"Green Lands, Prologue, Third Section."
"Shadow of Hunger."
"As one of the rulers of the Green Lands, your ancient and noble bloodline must never allow the shadow of hunger to exist. Fill your granaries and make the people love you from the bottom of their hearts."
[Collect twenty-five thousand jin of food. Reward: Magic Tide revival accelerated by 2.2 hours, Frost severity reduced by 0.000026%, magic concentration increased slightly!]
Darean had been trying to get enough food to meet this condition.
Now, however, the great benefactors from Oldtown had solved that problem for him.
He did not know exactly how this thing judged whether its requirements had been met.
But the searing heat radiating from the Book of Strange Script could not be faked.
The shadow of hunger had vanished from the lands of New Land Village thanks to a force outside his plans.
The first shipment of a hundred thousand jin of food meant that no one in his domain had to worry about having enough bread on their table.
And so, the Third Section of the Green Lands Prologue in the Book of Strange Script was completed without a sound.
This time, however, things were slightly different.
Through Darean's magical vision, the magic that had been thinly scattered around him suddenly seemed to come under the command of some force.
These energies, wholly imperceptible to anyone else, began condensing from mist into tiny droplets, then gathering into thin streams that plunged into Darean's body.
It seemed that the slight increases in magic concentration from the previous three times had accumulated enough to bring about some kind of change.
Darean felt the "magic reservoir" inside him, something he could not objectively describe, rapidly expanding.
A faint tearing sensation appeared throughout his body.
Magic was changing his flesh little by little, though the changes were not obvious.
Once the expansion of his "magic reservoir" reached a certain limit, the remaining magic he had drawn over seemed to lose its direction.
And so, in another dimension.
Crowded together, it...
Burst apart with a bang!
So faint that it almost dissipated, yet undeniably present, the magic formed a tide that spread in every direction.
The wave covered his entire domain, then continued spreading into the distance.
Most of the ordinary people enthusiastically mixing mortar and laying bricks, working to turn New Land Village into New Land Town, felt nothing.
Yet not everyone in this world was ordinary.
And so...
The Citadel.
An assistant maester cleaning a cellar gazed at the Glass Candle enshrined on a raised platform.
His mind was full of visions of the moment when he would finish forging his own maester's chain and swear his vows as a maester.
He would kneel in the unlit cellar and keep vigil, unless this Glass Candle began to burn.
The original purpose of this act was to warn new maesters that even a man filled with knowledge could not do everything.
Later, it had evolved into an established ritual.
Yet as he indulged in his fantasies, his eyes, fixed on the Glass Candle, suddenly caught a fleeting flash of light at its tip.
It was a purplish-red light.
Enchanting and beautiful.
"Am I seeing things? What was that?"
The poor assistant maester muttered to himself.
The same thing happened to Marwyn as he was working with herbs.
Of the Citadel's four Glass Candles, one was in his possession.
He did not witness it firsthand, however.
For his back had been turned to the Glass Candle when it lit.
"Maester... did you... see that light just now?"
The young "assistant maester" pressed into helping him looked as though he had seen a ghost. Pointing at the Glass Candle sitting in a recess in the wall behind Marwyn, he asked in a low voice.
"What light?"
Looking puzzled, Marwyn followed the young apprentice's trembling finger and looked in the direction he indicated.
Then he saw the Glass Candle standing there alone.
"Are you sure it was this thing?"
Marwyn thought the apprentice was joking.
"Y-yes. A purplish-red flame, right at the tip. It burned for a moment and went out. By the Seven, Maester, I swear I'm not lying."
His expression slowly began to change.
A tremendous storm surged through the heart of this old scholar who had spent his whole life studying magic and the occult.
Throughout history, there had been one and only one explanation for a burning Glass Candle:
"Magic..."
Marwyn murmured to himself. Suddenly, he turned to look in a certain direction.
"Was it you?"
He asked.
But no one answered him.
At the same time.
At the top of the Hightower.
An old man leafing through an ancient book amid the dust calmly swept his untroubled eyes across the characters on the pages, whose meanings had long since become indecipherable.
Members of his family had always been obsessed with studying these books left over from antiquity, which seemed to describe magic.
Since the gods had granted him a lifespan far beyond that of ordinary men.
Wasting it on tedious power struggles would go against their will.
Over countless days and nights, objects collected at the cost of vast sums of gold dragons had passed before the old man's eyes, one after another.
By now, he no longer felt disappointment.
Without expectations, how could there be disappointment?
Yet the instant his withered fingers touched the next page of the book.
A strange force from an unknown direction suddenly invaded the book before him, which had lain silent for thousands of years.
Invaded was not quite the right word.
It had awakened. It had been roused!
A viscous black substance, like mud, burst out of the thin pages. In barely half a breath, it burrowed straight into his exposed blue veins and vanished.
Bewilderment following a moment of dazed confusion appeared on the face of the most powerful man in this land.
The thing he had longed for had actually revealed a glimpse of its formidable nature on such an unusually peaceful afternoon.
Yet these things seemed different from what he had expected.
The old man knew that something had just entered his veins.
At this very moment, perhaps it was following his flowing, warm blood toward the heart that, though no longer young, still beat.
But what was it?
He seemed to have...
Forgotten something.
And so, he turned toward the darkness behind him.
A pair of black-tinged eyes stared straight into it.
An aged, hoarse voice, like dry bark scraping across the ground, slowly crept into the shadows.
The voice said:
"Moroia, what were we just looking at?"
No one answered.
Only the faint sound of breathing came from the darkness.
[Spell: Magic Foundation] [A supreme bloodline forges the foundation of magic. The user inscribes a magical array beneath the foundations, making the walls built upon them stronger, until they are ultimately indestructible.]
This was what the little stone that lit up in the Book of Strange Script after the completion of the Third Section represented.
Darean naturally thought of the Wall, standing alone at the northern end of the world.
When Brandon the Builder had built it, he and the Children of the Forest, who had still been active at the time, had inscribed magical arrays into the Wall's foundations.
Thus, unless an undead dragon, itself a wielder of magic, came to destroy it, the Wall had stood unshaken for thousands of years.
The bitter winds of the Lands of Always Winter simply could not cross it.
Perhaps this [Spell: Magic Foundation] is the same thing as what lies beneath the Wall.
Darean thought.
Before you continue