Black Iron’s Glory

Chapter 579: Sheila's Hope for Promotion

A half-day military conference was held until late at night when Claude, who returned to the Covent Bellene estate, felt exhausted and dizzy. Sheila, who had been informed of his return, had not slept and had been sitting in the lobby waiting for him. When Claude got off the carriage, Sheila greeted him and kissed him. This time Claude traveled to the Kingdom of Hicks, Sheila didn't follow him, and counts that they haven't seen each other for almost a year and a half. Long time no see, Sheila's very excited.

“Honey, why are you so happy today?” Claude was a little strange to find that Sheila seemed overzealous and excited.

When Claude took a hot bath to restore some spirit and Sheila served him a meal that was already ready, happy Sheila finally explained why she was so happy: “Claude, you know, in the magic books you sent to the Hicks Royal Collection, I found information about the magician's promotion...”

Claude finally understood why Sheila was so happy that she wanted someone to share her findings, and that secret could only be shared with Claude. It is now the last era, when the glorious magical civilization of the world has become a passing history and folklore. Even now you can learn magic to be a magician, but whether you are talented or ordinary, you have a ceiling on your head, and the five-ring magician is the ultimate culmination of all magicians.

Claude's biggest dream was to be a magician, free from worry, just after he had crossed the world and come into contact with magic. But the wheels of fate were not deflected by the will of men, and by now Claude had embarked on a completely different path from what he had dreamed of as a teenager. Even after all these years of Sheila's reunion, under Sheila's supervision, he was regarded as a dragging cultivator and finally promoted to a five-ring magician. But he's used to his military career. Magic has become something for him. He doesn't use magic in his normal days...

Among the magicians Claude knew, sister Anna was now focusing on raising her son and brother, Browick, the pair of Dragon Phoenix twins, and in her spare time began to study pharmacology again. Master Byrd and Mrs. Sonia are also syntactic scribes, except that they apply magic to experiments of their own interest, Master Byrd studies mechanical dynamics, and Mrs. Sonia develops a variety of weapons and ammunition.

Browick's magical gift, though less than Claude's, became a five-ring magician faster than Claude's. It's just that Claude doesn't know how to define his brother Browick now, because he uses magic in battle, and he uses magic to supplement his special battle, which can be described as an alternative modern combat magician. As for Claude, being high, I don't know what kind of spell I would apply, and I don't know how long I haven't done the magic experiment. For him now, it doesn't really make any difference if there are spells...

And only Sheila, a pure magician, has been pursuing magical knowledge and progress. She has always wanted to go further, breaking the confinement of the Five Rings Mage and promoting her to a Grand Mage. Her mother, also for that purpose, abandoned the young Sheila and joined forces with other magicians to dig up magical relics, hoping to find a way to promote the magician, who unfortunately was killed. And when Sheila grew up, she also went looking for magic ruins and found the remains of her mother, but there was nothing in the ruins that she wanted.

Though the tormented Sheila was later reunited with Claude in the Autonomous Territory, Claude knew exactly what Sheila wanted in her heart. Fortunately, even if Claude can't help her with magic, he can still surprise Sheila a lot from the trophy by going out to war, attacking the city, and being overwhelmed.

For example, books and materials on magic from centuries of the Nasserly kingdom, the captured city of St. Hiplian, King of the Hicks, the Nasserly royal family and the Hicks royal family, as well as many precious magic books, fell into his hands.

For Sheila, the books and materials that Claude brought home greatly increased her magical knowledge and insights and opened her eyes. Especially those precious magic books, many of which are inherited from the era of magical civilization, any book can make a magician mad. It's only a pity that these scriptures are locked in the palace by two royal houses. The sun is gone and not in the hands of the magicians who really need them...

Sheila found detailed information about the promotion of magicians in a book from the Hicks Royal Collection. After reading the information, she realized that in the years of the end of the magical civilization, there were many magicians who knew how to advance to archmage, and the difficulty was that they could not gather the enormous amount of magical material and resources needed for promotion.

At that time, magical materials and some magical mineral resources were essentially controlled and monopolized by magical families, and ordinary magicians had no place to collect them. So any unexpected appearance and discovery of magical resources or materials will lead to countless competitors and will likely lead to bloody fights and fights until the ultimate winner shows up...

Sheila was amazed at the scarcity and competition of magical resources and materials that emerged at the end of the magical civilization as documented in the Book of Magic, but she was more concerned about the knowledge, procedures and steps that were documented in the Book of Magic regarding the promotion of magicians, as well as the magical resources and materials required for that vast promotion ceremony. She was pleased that over the millennium, although many magic resources and materials had been artificially or inadvertently renamed, there was also a detailed documentation and validation of these magic materials and resources in this book…

While Claude was eating and drinking, while responding to Sheila's complaint, Sheila nodded a dozen chapters recording a list of magic materials and resources needed to promote a magician, more than two metres long.

Claude looked at Sheila with shock and smile, wondering if it was necessary to be so happy, even if you knew about these magic materials and resources, did you collect them? A lot of things were gone a thousand years ago, they were extinct. At that time, the sorcerer couldn't collect them. Now it's a luxury to collect them...

Of course, I'm glad Sheila answered Claude's question in a nailed fashion, because Claude forgot one of the most important prerequisites, the end of a magical civilization a thousand years ago, when countless magicians gathered the magical resources and materials they needed for these promotions, often for the rest of their lives, and even before they died, they didn't collect a single piece of magical material sufficient for their promotion.

To give a simple example, if the magic resources and materials of the end of magic civilization can still satisfy the promotion of a hundred magicians, then there are 10,000 magicians collecting these things, and the magic materials and resources collected are hidden in secret rooms by those magicians and are unknown. As a result, a hundred pieces of magic materials and resources sufficient to satisfy the promotion of magicians were collected by the magicians, and they couldn't be gathered together. In the end, nobody would be promoted, which is the fairest way...

But more than six hundred years ago, with the advent of guns, countless magical knowledge was extinguished with the rise of guns. The ordinary people of the Farea continent used guns to drive away the sorcerers who were so high that they regarded them as ants and welcomed new oppressors with joy. In fact, the expulsion of the magicians from the Farea continent did not allow the peoples of the continent to live in the peace and tranquillity to which they aspired, but rather opened the curtain for the next three hundred years of darkness.

Countless lords, large and small, used guns to ignite flames all over the continent, and they fought for revenge, for territory, for the expansion of their power, for financial gain, and to turn the youth of their territory into ashes on the battlefield. Nearly three hundred years of bloody warfare have reduced the population of the entire Farea continent by almost two-thirds, which culminates in the distribution of the continental powers and continues to this day...

For more than six hundred years, magicians have become a taboo word on the Farea continent, and no magician can ever appear publicly before the people. Even if the royal family of many countries is secretly associated with magicians, it is basically hidden in the dark. After all, for more than 600 years, folk tradition has been to think that magicians are evil, such as the so-called harmless spells introduced by the Kingdom of Orvillas are only limited to a very small number of people, and folk are more likely to think of these registered magicians as magicians and tricks.

With the passage of time, the Farea continent is no longer a magician's world, and today there are many precious magic materials and resources that could spark countless sorcerers' struggles and bloody killings a thousand years ago. Although many of them remain in the wild magicians on the Farea continent, they all hide in the wild or in the city wells without a trace of life.

Many magicians do not know what to do about promotion because of incomplete inheritance, some lack practical spells, some lack awareness of magic materials and resources, and more because of the monopoly and broom pride of magic knowledge and lack of communication, which leads to their magic cultivation going astray. Just like the knowledge of promotion a thousand years ago, almost all magicians know, and now it becomes the adventure to be explored at the cost of life...

Sheila said to Claude very seriously and clearly that promotion to the Archmage was not a dream, because she found that many of the magic materials and resources on the list were now easy to collect. For example, when the Autonomous Territory attacked the Kingdom of Hicks, many of the things brought back from the Royal Inner Treasury were magical materials and magical mineral resources needed for promotion. Importantly, these magical mineral resources were carefully refined, saving a lot of trouble...

The storekeepers of the Autonomous Territory did not understand that these items were extraordinarily precious magical materials, and they returned them to the Autonomous Territory simply because they were part of the Hicks Royal Collection. Sheila went to the warehouse department in the Autonomous Territory to test these magic materials, and she was surprised to find that the ingots extracted from these magic materials and resources were labeled by the warehousemen as drug test materials and metal forging test additives...

So Sheila immediately spent nearly half a million gold kroner on a Claude account buying all the magic materials and resource extraction items from the warehousing department in the Autonomous Territory in the name of testing her sister Anna's test agent and Mrs. Sonia's cannon metal strength test. This was a win-win deal for the warehousing department of the Autonomous Territory, selling the face of Marshal Claude and emptying several warehouses, emptying a large quantity of valuable experimental materials that were easily retarded and adding 500,000 gold kroner to the financial reserves of the Autonomous Territory.

It was a big surprise to Sheila that Claude only now knew that she owed another 500,000 gold Kroner in private loan debt to the Overseas Minsheng Bank. But now that you've bought them all, forget it, especially Sheila's, Claude has no temper at all. Even if he didn't have any speed, Claude would be able to repay the loan for two or three years, based on the profits and dividends of the various assets now in his possession.

“Honey, is this magic material worth 500,000 gold kroner enough for you to upgrade?” Claude asked.

Sheila shook her head with regret: "Not enough, these magic materials can only be halved at most. And you're wrong, these magic materials and resources are not worth half a million kroner. If you put it in the underground magic market for sale and the witch found it, don't say two or three million gold kroner, it's ten times the price of five million gold kroner all robbed.

You don't know, many of these magic materials are precious materials that are very difficult to find and collect, such as gold and earth crystals, which are almost extinct magical mineral resources, which are only possible in mineral development-oriented countries like the Hicks Kingdom. This is usually an undesirable precious piece of magic, not something you can dig up just by digging a mine.

It's mainly because the warehouse keepers in your military region don't recognize the goods, and use these as drug test aids and metal forging test additives, which I picked up a lot of cheap. Do you know why he labeled the gold? Extremely hard copper alloy, the talcum is what he calls a turquoise crystal block. I bought these two rarities for almost the price of potatoes... "

Claude suddenly felt a chill. He did not blame the warehousemen in the autonomous military region for not knowing the goods and selling the gold as dirt. Those bargaining evaluators were not magicians and did not know the magic materials for any reason. Claude was just a sensitive association, and this time Sheila picked up big cheaps and bought five million worth of precious magic materials and resources for just 500,000 gold kroner.

But the problem is that this time she bought only half of what she needed to get promoted, that is to say, if the other half of the magic material and resources were not available cheaply, Claude would have to pay close to five million gold kroner. Those precious magic materials have always been priceless in the underground market and require a great deal of energy as well as money to collect.

Even if Claude now has a lot of assets at his disposal, 120,000 gold kroner a year, but five million gold kroner is a huge sum that he cannot afford, which is already the sum of the total annual revenues of the kingdom of Auvellas at the height of the reign of the former King Sterling X, and last year we heard that the tax revenues of the kingdom itself were less than 1.2 million gold kroner a year.

Knowing that Claude was not His Majesty King Frederick I, he had obtained tens of millions of gold kroner from the royal nobility simply by means of a royal fee and a land selection fee. When he remembered the huge sum of five million gold crowns, he felt panicked. This time he understood why so many magicians had died a thousand years ago in order to spare their lives some magic materials and resources. He could not afford it and could only use violence to rob it.

It's just that the Autonomous Territory just invaded the Kingdom of Hicks. Which country can we target next? Want to say it or don't toss it, don't get promoted, but look at Sheila with a big eyebrow dance, Claude can't say it. It took half a day to interrupt Sheila's words: "So, uh, honey, how much money do you think the other half of the promotion materials and magic resources need to buy? ”

“Uh..." Sheila was interrupted by Claude's intercession. She was talking, staring at Claude with a sad face, finally figured out what he meant when he came over and laughed. "Claude, didn't you just listen to me? ”

Claude nodded bitterly and said to himself, "How much money can you afford to waste?"

“Didn't I just say that the treasures of this batch of magic material I bought from the military warehousing department were enough for three people to advance, and the remaining half of the material on this list was quantity, not price? Half of these magic materials and mineral resources are road goods, such as white root powder, which is very common, and a lot of medicines that are now considered pharmacologically necessary, all of which can be purchased on the market.

What's really hard to do is to have the right magic tower in the right place for promotion. I intend to transform the interior of this eaves landscape building in our estate into a magic tower, which will require time and energy to redraw the symbols of the entire inner structure of the tower and set up a magic bullet array. So over the next three years, I'm going to lead the low-level magicians that your family has developed to rebuild this eaves view building, and there's a lot of magic material that needs to be purchased to be applied...

Let us not forget that we are now in the Nubian continent, which itself produces a lot of magical materials and resources that are rare to the Farea continent. I calculated that after collecting magic materials and resources from the continent, only a small fraction of what was left to be promoted. When the renovation of the Magic Tower is completed three years later, I will take these family magicians on a trip to the central highlands and western wastelands of the Farea continent, where the remaining magic materials and resources are marked in the Magic Book... "

Claude was relieved, turning out that the other half of the magic material and resources that the loser woman said were needed for promotion was quantity, not price, and he finally let go of his mind this time, so he said, “Well, give me the list of magic materials and resources from the middle highlands and the western wilderness of the Farea continent, and I'll find someone to collect them. I don't feel comfortable letting you go looking for me. It's pretty rough out there, it's not safe..."

Sheila was very enthusiastic and proactive this evening, and Claude was enjoying herself and tired...