Wizard: Starting from the Skill Tree

After the gray-white light dissipated, the first sensation Duke felt was the strange texture beneath his feet.

He stood in the center of the basement, still atop the specially prepared circular silver-white metal transport plate, identical to the one in the Flower Sea Plane Manor basement, down to the precise direction of the connection rune engravings.

However, the texture underfoot was not the smooth hardness of metal, but a coarse, gritty sensation as if stepping on dry gravel.

He glanced downward, his pupils slightly constricting.

There was ash on the ground.

Not a thin layer of dust, but a thick gray-white powder that could cover the soles of his shoes, evenly spread over the entire basement tiles like snow.

The ashes were so thick that his shoes sank nearly a centimeter when he stood on them, producing a faint rustling sound in the dead silent basement, which sounded particularly clear.

To be precise, it was muffled; the sound reaching his ears felt as if behind a thick quilt, or as if the entire basement was enclosed in a transparent dome, muffling all sound within, no matter how loud, only to echo and fade inside without reaching outside.

"Safe house..."

Duke immediately understood; he was standing in a temporary projection zone formed by the Flower Sea Plane’s real-world material, projected into the Nightmare Plane.

This projection zone did not exist in the Nightmare Plane, not as if it were invisible or imperceptible, but fundamentally not part of the Nightmare Plane’s spatial coordinate system.

It was like an external bubble forcibly inserted into the Nightmare Plane’s space-time structure, whose internal rules still followed those of the Wizard Plane, while the Nightmare Plane creatures outside could neither see the bubble itself nor sense any happenings within.

But once the bubble dissipated, he would be exposed to the Nightmare Plane’s real environment, under the countless pairs of eyes lurking beneath the gray-white sky.

Duke lifted his head and surveyed the surroundings.

The basement walls and ceiling were identical to those in the Flower Sea Plane, featuring four black basalt stone walls and a ceiling engraved with the foundational patterns of a triple Witch Array.

Yet those rune patterns were all dimmed, with no magic power flowing, as if they had exhausted the last ounce of energy.

Dust on the walls was thicker than on the floor, accumulating from the ceiling all the way to the corners. In some places, the layers were so thick they formed gray-white streamlined folds, as if quietly built up over hundreds or even thousands of years, undisturbed.

Duke did not rush to push open the door; instead, he stood quietly for a moment, cautiously extending his spiritual power outward.

The spiritual power rebounded upon touching the walls, not blocked by the Witch Array—the three-layered Witch Array had long since lost basic energy—but by a more fundamental barrier.

This barrier was the boundary of the safe house itself, an insurmountable layer between real-world material and Nightmare Plane space.

The spiritual power probes skimming the boundary allowed Duke to judge the safe house’s range: covering the main structure of the manor, extending outward around the basement, barely reaching the surrounding shrub hedge of the manor garden.

The range was not large, but sufficient for his observation and judgment.

He withdrew his spiritual power, then stepped towards the basement door. With each step, gray-white clouds of dust puffed up from the accumulated ash, the fine particles suspending in the air like droplets frozen in space.

The air was very dry here, so dry that each breath felt like the nasal mucosa was contracting, quickly leaving a faint sandpaper-like rawness in his throat.

The basement door was a heavy slab cast from magic metal, originally driven by a set of precise verification Witch Arrays, which would automatically open only upon recognizing Duke’s spiritual power signature.

But now, as Duke placed his palm flat against the door, the Witch Array showed no response, not even a trace of lingering energy warmth was felt.

He probed his spiritual power into the Witch Array’s energy circuits, discovering the entire structure had decayed—not from external damage, but eroded over time, the rune structure of the Witch Array disintegrating due to a lack of magic power maintenance, like a sheepskin parchment exposed to the sun for too long, crumbling to dust with the slightest touch.

The verification Witch Array was thoroughly defunct, yet the magic metal door itself remained operable.

Duke took a step back, pressing his hand against the door, transmitting Level 3 Body strength from his shoulder blade to his palm, then to his fingertips. Without fancy moves, he simply pushed.

Initially, the door didn’t budge, then with a deep, old-beast awakening-like groan, the hinges started to turn.

It wasn’t a smooth rotation, but accompanied with the rough grinding sound of dust catching on the pivot.

When the metal door finally disconnected from the frame and crashed against the ground outside, the burst of dust was so dense that Duke raised his arm to shield his face.

The entire basement instantly filled with gray-white fog, reducing visibility to less than a meter.

Only after the dust resettled did Duke lower his arm, stepping onto the fallen door plate as he exited the basement.

He glanced back at the door plate, noting that it made surprisingly little impact sound when falling, or rather the sound was immediately muffled, like a stone thrown into thick mud, swallowed before splashing.

Duke redirected his gaze, ascending the stone steps. He passed through the covert toolshed door, entering the main building’s ground floor hall, then halting his steps.

The hall’s structure remained, the five-tiered giant tree building’s main structure still standing, those walls and columns sculpted directly from plant life trunks, radiating soft wooden luster in the Flower Sea Plane, the wood grains were vivid and flowing, sometimes showing tool marks from the original carving.

But now, those wooden walls could no longer display their original color.

Everything was blanketed with gray-white ash, with the wood panels cracking into dense fine lines, some cracks wide enough for a whole finger to fit through.

Several large holes pocked the wooden ceiling overhead, revealing the wreckage of the upper floor, toppled furniture pieces, collapsed floors, and dried vines hanging down from even higher levels.

Crossing the hall, his steps produced creaking sounds on the shattered wooden floor, each creak reminding him how decayed the boards had become.

Centrally was supposed to be a woven vine round table with matching chairs; now only half of the table legs stood, the other half having broken off at an unknown time, the tabletop slanted into the ground, nearly buried in dust with just one corner visible.

The clothes rack in the corner, originally for hanging robes, maintained its shape, but the vine hooks had dried into gray-black brittle fragments, breaking into pieces at the lightest tap.

When Duke pushed open the main hall door, one of the two door panels detached from the hinge, tilting outward.

Before hitting the ground, the door panel struck the other panel, both wobbling together, groaning under the strain until finally stabilizing.

Duke slipped sideways through the door gap into the manor’s yard.

The scenery in the yard more directly illustrated the meaning of desolation than indoors; the shrub hedge had long since withered and died, those branches once bearing small white flowers were now merely twisted charred black husks, bent like dead fingers pointing skyward under the gray-white light.

The gravel path in the yard was entirely obscured by dust, only sporadic glances of stone edges hinted at the former presence of a pathway.

Directly ahead lay a forest, dark and dense, replacing the once expansive sea of flowers stretching to the horizon.

Duke stood amidst the ruins of the manor yard, lifting his gaze.

Those trees were unlike any species he had seen in the Wizard Plane; grotesque in form, each trunk spiraled and twisted unnaturally, as if wrung dry of liquid.

The branches bore no leaves, instead clusters of gray-white fluff swayed gently without breeze, occasionally tugged free by mysterious forces, slowly drifting to the ground, then absorbed into the black soil as if vanishing into water stains.

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