Circle Advancement Potion

"What were these pages?"

As he picked up the small stack of yellowed pages beneath the elixir formula, Gao De pondered.

His spirits soared because of the tremendous haul.

The spell formula and elixir recipe were already here.

He truly could not imagine what other pages could be worthy of Mage Seda's solemn placement inside an Arcane Wooden Box protected by an Arcane Lock.

Gao De casually flipped through several pages and gave them a quick scan, only to stare in astonishment.

They were actually a stack of letters.

Most of them had come from Bremen City.

One of them bore Mage Seda's handwriting. It should have been a letter he had written and intended to send somewhere, but before he could send it, he had died at Gao De's hands.

In Gao De's eyes, Mage Seda had been an evil mage with neither kith nor kin, a solitary and withdrawn man. That was precisely why Gao De had felt safe taking over the herb garden.

How could someone like that have exchanged so many letters?

Who had he been writing to?

A trace of worry arose in Gao De's heart.

Could Mage Seda have had mage friends after all?

If that were true, perhaps one of them would notice that Mage Seda's correspondence had suddenly stopped, sense something amiss, and come knocking.

He had no confidence that he could kill another veteran Mage Apprentice.

Uneasy yet seized by curiosity, Gao De hurriedly read through the entire small stack of letters in detail.

After finishing them, Gao De first let out a long sigh of relief.

They were not letters exchanged with friends. They should have been called family letters.

"So you weren't all alone after all."

Gao De could not help but sigh.

This small stack of letters had all been sent by Mage Seda's wife, who was far away in Bremen City.

Starting ten years ago, Mage Seda's wife had sent him a letter roughly every half year.

Over a full decade, there had been twenty letters in all.

From the contents of those twenty letters, Gao De roughly pieced together Mage Seda's past.

It turned out that Mage Seda had been born into a mage family in Bremen City. He could barely be considered a second-generation mage.

His family had once flourished.

At its peak, the family had possessed one Second Circle Mage and nearly ten First Circle Mages. Even in Bremen City, it had counted as no small mage faction.

But after generations of inheritance, the family had begun to suffer a gap between the old and young. In the most recent four generations, it had not produced a single First Circle Mage, and so it had gradually declined.

By Mage Seda's generation, the once enormous family had been reduced to him as its sole male descendant.

And his talent for magic had been truly mediocre.

Relying on the wealth and foundation left behind by his family, he had consumed quite a few Mana Potions, yet he had only barely reached the level of a Third-Order Apprentice at the age of thirty-five. Becoming a First Circle Mage had been almost hopeless.

At first, Mage Seda had resigned himself to his fate.

Though he had no talent for cultivation, he had unexpectedly achieved a little success in Herbology and successfully mastered the elixir recipes his family had acquired during its prosperous days.

He made a living from that. Though his life could not compare to the family's heyday, he still got by well enough. At the very least, he never lacked food or drink in Bremen City.

Yet for some unknown reason, a rumor began to spread within a small circle, claiming that Mage Seda's ancestors had passed down several precious Mystic Items through the generations.

A man had committed no crime, yet possessing jade became his crime.

Mage Seda noticed strange watchers appearing near his home and heard the rumor as well.

Though his aptitude was poor, he had lived to this age and become no fool. He keenly sensed that there had to be a black hand behind the scenes pushing this matter along.

Left with no choice, Mage Seda could only risk attempting to "advance his circle" without any certainty and with insufficient preparation.

What did "advancing one's circle" mean?

It was the process of a Mage Apprentice Advancing to First Circle.

Put more plainly, it was "Foundation Establishment."

Only by becoming a First Circle Mage could he possibly frighten off those ill-intentioned watchers and deter the black hand behind them.

The result was that his advancement failed, just as expected.

The failure severely damaged Mage Seda's vitality. His lifespan plummeted, and signs of premature aging appeared.

Those watchers had already been eager to make a move. Now that his advancement had failed and he had become exceedingly weak, would that not only embolden the villains coveting his family's property in the shadows?

Mage Seda understood this principle as well.

Helpless, he could only settle everything with his wife, then leave his homeland and flee, quietly arriving in Hogan City to live in seclusion.

However, when he had fled all those years ago, Mage Seda had been forced to leave his wife and child behind in Bremen City in order to avoid leaving any Clues and to throw others off the scent.

And to ensure that no one could trace his whereabouts, Mage Seda had gone a full three years without contacting his wife.

Only after three years had passed, when the black hand lurking in the shadows should have lost patience and surely concluded that he had fled with the family property, abandoning his wife and child, and would no longer pay much attention to his wife, did Mage Seda contact her again through the method they had agreed upon before their separation.

Mage Seda had been forced to live in seclusion in Hogan City, separated from his wife and child, and his heart had already been filled with grievances.

Not to mention that his failed attempt at Advancing to First Circle had shortened his lifespan, while the vitality within his body dwindled with each passing day.

To reunite with his family, return openly to Bremen City, extend his lifespan, and avoid dying of premature aging, Mage Seda had to attempt to advance his circle again and become a First Circle Mage.

But how difficult was it for the mediocre Mage Seda to Advance to First Circle?

Especially after failing once and damaging his foundation, advancing his circle again would be harder than climbing to the heavens.

Unless he drank a Circle Advancement Potion, perhaps there would still be a sliver of hope.

What was a Circle Advancement Potion?

If "advancing one's circle" was "Foundation Establishment," then a "Circle Advancement Potion" was essentially the equivalent of a Foundation Establishment Pill.

The problem was:

A Circle Advancement Potion was as precious as a Foundation Establishment Pill.

The Circle Advancement Potion commonly used in the Sien Duchy was called Spirit Ascension Water.

And because one of Spirit Ascension Water's main ingredients had an extremely low yield, the entire country produced very little Spirit Ascension Water each year.

The Spirit Ascension Water produced each year had to first be absorbed internally, and only a small amount made its way onto the market. It was simply not something Mage Seda could buy.

Fortunately, his ancestors had left behind a fragmentary formula for Spirit-Linking Potion.

It was said to be an ancient elixir from the Gumisil Dynasty.

This gave Mage Seda hope.

As long as he could complete the Spirit-Linking Potion formula and successfully brew Spirit-Linking Potion, he could use the formula to trade for Spirit Ascension Water.

No matter how precious and rare Spirit Ascension Water was, it could never compare to a 1st Tier Elixir recipe.

After drinking Spirit Ascension Water and attempting to advance his circle again, if he could successfully become a First Circle Mage, the problem of his lifespan would be solved as easily as a knife slicing through bamboo. He would also be able to return openly to Bremen City and reunite with his family.

Clinging to this hope, Mage Seda had begun throwing himself heedlessly into completing the Spirit-Linking Potion formula, nearly becoming possessed.

And ever since he had re-established contact with his wife, Mage Seda had entrusted a merchant caravan to deliver a letter to his wife in faraway Bremen City every year, telling her about his circumstances over the past year.

Although Mage Seda still owned some properties in Bremen City that he had been unable to take with him when he left, and had left them to his wife.

The rent his wife collected from those properties was enough to cover daily living expenses.

But as a husband and father, Mage Seda was always worried that his wife and child would not have enough to eat or warm clothes to wear. Whenever he sent a letter each year, he would also enclose fifty gold coins.

That was where the fifty Sien Gold Coins Gao De had seized from the wooden box had come from.

"My dearest Misu, I know it has not been easy for you to manage the household alone and raise Serl these past years. Your resilience and wisdom have always been my greatest pride."

"Please continue managing the properties according to our plan and make proper arrangements for household expenses."

"As in previous years, I have arranged for fifty Sien Gold Coins to be delivered with this letter. I hope they will be enough to support the household and slightly make up for the debt I owe you."

"After living in seclusion for so long, the brewing of Spirit-Linking Potion has finally come infinitely close to success."

"If all goes well, perhaps I will be able to return home this year, reunite with you all, return to your warm embrace, and we will never be separated again; when I left, Serl had only been born for a little over a month and could not yet call me Father. Now he is already thirteen and has become a little grown-up. He must have inherited your beauty and my wisdom. You said in your letter that Serl's talent for magic far surpasses mine, and that brings me boundless joy. Once I return home, we will send Serl to a magic academy to study. Everything will get better."

"During these days of separation, though we cannot see one another, our hearts are tightly bound together, just like the two wisteria vines before our window, their roots forever entwined."

"Eternal love."

"Seda."