Rescue Strategy!

"Cough, cough... Yes, she's the Chief Mage, Lady Lei Xue..." Kulande coughed lightly, then emphasized the identity after Lei Xue's name, trying to make everyone forget some strange details...

Everyone froze for a moment before nodding. Right, right, she was the Chief Mage. That was indeed more important...

But wasn't she a little too young?

Being a mage was a profession that required age to convince others, much like traditional Chinese medicine practitioners in Central China. Unless they were fifty or sixty years old, no one would dare visit them for treatment...

But when they remembered that another young girl had previously beaten every one of them black and blue, they felt that judging her purely by age was too arbitrary...

Thus, they all turned toward an old man in the front left who looked as though he were nearing the end of his life...

He was the only surviving mage here...

The Western Islands had abundant mage resources, with numbers and quality several times greater than those of the Steel Empire. Yet even here, mages remained scarce...

The reason was simple. Mages enjoyed lofty social status, and most of them were valuable assets to their families. Ordinarily, no outstanding mage would participate in an adventurous exploration like this. Even a Royal Fleet would not have a high-level mage accompanying it.

There were some apprentices. Even low-level apprentices who could cast complete spells were treated as treasures by the leaders of the various factions here, because they could use Alchemy Conversion Arrays to convert certain materials into fresh water...

But even with focused cultivation, over countless years, only three people in this city had grown into full-fledged mages. Two of them had been taken into the Crystal Palace by that mysterious girl yesterday, so only the old mage Nikola remained