Glan Natural Science Academy

Two days after.

Ryger, Stella, Lulu and Logic returned to St Glan Castle.

“Big brother, I’ll go look for you after I save 10 gold coins. You’ll be our mercenary group’s chief magician and we’ll go on missions together to earn gold coins. As long as you help me retrieve Frost Creator, I’ll give you all my earnings, okay?”

Their parting was imminent. Lulu looked at Ryger with a face full of expectation.

“Uh… if it’s convenient, I’ll think about it!”

Ryger couldn’t bear to refuse and instead gave a non-committal answer.

But Lulu seemed to not understand Ryger’s other meaning and said excitedly, “Then I’ll go and start earning money. By then, I’ll go to the Academy and look for you!”

“Uh…”

Ryger smiled awkwardly. Leaving out whether he was going to answer affirmatively or not, saving and putting aside 10 gold coins in a year with how innocent she was, relying on completing missions one after another, was somewhat difficult. And after she accumulated enough gold coins a year after, he would already be in his second year, third year…

Uncle Logic, on the other hand, didn’t say anything more. His wealth of experience as a mercenary had long inundated him to the separation with his employers after receiving various missions.

Some time later.

After Lulu and Uncle Logic left, Ryger and Stella looked at each other and walked towards the Glan Natural Sciences Academy together.

……

Back at the little white building.

As Ryger expected, Kubo expressed absolutely nothing regarding his first excursion out.

At the dining table, Enid asked with full interest Ryger about every little detail during his excursion. When Ryger got to the part where he clashed with the Sealand students, Enid was even more surprised and nervous.

“Wow!”

After hearing Ryger actually made Konan explode and die with Air Bubble, not only did Enid not feel it was cruel, she even made an exhilarated expression. 

It wasn’t strange. As a senior student, even if she didn’t kill before, the number of people she had struck or heavily injured was most probably at a considerable amount. As for living beings killed in the process of collecting specimens, the number of them was uncountably large. She was long used to it.

“Junior brother, you actually thought of using Air Bubble to counter her dynamic vision. Hahaha, as expected from my little junior brother! Though from your description, it sounded like that girl experienced energy backlash because she was interrupted when accumulating energy, and was squeezed by the world’s magnetic field till she exploded.”

Energy backlash?

Ryger was shocked. Could it be that his Air Bubble had the effect of interrupting energy accumulation?

“Junior brother, test it out properly tomorrow and see if it really is capable of interfering with the working of energy. Wow, exploding into countless bits and pieces. Junior brother, you truly are so cool. Hehe, those little tykes must be terrified of you!”

Suddenly, Kubo, who had been silent up until now, looked at Ryger and interjected, “You came back just in time. Gather at the square as soon as possible tomorrow. The Academy has some matters.”

" "

Kubo sounded annoyed and seemed to be in a bad mood. In a low voice, he added, “Do not forget.”

“Huh?”

Ryger was confused but didn’t receive any answers. Even Enid and Adva who had been smiling before this abruptly stopped talking.

Dinner passed in an oppressive mood, as though something was going to happen.

……

Deep night.

In the laboratory’s corner, Ryger looked at the umbral iron sword, which was melting bit by bit while being subjected to the black-coloured metal-dissolving flame, and at the increasing liquid iron in the stone trough while he himself was silently stirring the vat of absorption fluid he only just finished blending. 

Under the crystal lamp’s light, the absorption fluid had a pale-yellow colour. It was a type of magical absorption fluid. Towards materials with magical properties, it possessed a good level of absorption properties but towards materials without, the fluid would have no reaction whatsoever.

Some time later.

After being burned by the black flames for an hour, the sword was finally melted into a pool of liquid iron. Ryger quickly directed the liquid iron in the stone trough to flow into the absorption fluid.

Tsss!

Steam filled the air but Ryger ignored and only waited silently. 

As the molten iron in the absorption fluid cooled and became lumps of metal, Ryger used a tweezer to clip these lumps of metals out, put them on a filter he had prepared beforehand, and poured a diluent onto the filter and into a glass container. The residues left on the filter were metal slags.

In this way, it was equivalent to filtering all the iron. Now, the fluid in the container was slightly blackish.

“Now, I just need to simmer it with an alcohol lamp. After the absorption fluid evaporates, the residues left in the beaker are umbral iron.”

Excited, he then studied the black flames for some time when Ryger suddenly thought of other matters. He carefully preserved the flame’s sparks then took out a spacebox. It was none other than the spacebox left behind after the female student from Sealand exploded and died.

Finally, alone!

Giddy with excitement, Ryger could hardly wait to open the box.

The first thing he did was to cry out “wow”. The spacebox’s volume was a full twice that of the one Satro had gifted him.

“Magic tools!”

There were many items in the spacebox. The first thing Ryger noticed was a red ring emanating energy fluctuations. After taking it out, the first thing to catch his eye was the red gem at the top of the ring. It was from there the strong energy fluctuations came from.

Ryger then looked at the inside of the ring and found it engraved with a line of words. 

“The Ring of Flames. For my eternal love.”

“Hm? She didn’t wear this ring even until she died. Could it be that the one who gave her the ring betrayed her?” Ryger speculated on Konan’s past with mischief. Though, he didn’t care at all, wearing the ring without any hesitation. As his energy field flooded into it, Ryger soon knew the ring’s attributes. It was a very simple one.

Ring of Flames: Draws on natural energy to unleash a fireball with an attack of 8 degrees.

Needless to say, the girl probably used this ring in the absence of Violet’s combustion totem to complete her fusion of wind and fire. Ryger could only wonder why she didn’t wear it on that day.

Drawing in a deep breath, Ryger couldn’t help but get more excited. He looked at the other objects in the spacebox.

“Huh, what is this?”

Ryger took out a bunch of pitch-black things and after some close observation realised it was a beehive. There were still some bee pupa in it wriggling constantly. Ryger frowned. He could feel a ferocious aura from these pupas. It was evidently not an ordinary biological specimen.

“Magic insects?”

Thinking of sorts of rumours regarding insect taming he had heard of before, Ryger’s eyes lit up. Similar to beast taming, insect taming could only be done with the rearing of insect larvae and required the usage of special methods to cultivate and imprint the insects as well as the use of mental power to control them. Some scholars even choose mutated insect kings to be their medium partner so that they could control an astonishing number of insects. Among low-level scholars, it was something that was extremely terrifying but among the high-level scholars, it was more of a liability than an asset.

The reason was very simple – nurturing magic insects required a relatively long time. It was even said that for ancient magic insects that were fearsome, several decades were required before the insect could evolve into its next life stage!

Attacking with several hundreds, several thousands, several ten thousand of magic insects would always be beneficial among low-level scholars. But among high-level scholars, it was very easy for the individually relatively fragile insects to die en masse after a battle. And once the magic insects lost their numerical superiority, they were naturally unable to threaten higher-order creatures anymore.

Regarding insect taming, Ryger only knew what little he heard from Satro. Shaking his head, he put the beehive back into the specimen-rearing container for now, deciding that he would go inquire what sort of bees it was when he had the time.

Ryger looked at the spacebox once more.

“I… I’m rich!”

Fingers trembling because of excessive excitement, Ryger took out gold coins from the corner of the spacebox one by one. After taking out a full ten gold coins and two-hundred plus silver coins, and hearing the clinking sounds of the coins falling onto his bed, Ryger felt an indescribable sense of elation.

For a moment, Ryger’s even thought of killing somebody and looting them every time he ran out of money in the future.

But soon, Ryger shook his head, feeling somewhat remorseful for his greedy and dangerous thoughts. Below though, his hands were honest, storing the gold and silver coins into his moneybag.

Only after he was done with the coins did he take out two biological specimens from the spacebox unhurriedly. One of them was an avian creature with purple feathers, a red crown at the top of its head and, oddly enough, two pairs of wings. The other was a plant that he happened to recognise from a botanical illustration he once saw. IIt was a tulda and it had a shape similar to bamboo shoots. The plant could sometimes be found on soils where the corpse of proteuses rotted and possessed certain medicinal values. Although the two were low-level biological specimens, Ryger was still likely to get some points if he submitted it to the education office during his freshman period because of their rarity and variability.

Lastly, after Ryger took out five books about mathematical foundations, awkwardly emptied the spacebox of some ladies underwear, some Sealand’s specialty food and some essential items for outdoor travel, he finally found the most precious possessions of a scholar – their handwritten notebooks!

Regrettably, the notebook’s original owner was a scholar studying natural laws and what the various symbols and equations written in it meant Ryger did not know. He could only get some insights from answers of the many calculations inside. But even still, with a scholar’s study thoughts and journey laid out bare for him to peruse, he was able to benefit a lot.

Of course, this was only the case when there weren’t a large, insurmountable gap between two parties’ knowledge and understanding.

He kept flipping and flipping, and gradually, Ryger lost track of time. Many of the knowledge regarding natural laws in the handwritten notes truly made Ryger’s eyes light up.

“Huh?”

When he flipped to the handwritten notebook’s last page, a piece of paper fell. Ryger picked it up and after some observing, made a strange face.

“Participation ticket for Sealand Principality’s coliseum?”

Shaking his head and after confirming the spacebox was empty, Ryger quickly packed up his gains, which of course included this spacebox with a large volume.