Wizard: Starting from the Skill Tree

He walked to the spot where Jin Mo had vanished and lowered his head, looking at the ice beneath his feet that was slowly melting.

Magma was surging under the ice layer, bulging the ice surface into one crack after another.

A barely perceptible gleam flashed across his amber pupils—that was him using the perception of his nascent Domain to track the direction of Jin Mo’s escape.

A few breaths later, he withdrew his gaze.

"He ran. Direction is southwest and downward, very fast—already beyond precise tracking range." His tone was very flat.

"Being able to slip out of my perception range ahead of time means his Perception Ability far exceeds the normal Level 4 Middle Tier. Someone like that won’t only make a single move. Our next battlefield deployment has to factor his presence in."

Ares nodded, then asked the most crucial question: "Do you think he’s a Child of the Plane?"

Alviss glanced at him; there was no excess emotion in those amber pupils.

"That’s not important. What Plane doesn’t have a Child of the Plane? It doesn’t affect the overall situation."

...

The sense of crisis hanging over his head suddenly dissipated in one instant.

It didn’t gradually fade, but snapped like a taut string cut without warning.

The heavy pressure still pressing at the edge of his perception one second ago vanished completely the next.

As Duke moved forward through the rock strata, he carefully sensed for a while, confirming that the signal of that Level 4 existence had completely disappeared from his perception range, before slowly letting out a breath.

He floated out from a fissure in the rock wall, not rushing to emerge onto the surface. Instead, he found a relatively stable cavity within the strata, sat down against the rock wall, and sent his Spiritual Power into the Six-Ring Badge.

A few unread messages lay quietly in the badge’s Spiritual Power network.

The first was from Vera, sent not long after he had jumped into the magma lake.

"Safe. Where are you." The wording was concise, but Duke had known her for a few years; he knew that the more she worried, the fewer words she used.

After reporting he was safe, Duke contacted Leon, Edmond, and Morris as well, discovering that their ability to flee for their lives was in no way inferior to his own—they truly had prepared plenty of life-saving methods.

He went through all the unread messages; there was nothing from Rex, and the messages he had sent over had no reply either.

Duke stared for a few seconds at that name in the badge which had given no response.

A bad premonition slowly rose like icy water.

Rex wasn’t the type to ignore badge messages. During this time in the Twenty-Third Battle Group, every time he sent Rex a message, the reply had come quickly.

The battle group commander’s duties required him to keep communication open at all times—unless he no longer needed to fulfill those duties.

Duke sent another message: "Lord Rex, I am safe. Requesting next instruction."

There was no response. He waited a long time in that cavity within the rock strata, but the message remained unread.

Just as he was about to shut down the badge and continue on his way, a new message popped up.

The sender’s name made his fingers pause: Ares.

"Rex is dead in action. The Twenty-Third Battle Group will temporarily be under Direct Legion Command. Your squad’s mission is complete. Return to the southern camp of Black Stone Plain to rest."

Duke stared at the words "dead in action" for several seconds. The back that had stood at the front of the formation when they set out, deep-blue uniform gleaming coldly under the dark-red sky—was gone just like that.

He remembered what Rex had once said: as invaders, Wizards naturally had to be prepared to die in a foreign land.

Rex had long been prepared; it was just that this day had come slightly earlier than he had expected.

Duke shut off the badge and stood up from the cavity in the strata.

This was not the time for mourning. He continued moving southeast, his Earth Element Transformation body gliding soundlessly through the crust.

The detour would cost some time, but safety came first.

The booming of Magic from the direction of Black Stone Plain had stopped at some unknown moment.

Those dull impacts that had gone on for days, like the Earth itself roaring, had all abruptly ceased at a certain point.

They hadn’t gradually weakened, but instead cut off cleanly, as if someone had severed the power with a single stroke.

The situation on the main battlefield should already be clear. All dozen or so energy channels along the ore veins had been severed; the trump card of the Spirit of Molten Fire was now impossible to activate. Next would be the cleanup phase.

Then he heard the sound of an explosion.

It didn’t come through the air—he was still deep within the strata; sound couldn’t travel that clearly through solid rock.

What he perceived was vibration.

The entire crust was like a drumhead struck hard by a massive hammer, jolting upward once, then slamming back down.

Immediately after, a terrifying Energy shockwave spread horizontally through the rock strata from the direction of Black Stone Plain, incredibly fast; every geological structure it passed shook violently.

Magma churned and sprayed in the fissures, rock fractured and shifted under the pressure, and even the rock layer he was in was shaken into dozens of new cracks.

Duke instantly bounced his Earth Element Transformation body out of the stone.

The moment the lingering force of the shockwave caught up to him, it was like being smashed in the chest by an invisible giant hammer; his internal organs all churned.

Fortunately, he was still deep underground; the thousand-meter-thick crust had absorbed the vast majority of the Energy for him.

He adjusted his posture, stabilized his body, quickly found a relatively stable cavity to latch onto, and sent his Spiritual Power upward.

Then he saw it from afar.

At the central region of Black Stone Plain, a gigantic dark-red pillar of fire was erupting from underground.

The pillar of fire had a diameter of at least two to three thousand meters; its height was immeasurable.

After breaking through the surface, it rammed straight into the clouds, burning a massive hole through the hazy volcanic ash clouds shrouding the skies above Black Stone Plain.

The clouds at the edge of the hole were baked scarlet by the intense heat, like a ring of burning wound.

The pillar of fire itself was not ordinary flame, but a mixture of extremely high-density Fire Attribute Elemental Particles and magma. In the course of its eruption, it kept bursting with blinding white light; each flash marked another small-scale secondary explosion within the pillar.

The shockwave spread outward along the surface. Wherever it passed, pale-gray volcanic ash and black Black Tortoise rock fragments were blasted hundreds of meters into the air, forming a gray-black ring-shaped wall of dust that pushed outward without pause.

The dust wall advanced at a furious pace, covering the ridgeline zones around Black Stone Plain in just a few breaths.

The Wizard camps, supply convoys, and Slave Creature Legions that had yet to pull out along the ridges were swallowed the instant the dust wall swept over them.

There were still several main camps of Wizard Legions around Black Stone Plain. All those dense tents and marching slave creatures were at this moment being shredded into pieces by the shockwave.

This was the trump card of the Spirit of Molten Fire.

It seemed severing the ore veins did not make activation impossible. At the final moment, the Spirit of Molten Fire had used the remaining underground Energy to directly detonate the Heart of Molten Fire beneath Black Stone Plain.

Ordinarily, the Heart of Molten Fire was their Energy Source, a super-high-capacity Energy storage device.

But right now, it was a colossal bomb, ignited by the Energy of the entire underground vein network.

If we lose, we die together—that was its final testament.

The information Duke captured with his Spiritual Power went far beyond what his eyes could see.

In the instant of the explosion, in the second the pillar of fire shattered through the crust, something was blasted up from deep underground.

Not magma or ore, nor anything belonging to the material layer—but something more fundamental, more pure: fragments.

Those fragments were diffusing outward, mingled with the shockwave and the pillar of fire. Each carried an extremely pure aura of the Flame Rules. They clustered close together, surging along the edge of the pillar with the Energy Flow of the blast, and were dissipating at a terrifying speed.

They were not Rule Fragments, at least not complete ones; they were more like residual Energy stripped from the very source of the Flame Rules when the Heart of Molten Fire detonated.

In Wizard Plane terminology, this kind of thing was called Rule Embers.

Rule Embers were neither complete Rules nor ordinary high-density Elemental Particles, but a transitional state between the two, usually produced in extreme environments and existing for an extremely short time.

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