Wizard: Starting from the Skill Tree

Ares has indeed been very busy these days, from morning till night, there was almost always someone in the command tent.

The Legion Commanders of the 235th Legion, 227th Legion, 241st Legion, 209th Legion, 218th Legion, and 253rd Legion, among others, who participated in the Black Stone Plain campaign, had to hold at least one meeting in the command center almost every day.

Sometimes there was one meeting in the morning and another in the afternoon, or sometimes it continued from dusk until late at night.

The meetings at the level of Legion Commanders focused on strategic matters: battle aftermath evaluations, resource assessments, and the next step in planning.

However, according to the gossip spread privately by staff officers who occasionally overheard snippets at the command entrance, the attitude from above wasn’t very positive.

The Black Stone Plain was essentially conquered; after more than a dozen supply veins were cut, the army of the Heart of Molten Fire lost its energy supply and was crushed by multiple directions from the several legions of the Six-Ring Tower on the front lines.

Although the final explosion of the Heart of Molten Fire couldn’t be completely prevented, it was launched in a situation where the army of the Heart of Molten Fire was defeated overwhelmingly, having no reverse impact on the outcome of the front battle.

From a military perspective, it was a victory.

The Black Stone Plain and its surrounding areas are now under the actual control of the Wizard Plane, with the remnants of the Heart of Molten Fire’s defeated soldiers fleeing deep into the Red Ridge Mountains, unable to organize an effective counterattack in the short term.

Yet, the evaluation criteria from above weren’t based on the military victory but on the return on investment.

What is the most valuable thing on the Black Stone Plain? It’s not those Level 1 or Level 2 Elemental Crystal ores; although combined, these ores constitute a considerable wealth, what truly led the Wizard Council to launch this campaign was the known largest Fire Attribute Elemental Crystal vein system beneath the Black Stone Plain, and the Heart of Molten Fire, hailed as the energy hub in the southeast corner of the Ashfire Continent.

The former provides a stable long-term resource output, while the latter serves as a top strategic resource for researching Flame Rules, forging High-level Witchcraft Artifacts, and even assisting Fire Element Mages in advancement.

These were the two things the Wizard Council explicitly required to be preserved as intact as possible from the beginning.

However, the vein system was largely destroyed in the explosion of the Heart of Molten Fire. Many of the cut supply veins fractured or got buried in the geological collapse triggered by the explosion, turning the once-exploitable network of veins for decades into a wasteland of fragmented geological structures.

Recovering mining operations isn’t impossible, but it would require additional manpower and resources for geological reconstruction, with costs multiplying several times.

And the Heart of Molten Fire itself, the most important strategic target of the entire campaign, also turned to ash in the explosion, leaving only a pillar of fire shooting skyward and a giant lava lake slowly cooling—it’s said the faces of the people from the Resources Development Department turned green when they heard the news.

The loss of the Slave Creature Legion also displeased those above; several legions mobilized billions of slave creatures as cannon fodder to consume the front lines of the Heart of Molten Fire with their flesh and blood.

This tactic itself wasn’t problematic, as slave creatures are meant to be expendable, and the Wizard Council never cared about the life and death of cannon fodder.

However, the problem was that when the Heart of Molten Fire exploded, a large number of slave creatures who hadn’t been withdrawn from the battlefield were caught up in the shockwaves and secondary eruptions, resulting in losses far exceeding expectations.

Reported final statistics led to the logistics department, reportedly, to slam the table.

Nearly 70% of the billions of slave creatures were lost in just a few days of battle, a loss rate that ranks prominently in the history of the Wizard Council’s plane conquest wars.

Although the Black Stone Plain was ultimately captured, suffering 70% cannon fodder losses to gain a devastated wasteland is clearly not worthwhile.

That’s why Ares’ face has been rather grim these past few days; as the Legion Commander of the 235th Legion, one of the main forces on the front lines of the Black Stone Plain campaign, he naturally became the primary target of accountability in meetings.

Even though the task of cutting the veins was executed by multiple small units independently, and both the Twenty-Third Battle Group and Mateo dispatched by Ares completed their missions satisfactorily, the overall campaign’s outcome didn’t meet expectations, and as the commander of the main force, he couldn’t escape joint responsibility.

Reportedly, during a third-day meeting, Ares had a table-slamming argument with another Legion Commander, focusing on whether to include Jin Mo’s presence in the official battle report.

The other Legion Commander believed the appearance of a Level 4 Child of the Plane with four attribute fusions on the battlefield was a significant intelligence failure, and the Intelligence Department, completely unalerted beforehand, should bear the main responsibility.

Ares, on the other hand, thought pursuing accountability at this point was meaningless; Jin Mo’s existence was already confirmed, and what’s necessary next is to adjust deployments, not to blame each other.

But no matter how the arguments went in meetings, the battle was over, and the aftermath work still needed to be done.

Since the Black Stone Plain has already been seized, it won’t be given back.

The Wizard Plane’s plane conquest wars follow a mature process: after seizing an area, the first step is to secure the defense, establish permanent military strongholds, deploy Defense Magic Arrays and vigilance lines to prevent enemy counterattacks.

The second step is basic construction, setting up long-term camp facilities, building supply lines from the rear to the front line, and setting up teleportation arrays at key locations to shorten the transport time of supplies and personnel.

The third step is resource development, where the Resources Development Department dispatches professional teams to conduct comprehensive exploration and assessment of the resources in controlled areas and formulate long-term mining plans.

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