Age of Adepts

Ever since embarking on the path of a wizard, what had been tormenting Grim was the difficulty of advancement.

Lacking the necessary access to resources prior to becoming a wizard, all wizard apprentices were forced to rely on the little bit that slipped through the fingers of the official wizard in an effort to strengthen themselves.

After becoming a sorcerer, past meditation techniques no longer have the same significant effect on the improvement of the sorcerer community as they once did. Often times, in order to improve themselves better and faster, witches also had to get out of their labs and run around to various barbaric and ancient ruins, or some strange and dangerous desperate places to get some necessary resources at the cost of their lives.

For them, staying in the safety of the Wizard Tower, they might be able to survive until the end of their life span. However, the slow advancement of the profession's main attribute would become a noose around their necks, tightening day after day, year after year.

If they were unable to advance to the next level before their life expectancy boiled over, then what awaited them would be a wasted body, a depleted spirit, and a decayed soul. Compared to ordinary people, this process could take up to ten years until their soul waves completely dissipated.

This process of waiting for death was so long and so terrifying that most witches who entered the life depletion stage would become even more evil, more insane, and more unbelievable.

Time may seem generous to a witch, but it is still like a dreadful god of death that will visit you on time, and use the dullest and slowest knife in the world to cut all your ties with the world, bit by bit, until eternal darkness.

So, saving up resources and trying to improve your professional attributes by any means possible has become an unrelenting theme of development in a wizard's life!

The Elemental Sorcerer route that Grim had chosen was a difficult one with spirit power as the main attribute of his profession. Every bit of Basic Spiritual Strength was very meaningful to him. This was because any little bit of base spirit power, if paired with the right sorcery abilities and powerful sorcery equipment, the battle power increase derived from it would expand tenfold or a hundredfold.

Thus, the importance of Basic Spiritual Strength to Grim could be imagined!

And now, the data from the chip's scan tells him that there is a way to quickly boost his mental energy right in front of him without meditating year after year, and you tell me how much of an impact that will have on Grim....

Grim let the chip scan the Soul Gathering Crystal in depth at least three times, and each time, he got the same conclusion, which was why he completely believed the chip's test report.

As for the side effects mentioned at the end of the chip's report, Grim didn't take them seriously.

It wasn't that Grim was overly conservative or reckless, but he was well aware of the difficulty of raising his spiritual power.

He meditated year after year, but his mental data didn't move; he broke into some extremely dangerous relic danger zone to find the right resources for himself; he served a big family or a large organization for decades just to get some resources that they monopolized.......

Compared to these hardships, a little mental backlash or side effect is a breeze!

Any sorcerer in Grim's position would not hesitate to choose to strengthen his spirit. As for that side effect, let's just wait until we get stronger and figure out how to resolve it a little bit!

After all, more power means more power and more resources, and what's the point of not having the means to fix some minor complications?

Of course, the pure holy light stored inside the Soul Gathering Crystal also had to wash away the remnants of those holy knights' soul fragments in advance. These things were equivalent to impurities mixed with the light of faith, and if they were not removed in advance, once Grim absorbed them all into the sea of his own consciousness, it would bring terrible and serious consequences.

In fact, in the world of witches, there were many witches who had delved into evil sorcery that absorbed other people's spiritual energy for their own use. But these sorceries invariably need to face a terrible disaster, which is spirit reversal.

Just like the clothes made of different colors and materials, they may look as good as new on the surface, but once they are subjected to huge pressure, they may fall apart in no time.

Therefore, these sorcerers also invented some special sorcery or special sorcery tools to suppress the devouring in their souls. However, the consequence of this was that they needed to carefully control their mental state, and if their spirit was massively traumatized, they could instantly be dominated by a hidden subordinate personality that took over their body, thus causing a disorder of priorities.

But the absorption scheme that the chip presented to Grim was clearly different and even somewhat unimaginable.

According to the chip's scans and analysis, it was clear that the pure holy light Grim encountered this time was completely different from the souls of the dead collected by other witches. It was more similar to an unclaimed 'free' power of faith, and possessed the strange ability to melt away all foreign energies and consciousnesses contained within it.

By storing them away, the remnant souls of the holy knights that were encapsulated in the holy light would be able to sustain themselves for a long time with the holy light as their carrier. This was obviously not conducive to Grim's subsequent absorption.

Therefore, Chip proposed that Grim also separate a portion of his spiritual consciousness into the Soul Gathering Crystal and seize control of the Holy Light carrier with them. If the holy light inside the Soul Gathering Crystal coagulated as one, Grim would undoubtedly be looking for death by doing so.

But now, it was a scattered mess inside, and all the souls of the Paladins had become incomplete, knowing only to instinctively cling to the holy light, wailing day and night for their future miserable fate.

Such a situation was obviously suitable for Grim to destroy each and every one of them.

Grim's divided souls only needed to defeat them one by one and rob them of the holy light they possessed, and they could gradually grow stronger day by day. When the split souls have completely devoured all of them and gathered their holy light together, they will then choose to disintegrate themselves, allowing this growing split soul to become the nourishment for the fusion of holy light.

That way, there would be no complications for Grim to then choose to fuse the holy light to grow his spirit!

As for the issue of Grim's purification after absorbing a large amount of foreign spiritual energy, that was another issue. Anyway, with his power and wealth, a regular spiritual purification ritual wouldn't cause the family's finances to collapse.

However, to split a portion of the soul, it could hardly be done in such a remote and crude place, and it had to wait until he returned to the Wizard World and used the alchemy laboratory of the Wizard Tower to carry out it concretely.

While Grim was thinking about the rest of his life with the Soul Gathering Crystal in his hand, he was attracted by a strange scene from afar with a slight movement in his soul.

It was a forest path 30 miles east of Grim's hiding place.

A transparent apprentice-level wind spirit was floating above the forest floor, following a particular trajectory as it slowly patrolled the area. At this moment, three figures of different heights suddenly came from far and near on the forest path.

All of them were wrapped in thick black traveler's cloaks, and even their faces were concealed by low hanging hoods, making it impossible to glimpse their occupations and identities. Only the vague shapes could be distinguished by the fact that the visitors were a man and a woman, and their movements were bizarre.

The wind spirits that were left here by Grim to act as eyes and ears immediately quietly lowered their height and attached themselves to the dense forest treetop canopy, quietly gathering a light breeze that blew towards the three from the front.

However, just as this breeze was about to approach the visitors, the one with the smallest figure behind the three embellished, abruptly raised his head, and a pair of dazzling pupils as bright as morning stars stared coldly at the wind spirit.

In the next second, the light and shadow shook, and the distant wind spirit severed its soul connection with Grim.

Originally, these scattered wind spirit eyes were remotely controlled by chips. Their daily patrol routes and scouting and scanning work were uniformly transmitted to the chip, which controlled them in unison. If there was no alarm, almost all of these daily tedious messages would be handled by the chip's master.

But now that the chip was projecting a scene discovered by some distant eye-catcher into Grim's mind, it was a sign that the situation it was facing was beyond the scope of a normal police situation, and had to be handled by Grim himself.

"Chip, can you identify them? A Paladin or a Wizard?" Grim asked in a deep voice.

To be honest, Grim would rather fight two 3rd rank natives than a 3rd rank witch. After all, the sorcery that sorcerers mastered was too complicated and strange. In many cases, even if one sorcerer was more powerful than the other, they could lose their lives due to some of the more sinister sorcery.

The chip quickly dropped the last captured scene just before the wind spirit's death before Grim's eyes, and it began to gradually zoom in.

The hood's shadow, which had been dim and blurry, became clearer as the light projection drew closer step by step.

It was a woman's face, delicate and beautiful, her face delicate and white, her white skin infused with vitality, even the hairs on her skin looked so even and smooth, without any blemish. However, what attracted Grim's attention was not her beauty, but her suddenly bright and strange pupils, as well as the strange crystal embedded in her forehead.

Repeatedly admiring and examining such a beautiful face, Grim's heart was strangely heavy and depressed.

Wizards...without a doubt, they were definitely wizards from the Wizarding World!

It also meant that there were a few more enemies who had broken into the Enwik dimension to hang themselves. And the mastermind behind the curtain might be shoving more Hunters this way!

The witch that showed signs of being a 3rd rank was definitely a 3rd rank, and by the looks of it, and the way her abilities operated, she seemed to be a mind sorcerer, a special witch profession that could use mental sorcery.

But were the remaining two actually a 3rd or 4th order? If they're all 3rd order, what are their individual abilities?

Grim, who had just reviewed his harvest and was a little complacent, was immediately disturbed by these unexpected enemies.

Since the enemies had already started to exterminate the eyes they had placed on the outskirts, and looking at the direction they were coming from, it seemed like they were coming from Harkans City. That meant that there was bound to be a scary guy among them who was adept at tracking.

Looks like we really need to fight them if necessary!

After thinking about it, Grim immediately began to pack up his tracks and prepare to run away....