Wizard: Starting With Synthesized Gems

Chapter 660: The Surprise of a Second Circle Black Wizard

Through the time-gold crystal window of the free library, the moment Locke stepped inside, he and the other wizard passengers saw an ordinary formal wizard who had been transported into the Second Sky, pressing himself against the observation window.His entire body was engulfed in the electrostatic lightning ring of the Second Sky. The Second Sky was profoundly hostile to wizards, and within that environment they were assaulted without cease by lightning energy born from world-force. Without a void warship, wizards would find themselves in an extremely desperate situation.

At that moment, the ordinary wizard had deployed a permanent defensive field around himself to resist the lightning energy. He hammered repeatedly on one of the transparent observation windows facing out from Locke's laboratory and used some kind of magic to transmit his voice through the solid material via vibration.

"Wizards, let me in. Please, I'm begging you, let me in. I'm a wizard from the Ares Academy. My academy was swept up without warning by a Demon Realm storm, and now my entire academy and the surrounding area have fallen into the Twin Demon Realm. Our magical power has been almost entirely plundered by the Demon Realm, and we cannot survive in this strange sky for long."

"And I can't maintain my flight spell much longer either..."

"Let me in, please."

He looked toward a short female wizard standing closest to the window and pleaded, "If someone rescues me, I'll give every last magic stone I have to that wizard."

"Please help me..."

His expression was desperate and frantic.

The short female wizard stepped back half a pace, clearly at a loss, unsure of what to do. A void warship was a large-scale wizard vessel, something entirely beyond the understanding of an ordinary First Circle wizard like herself.

Though they could see each other clearly at that moment, one of them was inside the safe and comfortable interior of the void warship, while the other was trapped in an environment of lightning and malevolent world-law. Like heaven and hell.

Between them lay only a time-gold crystal observation window roughly ten centimeters thick. But time-gold crystal was famous for being indestructible, nearly impervious even to foreign world-laws, and certainly beyond the ability of any First Circle wizard to damage.

Just as the First Circle female wizard stood there not knowing what to do, the next moment the ordinary formal wizard was suddenly struck by a bolt of lightning composed of world-force. The malevolent world-law shattered his permanent defensive field, and in an instant, half of his left arm disintegrated into dust.

It was not the lightning itself that did it. It was the intrusion of a foreign world-law directly into his flesh, the collision of two incompatible world-laws causing his body to break apart.

Just as this formal wizard attempted to reinstate his permanent defensive field, another disaster struck. A small fang-shaped aircraft came flying over and, seizing the moment when the wizard's permanent defensive field had been shattered by the world-law lightning and had not yet recovered, drove itself straight into his body, piercing clean through him.

The fang skewered his abdomen. The formal wizard immediately spat blood, and the portion of his body that the fang had penetrated began to exhibit a vitrification effect, all his matter and all his magic being absorbed by the Twin Demon Realm.

Seated atop the fang-shaped miniature aircraft was a First Circle vaporization-stage black wizard. This black wizard had a scar across his face, and now he gazed at the wizard who had turned into iridescent glass and broke into loud, jeering laughter.

He fixed his malevolent gaze on the female wizard and transmitted his voice magically, "You don't need to feel conflicted anymore."

"Everything he was has been absorbed by the Demon Realm! Everything he had now belongs to the Demon Realm!"

"Ha ha ha ha... hypocritical white wizards, are you frightened?"

Locke watched as a strand of iridescent thread rose from the top of the rainbow-glass statue, and then a small Demon Realm black hole opened above its head. Within that black hole, countless tongues seemed to be rolling and writhing with hunger. Then one tongue stretched out and coiled around the seven-colored thread, pulling it away.

The female wizard had gone pale with fright. Clearly, being confronted directly with such a brutal scene had caught her completely off guard.

"You... you... you're insane..."

"You've broken the Association's laws... what you're doing is illegal..."

The black wizard clutched his stomach, roaring with laughter. "Ha ha ha... illegal? Breaking the law is exactly what we black wizards do."

The large Demon Realm black hole above the Second Sky expanded once again, and a second wave of buildings rained down. Vast numbers of structures, trees, wizards, and magical creatures fell like raindrops into the Second Sky at this altitude of fifty kilometers.

The Twin Demon Realm was using the world-laws of the Second Sky to reduce the difficulty of "digestion." And these black wizards who had signed Demon Realm contracts were like microorganisms living parasitically within the Demon Realm, further reducing that difficulty on its behalf.

Through the time-gold crystal window, Locke looked down over the Cloud Marsh Wetlands, and even from the Second Sky he could make out the dim outline of a faint storm beginning to form below.

If the signs of a storm were visible from fifty kilometers in the air, one could only imagine how enormous that storm must be down in the Cloud Marsh Wetlands.

So this was the Demon Realm War.

Locke had previously watched a small-scale Demon Realm War at the sports festival held at Golden Crown Mountain, and that had given him a certain preconceived impression of what the conflict looked like. He had assumed it was more or less a slightly larger version of the black and white wizard skirmishes common in the southeastern quadrant.

But he had not anticipated this. The two were completely different. This was a battle between two worlds. The savagery of a world war was something no conflict between black and white wizards could compare to.

The black wizard seemed to consider ramming his fang-shaped miniature aircraft into the void warship. But the next moment, a large number of the warship's combat golems came flying out, moving to eliminate him.

Though Locke suspected the combat golems might not even be necessary. Wizard void ships were void warships retired from the frontline void battlefields, genuine weapons designed for grand void warfare against the true enemies of wizard civilization. A mere vaporization-stage wizard who dared to charge a void warship head-on would probably be reduced to not even ash in a direct confrontation.

When the black wizard saw the combat golems jetting fluid from their backs and closing on him at high speed, a look of regret crossed his face. "What a shame. I was wondering if I could take you all to the Demon Realm too."

"You really are lucky, white wizards. This time, as long as the Demon Realm War ends in our victory, under the agreement we have with the Cloud Marsh Wetlands' White Wizard Association and Golden Crown Mountain, we'll be entitled to launch a full-scale plunder of certain areas of the Cloud Marsh Wetlands."

"Just you wait. Once we win, perhaps we'll meet here again someday. Ha ha ha ha..."

He gave a sharp whistle and turned his fang aircraft around to leave, but suddenly found a moon appearing before him.

The black wizard froze for a moment, and a sudden wariness rose in his heart. "Aren't all those feeble white wizards inside the void warship? Can a First Circle wizard really cast a spell from inside a void warship that takes effect on the outside?"

"That's impossible, surely..."

"Wait, can this magic be stolen and given to the Twin Demon Realm?"

The black wizard's eyes lit up with a frenzied gleam, but he quickly noticed that the moon was generating a gravitational pull, and that his aircraft had come too close to this spell-moon. His aircraft began to shudder uncontrollably, unable to maintain its trajectory.

"How is this possible?" the black wizard let out an incredulous cry. "This is just a spell-moon, how can it behave so much like a real moon?"

"Damn it, I can't break free from the gravity."

He turned back and looked toward the observation window, where he could see Locke walking up to it. Locke's voice was carried outward through the moon. "There's no need to rush off, black wizard. Weren't you looking to make a name for yourself at our expense? If so, why the hurry to leave."

"I was just about to use you Twin Demon Realm wizards for an experiment..."

The black wizard, seated on his fang aircraft, felt it beginning to fall toward the spell-moon. He had no idea what would happen if the aircraft fell into it, so he could only struggle desperately to control the aircraft and resist the pull.

"Damn it all." The black wizard raised his hand and fired a poison fireball at the spell-moon. The fireball plunged into the moon, but the next moment it came flying right back out, nearly knocking him off his aircraft.

"What on earth is this thing? It's exactly like a real moon." The black wizard's expression shifted drastically. At the same time, he raised his left hand, preparing to use the most powerful theft magic of the Twin Demon Realm.

In essence, it was a form of magic in which the Twin Demon Realm's own world-force participated directly. That was what made it so powerful.

"Switch heaven for earth, call a deer a horse..." The black wizard raised his left hand. The mouth on his left palm licked and writhed its tongue ceaselessly, then extended the tongue toward the moon, as though attempting to steal it away.

But the next moment, the tongue recoiled as though it had choked on something, and the black wizard clutched his own left arm and screamed in pain.

He tumbled from his aircraft, man and machine alike drawn into the lunar gravity, falling into the spell-moon that seemed so indistinguishable from a real lunar plane.

In the next instant, a bolt of world-law lightning fell from above, entered the moon, and reduced the black wizard and his aircraft to dust.

Inside the free library of the void warship, Locke fell into thought amid the awed and reverent gazes of the people around him. "I was just fretting over not having any black wizards to experiment on, and here one delivered itself to me like a pillow arriving just as I was dozing off."

"Lunar gravity can be quantified, since my lunar gravity just now was distributed evenly. That means I can calculate the maximum total magical pressure a First Circle vaporization-stage black wizard's twin siphon organ can absorb in a single instant."

"This will let me build up more reliable test data. The figures in books aren't necessarily accurate, especially the data from Demon Realm War records, which were probably filled in casually by some wizards without any serious data collection effort. So there's bound to be some margin of error."

"If I want to win the wizard shoe collective procurement, I'd better take the time to gather proper data."

Locke began chanting and steadily raised his magical pressure output. If he hadn't used the soul artifact Thousand-Fold Bronze Furnace to expand his upper limit, he would already be entering a period of soul decline.

Then, a spell-moon appeared at the center of the black wizards' battlefield. This prototype of his Grand Magic possessed the ability to illuminate all of time and space around it, and could therefore bypass the barrier of the void warship. Wherever moonlight could reach, the spell-moon could exist.

A lunar plane appeared in the Second Sky, drawing the attention of many black wizards.

Most critically, this magically simulated lunar plane unleashed a terrifying tide of gravity, warping the flight trajectories of numerous black wizard aircraft and drawing them inexorably toward it.

Many black wizards caught in the gravitational pull of the spell-moon instinctively raised their twin siphon organs to try to steal the moon, only to discover that the total magical pressure of the spell-moon was far too high for them to absorb. It could not be stolen at all.

The black wizards were gripped by fear and panic. "Who cast this magic? Why does this spell feel exactly like a real moon?"

"Damn it, it's a white wizard inside that void warship! We weren't touching them, and they dare to come after us!"

"Just wait until we win the Demon Realm War. They'll regret this!"

"My aircraft is out of control. Help me... why did you just kick me in there!"

Another black wizard had used that very method to escape the lunar gravity. "That's called, I just need to run faster than you."

He steered his aircraft away from the area as quickly as possible. "That spell... right, I think I saw something similar at Golden Crown Mountain. It was cast by a wizard named Locke Augustine. His talent is ranked fairly high on our Demon Realm wanted list, even among the First Circle rankings."

"This magic seems even more powerful than it was before. Something is seriously off. It hasn't even been half a year, so how has this magic grown so much stronger..."

"I wonder if there will be a chance to run into him during the Demon Realm War..."

At that moment, Locke was using this spell, dispersing equal and uniform lunar gravity across the battlefield, one stream per person, to suppress dozens of formal black wizards, and was using this method to measure the upper limit of total magical pressure that the twin siphon organs of First Circle wizards at various stages could absorb.

From this, he was judging the soundness of his own wizard shoe design.

At the same time, Locke was putting into practice the new applications and construction methods for his Grand Magic prototype that he had been working out over this period.

Many black wizards were struck by the world-law lightning of the Second Sky and reduced to dust.

Just as the black wizard casualties were mounting, a large black hand suddenly appeared above the spell-moon. The palm slowly closed around Locke's spell-moon, like a lunar eclipse.

A Second Circle black wizard from the Twin Demon Realm appeared above Locke's spell-moon with his hands clasped behind his back. "Locke Augustine, a distinguished student of Golden Crown Mountain, the Eye Demon Wizard. I'll be taking this moon."

"Your magic... is impressive."

Locke met his gaze without any sign of fear. The other party clearly understood what a void warship was, and showed not the slightest inclination to approach it. It was essentially impossible for a single Second Circle wizard to breach a void warship frontally from the outside. If it could be done, it would not deserve to be called a void warship.

The Second Circle wizard looked down at his own left hand. Having just stolen Locke's moon, his twin siphon organ had encountered a degree of pressure, and his little finger gave an abnormal twitch.

'Stealing a First Circle wizard's spell caused me this much strain? This isn't even a Grand Magic! Does this mean the fundamental nature and potential of this magic are extraordinarily high?'

The black wizard was quietly shaken.

Locke looked across the void at him and was quite satisfied that his data collection was now complete. "Oh, that spell? Take it if you like. I have something even better now."

It was just an ordinary spell after all. As long as he chanted the words, he could keep producing them. So even though it had cost him nearly all of his magical pressure, having it stolen away meant nothing.

The Second Circle black wizard's expression darkened. "I hope you remain this composed when the Demon Realm War comes, Eye Demon Wizard."

"I'll hold onto this spell carefully. Perhaps the next time we meet, I can return it to you."

"Heh..."