No amount of envy would fill his stomach.
Lucian stared at the illusion for a while, then found a seat at random and ordered the cheapest bowl of plain noodles.
While he waited for his noodles, he continued watching the news on the Mana Illusion Projector.
After the previous news item ended, the image shifted to a view from high in the sky.
Below lay a sprawling, magnificent city.
Lucian recognized it at once as Wimbledon City, the capital of the Candel Empire.
Lucian had never visited the empire's great capital himself, but he often saw it on illusion news broadcasts, so it was very familiar to him.
Being familiar enough with a place he had never visited to recognize it at a glance was something his parents' generation would never even have dreamed of before.
His parents, for instance, had never traveled farther than the province's third-largest city, roughly fifty kilometers from his hometown. They had never even visited the provincial capital, let alone Wimbledon City.
If the world had remained unchanged, they would have been like his grandparents' generation, spending their entire lives in their hometown and knowing almost nothing about the outside world.
But the Xinfei Merchant Guild had invented the mana signal transmission network and the Mana Illusion Projector, while the New Moon Merchant Guild produced all kinds of mana illusion programs for them. Even people who had never left their hometown could now learn about the world without leaving their homes.
It was precisely because they had watched those programs about "education" that Lucian's parents had made up their minds to send him to Philip College. They were willing to forgo buying new household magic machinery every year as their neighbors did, and endure a much harder life.
That was why Lucian had always been