Wizard: Starting With Synthesized Gems

As Locke descended from the sky and landed upon the Dragon Mountain Range of the Atlas Mountains, his magic pressure rose along with the descent. The soul's declining period, produced by the soul's upper limit existing between the First Circle and Second Circle, had already vanished the moment he successfully became a Second Circle wizard, acquiring a brand new level of soul and a new realm of potential.

And at this moment, the overwhelming energy of the Dragon-Tasting Marvel made his soul extraordinarily active, causing his soul force to surge sharply, surpassing even his magic pressure.

Soul force and magic pressure were proportional to each other, but they did not correspond exactly one-to-one.

At this moment, the Dragon-Tasting Marvel had temporarily at least doubled Locke's soul force. His soul's essential nature had already been elevated, and so it was only natural that his soul force could now double, sending his combat power soaring.

The Sun-Herding Dragon's scales blazed like scattered firelight, and the wyvern disaster it triggered sent wyvern after wyvern rising from the Dragon Mountain Range, attacking everything around them that was not of dragon-kind.

Dragon roars sounded one after another in Locke's ears.

Locke watched as Witch Esther seized the opportunity to take out a Second Circle magical plant from her astral ring, the Star-Guiding Rose. The red rose's petals trailed many phantom gravitational star threads hanging downward, with starlight scattering beneath them.

The Star-Guiding Rose's virtual root seemed entirely different from the Temporal Shadow Fern's virtual root. Its virtual root appeared considerably more advanced, and it had a primary root, rather than a surface-level sparse root system with no dominant structure.

The Star-Guiding Rose spread like a pagoda above Witch Esther's head, carrying her flying up into the mass of wyverns, while the rose emanated stellar gravitational force that became an invisible barrier, repelling the countless wyverns attempting to attack her.

At this moment, a dense swarm of wyverns filled the sky and the ground, everywhere one could see, as though the entire world had been composed of wyverns.

A single wyvern could not stop itself, and was pushed by the wyverns behind it into the Star-Guiding Rose, whereupon the stellar gravitational force instantly reduced that wyvern to fragments.

And the wyverns behind it continued to be pushed helplessly into the Star-Guiding Rose in turn.

At this moment, the wyvern swarm was simultaneously disrupting Wizard Cis and Wizard Kelt, as well as the several other wizards tasked with intercepting Witch Esther.

Locke observed this and his dragon pupils suddenly contracted, because he had seen something like this before.

He had once witnessed through the Historical Milestone Curse the Land of Six Towers in the ancient past, being assailed by countless wyverns, at a time when the Land of Six Towers had still possessed a large number of Second Circle wizards.

The Six Towers of the Land of Six Towers had been the critical barrier holding back those wyvern swarms.

So had a dragon disaster directly struck the Land of Six Towers during that period?

But why would it strike the Land of Six Towers specifically? Or had dragon disasters once struck all wizard lands?

Or perhaps the Six Towers of the Land of Six Towers served not only as barriers, but had other purposes as well?

At that moment, Locke heard one dragon roar after another, and then a tremendous and piercing dragon roar erupted beside his ear, so deafening that his dragon eardrums bled from the force of it.

"What is happening? This Chasm territory truly is strange. No wonder it can isolate the various wizard lands from one another. Even though I transformed into a Second Circle dragon through a world marvel, a dragon roar just suddenly appeared in my ear."

"That seemed like a warning, telling me to leave the Chasm as quickly as possible, or something terrible would happen."

"It seemed to be very politely reminding me that even though we are both dragons, I cannot integrate myself into Chasm territory."

Locke turned his dragon head and looked toward the depths of the Chasm territory.

In the past he had only sat in a wizard airship and gazed at the outer edges of the Chasm territory from afar, but now, as a Second Circle being capable of seeing the flow of planar force with the naked eye, the sight before him was entirely different.

Locke could see that the Chasm territory was saturated with alien planar forces unlike those of the wizard world.

And moreover, this place was different from the Second Sky as well.

These alien planar forces were interconnected with one another, and simultaneously connected to all of the wyverns in the Dragon Mountain Range, collectively forming dozens of peculiar quasi-living-body states composed of planar force.

In other words, for living beings below Second Circle, entering the Dragon Mountain Range meant only seeing wyverns covering every mountain and filling every valley.

But for Second Circle beings, they could see the bizarre living entities composed of planar force hanging upside down in the sky above. These entities resembled dragons yet were not truly dragons.

Each had three pairs of dragon wings and multiple deformed heads resembling dragon skulls, red light blazing from their eyes, hanging inverted in the sky like alien demon gods, their gazes falling down upon the earth, watching all intruders into the Chasm territory with malicious eyes, while at the same time gazing out toward the distant wizard lands of the Cloud Marsh Wetlands with that same hostile intent.

A question surfaced in Locke's mind. "These things... what are they? Why does the wizard world contain so many alien forces? If it swallowed other worlds and failed to digest them, that was my old hypothesis, but thinking about it now, something still feels off."

"The Second Sky and the planar forces of this kind of Chasm territory are actually..."

In Locke's direct vision, the planar forces of the Chasm territory and the planar forces of the wizard lands formed circulating currents that converted into each other through ley lines and the sky above.

This indicated that these planar forces and world laws were still part of the wizard world itself.

That made it all the stranger.

These things that could not possibly exist in other worlds, what exactly were they, and how had they come to form?

"This time, accepting Teacher Yekaterina's private secret mission counts as a personal service I am rendering her outside of my academy work."

Locke thought to himself, "But it is not without its rewards. Through this world marvel, I have been able to take the form of dragon-kind, and temporarily as a true dragon, I have discovered that the Dragon Mountain Range, as a Chasm, does not draw its significance primarily from the dragon race itself. Looking at it this way, it seems that even foreign dragon-kind cannot integrate into Chasm territory."

"Chasm territory is entirely self-contained. The energy conversion between two types of planar force seems to hold an enormous secret. No matter. The warning just now was only that, a warning. I can remain here for now, until Witch Esther successfully escapes."

As Locke thought this, he saw seven grass nails formed from vetiver grass hurtling toward his dragon wings.

That was Wizard Kelt's magic pressure.

Wizard Kelt appeared before him, looking nothing like the prickly image he had once presented to Locke, and nothing like the friendly image he had later projected either. At this moment, Wizard Kelt's expression was ice cold, his eyes indifferent, his strikes ruthless.

It was the attitude of a wizard facing a strange member of dragon-kind.

Wizard Kelt swept Locke with an icy gaze, intending to dispatch him directly with the Second Circle botanical spell model, the Stasis Seven-Segment Grass Nail.

Wizard Kelt thought to himself, "It is this oblivious dragon standing in front of me that triggered the wyverns in the Dragon Mountain Range and caused the dragon disaster. So if I eliminate it, the dragon disaster will be dispelled."

"If the dragon disaster wakes up even deeper dragon-kind within the Dragon Mountain Range, or worse, draws even more powerful dragons here, things will get out of hand, and there will be no end to it."

That was precisely what made a dragon disaster so troublesome.

Wizard Kelt said to the other Golden Crown Mountain Second Circle wizards around him, "You go after Esther. I will kill this foolish dragon. Do not let her leave the Golden Crown Mountain district."

Wizard Cis had already stepped onto a mahogany tree boat, treating the wyvern swarm like an ocean, while the mahogany tree boat sailed atop the sea of wyverns, and no matter what those wyverns did, they could not overturn the boat.

This was because the wyvern swarm, like an ocean, would rise when the tide rose and fall when the tide fell, carrying the boat with it.

A sun ring wizard's spells had already reached this level of profundity. Locke caught one glimpse of it and was genuinely astonished, immediately realizing that he could not comprehend this kind of magic at all.

Mahogany was a large evergreen tree of the Meliaceae family. As a magical plant, it was inherently well-suited as a material for constructing void warships, and in the early days of void warship development, when the technology was still relatively primitive, large wooden ships and sailing vessels built from the natural timber of such magical plants had been the preferred choice.

Locke had previously read some popular science articles about this, but he had never imagined that mahogany wielded by a sun ring wizard could achieve something so extraordinarily refined.

No matter how many wyverns piled up, none of them could get anywhere near the boat.

The individual wyverns that approached the boat could only be crushed to death by the wyverns pressing in from behind them, all their efforts in vain.

Wizard Cis's eyes were ice cold. He seemed utterly unable to forgive Witch Esther's betrayal.

He used the Peach Bow Thorn Arrow spell model, sending a jujube branch arrow flying out that suddenly vanished in midair, then reappeared lodged in the magical plant above Esther's head.

It felled it with a single arrow.

The Star-Guiding Rose instantly bloomed and withered, collapsing in a moment.

The technique was breathtaking. In the eyes of ordinary Second Circle wizards, a sun ring wizard's methods were already like divine artistry.

Many of the Second Circle wizards present, upon witnessing this scene, could not understand why his arrow had vanished after being fired, only to reappear above Witch Esther's head.

Setting aside the panel gap between them, even just the method of the magical attack was beyond anyone's comprehension.

Of course, the gaps between Second Circle magical plants were simply enormous.

Because the Second Circle level was in essence a tier at which power could be raised limitlessly, and so the upper limit for most civilizations in the infinite void was this very tier. In descriptions left by those civilizations, some had even divided this tier alone into dozens of sub-levels.

Though many of these were misguided efforts, endlessly carving out new sub-levels within the tier to no meaningful end.

The sun ring wizard level was the closest within the wizard system to the Third Circle, and so while they were both Second Circle wizards, the gap between an ordinary Second Circle wizard and a sun ring wizard was like the gap between an ordinary person and a world boxing champion, a top-tier special forces operator, or a world-class scientist.

The disparity was simply immense.

And because the gaps within the Second Circle were so vast, virtual roots alone came in four grades, inferior virtual roots, average virtual roots, superior virtual roots, and perfect virtual roots.

The externally-sourced virtual roots Locke had obtained from the Temporal Shadow Fern were inferior virtual roots, with the characteristic features of this grade being that they were surface-level roots, sparse roots with no primary root.

All roots were roughly the same size, arranged like a beard of whiskers.

At this moment, Locke was not certain what grade of virtual root the magical plants Esther and Wizard Cis were using in their exchange actually were.

"Not good, Esther has been brought down. Wait, I need to worry about myself first!"

Locke kept beating his dragon wings, flying backward.

Wizard Kelt was only an ordinary Second Circle wizard, and was even on the verge of being phased out by Golden Crown Mountain. Had it not been for Witch Yekaterina, he would have been dismissed long ago.

Therefore, his magic was something Locke could currently parse, and even the parts he did not fully understand could be quickly worked out, with countermeasures found within a short time.

And so, facing Wizard Kelt's Stasis Seven-Segment Grass Nail, after having two half-meter-long vetiver grass nails driven into his chest, Locke kept retreating, while using his dragon claws to contend with the remaining five vetiver grass nails.

As his dragon claws swept and deflected, Locke continuously avoided the points of greatest magic pressure concentration in the opponent's attack, while striking the clearly weak points in the opponent's spell model where magic pressure was thinnest and flow was least smooth.

This resulted in Wizard Kelt failing to do as he had envisioned, which was to quickly immobilize Locke's body with the Stasis Seven-Segment Grass Nail and lock down Locke's power.

Wizard Kelt felt a faint twinge of surprise.

"Strange. This is only a dragon, the kind that is destined from birth to become a Second Circle being. These kinds of Second Circle beings, who reach that level purely through the bloodline of their ancestors, are usually very easy to deal with. With one spell I should have had it under control."

"But it had no effect? This dragon is more troublesome than I expected."

At this moment, one of the vetiver grass nails in Locke's chest gradually separated from his body and dropped away from his chest like a falling iron nail.

Locke looked down at his own chest.

The Stasis Seven-Segment Grass Nail was very likely connected to the foundational magic underlying Wizard Kelt's Grand Magic. Though of course, the man had not used his Grand Magic at all just now.

The Stasis Seven-Segment Grass Nail was only an ordinary Second Circle spell.

This spell would transform vetiver grass into iron nails driven into the target's body, simultaneously pinning down the target's blood, spiritual energy, and magical power flow, leaving them as though struck by a paralysis curse, fixed in place.

Of course, the prerequisite was that all seven stasis grass nails had to be driven into the target's body simultaneously.

And just now, Wizard Kelt had only managed to land two stasis grass nails on him, and with the passage of time, Locke had already expelled one of them.

This indicated that in Wizard Kelt's mind, dealing with a dragon whose magic pressure was roughly equal to his own required no particular effort, and so he had simply cast the spell casually.

Locke thought to himself, "I did not expect that even the usually unreliable Wizard Kelt would have around eighteen thousand magic pressure."

"And furthermore, both his spell models and his understanding of magic are so excellent, and his control of combat is perfectly calibrated. Golden Crown Mountain truly is a gathering place of extraordinary people."

"But now, I finally have the standing to face Wizard Kelt on equal footing and exchange blows with him."

Locke beat his dragon wings and flew backward, though perhaps because he was still a new dragon, his control of the wings and movement of his dragon body was somewhat clumsy. He ended up colliding with the mass of wyverns behind him and nearly tumbled out of the air entirely.

Wizard Kelt was momentarily taken aback, and then immediately drove the Stasis Seven-Segment Grass Nail toward Locke.

"I was overthinking it just now. I thought this dragon might be formidable, but it turns out it is just a foolish dragon."

"Its limbs are completely uncoordinated."