Though the devastation wrought by the Fire Mage was horrific, Take and the other players showed no sign of backing down. If anything, they seemed strangely excited.
After thinking it over for a moment, Li Wen more or less understood.
By a normal player's logic, the stronger the boss, the rarer its drops. Add to that the fact that some players craved a challenge more the harder it was, and such emotions were hardly surprising.
Thinking of this, Li Wen had to warn them a few more times. "The mages of the Arcane Academy are all extremely dangerous. You must not underestimate them."
Danger was relative. The Sunday Secret College was mostly made up of scholars who researched magic. They wielded magic powerful enough to alter the face of the world, yet they rarely showed themselves before ordinary people. This Fire Mage, however, was clearly not one of those mild-mannered researchers. Judging from the mess he had left behind, he might well have been a complete madman.
Take and the others nodded solemnly. It seemed they had taken Li Wen's words to heart.
They followed the direction indicated by the potion. Even as dusk arrived and the twilight deepened, they still found no trace of anything.
If they had not all been players, they would probably have suffered heatstroke or dehydration after traveling under the sun for so long. Even so, they were exhausted. The male players carrying tents, armor, and weapons in particular looked utterly worn out.
Li Wen even heard someone muttering under his breath, "Why doesn't this game have a one-click teleport function for quest locations? This is so inhumane."
Of course it was inhumane. After all, this was not a game at all, but a real world.
Li Wen looked up at the sky. Half the sun had already sunk beneath the horizon, while stars glittered across the deep-blue firmament. Judging by their positions, the Fire Mage was to the north.
Streamstone Rift... north...
Li Wen's heart sank. Was that mage's target really the same thing?
"Set up camp here."
The male players were overjoyed. Take blinked and said, "Are we stopping to rest? I think we could keep going."
"We've already found it." Li Wen shook her head. "Set up camp and rest first. Make your preparations. He's here."
"Here?"
Take shuddered, her eyes widening as she nervously looked around. Yet she could not find so much as a human shadow, let alone any living creature.
Li Wen said nothing and merely pointed at the firm, dry ground. Her meaning was obvious.
The players quickly set up their tents. The tents were not meant for resting, but served as resurrection points. Just like logging off, a player's resurrection point had to be established in a safe and private space. If the resurrection point was destroyed, players would often revive somewhere unpredictable.
While they set up camp, Li Wen used a branch she had picked up to draw one neat circular pattern after another on the ground. Take watched blankly from the side. Though she could not understand what Li Wen was doing, it clearly was not random doodling, so she memorized whatever she could. Who knew? It might be some powerful magic.
Li Wen was drawing a large-scale magic array called Leonart's Fourth Solution. The array could consist of up to eleven smaller arrays, each containing a different symbolic pattern: keys, blades, stars, eyes, spirals, hanged men, and more.
In Ritual Magic Studies, Leonart's Fourth Solution was often called a cheap universal formula. It had many functions and could be applied to most problems one might encounter in daily life. Its only flaw was that the array had to be drawn in full; there was no simplified or abbreviated method.
As a result, although it was called a universal magic array, it was not versatile enough in practice and had always been mocked.
For a situation like this, however, it was perfectly suited.
Li Wen needed to borrow three of the array's functions: manifestation, opening, and sealing.
Manifestation would reveal what was hidden, opening would unlock invisible locks, and sealing would naturally keep whatever was within the array from escaping.
After completing the entire array, Li Wen paid half of her mana.
This was one of Leonart's Fourth Solution's advantages—or drawbacks. It required half the caster's mana to operate, and the array's power depended on the caster's total mana. For weak casters, that was a good thing. But for those with abundant mana, it was absurd, since with the same amount of mana, they could make broader and more practical choices.
Li Wen was only level one and had just ten mana to begin with. After paying half, she had five left, enough to use Prayer Incantation at most two more times.
That was fatal in battle. First, Li Wen had to ensure she remained protected by Prayer Incantation. Second, she needed Prayer Incantation as her means of attack. But a single Dark Word Curse was difficult to use to kill someone. In other words, to handle a battle, Li Wen needed to keep her mana above six points at all times.
She had prepared for that long ago.
Li Wen took out dried Mandrake Grass from her pack. As a magically infused ingredient, Mandrake Grass was one of the primary materials used to make Clarity Potion, a common magical potion mages used to urgently restore mana.
According to Advanced Alchemy, primary ingredients usually possessed some of the potion's effects. In other words, Li Wen could restore mana by chewing Mandrake Grass leaves.
The effect might be slight, but restoring her mana to six points would be enough.
When Li Wen poured her mana into the array, the entire formation shone with a radiance as brilliant as stars. Within the area illuminated by that light, everything revealed its true form. At the same time, the ruins of an ancient temple appeared before everyone.
Before the Kingdom of Arthur was called Arthur, the people of Noradun built this temple, known as Tyrion. Later, when King Arthur conquered and unified the kingdom, the temple vanished in an earthquake. Streamstone Rift was formed at that very time. Many believed that the Temple of Tyrion had been buried underground, while opinions differed wildly as to why the people of Noradun had built it in the first place.
In later ages, after Arthur fell, the Black Dragon rose from Streamstone Rift, and the Temple of Tyrion, buried beneath the earth for thousands of years, saw daylight once more. Only then did everyone learn the truth: the Temple of Tyrion was merely an entrance, built to conceal the existence of another ruin.
That ruin was called Amber City. In the more ancient Golden Age, it had been known as the Eternal and Twilight Kingdom, the land dreamed of by all Elders—the City of Eternity that lay between life and death, and the Twilight Witch's sole dwelling in the Mortal World.
Before you continue