Having decided to stop hunting other Wizard Apprentices, Leo simply made the cave in the cliff his base.
The cave was in an excellent location and very difficult to discover. Leo had climbed up here with Alice on his back, after all. Ordinary Wizard Apprentices had no interest in climbing mountains for a stroll.
There was no safer place than this.
To conduct his experiments, Leo hollowed out another cave to use as a laboratory.
Since this involved privacy between wizards, Alice hollowed out a cave of her own as well, leaving the original cave as their shared living room.
Every day, the two of them busied themselves with their own experiments, paying no attention to the competition outside.
As a disciple of the great Purple Flame Stigmata Wizard, Alice had long been capable of advancing to a First-Level Wizard. She had only been holding herself back to protect Leo. As for the championship rewards, Alice said she had no interest in those things whatsoever.
Now that Leo had decided not to participate in the championship, Alice was even happier than he was!
Leo no longer agonized over the Purple Flame Academy's top-ten spots, which guaranteed advancement to the first level, because he was dismantling an atomic bomb.
In Leo's eyes, nothing mattered more than the atomic bomb before him!
"Training the body requires sustained exposure to damage to achieve passive cellular evolution."
Modifying his tonsils, the Gravity Rune Array on his body, the High-Temperature Rune Array, the Low-Temperature Rune Array, and the Electric Shock Rune Array-all of these were intended to promote cellular evolution.
As his strength increased, he would have more rune-array modification projects planned.
Body Refinement Wizards conquered worlds with these tough bodies!
But which of Leo's current rune arrays for passively stimulating cellular evolution could possibly compare to nuclear radiation?
The instant he saw the atomic bomb, Leo's first thought was to make nuclear bombs by hand and steamroll the myriad worlds!
Atomic energy-this was the technological pinnacle Earth pursued.
Fission, fusion, antimatter.
Just thinking of those words made Leo insanely excited.
But once reason took over, he realized that, never mind making nuclear bombs by hand, he could not even withstand holding nuclear material.
He had to walk one step at a time and eat one mouthful at a time.
Beyond making nuclear bombs by hand and using nuclear radiation to stimulate cellular evolution, Leo had an even crazier idea!
That was to master atomic energy while using nuclear radiation to stimulate the evolution of his cells and body. With the two complementing each other, wouldn't this be the best path for an Elemental Body Refinement Wizard?
Leo truly admired himself for coming up with such a marvelous idea!
An Elemental Body Refinement Wizard.
Leo had never expected this path to appear so soon!
It was not that other wizards could not develop the same theoretical knowledge. It was simply that Leo, with his education from Earth, had a greater advantage over other wizards!
Even an Official Wizard could not successfully research atomic energy in a short time.
How much manpower and material resources had Earth expended between the emergence of the theory and the explosion of its first atomic bomb?
Even if every wizard's brain was equivalent to a computer, building that vast body of atomic knowledge from scratch would still take them centuries.
But now, Leo, who already possessed this knowledge and experience, could save a tremendous amount of time and avoid many wrong turns.
Success was like a fruit within arm's reach. Leo only had to reach out to pluck it!
An Elemental Body Refinement Wizard!
How many wizards yearned for that title yet could never obtain it!
Leo had never expected to find a path that suited him so easily!
Mastering atomic energy as an Elemental Wizard and enduring nuclear radiation to evolve passively as a Body Refinement Wizard-utterly perfect!
"An atomic bomb's explosion is nothing more than uranium-235 fission. Back then, only 0.6 grams of uranium-235 underwent fission in Little Boy's explosion, yet it produced an explosive yield of 100,000 tons of TNT, directly killing a hundred thousand people and destroying a city."
"If I can perfectly master uranium-235 fission, wouldn't destroying cities and countries be a piece of cake?"
Leo carefully dismantled the atomic bomb, recording every step so he would not end up with parts left over when he reassembled it.
Leo examined every detail curiously. Although he knew how an atomic bomb exploded, this was his first time handling such a devastating weapon.
Leo had no nuclear material to experiment with, so he could only remove it directly from the atomic bomb!
Without protective clothing, Leo activated his physical power, then simply wrapped himself in three layers of protective barriers.
These were all defensive wizard artifacts taken from the Wizard Apprentices he had hunted. Though their defenses were weak, capable of blocking attacks worth only a few dozen points at most, their quantity could still make up for their lack of quality.
Leo dared say he could now ignore attacks worth 300 points.
Defenses like these should let him ignore nuclear radiation, right?
Dismantle.
Record.
Sort and put away.
When a uranium-235 disk with a purity above 90 percent appeared before him, Leo felt waves of stinging pain all over his body.
Despite the multiple layers of protection, the all-penetrating nuclear radiation still passed through and irradiated him.
He immediately placed the nuclear material into a container he had prepared in advance. It was a container used for storing energy crystals, designed to minimize the natural loss of their energy.
Sure enough, once he activated the array on the container, the nuclear radiation he had just felt disappeared.
Leo took out his experimental notes and repeatedly considered and studied the sequence of the experiments to come.
The uranium-235 removed from the atomic bomb weighed 70 kilograms. Leo had no idea when he would be able to replenish his nuclear material, so these 70 kilograms were his only experimental supplies.
He had to budget carefully and give meticulous thought to the experimental use of every gram.
But as Leo continued working through his calculations, he suddenly felt a tingling sensation across his body.
Startled and puzzled, Leo looked down at his body. At some point, tiny red spots had appeared in places.
None of these red spots was even as large as a sesame seed. Like mushrooms breaking through the soil, they rapidly pushed out of his skin, then withered and fell off one after another.
"My cells have already turned cancerous after just that brief exposure to nuclear radiation?"
Leo naturally knew what these little red spots were. When he came into contact with the nuclear material earlier, the radiation had stimulated some of his cells and caused them to change.
These changes had no fixed direction and could not be predicted. They were completely chaotic and disorderly. Almost all these altered cells were cancerous and extremely harmful to his body.
Leo understood the principle perfectly. Particles from the nuclear radiation had attacked the genetic material, DNA, inside his cells, destroying the stable double-helix structure and causing the cells to become cancerous.
This was what humans on Earth feared most. Otherwise, every nuclear leak would not have caused such enormous panic.
Had Leo still possessed his former human body from Earth, his legs would have gone weak and he would have fallen to his knees by now.
But he no longer did. With the robust physique of a Body Refinement Wizard Apprentice, his body detected and expelled these cancerous cells as soon as they appeared, giving them no chance to develop or spread.
Leo had experienced passive cellular evolution many times already. His ascetic training in the desert, his high-temperature training at the volcanic crater, and his usual gravity and electric-shock training were all intended to stimulate passive cellular evolution.
But the direction of those evolutions was almost entirely controllable. His cells evolved to resist the harsh environments they experienced, becoming resistant to high temperatures, electric shocks, and gravity after changing.
Just as a person trained constantly to become stronger, his cells underwent the same training. All those trained and strengthened cells combined to form a stronger individual, Leo.
But nuclear radiation was different. It completely destroyed cellular structures, brutally demolishing everything until the cells could no longer endure it and collapsed outright, turning into the cancerous growths most harmful to the body.
Perhaps he could withstand nuclear radiation after advancing, but not now!
One important task in his planned experiments with nuclear material was figuring out how to control the direction of cellular evolution under nuclear radiation.
If he could perfectly control how his cells evolved under nuclear radiation, Leo hardly dared imagine how much stronger his body could become!
Wasn't Godzilla, who always made it his mission to destroy the island nation in the movies, the result of constant evolution through nuclear radiation?
What Leo wanted was much the same as Godzilla's evolutionary process. The only difference was that Leo wanted control over the direction of evolution!
The cancerous cells on his body were soon completely purged. Ordinary illnesses were no longer worth Leo's attention.
Time began to pass. Leo's filled experimental notebooks piled up in a corner of the cave. He busied himself every day, constantly muttering something under his breath.
Sometimes, when he ran out of ideas, he would go out to eat and chat with Alice. Although neither shared specific details about their experiments, they talked about the customs and cultures of the Wizard World.
Alice truly lived up to being a Stigmata Wizard's disciple. Leo's horizons could not compare to even a tiny fraction of hers. She had even traveled with the Purple Flame Stigmata Wizard to other worlds that many apprentices could not visit.
At most, Leo had read some introductions to the Wizard World in wizard books, but hearing about it from Alice made it more tangible.
Expeditions to other worlds could only begin after becoming an Official Wizard. Apprentices could not withstand the damage caused by differences in world laws and energy. If they went to another world, the most likely outcome was instantly becoming weaklings unable to truss a chicken.
Since Alice could visit other worlds for fun as an apprentice, she had clearly gone under her teacher's protection.
He had to admit, having a good teacher was wonderful!
Compared with Alice's experiences, Leo's experiences on Earth were hardly worth mentioning. To put it bluntly, it was a low-end world with some modest technological achievements.
Were it not for the fairly well-developed brains of Earth's humans, they would never have qualified for second-class native inhabitant status in the Wizard World.
The days passed like this, one after another.
Laboratory work was dull and tedious.
Especially since Leo's experiments rarely made any substantial progress, and he repeated the same basic experimental procedures every day.
This was all within Leo's expectations. After all, experiments involving nuclear material were never something an apprentice could manage. The most suitable time to begin would be after becoming a Level One Formal Wizard.
Besides, the laboratory Leo had on hand was still the lowest-grade portable miniature laboratory, making further tests and experiments impossible. Its measurements were only accurate to whole numbers, not even to two decimal places.