To accelerate the process, Alan took another measured sip of Felix Felicis. His time was bleeding away, and he needed to decipher the logic of the magic book in the shortest window possible.
Yulia watched him from the sofa, her expression one of tired disdain. She had absolute confidence in her family's treasure; in her eyes, the boy was merely wasting his remaining hours on a fool's errand. As she watched Alan's frantic pace, a small, vengeful spark of satisfaction flickered in her heart.
Under this heavy atmosphere, the minutes turned into hours. Ten hours vanished in what felt like a blink. Yulia's eyelids were drooping with exhaustion, her noble posture finally sagging, while Alan, who had been working with his head down in a feverish trance, finally looked up.
"Phew!" Alan, his eyes bloodshot and stinging, let out a long, ragged breath. He checked his pocket watch immediately. Only after confirming he still had a few hours left did he allow his shoulders to drop. "Thank Merlin for Liquid Luck. I never would have cracked this in time without it."
"Seven layers of magic runes," he muttered, his voice raspy. "Protection, Recording, Activation, Concealment, Energy Storage, Bloodline, and Coordination. The Coordination rune is the heart—it's the hub for the entire formation. I was trying to force my way through the perimeter before, but once I found the central node, the logic unraveled. It's a masterpiece of efficiency."
After ten hours and half a bottle of the golden potion, the skeletal structure of the magic book lay bare in his mind.
"Now, the replication. The materials are the hurdle. To house these active runes and maintain the internal magic field, the medium needs high conductivity and immense physical durability. Otherwise, a high-intensity spell—like that primordial lightning rune—would simply shatter the binding."
Alan rubbed the cover of the Travers book, feeling the strange texture. "I still don't recognize this material. It feels like leather, soft and supple, yet it has the tensile strength of dragonhide. What is it?" He shook his head. "No matter. If I can't match the elegance, I'll match the specs. I need strength and conductivity. I'll force a solution with what I have on hand."
He began rummaging through his freshly acquired spoils, his mind racing. If he couldn't make a leather book, he would build an iron one.
"Aether Mithril is the best conductor. For the frame, I'll reinforce it with urim steel and Agriba alloy. The spine and covers will be a Mithril-urim blend—that's where the Coordination hub will sit, and it needs to withstand the highest magical pressure. The pages will be a sandwich of Agriba alloy and Mithril. It'll be heavy, but it'll hold."
The leather book in his hand had 150 pages, though many were blank. Even so, it was thick due to the treated parchment. Alan calculated the density of his proposed metal plates. "I'll start with seventy pages. I'll copy the essentials now and refine the weight later."
He pulled out the remains of the Mithril candelabra, a urim steel bracelet, and a pound of Agriba alloy. Using a controlled Incendio, he began the smelting process. He downed two bottles of invigorating tonic to keep his magic reserves from bottoming out.
Yulia, jolted awake by the heat of the forge, watched with wide eyes as Alan transformed the library into an alchemical workshop. His movements were clinical and precise, aided by spells that made the metal flow like water. He cast Transfiguration to flatten the Mithril and Agriba alloy into sheets the size of standard stationery.
He worked like a machine, fusing three layers into a single, one-millimeter-thick plate for each page. Seventy operations later, the "paper" was ready. He then fashioned the Mithril-urim blend into a heavy cover with a series of reinforced semi-circular rings along the inner spine.
Since metal pages couldn't be turned like paper, he had designed a mechanical binder system. By punching holes in the metal plates, they could slide along the rings. It wasn't as elegant as the original, and the magic dispersion at the joints would be higher, but it was functional.
The physical construction took an hour, leaving his scalp tingling from the sheer intensity of the magical control required. But the hardest part remained: the enchanting. To find his focus, Alan drank another energy potion.
The next three hours were a blur of painstaking runic inscription. His hands moved with practiced grace, though the sheer volume of work tested his endurance to the limit. By the time he finished the Coordination hub on the spine, the Bloodline and Protection wards on the covers, and the functional runes on all seventy pages, he had been in the library for nearly twenty hours.
Stretching his stiff fingers, a pale, weary smile finally touched Alan's face. Yulia, who had been watching in stunned silence, swallowed hard.
The finished product was... imposing. It wasn't so much a book as it was a silver-metallic brick, the size of a large folio and ten centimeters thick. It gleamed with a cold, industrial light. If someone were struck with it, it would likely do as much damage as a mace.