World Too Small

"Hahahaha, who would've thought? Who would've thought that a little runt like you would be scared by Stitching Beasts casually created by the great wizards."

After listening to Taylor's account and seeing his fingers still trembling unconsciously, Oak laughed so hard that even his graying beard shook.

"Don't laugh. You'll still be relying on my funding in the future. Is that how you treat an investment project you'll be profiting from?"

Watching Oak laugh nonstop, Taylor could not help feeling a little embarrassed. His young face flushed red as he snapped indignantly.

But Oak continued laughing, completely ignoring Taylor's reddened, childish face.

"Haha—cough, cough, cough... All right, all right, I won't laugh anymore. Kidd, let me ask you something. Why do you think the great wizards prepared so many Stitching Beasts?"

Oak had laughed too hard and seemed to have choked on his own saliva. After catching his breath, he asked Taylor this question.

"I don't know."

Taylor honestly shook his head.

Oak gave a mysterious smile. He raised two fingers and held them a very short distance apart.

"That's because this world is too small. It isn't enough for the great wizards to truly stretch their legs. Once you become a third-rank wizard apprentice like me, you'll know more."

Half a year later

"Black Mist!"

In his room, Taylor mobilized the magic within his body. Guided by his mental power, it flowed through the spell model and was released.

A large cloud of black mist appeared before Taylor. He deliberately stretched out his hand and fanned it hard, but the mist still remained gathered in front of him, untouched by the breeze. Clearly, this magic-infused black mist, capable of sealing off the senses, was not ordinary fog that could be scattered by the wind.

Yet the black mist was not dense. It appeared as a faint black haze, and Taylor could even see the window on the other side through it.

"Squeak, squeak, squeak!!!"

Taylor took a black mouse from a small cage beside him. He had many such cages filled with mice.

Twenty mice for one point at the sundries depot.

Taylor then controlled the black mist and slowly lowered it onto the floor. The mouse in his hand squeaked frantically. Perhaps its sesame-seed-sized brain could not distinguish what the black mist was, but instinct told it that the mist was dangerous.

Expressionless, Taylor dropped the mouse directly into the faint black haze. Very soon, as though it had realized something, the mouse began shrieking at the top of its lungs. But now, it could neither hear, smell, nor see.

Taylor could tell from the black mouse's body language alone that it was panicked and terrified.

Next, Taylor took a small cube from a pouch nearby. The scent wafting from it sent all the mice in the surrounding cages into an uproar. They even clawed madly at their bars and bit fiercely at the wire-thick cage grates.

This was an attractant specifically used to lure ordinary animals. It even had a considerable effect on some weak magical beasts that had yet to reach a rank.

Fundamentally, this attractant was an inferior magical potion, an ordinary concoction that could be kneaded together with some dirt.

After tossing the cube mixed with attractant into the black haze, Taylor discovered that the mouse, which had been blindly scurrying around inside, was not drawn to the cube at all. Instead, it became even more frightened.

It was probably because of the faint vibration caused by the cube hitting the ground. Once smell, hearing, and sight were sealed off, even slight feedback from other senses, such as touch, could have an enormous effect.

After recording this data in the notebook he carried with him, Taylor continued observing the mouse's reactions.

Under his observation, the little black mouse initially tried to walk in a straight line. But as it walked, it suddenly lost its way and began circling in place.

In a world with supernatural power, even mice could have their own differences. At the very least, in his previous life, Taylor had never known that a mouse deprived completely of smell, hearing, and sight would still think to walk in a straight line to escape its predicament.

There were only two possibilities. One was that the faint black haze he had created had some kind of disorienting effect. The other was that the mouse had lost its mind.

When linking the spell model for Black Mist through mental-power nodes, Taylor had made extremely subtle adjustments, allowing mental power and magic to flow more smoothly. Perhaps those changes had also brought him another surprise: a slight disorientation not recorded in the original data.

So Taylor grabbed two spotted mice from the cages and threw them into the black haze. Like the earlier black mouse, the spotted mice darted around everywhere at first. Then, as though they understood something, they began walking in straight lines. But after only a few steps, they started circling in place again.

"Minor disorientation."

Taylor flipped his notebook to the page for Black Mist and wrote down the words "minor disorientation."

After his minor modifications, this spell had gained an attribute of mental power. After all, disrupting the senses already involved a degree of mental-power radiation.

After dispersing the black mist, Taylor casually picked up the three mice from the floor and placed them on the windowsill. Less than a minute later, a Six-Eyed Owl suddenly appeared and swallowed all three mice whole.

The Six-Eyed Owl nodded its owl head at Taylor, then flapped its wings and flew away.

Taylor had discovered this by chance as well. As a hybrid of owl and cat, the Six-Eyed Owl naturally loved eating mice. So Taylor fed all the mice used in his experiments to the Six-Eyed Owl. After all, within the White Tower Alliance, the Six-Eyed Owl could be considered an inspector for apprentices.

After clearing an open space for himself, Taylor lit a small handful of dried grass in an iron bowl before him. He cast Black Mist again, and a faint black haze enveloped his own head.

Then he cut off his connection to Black Mist.

From his own perspective, the burnt smell he had just been able to detect abruptly disappeared. Though his eyes were wide open, everything now looked black. His sense of smell had completely vanished, and he could not hear anything either, because he had just stomped his foot hard.

At the same time, within Taylor's mental space, he felt an extremely faint strand of mental power, thin as a hair, suddenly invade his mental space and attempt to disrupt his mental judgment. But the interference was simply too weak.

It could fool mindless mice, but even an ordinary person could break through such interference by concentrating.

After the black mist slowly dissipated without a supply of magic, Taylor sat before his desk, opened his notebook, and added another note under Black Mist: almost completely ineffective against ordinary people.

"Perhaps I should try developing Black Mist's disorienting ability in the future."