Abe the Wizard

The oak tree finally stopped growing after it absorbed all the energy. Right now, its trunk was about ten meters in diameter, and its leaves grew so much that its leaves covered a large part of the region. Green flowers bloomed on the branches, and when they were at their ripest, the fruits started hanging at the tips. Just when Abel thought that this was the end of it, unique energy transpired from his palm on its own and entered into his own body. This was pure vital energy, a special power that charged up every cell in his body. It was getting hard for him to describe what was going on with his body. If he had to put it into words, it was like he was becoming a baby that had vital energy growing out of his skin, muscles, and bones.

This vitality energy continued. Any more of this, actually, and he might be the first wizard to ever die to an oversupply of vitality energy. While he was thinking about this, the wide trunk of the oak shook for a bit. After that, it transformed the vitality inside of him into pure wizard mana, which was absorbed by his wizard crystal body as soon as it went into his own body. It felt quite fabulous, to say the least. It took about ten minutes for years worth of mana to be replenished into his own body. He thought about what he was going to do with all this energy, and while doing so, he could feel that the oak tree trying to send some message to him. It made him enter into a promotion state immediately, and promotion started rising inside his own body.

Wizard Malon couldn’t be more afraid of what he was looking at. He just had all the energy inside his body taken away. Now, he’s losing all the special memories he’s stored up inside his brain. He knew what the promotion qi that was emerging out of Abel was. It was the promotion memories that he once had. The oak tree wrapped around him was literally taking every bit of him away to Abel. It was a tree of life, one with all the control it needed to make sure that the creature in control was either dead or alive.

This would’ve been a lot more different if Wizard Malon was in full condition. The tree of life was one of the weakest divine beings there was. It had no particular ways of attacking at all, and it was actually a lot tamer than other species of the same type. It was pretty great in mediating different sorts of energy, all things considered. It might just help Wizard Malon to merge with his metallic puppet better if it allowed him to take control over it. Wizard Malon was fully aware of that fact. From his point of view, he was baffled about how Abel managed to become its owner. Only the elves would ever earn the tree of life. As the elves were the sole defenders of the only tree of life in the world, it just didn’t make sense that Abel would have a second one with him.

That’s when Wizard Malon noticed the mana environment here. He thought about everything that he saw here. Eventually, he concluded that this was another world. This was another dimension they entered. He wasn’t going to say his guess, though. He would die soon, so either way, there was no real point in figuring this all out.

For Abel, he couldn’t care how much Wizard Malon knew. He was too busy getting into mediation. The amount of energy flooding in his body was just too much for him to think about how to handle them. He waited as the rank seventeen wizard rune was engraved into his own body, elevating his power of the Will capacity to a whole new level. Eventually, he became a rank seventeen wizard before regaining his consciousness. He got more and more focused on becoming one with this new flowing energy streaming inside of him. Even now, he’s yet to have seen what the oak tree had grown into.

While Abel couldn’t pay any attention to it, the oak tree seemed to know what its master wanted. It continued to suck the mana from inside of Wizard Malon’s body. The oak tree filtered the mana into a purer form. Usually, it would take about several decades to fill in the wizard crystal body of a rank seventeen wizard, but the fact that Wizard Malon was here just made it all a lot faster. After half an hour, Abel could feel himself entering into a state of promotion once more. A promotion qi rose out of him as he was ready to move on.

For Wizard Malon, he found it hard to accept that this was the way that he was going to die. There was little to no energy left inside of him, and right in front of his eyes, Abel just promoted himself by two ranks within a short span of several minutes. Abel was doing it with the energy that he had gone through so much trouble to gather over the last few centuries. He gave away a lifetime’s worth of achievement over to his biggest enemy, who still had so many years ahead of him.

Abel might not know what this all meant, but Wizard Malon did. This was what he and every other wizard wanted. Abel just became a “life-overlapper,” which was the pinnacle of what one living creature could theoretically attain. As the name suggested, a life-overlapper had two lives overlapped with one another. Life would be in a newborn state, but at the same time, it would gain all the experiences and skills that the previous life owned.

Again, Wizard Malon was very, very distraught to see Abel becoming one. It should’ve been him, in any case. Abel was just nineteen years old. He would’ve been considered a prodigy even if he was still a beginner-intermediate wizard. That’s just too much to take in for Wizard Malon. This was what he was going to see when he went through all the years, the pain, betrayal, and so much sacrifice to get to where he was at.

Without caring for what Wizard Malon was thinking, Abel began to draw his rank eighteen wizard rune right onto his own wizard crystal body. It was quite easy for him, mainly due to the concentrated crystal body had become in a very short span of time. It got him over a lot of the steps the other wizards would’ve been stuck at. He should’ve been grateful to Wizard Malon, actually. He was only there to enjoy the fruit of other people’s work.

While Abel was thinking about what to do with the mana growing inside him, he realized that the mana source was suddenly gone once it grew halfway. He woke up very quickly from his meditation state. As he opened his eyes, he realized that none of the things he experienced were in a dream. He had actually just become a rank eighteen advanced wizard. While it was still not enough to get him face against a rank twenty wizard, he would at least have the power to move without having his wizard crystal body being put under pressure. Like now, he was standing in front of a rank twenty wizard. He couldn’t stand up for a fight, but he had the option to run at any point he wanted.

Back to Wizard Malon. He was already dead. It’s not like Abel wanted to bury his body right here, but there had to be a special way of handling the corpse of a law-defying wizard. Even having to come to mind what that might be, he decided first to put it inside his Valaya’s ring.

He looked towards the oak tree to realize just how big it had become after doing everything here. He was lucky that there was some distance from here to the Rogue’s Encampment. Otherwise, the whole camp would just be covered by a bunch of bushes.

On the oak tree, there were figs that seemed to be breeding some living beings. It’s probably going to take some time for them to fully hatch, and he wasn’t sure how much time that it’d be. As far as he knew, it might just be another oak tree that was being bred. As though having spent a lot of its vital force, the oak tree just rested. There was still quite a lot of energy being stored inside, however. It’s almost like it was about to erupt at any time. Abel decided not to interrupt its rest anymore. He picked up Wizard Malon’s four portal bags, and very quickly, he teleported himself back to the inside of the Rogue’s Encampment.

Whilst inside the Rogue’s Encampment, the first thing he did was to reach his power of the Will inside his own portal bag. Wizard Malon was already dead, so he didn’t see anything that was interfering with him from seeing the content inside.

“I thought this was my portal bag?”

The bag was about ten cubic meters in total. Inside, several “instantaneous movement” scrolls and some other items were not so precious. He recognized them all. When he saw that there was one scroll gone, he pounded his chest with his fist.

“Wizard Malon! Agh! So he’s been using my scroll?”

Having cursed at the dead man, Able reached for the other portal bag. A wide grin appeared on his face this time. There was a large pile of the “instantaneous movement” scrolls inside. It should be about one hundred and ten or more. While he didn’t know what rank the wizard originally owned, he knew that the “instantaneous movement’ scroll” was supposed to be a very rare item. That was the same even for law-defying wizards. They also had a great demand for these scrolls to keep up with their maneuverability during fights.

Having made an inspection with his power of the WIll, Abel realized that all these “instantaneous scrolls” were transformed from max-level spells. This meant that the ones that he had were of secondary quality.

“Wait,” he paused when he saw the thing that he wanted the most. The light stones. Large ones, too. There were just about twenty in total, but each would’ve had to cost the life of one advanced holy crusader. Only a law-defying wizard would be capable of getting such a high kill count to keep these stones all to himself.

Other than that, there were also some top-level gemstones that he just didn’t care that much about. There were a total of one hundred and twenty. This was the first time he’s seen so many stones apart from his own collection. As disinterested as he was in those, he thought that he could at least trade items with them.

Come to think of it. Everything Wizard Malon had was top-level. Having gone through all of them, what he found last was a black card made of very special material. He couldn’t tell what materials they were made of and the properties they possessed. He just knew that they had to be very valuable and that that turned to be correct as he checked what was inside.

This portal bag was full of precious items. The inside was about twenty cubic meters in total, and tons of different things were inside. It made him quite hopeful of what he might find in the next bag. He went on to open the next bag and surprise, surprise. It had the five portal bags that originally belonged to him. He was quite surprised with what he was seeing, but there was still the last bag.

And so he went to open the last bag. Again, this was a bag with a total volume of twenty cubic meters. There were much more items inside, but the quality of these items was not worth the comparison. From what it looked like, this seemed to be the bag that Wizard Malon used the most. It contained his wizard crest, which was already dead and had lost all the functions that it was supposed to contain. There should be points stored inside, but disappointingly enough, there was pretty much no way to recover them.

Other than that, there were some daily commodities and a large number of intermediate gemstones. There were about several tens of thousands of intermediate gemstones in total. Other than that, there were various potions that wizards would often find themselves using. There were no healing-type potions to be found. Most of them were just for training purposes.