruined Death Knight

"Thankfully the 1st-tier skill doesn't cost as much as those runes. I got only 8 chances to throw the dice and hope to get lucky." Danzel mumbled to himself.

Though he was extremely eager to see the so-called [Great Rune]. It wasn't the only reason why he chose to spend such a large amount of XP on runes.

After all, 8 000 000 XP was a huge investment to spend purely on something that doesn't might appear.

They were three core reasons why he wanted to learn more runes. upgrade his skills.

One was that the armor that Nersan'rah had given him started to show how he abused the pure armor to its limit.

First of all, the original metal of the armor that did most of the work on protecting his bones had been damaged. Several holes and scars had been made by it from blades or other kinds of weapons and several tents had appeared from weapons that did bludgeoning damage.

The latter is the weakness of the skeleton type of undead.

Weren't for his armor, receiving a blow from a mace or a warhammer would easily break his bones.

Though it would only be lethal if his head was hit, it would be extremely bad for him if he had his spine broken.

Not only would he end up being a half-assed skeleton at this point, but regenerating such a large part of his body would take both time and mana.

Though the dark platting covered the damage, making the armor appear as if it were new. That couldn't be further from the truth. The armors enchantments had also been affected by the damage, making it more costly to make black sand and slower to reinforce the sand to become the dark plating.

In short, he needed new armor.

And a new armor called for new and better runes.

The other reason was that he finished some projects in his rune research list. Though the list was still enormous, taking 8 whole pieces of paper to list up all the potential future projects.

Most of those future projects though consisted in how to utilize parts of the [common] and [uncommon] runes to improve the "recipe' of the much better runes.

Though [Rare] runes were powerful, he wanted to focus in strengthen the "quality goods'', even if he still thought it was a bit hasty.

And last of them all, even if a [Great Rune] didn't appear at all, the information that he would gain by [Epic] runes alone would good enough.

8 000 000 XP was a lot, no doubt about it.

But considering how great the [Rune of Harvest] was, betting his "hard-earned" XP was worth it.

'Even if nothing good comes out, I will simply need to get more.' He thought before pressing the window in front of him.

With his XP drained rapidly, an extremely painful headache appeared, so painful that he felt his mind was about to break at any moment.

"Argh-!" Screaming out of pain, he suddenly stood up, as a result throwing the chair that he was seating on the ground.

He tried to grab his head with one of his hands in hopes to relieve the pain, alas the helmet he was wearing prevented such action.

[You acquired an Epic Undead Rune Intimidating Will]

[You acquired an Epic Soul Rune of Þolian Repent]

[You acquired an Epic Rune Iron Fortress]

[You acquired a Great Rune of World's Gaia]

[You acquired an Epic Undead Rune of Living Legion]

[You acquired an Epic Soul Rune of Soul Armament]

[You acquired a Great Rune of Ruined Vessel]

[You acquired an Epic Rune of Mana Essence]

...

Ignoring the several messages appearing in front of him, Danzel staggered to keep himself standing.

"Our Liege!" The nearby Draugr called out with their cold voices of concern.

"Be quiet all of you!" Danzel yelled in anger at his undead. Their mere voice not only made his headache strong but also extended the duration of the pain.

Being told to stay quiet and by their master's will to remain in place, the Draugrs couldn't do much but stare at their master in silence.

After a passive few minutes, so did the headache became tolerable.

"I should stop this bad habit of learning everything in one go..." He said as he picked up his chair and seated once more.

Opening his status and pressing the [Dead Rune Knowledge], he found only the 6 [Epic] Runes there to see.

As he was about to get confused, a new [Great Rune] box appeared in the talent, listing up all the [Great Rune]'s he had acquired. The only difference with that box was that there was no way to purchase them except of trying his luck to get one at [Epic] runes.

'I faintly expected to gain a single [Great Rune], but seeing that I got two...luck is on my side!' He shouted internally, making his headache itch once more.

"Aghh.."

Reminded by the pain, he calmed himself down and looked at his [Epic] runes.

He wanted first to start with the appetizer before digging into the main dish!

A saying from humans that he vaguely remembered through his interactions with them.

The first thing that he notice though in both [Epic] and [Great Runes] was that they were using 2 words instead of a single word.

In his own experimentation, he created [Common] runes that had more than one word, or rather symbol.

By doing that, one could squeeze more information into a rune.

Of course, doing that would put the item under much more stress and take more space than was needed to carve other runes.

In the end, he abandons the idea, dubbing it insufficient.

Alas, the [Epic] runes proved that he was simply ignorant of the ways of Runesmithing.

Not only were there 2 symbols that had the same limitation as the lower-tier runes, but the effect themselves were amazing.

The Soul [Rune of Soul Armament ], was created by some death knight named Khalid who by this day is still fighting.

What he was fighting wasn't mentioned, but what was mentioned was the effect of the rune.

As it stated, it allowed one's weapon and armor to be in a "soul bound", allowing the user to call those items back regardless of distance.

He didn't particularly find that rune that useful.

Not only would it waste precious "rune slots" of his item, but it was nothing more than a convenient magic trick.

He imagined that it could be useful for assassination, but other than that, he pushed that rune to the side of his mind.

The next rune he checked out was the [Rune of Iron Fortress].

This one was made by someone called "Artificer", who created this rune to reinforce the defenses of something called the "Perfect Lifeform". Which he ultimately failed to accomplish.

Not caring much about the guy's name, Danzel focused on the effect itself.

And all he could think after reading was...simple.

Way too simple.

All it did was increase the toughness and absorption of the force of armor by a total of 50% in the cost of increasing the overall weight of the armor by 20%.

During Danzel's whole runesmithing career, Danzel saw dozens of such runes that increase the improvement of the defense of armor.

But seeing such a high number was a first in a defense-type rune. Even the runes that brought negative effects to reinforce the main effect of the rune didn't actually make armor essentially 50% better.

Though it was the same type of rune, the negative effect was purely making your weight more.

Going and reading the next rune, the Undead [Rune of Intimidating Will], it seems like the runes creator was an undead just like him. A Revenant to be specific.

A type of undead that even his books didn't cover about.

Not much interested in him though, Danzel found the effect of the rune interesting.

It was an activation-type rune that could only be carved in a helmed, its effect is that it brought the [Fear] status effect to others whether they were willing or not. But that wasn't yet the full effect.

The reason why it was categorized as [Epic] rune was that it drew the negative thoughts of his enemies, making them his enemies affected by [Fear] to truly fear him to the point of the effect turning into a permanent curse called [Terror].

Usually, when an effect such as [Fear] is being forcefully placed unto someone, they would only feel slightly anxious at the feared person/object.

After all, not everyone could feel instances of fear towards something that he originally didn't fear. The [Fear] effect alone only lowered one mental resistance by 10% while lowering 3% of all their attributes.

It was a nice debuff, but necessarily a game changer.

The really dreadful part of that status effect was that it could develop into a more intense debuff.

From [Fear] it became into [Dread], further enchanting the debuff and the fear on someone.

And then after [Dread], was the third level.

[Terror].

For example, if someone was put into a dark room inflicted by [Fear], he would constantly feel anxious about his surroundings.

In the second level, once it becomes [Dread], the person in question would develop some sort of Nyctophobia, constantly seeing shadows movings and hearing things where in fact they were no sort of shadows or noise in the room.

In the third level...

Once one was inflicted by [Terror], the shadow that they would be hearing would become alive and reach out to claw at his flesh where the none existence noise would become into whispers that were near his ears.

Reaching that point was already bad enough, but for it to become permanent?

Yeah, Danzel found the rune worthy enough to be of the [Epic] grade...

Though he found the rune quite dreadful, that wasn't going to stop him from using that rune to his advantage.

Going through the list, he went next to read the [Rune of Mana Essence], made by a druid that was the priestess of some kind of tree.

Though he didn't understand why someone would worship a tree of all things, the rune that he received was the same type as the [Rune of Iron Fortress].

What the rune essentially did was increase the mana flow and the amplification of an item by around 36% with no drawbacks unlike [Rune of Iron Fortress].

Such an effect would essentially improve any types of mana skills or spells and make the casting of them all the easier (though it wouldn't reduce the casting time by 36% in total).

Though such an effect could be surpassed if the improvement focused on a single element. Proven by a rune uncommonly called [Rune of Levithin] on his possession, that did the same only for water-type spells and skills for 35% improvement.

The amazing part of the rune and probably the reason why it was categorized as a [Epic] rune was that the effect covered every spell and skill that used mana.

Danzel at first was excited about such a rune appearing, but after digging through the information about the rune in his mind, he was quickly disappointed.

The reason is that the rune was designed to be a major rune for a staff/spear type of weapon.

Major was a title that he came up with for runes that took the majority of space of an item and also brought out a big effect.

But with the restriction of the rune being for a staff/spear, Danzel found that he couldn't really use the rune for himself.

Maybe it was because this tree priestess aimed to carve working runes into a wooden staff but in the end, end up failing with this rune being the by-product of her research. The reason why she failed was that this rune couldn't be carved into wood, but only of metal of any kind.

'Ugh~here I found another subject to write in my list. Reforming the symbols without messing with the effect is always a pain to deal with. Reforming the rune to suit a sword might be too difficult...maybe I can make it work if I target the armor?'

Writing down his thoughts in one of the many lists of rune carving projects, Danzel pushed such thoughts to the back of his mind.

Although his thought suggested that he was annoyed that he found more work to do, that wasn't really the case.

He was quite excited about messing with the rune and trying all kinds of combinations only to see an unfunctional rune that brought forth only negatives.

In fact, he found such a thing quite fun.

It was quite the novel feeling in the runesmithing job.

Also, the feeling that came after successfully making a better rune that would strengthen him was also amazing.

Alas, that was only 5% of the runesmithing process with the remaining 95% being the frustration of things not working out and trying to find why it didn't work out and to find a solution for the problem.

In his opinion, it was worth it in achieving that 5% success after working literally tirelessly.

Also, the XP that he gained on top of that was also a form of motivation.

'No point getting excited about one rune when they are still two remaining.'

Though the knowledge he received made him somewhat know what the runes were capable of, he found it better to be 100% of the effect of those runes.

With the Undead [Rune of Living Legion] and the Soul [Rune of Þolian Repent] remaining, he went right ahead

The first thing that he noticed in that description was the name of the creator of those two runes. Usually, he would consider it as merely flavor text to honor the creator of the rune.

But seeing a familiar name stuck on those two runes, he couldn't help but get slightly surprised.

The creator of those runes was the same guy who developed his runed contracts.

The Warmonger conquered the whole continent, Uzal.

How according to the description, became an undead just like him.