Wizard World

Bang, bang, bang. A violent knocking sound came from the heavy door.

Inside the hut, Green, who was sleeping soundly under a tattered quilt, was startled awake in an instant. The icy numbness in his feet made him gasp, but he didn't dare delay. "Coming," he shouted.

Ignoring his feet, which were nearly frozen to the point of losing all sensation, Green nimbly put on his ragged clothes, grabbed the leather coat he used as a second blanket, and opened the wooden door.

As the biting winter wind blew in, mixed with shards of ice, Green's body shuddered from the shock.

Outside the door, Old Ham was curled up on a dilapidated wooden cart, holding a leather whip in one hand and puffing on a pipe with the other. The cart had left two deep ruts in the pitted, snow-covered ground.

"Hurry up. The road isn't easy today; we'll get scolded if we're late."

After taking a fierce drag from his pipe, Old Ham grumbled at Green.

"Oh, I know."

Green pulled the wooden door shut and climbed onto the cart with practiced ease. Everything was routine; ever since he'd taken on this steady job with Uncle Ham, Green heard him mutter that same line every single day.

Ham didn't have much to say. After one last puff on his pipe, he cracked the whip hard. The old horse let out a muffled grunt and pulled the cart forward through the uneven snow.

Green leaned against the cart's railing, looked up at the dark, murky sky, and closed his eyes to doze off again. Based on past experience, in this kind of snowy weather, it would take the old cart at least half an hourglass to reach the Viscount's Manor in the city, by which time it would be nearly dawn.

Leaning against the cart, Green smelled the familiar scent of dry tobacco and felt a deep sense of gratitude toward Old Ham from the bottom of his heart.

Green's earliest, most primitive memory was of a winter filled with heavy, goose-feather snow. All memories before that were a complete void, and no one had ever seen Green before that day; it was as if he had simply popped into existence out of thin air.

From then on, Green had often hung around Bissell City with a group of orphans, living a life of begging and starvation, until one day, Old Ham, who had no children of his own, saw that Green was quite sharp. Thinking of his own childless state, he took Green in.

Old Ham would chuckle, "When I die, these two huts and the old horse will be yours."

To be honest, these two country huts and the old cart weren't worth much, but they filled Green with gratitude toward Old Ham, whom he regarded as a second father.

As for the job that kept Old Ham and Green alive, it was to arrive at the Viscount's Manor in Bissell City before dawn every morning, clean up the massive amount of trash left behind after the high-and-mighty noble lords finished their night of revelry, haul it outside the city to dispose of it, and then purchase all the supplies needed for the next night's festivities.

This round trip took up the better part of the day.

Half an hourglass later, clatter, clatter—the road began to smooth out as they reached the paved stone path.

Green, dozing on the cart, didn't need Old Ham to remind him; he woke up naturally, knowing they had reached Bissell City and were about to arrive at the Viscount's Manor. He hurriedly brushed the snow off his body, tidying his appearance as best he could.

Although the nobles who had spent the night partying at the Viscount's Manor were usually long gone by the time Green and Old Ham arrived, and even if some remained, those high-and-mighty lords wouldn't spare a glance for two lowly servants, so appearance didn't really matter.

However, the old butler of the Viscount's Manor was a difficult man who always made things hard for the menial servants like Green, waiting to squeeze out some benefits. More than once, he had used the flimsy excuse of "disheveled appearance" to extort silver coins from Old Ham.

The two burly knight guards at the gate of the Viscount's Manor were already exhausted after a night of standing watch. They glanced at Old Ham and Green, but having been familiar with them for years, they paid them no mind.

Old Ham offered a fawning smile, while Green jumped off the cart and headed into the manor with his head bowed, not daring to look around, heading straight for the luxurious hall that required careful cleaning every day.

Green and Old Ham, who were usually listless, suddenly felt that the atmosphere today was a bit different. The old butler stood at the entrance of the hall with a gloomy face, his sharp, triangular eyes glaring fiercely at Green and Old Ham, and he trotted over to them.

The old butler whispered, "Wait here properly. Plug your ears and close your eyes."

"Yes, yes."

Green and Old Ham replied in a hurry.

Faint, noisy sounds drifted from inside the hall. Although they couldn't hear clearly, they could vaguely distinguish that it was a young girl making a scene.

Instinctively, Green and Old Ham knew this must be someone important.

They waited for nearly an hourglass. The sky had fully brightened, and Green and Old Ham were stomping their feet in the snow, shivering from the cold.

The old butler, who had been guarding the hall entrance, walked over with a dark expression and hissed, "If you can't stand the cold, don't bother coming tomorrow."

Green and Old Ham's expressions changed. After struggling for a moment, Old Ham took a silver coin from his tattered linen clothes, pressed it into the old butler's hand, and kept fawning, "We can stand it, we can stand it."

"Hmph."

The old butler skillfully tucked the silver coin into his pocket and ignored them, returning to wait anxiously at the hall entrance, peering inside from time to time.

Green couldn't help but whisper, "Damn it, he just took benefits from us a few days ago, and now he wants more!"

"Sigh, forget it. Just endure it. There are plenty of people who want this job; the old butler would love for us to leave."

Old Ham sighed.

When a man gets old and is near the grave, he learns to let things go and no longer has the fiery temper of a young man.

Just then, a girl rushed out of the hall. She was wearing luxurious noble clothing, but her delicate face was covered in tear tracks. She stopped after running past Green and Old Ham and shouted back into the hall.

"I won't go to any Lilith's Cottage Wizard Academy, and I certainly won't become some wizard!"

After saying this, the girl didn't seem satisfied; she fiercely pulled out a book, threw it, and strode out of the Viscount's Manor.

"Rebellion! Rebellion! What are you two standing there for? Why aren't you chasing her?"

A pot-bellied noble lord, his face flushed with anger, roared at the two armored knights beside him.

However, what Green found unbelievable was that the usually high-and-mighty Viscount was standing beside this pot-bellied noble with a helpless expression, smiling obsequiously and whispering something to persuade him.

"Hmph, what does she know? Great wizards are the masters of this world. Do you know what price I paid for the test six months from now?"

In a great hurry, the Viscount followed the pot-bellied noble out of the manor without sparing a glance at Green or Old Ham.

As for the old butler, he followed them out in a similar rush, taking both guards with him before disappearing into the snow.

In the blink of an eye, the courtyard became empty and silent.

Seeing no one around, Green instinctively reached out to pick up the book on the ground, but Old Ham stepped forward, tapped Green's hand with his pipe, and hissed, "Do you have a death wish?"

Grimm winced in pain and whispered, "It should be fine, right? If anyone asks later, we'll just say we threw it out with the trash. It was that noble lady who dropped it on the ground anyway."

Old Ham thought for a moment, then looked up to confirm no one was around before nodding, tacitly agreeing with Grimm.

Grimm tucked the book into his clothes and then, acting as if nothing had happened, began helping Old Ham clean the hall. The massive amount of trash left behind after the nobles' night of revelry was all swept into the carriage.

Until they left, no one asked about the whereabouts of the book, so Grimm didn't give it another thought.

After all, in the past, trash often contained treasures that the noble lords looked down upon but the servants were overjoyed to find.

Creak, creak...

The carriage, loaded with a full cart of trash, slowly departed from Bissell City.

Sitting on the carriage filled with garbage, Grimm no longer felt sleepy. Suddenly remembering something, he pulled the book he had picked up from his chest.

Frowning, Grimm—like most servants working for noble lords—was generally illiterate. However, Old Ham had served as an accounting apprentice for a shop in his youth; although that shop eventually closed, he had learned to read and had taught Grimm over the past few years.

Still, the reason Grimm was frowning was that the handwriting on the cover of this book was not commonly used in daily life; the characters were unfamiliar.

After thinking for a long time, Grimm finally managed to identify the words.

"Hunting Nose Modification and Scent Atlas? What is this?"

Grimm widened his eyes. He had expected it to be a biographical novel by a bard—the kind of books those noble ladies and young masters loved most—but he hadn't expected that noble lady to have thrown away a book with such a strange title.

Wait!

Grimm suddenly thought of something, his eyes widening in disbelief!

Could this be a book written by a wizard about mysterious magic and sorcery?

Wizards were a topic only noble lords were qualified to discuss; ordinary people might not even catch a glimpse of a mysterious wizard once in their entire lives.

In the eyes of commoners, wizards mastered unfathomable sorcery and were full of evil and mystery. There were often rumors of wizards slaughtering civilians, eating children's eyes, or using commoners for evil magical experiments.

But because these wizards could easily kill commoners and even knights, and possessed extraordinary power, they were awe-inspiring.

Grimm had even fantasized more than once about how those mysterious, great wizards mastered such power, and why ordinary people couldn't.

If he became a wizard and mastered those mysterious, great powers, he wouldn't have to worry about the whims of those noble lords anymore, would he?

With a look of disbelief, Grimm quickly flipped through the Hunting Nose Modification and Scent Atlas he had just obtained, beginning to read it word by word. Sometimes, when he encountered an unfamiliar character, he would ponder it carefully or skip it for the time being.

Slowly, a look of shock began to appear on Grimm's face, as if the door to a brand-new world had been opened!

So-called scent was the biological olfactory system distinguishing volatile molecules of different substances in the air. The most pungent odors accounted for half of what a creature could distinguish.

According to the Scent Atlas, a normal human could distinguish between 300 and 400 different scents, and occasionally, people with specific functional traits could distinguish about 600.

But this olfactory discrimination was pitifully low compared to other creatures!

For example, the Infant-Crying Chicken, a creature that could emit sounds like a human infant crying, could distinguish at least 6,500 scents according to experiments.

Or the Shadow Butterfly, a magical creature that survived solely by collecting odors, which could distinguish over 8,200 scents...

The book mentioned that the creature known to capture the most scents in the air was the Three-Headed Dog. This was a formidable creature that many wizards dared not provoke, capable of distinguishing a total of 17,852 scents—every known scent a wizard could isolate.

The sense of smell of the Three-Headed Dog had reached an incredible level!

Hunting Nose Modification described the wizarding knowledge of how to modify one's own body to mimic the sensitive sense of smell of certain creatures, achieving a perfect evolution of the olfactory sense based on the wizard's own physical condition.

The magic and sorcery experiments involved many strange materials, as well as a word that appeared most frequently in the book, which Grimm still didn't understand: cell?

"Grimm! Grimm!"

After Old Ham shouted twice, Grimm finally snapped out of the wonders of the magic book. He scrambled to put the book away and helped Old Ham start dumping the trash from the carriage.

After dumping all the trash, Grimm followed Old Ham to collect goods from the Viscount's Manor as per their usual routine, intended for the noble lords' consumption that evening.

Busy until dusk, Old Ham and Grimm finally transported all the goods to the Viscount's Manor in the city, then took a dozen copper coins and headed back to the countryside. On the carriage, Grimm continued to read the Hunting Nose Modification and Scent Atlas, lost in his own world.

Old Ham looked back at Grimm and sighed, "You child, you're truly bewitched today. Is that book really that good?"

Grimm chuckled but didn't say much, his heart filled with longing and shock for this mysterious Wizard World.

Were there really living mountains that could move in this world?

Rivers that flowed from the sky?

And what exactly were those so-called exotic worlds?

What was the principle behind wizards mastering powerful magic and sorcery?

A series of questions surfaced in Grimm's mind, but there was no one to answer them.

"Sigh, you're seventeen in the blink of an eye, aren't you? Well, next year I'll renovate the house and see if I can find a girl from a suitable family nearby to be your wife. I hope I can see my own grandson before these old bones are buried."

Old Ham muttered.

Grimm didn't even look up as he mumbled casually, "What are you talking about? You'll live to be a hundred."

"Heh heh..."

Old Ham laughed and continued driving the carriage back along the familiar road.