Chapter 9 (1/2)

Translator: Henyee Translations Editor: Henyee Translations

Roland’s excitement was perfectly understandable. Everybody wanted to pick up new skills and play on easily in a game. But the difficulty of learning spells in this game was beyond his expectations.

And this was only a level-one spell. Level-two spells could blow up his head if he failed. Roland remembered the chart of dense nodes when he used Language Proficiency a few hours ago and felt freaked out.

What about the level-three, level-four, and level-five spells? How many nodes did they require the spellcaster to learn and understand?

Frustrated, Roland sat back on his bed. It was already sunset. His cottage was covered by the shadows of the trees on the mountain. When the trees swayed under the wind, the spots of light in the shadows sprayed across the ground.

Roland looked at the beautiful view outside the window and listened to the wind and the birds. Nature was the best tranquilizer. Roland’s mood became a lot better. He stood up and returned to the profiles with his stick.

Since magic nodes would not move, he could establish a coordinate system to remember their locations. The beginner Mages had to chant to cast a low-level spell. Roland speculated that the chanting would not increase magic power and was only a way to remember the flow among the magic nodes.

Then, would it be better if he read the coordinates of the nodes out?

Roland marked the coordinates of the magic nodes and thought hard. He established the most cla.s.sic x, y, and z axises with specific numbers. Of course, to accurately locate each node, Roland divided the four profiles equidistantly.

It was already dark by the time he numbered all the nodes. He rested for a while in the cottage. He sniffed the leftovers from his lunch and discovered that they were not bad, so he ate again. He was rather hungry after an afternoon of hard thinking.

When he was having supper, he did not notice that Falken came to the four profiles he had drawn. The old man observed for a while and said in admiration, “What a detailed representation of the nodes of the magic model. Even though the spell a.n.a.lyzed is one of the lowest level, those four charts are still worth ten gold coins. What a genius.”

Falken roamed back to his temple with his hands clasped behind his back. He was a Priest. He knew that magic models were valuable but he was not interested. He was only here to check on Roland’s progress.

After eating supper in a hurry, Roland returned to the profiles. He recorded the four profiles and the nodes with the photo function of the system. After all, one’s memory was always limited, but photos were different. If he extracted the photos from the virtual cabin to a portable disk, they could be forever preserved until he deleted them.

“If only the system had a modeling app…” Roland mumbled and wrote the data on the memo of the system. “Let’s test this line first.”

X23, Y1, Z56… Z55, failed.

Roland’s head was painful. After he recovered, he recorded the reason for the failure on the memo: Node A and Node B cannot be connected.

X23… Z47, failed. Reason: Too many nodes were connected; the magic line broke off.

X23… Z11, failed. Reason: Nodes were connected too fast.