"Can you take us with you, Master Angele?" Julie begged as she grabbed ahold of her brother and sister’s hands.
"Sorry,"—Angele shook his head slightly—"I can’t adopt you."
He knew that Cruise had many political enemies when he was alive. As a friend, he had wanted to help the man’s children, but without the intention of adopting and treating them as his own.
He also knew that it was not the first time Julie tried asking for a wizard to adopt them; however, no one wanted to become the target of Cruise’s political enemies. The best way to help the three children was to keep them out of this fight. People wouldn’t care as long as they were mortals.
Angele sighed. "Go talk to Barry and study in school. You’ll find a good job in the city after you have graduated."
After saying that, he left.
Angele would not become the department head after the death of Cruise. The headquarter would send someone else to replace Cruise, and Angele could keep doing his job as an assistant.
He declined all the party invitations from his colleagues and returned to the mansion by the Ness River.
Angele had decided to stay in the mansion and focus on practicing the Molten Core River.
The required runes and magic circles for the fourth stage were extremely hard, and he was still having trouble understanding them.
He had wanted to take his time to study the magic circles, explore the Nightmare Realm, and spend more time with Freia.
Air transportation city, by the edge of the Abyss Canyon.
Under the dim sunlight, the Abyss Canyon looked like a huge fissure in the land, with chilling air breathing out from the darkness.
The orange light from the setting sun illuminated the ground, and the ladder-shaped clouds were painted in gold.
*Crack*
A white leather boot stepped on a small rock, flattening it.
It was a woman with a huge chest and a charming face. She was wearing a long tight robe, and her face held a cold expression.
Her skin was clean, her face pretty, and her right ear was long and white, covered with grey fur.
The woman glanced around the area.
"This the last place that I detected Terry’s vital signs," she muttered.
Two men in white robes were behind the woman.
One of the men crouched and touched the ground to check the dust.
"The death wave that ended a while ago already erased all the living beings from the area and we won’t be able to locate the murderer." His brow furrowed. "Master Erwin, I think we’re just wasting time, we should find Master Julian and…"
"Are you questioning my decision?"
The woman named Erwin turned around and glared at the man.
"Yeah." The man stood up and responded in a cold tone, "Master, you’re just wasting your time."
*BOOM*
The male wizard’s head exploded like a watermelon, his brain, mixed with the shattered bones, splashed on the ground.
Erwin lowered her right hand calmly.
"It has been 500 years since someone last questioned my decision…" She turned her head around and stared into the abyss again.
The male wizard’s dead body fell to the ground. Black strings of smoke rose from the dead body and formed a human’s face. There were no nose nor ears on the face, and the scene was terrifying.
"Master Erwin! What you just did was unacceptable and I’ll report the situation to Master Phil!" The human face roared in anger and slowly disappeared into the air.
Erwin was not concerned about what the face just said—she was still looking at the abyss. The other male wizard did not react to the incident either, and it seemed like he didn’t care that one of them was just killed.
"Terry… I’ll avenge you…" Erwin spoke in a light tone.
"Master, a rank 4 wizard in the air transportation wants to speak to you through communication rune. What do you think?" the man questioned.
"No. H
e’s just a rank 4 wizard without the inheritor magic circle and I’m sure he doesn’t have any important matter. Everyone thinks that Terry and Cena were killed by the underground race, but I’m seeing something different. They were murdered by someone else," Erwin explained. "I’ll stay here for several more days. You can go back first."
"Yes, master." The man bowed and left, leaving the other man’s body on the ground.
The Nightmare Realm, in the mansion beside the Ness River.
Angele stood quietly in the center of the living room and started thinking in front of the two matrices’ control panels.
Phoenix stood on the wooden bird stand in the corner of the living room singing in a strange voice. The bird had cleaned its feathers with its beak, and its body was a bit larger than before, surrounded by a golden glow.
The morning sunlight went through the window and dropped on the floor, dividing the living room into two areas.
With Zero’s help, Angele was able to analyze his progression: ‘My advancement with Molten Core River slowed down again. It’ll probably take me four to five years to reach the bottleneck of the fourth stage.’
Wizards needed to find their own ways to break the bottleneck, but some of them needed at least one hundred years to figure out the way. Although Angele had the help from the biochip, it would still take him a while to advance to the next rank.
‘My enemies will find me sooner or later. I’ll need to find some other ways to increase my power.’ Angele recalled the scene he witnessed in the stone room and it was making him excited.
‘Zero, is the analysis of the Frozen Wave Matrix completed yet?’ Angele asked. He had spent most of his time practicing the Molten Core River, so he had asked Zero to analyze the matrices for him.
‘Task completed. The Frozen Wave Matrix has been partially analyzed. Creating the basic model.’
A simple graph of the matrix was displayed in front of his eyes.
It was a diamond-shaped picture with five blue dots.
Four dots formed the diamond shape, and the dot in the center was blinking.
The dots were all connected by the energy strings.
‘That’s the basic unit of Frozen Wave Matrix?’
The structure graph for the complicated matrices usually contained multiple basic units and was hard to understand, but Zero did a good job analyzing them. Angele could have always studied the structure himself, but that would’ve taken a lot of time and he might become bored halfway through.
It only took Zero five months to create the basic model for the basic unit of the Frozen Wave Matrix, and even then, it was able to simplify the graph by a lot.
Angele looked at the simplified graph of the matrix, and it was the simplest graph of a matrix he had ever seen.
The book related to the matrices could never teach him something like this.
‘Show me the data,’ he ordered.
*DI*
Rows of complicated data were displayed under the blue graph.
The most important information was the function and energy consumption of the matrix.
‘Function: Release energy shockwaves. Damage, zero. Good for alarm. Range is decided by energy consumption.’
‘Energy consumption: 1.52 degrees/hour.’
Angele looked at the simple graph and sighed with mixed emotions.
‘The powerful Frozen Wave Matrix is created with such weak basic units…’
He walked to the sofa and sat down. Taking out five regular magic stones, he placed them on the table just like the five dots on the graph and used some clean water to create the energy strings and connected the stones.
After all the stones were connected, Angele used his right index to tap on the magic stone in the center of the basic matrix.
A translucent shockwave was released from the center of the matrix and it started expanding to all angles. The shockwave quickly covered the whole living room.
Angele was satisfied with the result.
‘That’s the basic unit of Frozen Wave Matrix. Zero, analyze the basic unit of the Twisting Matrix for me and find the two energy cores of it. Also, see if you can try to combine the two basic units.’
He wanted to create an energy center using the two matrices, and he wanted to connect the two matrices in such a way that only one crystal card would be needed to deliver energy to them.
The ultimate goal was to connect all the matrices in an area and power them all solely through one crystal card.
‘Task created. Analysis started…’ Zero’s mechanical voice echoed in his ear.
Angele headed to the second floor and entered the reading room.
The reading room was rebuilt into a laboratory. Freia was no longer allowed to enter the room and there was a defensive magic circle set up outside the door.
Bottles with various sizes were located in the room, and many crystal bottles had glowing liquids inside.
There was a white platform in the center of the reading room. A female, with a slim body and half the height of an adult, was lying on the platform quietly with her eyes closed. The female had a pair of translucent wings, like those of a dragonfly, and her hair was silver.
She was a corpse of an unknown species, and Angele had been studying her body for a while.
The dead body was surrounded by an invisible force field, with a diameter of about two meters, and no living being could enter the area.
Angele had not yet found a way to destroy the force field. He had purchased a small energy absorption matrix from the market and he had thought that the force field would disappear if there were no longer any energy supporting it.
He could have tried to break the force field by force, but he didn’t want to damage the body.
Angele walked to the body and tried to touch the dead body.
*CHI*
It sounded like a soap bubble was pricked by a finger.
Angele knew that it meant the force field was no longer supported by a sufficient amount of energy. Raising his right hand, Angele created a small silver dagger as he tried to stab into the chest of the body.
However, before the tip of the dagger contacted the body’s skin…
*BAM*
A ball of purple flame covered the whole dead body.
Angele did not expect it and his finger was scorched by the purple flame. His expression changed and he took several steps back quickly.
White, green, and red glows flashed on Angele’s body and the purple flame was slowly extinguished. The tip of his index finger already turned purple and it was hard like crystal.
The body was still covered in the purple flame as it slowly melted and started evaporating.
"Damn!" Angele was not sure what he did wrong, however, the purple flame reminded him of something.
He quickly raised his right arm and the dark red armband flashed.
*WOO*
The armband started absorbing the purple flame from the dead body.