After seeing Ovesto out, Roland accompanied him all the way to the street corner. Only after watching him board his carriage and leave did Roland shake his head slightly.
"Why does it feel like my teacher has grown old? He's even starting to stoop when he walks..."
Atali, who stood beside him, asked in puzzlement, "Isn't Lord Ovesto already past sixty?"
"I mean, when I first entered the tower and met him, he wasn't this..."
At that point, he suddenly stopped.
"Heh, I'm being foolish. That was already ten years ago."
"Ten years have already passed..."
Atali suddenly seemed to remember something too, and fell silent.
"Time really is the most miraculous magic of all."
Roland sighed with a smile, but did not dwell on it. He returned inside to read.
Roland spent all of March and April socializing with various people and consulting reference materials.
By then, he understood more and more clearly that advancing to the higher tier was no easy matter for an ordinary person.
The divide between the middle and higher tiers was a crucial watershed in the magical world, almost amounting to a complete transformation of body and soul.
It also involved saturation with magic power and the question of human longevity.
"Humans aren't naturally a Long-Lived Species, nor are they true magical creatures. Changing that is almost equivalent to defying heaven and rewriting one's fate.
"And regardless of the world or the method of cultivation, rewriting one's fate like that is extremely difficult.
"Fortunately, so many mages and higher-tier professionals from every field have explored this already that the paths of advancement are well established. There's no need to find one myself.
"If I'd arrived a few thousand years earlier, when the overall professional system wasn't as complete and higher-tier practitioners weren't so common,