Wizard: Starting With Synthesized Gems

Three days later, in the simple laboratory within Locke's dormitory, Locke completed signing the visiting researcher contract with Bonifacius University's new textile school, received a Bonifacius University visiting researcher badge, and was granted access to certain breeding equipment and wizard apprentice resources within Bonifacius University's new textile school.

That afternoon, after promising Antoine that if he successfully brewed the avatar potion he would split a bottle with him, Locke obtained a vial of Antoine's blood.

At this moment, inside the small alchemy room within the dormitory, Locke placed Antoine's blood into the crucible, and following the reaction rate formula he had designed in his notes along with the corresponding procedure, added the materials into the crucible in sequence.

Before long, the dozens of raw materials inside the crucible had undergone forty-nine changes in elemental fire type through the primordial fire, with rapid alternations between large, medium, and small flames. After an entire afternoon had passed, what had formed was a pitch-black paste.

Locke thought about it and did not dare touch the crucible directly with his hands, because many dangerous substances were things alchemists had produced inadvertently.

He casually constructed a First Circle spell, Arcane Hand, a potion-school spell that Locke had learned while reading articles in Golden Crown Mountain's free access area.

The semi-transparent arcane energy hand gripped the unidentified paste inside the crucible, and in an instant, the semi-transparent arcane energy hand turned a deep black-violet color.

It did not sustain that state for long before the black-violet instantly turned black-red.

Locke let out a quiet sigh. The Arcane Hand was a special alchemical spell that made use of arcane energy's sensitive reaction to spirituality, and through changes in color could provide an initial indication of a substance's characteristics.

Purple, black, and red all represented different directional toxins. Purple was a hallucinogenic toxin, black was some form of contaminating toxin, and red was an acutely lethal poison that would kill instantaneously.

The depth of the color represented the severity of that toxin.

Locke glanced at his Arcane Hand, thinking that this hand could probably kill an enemy the instant it touched them.

The Arcane Hand did indeed have a variant spell model, the attack spell model within alchemical magic called the Lethal Toxin Hand.

"Where did I go wrong?"

A look of confusion crossed Locke's face. He picked up his notebook and examined his notes' formula in detail again, recalculated the reaction times for each material he had previously worked out, confirmed there was no issue there, and then re-examined his procedure design section, re-verifying the order of material addition and the quantities.

"There is no problem here."

Locke looked at the black paste in the crucible and thought for a moment, then drank a vial of Holy Spring Nectar potion to partially recover his energy. He then passed his palm over the paste.

The primordial fire wrapped around it, and he immediately applied the Reverse Refining technique to reverse-refine from the black paste the portion of blood that Antoine had given him.

A phantom human spirituality appeared above the crucible.

The phantom human spirituality took the form of a small male figure, its mouth opening and closing. The black paste began to disintegrate and gradually separated, with the majority of the materials wasted, but certain black droplets floated up into the air, and these black droplets gradually turned vivid red during a process of inhalation and exhalation.

Locke turned his right palm over, and the blood droplets flowed into the glass vial in his left hand.

"Using certain techniques from the Reverse Refining method, it is possible to restore core materials from alchemical waste."

"The Reverse Refining method that Wizard Otto passed down to me seems to still have many uses."

He had barely begun to develop it and had already unearthed quite a few benefits.

Of course, during these three days Locke had tried and confirmed that he was unable to use the Reverse Refining method to extract core materials from relatively high-quality potions.

The reason was that for alchemical waste, the medicinal properties had not yet fully fused and had not been completely transformed. But for a well-made finished potion, the internal energy was balanced and complete transformation had already occurred, making it impossible to re-extract raw materials using the Reverse Refining method.

Locke placed the blood droplets back into the crucible, wiped the sweat from his forehead, and added a second batch of dozens of raw materials totaling five hundred thousand magic stones in value.

When the next morning arrived and the sun had just barely risen, Locke looked at what was still a pitch-black paste and his expression grew slightly pale.

He used the Arcane Hand again to touch the potion inside the crucible, but the result was little different from the previous attempt.

Locke sank into deep thought.

"Is there a problem with my refining technique? Indeed, a Second Circle-grade potion formula, the precise level of heat, and the chain reactions between materials are simply incomparable to First Circle potions."

"But I had already practiced many times before attempting the actual brew. Even if my technique is somewhat rough, I believe it basically meets the requirements."

Locke sank further into thought.

"No wonder someone can become a Second Circle wizard and yet not necessarily become a Second Circle alchemist."

Locke exhaled a long breath and prepared to rest for a while.

Because his magic pressure had been depleted to its limits.

A day later, Locke restored his magic pressure through a reverse infusion from the natural primordial force plane, then resumed brewing.

This time, he suspected that his own technique was simply too rough, and so he did not immediately start brewing again, having already wasted a million magic stones.

Locke first practiced with some very inexpensive materials for half a day, then resumed brewing the avatar potion.

This time, he spent an even longer time on the brewing.

A day later, Locke looked at the pitch-black paste in the crucible and sighed.

"No change. Either my technique still has problems and the error tolerance for brewing Second Circle potions is far lower than I imagined, or my calculations of the reaction rates for each reactant are incorrect... I made a calculation error."

"Or perhaps both guesses are wrong."

Locke began absorbing natural primordial force, started restoring his magic pressure, and gave up on the plan to brew the avatar potion within a short time.

"A Second Circle alchemist... I need to reach this level as soon as possible."

"To become a Second Circle alchemist, one needs to be capable of compounding three different kinds of Second Circle potions, three varieties of Second Circle-grade potions brewed through conventional methods. The avatar potion is not difficult among Second Circle potions, leaning toward the lower end of difficulty, yet for some reason I have brewed it three consecutive times and failed every time."

Locke planned to first practice every day using cheap materials to sharpen his technique, and then return to compounding the avatar potion.

And he should also re-verify the compounding procedure he had formulated.

The Lingzhi magical plant on the table trembled. Antoine had sent a message.

"Locke, how is the avatar potion brewing going? Was it a success?"

Locke thought for a moment and replied, "I am still researching this potion."

On the other side, Antoine was in the middle of giving an open lecture and at this moment looked at his Lingzhi magical plant with a crooked smile, which sent the second-class wizard apprentices in the lecture hall into a collective look of terror. They had no idea why this instructor had suddenly smiled, and why the smile was so deeply unsettling.

Antoine thought to himself, "It seems Locke has run into that barrier. The barrier that has caused many wizards to give up further progress in alchemy."

"There is a qualitative difference between a First Circle alchemist and a Second Circle alchemist."

"Without crossing that barrier, one cannot be considered a true alchemist. Just someone who mixes potions. In my past life, I seemed to have always been stuck at the First Circle alchemist stage and never became a Second Circle alchemist... though of course in this life I abandoned alchemy entirely."

Antoine wore an expression of mild amusement. "I wonder how long it will take for Locke, a gifted breeder genius, to cross this barrier."

"Or will he redirect all of his attention back to the field of breeding studies?"

Many wizards at lower circle stages could manage cross-disciplinary learning, but at higher circle stages, faced with increasingly complex specialized sub-disciplines and a boundless sea of advanced content, many of them would give up certain fields of study and allow their magic in those areas to remain perpetually at a circle level.

Antoine settled in with the attitude of a spectator to watch whether Locke could brew the avatar potion.

The wizard apprentices listening to his lecture were all watching him with nervous expressions. These wizard apprentices did not know much about Antoine personally, but had all heard that this instructor was not easy to get along with.

...

Inside the simple alchemy room, Locke thought to himself, "I should put the potion brewing aside for now. Every failure consumes five hundred thousand magic stones in materials. Fortunately I can use the Reverse Refining method to recover Antoine's blood repeatedly."

"That Antoine, he timed his message to ask me precisely whether I had brewed the avatar potion yet. When he lent me his blood, he seemed to already have a basic understanding of the difficulty of the avatar potion."

"Could it be that he studied alchemy in his past life?"

Locke planned to go to Golden Crown Mountain's library to look through materials in addition to practicing every day, to find out exactly where the problem lay.

In truth, the most troublesome thing was not the failure itself, but that he did not even know where the problem was.

He had checked every step of the previous brewing process and had not found where anything had gone wrong.

Locke opened the water hyacinth system and saw another tax reminder from the Cloud Marsh Council.

He furrowed his brow slightly. It seemed he should pay the tax as soon as possible.

And moreover, after paying the tax he could enter the wizard secret realm, the Forbidden Library. He could try going into that wizard secret realm to find things that could allow a Second Circle wizard to make rapid progress at the Second Circle stage.

Or at the very least, find a method that could accelerate the forging of his Grand Magic.

Locke brought the waste from the crucible into the half-plane within his eye. He poured the waste onto the Obelisk Stone Golem standing before the forest.

The Obelisk Stone Golem received the alchemical waste as nourishment and its entire body expanded by another degree. Small stones tumbled down from its surface, and after those pebbles had rolled off, its eyes released a red glow, like a giant capable of shaking the heavens and earth, terrifying magic pressure radiating from its entire body.

Locke swept a glance over this Obelisk Stone Golem. It was the alchemical treasure he had obtained in the ladder trial of the Feathered Serpent Pavilion, the Obelisk Stone Golem, which was born by consuming medicinal waste. Under his irrigation of waste, its magic pressure had now reached the gasification stage of the First Circle.

Truly remarkable.

Previously it had only been at an ordinary First Circle magic pressure level, but after he had poured in three batches of the avatar potion, a Second Circle potion's waste, this stone demon's level had shot up instantly.

It was in for a good time for quite a while to come.

At this moment, the stone demon rolled on the ground, triggering a small tremor that sent the Dune People tribe on the other side of the forest sanctuary into a panic, while the Obelisk Stone Golem exposed its belly toward Locke.

The stone demon was an alchemical pet that subsisted on waste, and so it was extremely affectionate toward Locke.

Locke comforted it briefly, indicating that there would not be any waste available to eat for the next few days, because he was going to go broke at this rate of producing waste.

The resources required at the Second Circle stage were simply too enormous.

One practice session consumed five hundred thousand magic stones.

Simply staggering.

And right now he had not even figured out which part of his compounding was going wrong.

Locke looked toward the forest sanctuary and saw that his Tree of Life had already become a Second Circle magical plant.

The Tree of Life shared its grade with its owner, and the Tree of Life was an existence with Third Circle potential, meaning it would not encounter any barrier before reaching the Third Circle.

The moment he had become a Second Circle wizard, this Tree of Life had begun ferociously drawing resources from this half-plane, so as to advance to a Second Circle magical plant.

The Tree of Life had originally absorbed sufficient energy during that meteor shower to nearly evolve into a Second Circle magical plant, but had been forcibly blocked by his own dragging of its progress.

At this moment, the Tree of Life standing at the center of the forest was lush and thriving, its branches dense and full, every vein of every green leaf gleaming with a faint green magical radiance.

It seemed as though each leaf was a living entity in itself.

Powerful magical energy was releasing freely in all directions.

Locke looked at the Tree of Life and gave a satisfied nod.

"Since the avatar potion, being a Second Circle-grade potion, is something I cannot brew in the short term, I should use the Ancient Tree Fruit Avatar Spell first to create an avatar, and send it back to the southeastern quadrant to have a look."

"In the past few days, I managed to find time to finish reading the divine tree avatar spell book. Combined with the Tree of Life that already shares my level, it should be possible to successfully create an avatar."

Locke approached the Tree of Life and found that the soil within a ten-meter radius around the tree had cracked and dried out, becoming sandy in places.

Locke furrowed his brow at this sight, because it indicated that this half-plane could not sustain a Second Circle magical plant and could not provide such powerful energy.

He could see that the Tree of Life's virtual roots were extending downward and outward, drawing on the limited virtual energy of this half-plane's virtual sea to sustain this Second Circle magical plant's existence.

Locke took out a Second Circle-grade botanical spell book he had borrowed from Golden Crown Mountain's free library. "According to the content I borrowed from Golden Crown Mountain's library free area after becoming a Second Circle wizard, the virtual roots of a Second Circle magical plant will take root in a virtual space composed of three spatial coordinates plus one dimension of spirituality."

"That virtual space is the spiritual sea of a world."

"The spiritual sea is an inherent attribute present in every world. If the present world is a leaf on a branch of a tree that is a world, then the spiritual sea is not another leaf, but the veins of that leaf."

"And so, just as every leaf must necessarily possess leaf veins, every world conceals within it a spiritual sea."

"The reason virtual roots have become a universal direction of evolution for magical plants is also because the spiritual sea is universally present in every world... and therefore virtual roots are an extremely advantageous type of nutrient-absorbing root that magical plants have evolved in order to obtain nourishment."

Locke looked at the Tree of Life's virtual roots, extending downward and outward without limit, and his spirituality seemed to merge with the Tree of Life, so that for one brief instant his eyes glimpsed a spiritual sea that had boundaries yet seemed boundless, possessing what appeared to be infinite depth.

The Tree of Life's virtual roots were still the sparse filamentous type without a primary root, and so could only float on the surface of this spiritual sea like the aquatic roots of a water hyacinth.

"The spiritual sea, academically known as the virtual sea. This is the land of primordial spirituality."

Locke withdrew from that field of vision after a brief glimpse, compelled to retreat.

"No wonder virtual roots have a smooth surface with no root hairs. There is no need for root hairs to expand the surface area. That is a typical characteristic of aquatic roots."

"So the virtual space is an ocean."

"By general definition, the virtual sea is a form of possibility, the possibilities of past, present, and future, the possibilities along the countless lines of development of the present world, the excluded possibilities that have already been ruled out by the confirmed past of the present world, the possibilities beyond the present, the possibilities that may still occur in the future."

"When plants take root in this virtual sea, they can draw from it sufficient energy to sustain themselves and achieve further evolution. Virtual energy is energy that ordinary normal-world life forms cannot utilize. It is a form of energy built upon possibility and primordial spirituality... this portion of the content I have also only read with partial comprehension."

It was entirely normal for botanical spell books not to be able to clearly explain the virtual space, since this was not a field specialized in soul studies.

Anything in books that was vaguely described and poorly explained could generally be taken to mean that even the author had not necessarily understood it themselves.

At the Second Circle wizard stage, no one could be confident they could clearly write out everything in a book.

He had come across a relatively mainstream hypothesis in botanical spell books called the Virtual Root-Soul Origin Theory.

The theory proposed that after a plant's virtual roots take root in the virtual space and absorb virtual energy, in the process they inadvertently draw primordial spiritual energy out of the spiritual sea. After that plant dies, it transforms into a plant spirit.

And as plant spirits accumulate abnormally in certain regions over time, they form souls.

Of course, this hypothesis had numerous flaws, and Locke had noticed the absurdities within it after finishing the book.

First, plant spirits should logically have appeared prior to plants.

Second, virtual roots are a characteristic of Second Circle magical plants. If a world had already developed to the point of sustaining a Second Circle magical plant, it would long since have given rise to higher life forms.

But working backward from the result to the process, virtual roots taking root in the spiritual sea and fishing out primordial spirituality could indeed potentially bring some of that spiritual energy into the present world.

But whether that portion of spiritual energy was the origin of the world's spirituality, or even the origin of souls and spirits, was difficult to say.

Locke looked at the cracked earth surface and furrowed his brow slightly. The half-plane's spiritual sea was relatively weak, and this half-plane itself simply lacked the capacity to sustain a Second Circle magical plant.

Locke crouched down and placed his Four Elements Ring on the ground. As he recited the incantation for the First Circle spell, Elemental Offering, the four rings automatically embedded themselves into the earth, becoming four decorative elements on the ground.

Elemental Offering could present elemental force to a localized region, enhancing it.

This was not actually a botanical spell, but rather a geomantic spell from the life school.

The core incantation of the Lim Cyclical Ecology Curse he had studied earlier in preparation for his Grand Magic was precisely Elemental Offering.

He had not managed to learn it at the time, but now, drawing on the commanding vantage point of a Second Circle botanical wizard, along with the fact that both botanical magic and geomantic magic were varieties of the life school, and that Elemental Offering leaned somewhat toward botanical magic, he was now capable of casting this lower-circle geomantic spell.

Using Elemental Offering could modestly strengthen this half-plane, and this was essential, because otherwise this half-plane would be completely drained and potentially destroyed by his Tree of Life within approximately one year.

Locke smiled bitterly.

"For a Second Circle wizard and his Second Circle magical plant, a half-plane like this is so fragile. The resources required just to strengthen this half-plane alone are already beyond knowing."

"The world of a Second Circle wizard truly does consume money."

The key point was that the equipment on his person needed to be able to keep up with the intensity of his magic pressure.

Otherwise, simply carrying this equipment, he would need to control his power to avoid crushing it.

A very large portion of what Second Circle wizards spent their money on was finding things capable of withstanding their power. For example, the half-plane right before him needed a better strengthening solution to stabilize its existence.

Locke took an ordinary grafting knife and drew it across his finger. The enchantment magical inscriptions on the grafting knife shattered after being used once.

Then Locke placed a drop of his blood on one of the Tree of Life's branches.

Immediately, two flower buds appeared between the leaves of that branch.

Locke stood before the tree and continuously recited incantations, maintaining this for approximately two weeks.

During this time, the Tree of Life continuously drew energy from the half-plane's virtual sea. The entire half-plane, as though too much groundwater had been extracted, had its relative elevation in the present-world layer begin to continuously decrease.

Locke looked with some surprise at the continuously sinking present-world layer of the half-plane, not having expected that the virtual sea could play a supporting role for a plane's present-world layer.

That made sense too. The present world was the possibilities of this world that had been solidified, while the virtual sea was those possibilities that had not yet been solidified. The solidified possibilities needed to be upheld by those not yet solidified.

On the first day of the third week, as Locke channeled all of his magic pressure into the two flower buds, the buds gradually bloomed. After Locke manually pollinated the two flowers, one flower withered.

The other bloomed and bore fruit.

The fruit then fell to the ground.

In the instant it touched the earth, the hard shell of the fruit, which stood as tall as a person, suddenly cracked open, and from within it walked a figure. His skin was smooth, his appearance identical to Locke's in every detail.

Only there was a green leaf marking at his brow.

Locke tossed a white wizard robe over to him.

Done.

The Ancient Tree Fruit Avatar.