The rune interlacing had activated, so obviously something had worked, but why had it been rune layers from the two different stones? Had the other layers been faulty and then that's why it all short-circuited in the end? Or is there something fundamental about the layers belonging to different materials, maybe? The course material had said something about planes…
I tried to formalize my thoughts so I could figure out how to move forwards. Well at least something worked. Hopefully this means that I can make some progress on multilayered rune formations without the magic crystals…
I decided to first test whether doing it on different materials would work, so I threw out the two stones on my desk and drew out another two from my pile. Luckily I didn't need any bigger than normal stones, because I only really had one of those left without going back down to the stream, but Violet had told me not to leave, so that was off the table for the moment.
I quickly inscribed a simple battery layer onto one, and then a simple light-emitting layer onto the other, completed the complementary interlacing runes, and then paused. Does it matter which one I try to activate? I remember the encyclopedia saying something about rune layers having input rings, but there it doesn't really matter because the whole thing activates at once…
I tried to refer to the interlacing runes, but I hadn't actually learned what they individually did, I only had copied them from the image in the encyclopedia entry, so if it was a directional or one-way link, I had no way of telling the input from the output. Hmm, well, I guess I just have to try then…
I lifted up the stone with the light rune and tried activating it. The runes activated and the light rune activated, but the moment I stopped actively pouring mana into the stone, the light turned off.
"Oh? Did the interlacing not work?" I looked at the battery circuit only to then see it dimly glowing, and if I concentrated I could sense some mana circulating through the stone. I waited for a bit, but while the interlacing on both stones faded after a bit, the battery stone remained active.
"Actually, wait, if that stone has mana in it that means the interlacing worked, because I didn't put any mana in that stone…Ahhh," I realized what happened. "I must have got the direction of the interlacing mixed up, the mana flowed from the light stone into the battery stone and stayed there, so the light rune deactivated because there wasn't any mana left…"
"Wait, but then…interlacing must be quite complicated then? If I want only one input for the whole device, that means I'd have to build two-way interlacing, but then I'd probably have to make it conditional on certain…or wait…" I stared at the two stones trying to think.
"I guess at a basic level just two-way interlacing would probably work, because it would function like a single rune layer, but if I wanted to add more complex functionality then there would probably have to be logic runes built into the interlacing. Huh…ok, well, not bad for a first attempt. I guess the problem for the first time was doing it with the same materials."
I played around with the two stones a little longer and found that the distance the interlinking worked within was only about half a meter, so if I took one stone further than that distance from the other, the interlacing stopped functioning, and each rock behaved as a separate rune device.
"Ok, but what if I add another stone into this mix…just how specific are these interlacing runes?"
I sat down again and busied myself inscribing another stone. This time I inscribed the stone with a simple battery circuit as well as the spellrune for directional light that I'd used for my flashlight stone. Once I was done I put the same interlacing I used for the battery stone, which seemed to be the receiving interlacing, and then sat back to see how it would interact with the other two stones.
For the moment nothing happened, but when I inputted mana into the light stone, I could tell that mana was entering both the battery stone as well as the new flashlight stone. "So it doesn't differentiate between the two…" I tried to tell if the mana flow was equal between the two, but my mana sense wasn't nearly specific enough for me to tell. At the moment the best I could tell was that mana was being transmitted to the two.
I sat back in my chair, drumming my foot on the ground. "I wonder if there's a way to make that more specific, surely that's not how they do it in those many-layered magic crystals, right?
I pulled out my encyclopedia screen and quickly started trying to search for what I wanted. Not getting very far in the basic knowledge entries I quickly switched back over to the course info, and started scrolling through the lessons trying to find what I was looking for.
"Ah, here it is…" I said after impatiently scrolling for the last few minutes. "'Now that we've accomplished basic interlayer circuitry'…yadyadayada…ah, 'in order to establish specificity and conditionality in our rune circuitry it is necessary to create referential rather than omnidirectional interlacing. If you only want to transfer mana to a specific layer in a device, it is necessary to have interlacing that establishes particularized bonds…"
"Ok, so basically a different kind of interlacing makes it so the connection only goes between two specific layers rather than anywhere, there we go…" I looked back over the different interlacing runes and back to what I'd done by copying the general knowledge page and face palmed.
"No wonder there was nothing about how to interlace outside of a magic crystal! It's exactly the same, you just have to make sure to use different materials…" Initially when I had seen that there was no way to connect the layers in a magic crystal because they were fragmented, I had assumed the interlacing used the interconnectedness of the stones to transmit the mana, but in actuality it was the opposite. It was the fragmentation of the mana stones that allowed multiple layers to exist without interfering with one another. Omnidirectional interlacing like the runes that I had used connected any available layers within range either inside or outside of a mana stone.
All a mana stone did, as far as I was aware, was compact the whole thing, so you weren't left with a whole bunch of loose rune stones. "Dope, ok, so mana crystals really aren't all that necessary it seems."