Chapter 96 - To Each Their Own (2/2)

Between him and Bard, it was more a matter of disliking each other’s vibes than of actual conflicts of interest or a life-and-death feud.

“If that day does come, I will go to your house and have a chat with you.” Roland also stood up.

Bard smiled at Roland and suddenly said, “I hope you won’t become our gravediggers!”

Roland pondered over this.

With these words, Bard left the Magic Tower, taking his friends and subordinates with him.

Roland stood at the window, watching Bard and the others leave in the night.

Vivian pushed the door open and entered. She placed pastries and some dried fruits on the table, then walked up to Roland and also watched Bard gradually disappear into the distance.

After a while, she said, “Deputy Chairman, the reason you asked us to go out of town was so that we could avoid this man. He’s very dangerous, isn’t he?”

“You saw through my intentions!” Roland chuckled.

“We’re not stupid. Actually, we all guessed that was the case.” Vivian said with a slight sigh, “Even the Chairman avoided him, he must be a very troublesome person. You left us outside the city and asked your friends to protect us—it must’ve been dangerous for you to face them alone. We all feel a little apologetic and quite ashamed.”

“It actually has nothing to do with you guys, but it’s more suitable to say that the Chairman and I almost got you guys into trouble.”

“Do you really think we’ll believe that?” The rims of Vivian’s eyes were slightly red. “Deputy Chairman, please remember, we are also members of the Magic Tower—if there are such matters in the future, please do not exclude us.”

No… It really had nothing to do with you guys.

However, Vivian left the study before Roland could explain.

In the days that followed, Roland found the magic apprentices in unusually high spirits. They went out of town during the day to help build houses and returned to the tower at night to practice magic until the middle of the night.

They were already very diligent, and now they were even more diligent, almost to the point of desperation.

Diligence is a good thing, Roland thought, so he didn’t clarify anything with them.

Because Language Proficiency was at a bottleneck—stuck—Roland did not derive the spell again these past few days.

In the library of the Magic Tower, he found another spell that was quite interesting.

Spell Puppet.

It was also a type of zero-level trick. Like Hand of Magic, it was known as a spell of little worth.

However, Roland found it quite interesting.

Level zero spells were easy to learn. Roland looked at the spell model, and in less than ten minutes, he successfully cast a blue elemental puppet.

The puppet was about the same height as Roland. It had no eyes, no nose, no face or anything of the sort. It was simply a magic figure.

In addition, this thing had no soul, no consciousness. However, it inherited some of the summoner’s instinctive knowledge. It could distinguish between friend and foe and understand most of the language commands. Its strength was not considered great, so it could only a.s.sist mages with some delicate experiments or handiwork.

Hand of Magic was used for heavy lifting, so it was not possible to use it for delicate work.

In contrast, Spell Puppets were created for this purpose, but many mages found them to be of little use.

This thing only inherited some knowledge of its summoner, so it often made mistakes in experiments. Magical supplies were very expensive, and if it failed several times, a mage would become impecunious.

In the end, the purpose that remained for this thing was cleaning up and staying on alert for foreign enemies.

However, it would simplify matters to just recruit a few more magic apprentices.

After all, maintaining a Spell Puppet required constant consumption of mana.

After about an hour of looking at the spell model of Spell Puppet, a lot of bold and daring ideas emerged in Roland’s mind.