Felis's advancement had been fraught with danger, and the result was barely satisfactory, but at least it had ended acceptably.
After advancing, his mind power ranked only in the lower-middle range among newly advanced Mages, not because his foundation was unstable, but because he had been forced to sacrifice a great deal of mind power to purge those three pieces of garbage. As a result, his Mental Sea was utterly empty.
But Felis had had no other choice.
He had already discovered that even when he did his best to keep his mind power from merging with those three things, they kept reaching out as though they had tentacles of their own.
Even though Felis had been working constantly to cleanse it, the filth spread its contamination very quickly, and its pace kept accelerating.
Felis had tried several times to trap them, but each attempt had been like throwing sheep to a tiger... instead, vast stretches of his sea had been contaminated.
But this had also allowed him to discover the one way to clear them out.
Though it demanded an enormous sacrifice, it was the only way to make all three filthy things appear at once and gather every last trace of their residue in one place.
He had to send everything toward those things, retaining only the basic mind power required for his advancement.
Though they had some capacity for thought and even seemed quite cunning, that was merely instinct. They were not capable of evading traps.
Instead, their greed was stronger still, so they would never pass up an opportunity.
Felis knew this would make him seem little different from an Outer-Ring Mage... but judging by Russell's constant caution and vigilance, being inconspicuous was not necessarily a bad thing for an unlucky fellow like him, who had