Wizard: Starting from the Skill Tree

The bark of those trees is a dark, nearly pure black green, covered with irregular cracks, with extremely faint grayish-white phosphorescence occasionally flashing in the depths, as if something under the bark is breathing slowly.

The forest floor is void of weeds, void of shrubs, only a thick layer of black and gray leaves covering everything.

No one knows how many years those fallen leaves have accumulated, the bottom layer has long turned to mud, the top layer still retains the shape of leaves, but each step shatters them into countless pieces, producing a muffled crackling sound, as if stifled by thick blankets.

Duke turned around, his gaze crossing the shattered rooftop of the manor, looking into the distance.

At the edge of the forest, where the twisted black tree canopies stretch uninterruptedly into the distance until they blur into a dark line, a massive ridge rises from the earth.

The ridge is gray-blue, several shades deeper than the sky, with no vegetation covering it, exposing the bare rock wall.

But the shapes of those rocks are abnormal, not naturally weathered but seemingly forced from deep in the crust by some enormous external force and then randomly pinched into various strange shapes.

Some mountain ridges are too sharply defined, while some mountain peaks are twisted to the point of defying gravitational principles.

And above the mountain range is the sky.

The sky of the Nightmare Plane is eternally gray-white, with no sun, no clouds, no change in the angle of light, no gradual transition between light and dark.

From the zenith directly overhead to the end of the horizon, all areas of the sky are the same monotonous, oppressive, dead gray-white, like an old piece of linen bleached countless times until all color has been stripped away, stretched motionlessly overhead.

And right in the center of this gray-white sky hangs an unimaginably enormous moon.

The moon overhead is at least dozens of times the size of the full moon on the Wizard Plane.

It almost occupies nearly a third of the sky, like a wall hanging from the zenith, poised to crush down at any moment.

But what truly sends a chill down Duke’s spine is not the size of the moon but its surface.

The moon’s surface is gray-white, extremely close to the color of the sky, so from a distance, it appears as if the sky itself has condensed into a circular entity, protruding from the gray-white sky canvas.

Yet upon closer inspection, one can see that the moon’s surface is not smooth but covered in dense vein-like patterns, like an old silver pocket watch placed on gray velvet, with its dial engraved with countless intertwining intricate lines.

These lines are not static; they move, but not fast enough to be directly captured by the naked eye. Instead, they drift with an extreme slowness, requiring prolonged observation to ascertain.

Each line wanders across the moon’s surface at its speed, some clockwise, some counterclockwise, occasionally merging briefly at intersections before parting to continue their separate journeys.

From afar, the entire moon resembles a colossal gray-white heart, still beating slowly, with those lines representing the blood vessels on the heart’s surface.

Standing in the courtyard of the manor’s ruins, Duke gazed up at the moon for a long time.

He forced himself to disregard the indescribable psychological pressure the moon exerted and instead focused entirely on analyzing the moon phase.

Among the books he’d devoured in the Six-Ring Tower Library about the Nightmare Plane, one had detailed the regulations of the nightmare moon phase.

The Nightmare Plane’s moon undergoes no changes in its phases of waxing and waning, and its phases are not determined by shifts in light and shadow.

Without sunlight, the moon itself is not a reflector but rather determined by the distribution form of those vein lines on its surface.

When the veins concentrate at the central area of the moon’s surface, it corresponds to a specific state; when they spread across the entire moon, it corresponds to another state.

The document mentioned that Nightmare Dust only appears when the veins spread to certain specific areas of the moon, and different vein patterns correspond to different cycles with precise mathematical relationships among them.

Duke’s spiritual power surged in his mind as he observed the veins’ current positions on the moon’s surface, comparing them with the periodic formulas recorded in the literature.

The patterns of the veins, density, the proportion concentrated in specific regions, the progression direction of several main veins — he input these observed data into the formula, beginning to deduce the timing of the next collection window.

The calculations were immense, as several independent systems of veins operated simultaneously on the moon’s surface, each moving at different speeds and directions, requiring them to be calculated individually, and then cross-referenced to find the precise time point when they all converge in the same specific region.

After a considerable amount of time, Duke’s furrowed brow finally began to ease.

According to the moon phase calculations, there are about three days before the next appearance of Nightmare Dust, calculated using the time units of the Wizard Plane.

During this time window, the veins on the moon’s surface will spread to cover nearly two-thirds of the entire moon’s surface, then begin to contract slowly, and during the first few hours of contraction, Nightmare Dust will appear on the surface of specific plants.

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