Dust Sprites and News

"I never knew there were... things hiding in this room."

Dago looked at the tiny figures of smoke in Baker's hand. His voice trailed off; he did not know what to call them.

The little creatures were not flesh-and-blood life-forms. They seemed more like products of rules and elements that had happened to coalesce in an environment of unusually high concentration. They flitted between Baker's pale fingers as though drifting through the seam between reality and the Spirit World.

"Dust Sprites."

Baker supplied the name, then said evenly, "Once you've lived here long enough, you'll come across them. They're very shy. I'd been here fifteen years before I could gradually begin to interact and communicate with them in simple ways."

Fifteen years...

Dago pressed his lips together. A barely perceptible tremor passed through the depths of his eyes.

To a long-lived species, fifteen years might pass in a blink. But to a wizard still on the rise, it was enough time for one generation to replace another, enough for a glorious school to fall to ruin.

In this cramped attic, Baker had traded fifteen years of desolation for "simple interactions" with these insignificant elemental creatures?

No. There was more to it than that.

Dago quickly corrected himself.

There were no geniuses without a reason in this world, and no one became powerful without one either.

Baker had advanced to Third-Ring Wizard before his soul reached fifty years of age and earned the resounding title of "Four-Colored Crystal." His exceptional talent was only part of the reason. The top-tier resources the Thorn Ring had poured into him were just as important.

And that kind of investment often came at a price most people could not bear: absolute solitude and an almost self-punishing pursuit of truth.

This was the Thorn Ring's Ascetic