Re: Tales of the Rune-Tech Sage-Chapter 71: Alex the Mad Scientist

CH71 Alex the Mad Scientist

***

’So that’s it...’

The creature behaved like a nest queen.

It consumed resources, laid drones, and expanded its domain in cycles.

Classic broodmother logic.

And with his knowledge of similar archetypes from games and fantasy novels back on Earth, Alex could already predict the likely next steps.

It would build a nest. It would expand its brood. It would multiply exponentially.

’There’s nothing more to see,’ Alex thought grimly, eyes narrowing.

’In that case... let’s get things under control before they get out of hand.’

Suddenly, Alex’s eyes shifted— no longer human.

They became beastly.

Beast Intimidation!

A newly awakened ocular ability triggered from his Solmir True Name.

His gaze locked onto the Nest Queen and unleashed a crushing, primal dominance.

The effect was immediate.

The creature froze, paralysed mid-motion.

Even its mental instructions to the drones ceased.

Overwhelmed by primal fear, the Nest Queen cowered beneath his stare.

-

Beast Intimidation was a power that asserted one’s dominance over any creature within line of sight.

It instilled dread.

It suppressed lesser beings and could paralyse them completely— if their mental defences were weak.

Only those with greater spiritual force, a stronger will than Alex’s or a superior cultivation, could shrug off the effect.

The Nest Queen, unfortunately for her, met none of those conditions.

-

Under Alex’s unblinking, oppressive gaze, the creature halted reproduction.

Driven by a primal, instinctive fear, it lowered its spiny head and emitted a low-frequency drone—

—a nonverbal gesture of submission.

--

With precision, Alex manipulated the intensity of his Beast Intimidation, forcing a neural reordering within the creature’s mental hierarchy.

The Nest Queen reclassified him at the top.

The Highest Node in its Hive Mind.

A sort of Alpha designation—above even herself.

This didn’t guarantee absolute obedience.

What it did guarantee was priority.

Any entity connected to the Hive Mind would prioritise Alex’s commands above all others— unless doing so would compromise their individual safety, or endanger the Hive itself.

Beast Intimidation, after all, was not mind control.

It was just that—intimidation.

If backed into a corner, even the weakest creature—even a rabbit—could lash out, abandoning fear in a final act of defiance.

Still, what Alex had accomplished was enough.

More than enough.

’Since it’s now a mass of living Runes... understanding its structure—and communicating with it—depends on decoding its Runic framework.

’For that... I need to crack the encryption protecting its Rune structure.’

-

To begin, Alex turned to his eidetic memory, recalling the Runic structure of the virus that had set this entire sequence into motion.

He concentrated.

In his mind’s eye, the memory replayed:

The moment before the failsafe activated, just as the virus seeped into the mite’s body.

By sheer luck—or fate—he had caught a clear enough glimpse.

And even better—

The virus’s structure was composed mostly of Rune script, not Ancestral Markings.

That gave Alex an opening.

He fed the remembered structure into the OmniRune Core, using its simulation functions to begin a slow, meticulous reverse-engineering of the virus.

It took him half a day of focus.

Bit by bit, he reconstructed the virus’s internal logic.

From its activity patterns, he was able to deduce the remaining Ancestral Marking components— approximating their function even without fully understanding their script.

With the full blueprint of the recursive virus—the one that had rewritten the mite’s DNA—Alex now had the syntax rules of the living Rune system.

The Runic grammar.

The logic that governed how this genetic programming was written.

With that in hand, Alex could finally breach the final barrier— the encryption protecting the creature’s Runic structure.

And with a triumphant grin...

He broke it.

-

With the encryption cracked, the Nest Queen’s Runic Structure now lay exposed—

completely visible to Alex and the OmniRune Core.

The AI immediately attempted to process it.

It failed.

Again.

And again.

The structure was simply too complex.

Alex didn’t push it.

’If even the AI can’t make sense of it, there’s no point in me trying to fully replicate the design.’

Instead of aiming for total understanding, he pivoted.

He only needed enough understanding to secure control over the Nest Queen, and determine how best to utilise her

With that narrowed objective, the OmniRune Core found its footing.

Alex began manually guiding the AI’s processes, and together, they drafted a biological-neural interface— a bridge protocol that allowed him to transmit simple logic commands into the Hive Mind.

Then, building on the Alpha Authority gained with his Beast Intimidation, Alex injected a new system:

A Command Hierarchy Protocol (CHP).

A Runic Array that hardcoded specific operational parameters into the Hive Mind.

The CHP elevated Alex’s mana signature as the designated Master Node, defined what qualified as valid commands, introduced autonomy thresholds, and embedded emergency failsafes within the mental network

In practice, this allowed Alex to issue orders to the Nest Queen— and have those orders propagated through the Hive via resonance.

Every connected being would understand the commands through the translation interface of the OmniRune Core.

And the Queen would enforce them.

For the final stage, Alex crafted a special Rune.

A Runic Loyalty Seed.

He embedded it directly into the Nest Queen’s neural command matrix.

This wasn’t crude mind control.

That would be too aggressive... Too likely to trigger an instinctive rejection from the creature.

Instead, Alex took the subtle route.

The Loyalty Seed was an emotional tether.

It encoded an artificial instinct to obey him, baked into her core logic.

’Instead of forcing the Nest Queen to obey me... this will trick her into thinking that obeying me is natural instinct,’ Alex thought.

’For a creature ruled by instincts... that’s as good as branding permanent loyalty into her being.’

Once that instinct settled in, it gave him the opportunity to plant deeper failsafes that the Queen would’ve rejected earlier.

He wove together a logic bomb— a hidden command that would detonate if the Queen ever tried to sever his link to the Hive Mind.

He also embedded a Wipe Command— a hidden override that would allow him to instantly deactivate all current and future drones linked to her.

With all of this in place, Alex finally had a sturdy control protocol.

The final step?

Behavioural conditioning.

He needed to establish a feedback loop— a Pavlovian reinforcement.

Positive and negative stimuli.

Rewards and punishments.

A system that would train the Nest Queen’s Runic psyche to depend on him.

But for that to work, he had to understand what she was capable of.

Fortunately, while Alex had been busy weaving in protocols and safeguards...

The OmniRune Core had been quietly working in the background— analysing her primary Rune Structure, to deduce her capabilities.

***