This Kind of Thing Had to Be Publicized Far and Wide

A month later.

"Honestly, I'm somewhat disappointed."

He Shenyan stood with his back to the person behind him, who lay on a raised platform tightly bound in black chains of Magic Power. He sipped from a cup of coffee.

He was dressed casually, but his expression was far from pleasant.

"You attacked me without provocation and showed intense hostility. I understand that people like you are capable of any despicable act, including killing someone you see as, ah, a Muggle for no reason at all. Unfortunately, I am not one."

"But what I cannot understand is your method of casting spells. Gentlemen, you possess a treasure trove, yet you never thought to excavate it."

He set down his coffee, turned around, and pulled a stick from the man's waist, waving it in his hand.

"A shoddy enchanted wand. You have clearly touched the boundary where the mind distorts reality, so why stop there? Sigh."

He let out a long sigh. The man stared at him in terror, whimpering incessantly through his gag, apparently begging for mercy. He had not listened to a word He Shenyan said.

What a pity.

He Shenyan took one final, careful look at the wand in his hand, shook his head, and tossed it away.

He raised his right index finger, and a thin blade of Magic Power appeared. He approached the pitiful local Mage and, upon noticing the man's sweat-soaked head and terrified expression, even offered him a gentle smile.

"Relax, sir. With the experience I gained from your previous companions, I'll be very careful this time. You won't die—at least, not too painfully."

The man began struggling violently.

"Don't bother begging. Accept the fact that you intended to kill me when you cornered me in the back alley of that Magic Power artifact market."

The Mage smiled mildly. "Every cause has its effect, sir. You are an adult. You should take responsibility for your actions, shouldn't you?"

Half an hour later, he wiped the blood from his hands as he walked out of the basement, then snapped his fingers and used Magic Power to clean up the mess inside.

Afterward, he went to sit in the courtyard of the country villa where he had lived for the past month.

The scenery in rural Europe was quite lovely, worthy of being called picturesque. In such surroundings, He Shenyan began to think in silence.

Thanks to those kind people who had delivered themselves to his doorstep, he had finally figured out how the Mages of this world cast spells.

He had been here for a month. He had initially intended to leave immediately, but discovered that Magic Power was unusually abundant in this world and that spellcasters existed. With a researcher's mindset, he decided to remain for a while and gather some knowledge related to spells.

However, as an outsider, he had not interacted with the spellcasting community here. At most, he visited the places where they traded items in private, broadened his understanding of another world, and silently scanned the books in those bookstores with his mental power.

He could not possibly refuse such an opportunity.

Then, the good times did not last.

After one gathering, those people set their sights on him.

They thought he was an unfamiliar face who could be easily bullied, a Muggle who had luckily slipped into a wizarding gathering. They wanted to kill him for it—they seemed to hate Muggles, meaning ordinary people, intensely.

That was rather interesting.

However, their meager knowledge was not enough to let their foolish minds understand that the unfamiliar man in black robes did not lack Magic Power. Rather, all of it had been completely restrained.

That was proof of his extraordinary control over his own Magic Power.

Still, although he had changed worlds and the people here called themselves wizards rather than Mages, their bodily structure was no different from what He Shenyan knew. Even the place where Magic Power was stored had not changed—it was still in the brain.

Thinking of this, he sighed again. How could they simply stop progressing? Why did they have to rely on wands and incantations? They could have gone further! What a shame!

The mind distorted reality, and will forced it to obey its commands. Was that not a better path than casting spells with a wand?

He shook his head helplessly, regret welling up inside him, utterly impossible to suppress.

At first, the essence of the magic he learned from Ancient One had been borrowing.

Mages used complex gestures and incantation syllables in tandem, then offered sacrifices to the Dimensional Gods to obtain Magic Power and complete their spells. As someone from another world, He Shenyan quickly noticed something was wrong.

I do not even have Magic Power. Does that still make me a Mage?

So he began making bold changes—and he had even succeeded. No one expected him to succeed.

After his improvements, the methods of spellcasting used by the Mages of Kamar-Taj had become vastly different from before.

Now, they no longer needed to borrow power and pay a painful price. They only needed to generate Magic Power through meditation, then use their mental strength to guide its flow.

A Fireball was still a Fireball, and even the spell formations had not changed, but there was no longer any need to communicate with the Dimensional Gods—why communicate with them? The creditor had become himself!

Even so, the means of obtaining Magic Power—the process of meditation—was extremely dangerous. Without long periods of practice or astonishing talent, any careless step could bring severe consequences.

At best, one would become an idiot. At worst, one would die on the spot. Even so, it could not stop Mages from all over the world from coming to Kamar-Taj one after another to study—no Mage could refuse this path.

Great power belonged to oneself.

As his attainments in magic grew ever deeper, He Shenyan did not stop there. He continued improving, continued inventing new spells, and in the process, he gradually discovered the essence of magic.

At its root, magic was the use of powerful will to influence, distort, and even change the world.

To make the world submit beneath one's feet.

That was the true reason he was disappointed in this world's wizards.

They had already traveled the path Kamar-Taj's Mages had spent thousands of years walking, yet they had abruptly stopped moving forward. They could clearly take another step, go even further. Just one small step!

Yet no one took it.

The wizards of this world were all children who had only just learned to run. They possessed talent, and the outstanding ones might even have formidable Magic Power. Sadly, that talent had been wasted, utterly wasted.

Once they grew up, they could have become professional runners. Those with exceptional talent could even have become Bolt, running so fast that everyone was astonished and becoming synonymous with greatness. But now—

He Shenyan raised his head and looked at the clear sky over the European countryside, unable to help feeling hesitant.

Do I really want to do this?

Do I really want to help them advance and forcibly change this world's course as an outsider? They are satisfied with the status quo. Though I resent their failure to strive, that resentment is entirely unreasonable.

He closed his eyes, intending to rest for a while and let go of this pointless obsession, but then a voice sounded in his heart.

It was not his voice.

"Please help them."

The voice vanished in an instant. He Shenyan lifted his head in shock—someone had bypassed the protective spell formation he had set up and begun speaking directly within his mind?

Who are you?!

The voice answered two seconds later. "The World Barrier. I have accepted you, outsider, so I ask you to help them—they have taken the wrong path."

The Mage froze. His instincts made him refuse to believe it, but his Sanity compelled him to verify whether it was true. He vanished from where he stood and appeared at a weak point in the World Barrier that he had observed earlier.

The Eye of Observation was unleashed—in that dim field of vision, the only glowing weak point slowly writhed, and a line of text appeared upon it.

"I ask you to help them. I will help you cross worlds again."

He Shenyan fell silent—he could not think of a reason to refuse. After a moment, he nodded.

And he acted immediately.

He closed his eyes and no longer concealed his mental power. His incomplete, recovering half-soul was still formidable, sweeping across the entire world in an instant. At that moment, everyone with Magic Power inside their bodies felt an inexplicable palpitation.

However, only those with great magical power could realize that this was actually a message, an invitation.

There were many ways to help. The most efficient might have been to brainwash every spellcaster in the world and brutally force knowledge into them, leaving them to fend for themselves without any concern for the dangers of meditating alone.

But if someone asked what He Shenyan had learned from the more than seven hundred long, tedious histories of magic from around the world in Ancient One's library, he would tell them one thing: any Mage who stopped seeing himself as human and placed himself above all living beings would meet a miserable end.

After all, you were born human.