The Truth of Magic

Chapter 23: Activation Ceremony

Translator: Nyoi-Bo Studio Editor: Nyoi-Bo Studio

In less than ten minutes, a servant girl knocked at the door.

Before Zhao Xu could stand up, Antonya opened the door. The servant girl didn’t say much, just bowed her head politely. She quickly put a box down by the door and left.

Zhao Xu realized that the activation method Antonya was talking about wasn’t reading a book but perhaps mixing some materials together.

“The method to activate Enlightened Spellcaster is very simple. Once I set the whole thing up, you just need to sit in the middle,” said Antonya as she opened up the box.

Zhao Xu was puzzled. “That’s it?”

The incantations required of a wizard were enough to torture him for hours. Some players already knew how to cast cantrips, but they were stuck at learning Scribe Scroll and Summon Familiar.

In that case, he had two problems fewer than others. After all, according to Antonya, all he had to do was just sit there.

Initially, he thought that he had to learn those two features fully and then give them up before he could exchange them for Enlightened Spellcaster, but it looked like that wasn’t the case.

“Mentor, if I activate the feature Enlightened Spellcaster but I end up taking up a different base character class instead of remaining a Wizard, then doesn’t that mean I’ve gotten an additional skill for nothing?”

Antonya’s cloak turned a little and she was clearly glaring at him.

“What are you thinking of? If you don’t become a Level 1 Wizard within a given amount of time, then all these additional abilities will be taken away from you. The only thing you’d have left is your Draconic, because that’s attached to your Intelligence.”

“You have to reach Level 1 for all your features to become part of your character class and become more powerful. Also, I’d advise you against attempting to look for stupid loopholes.”

“Arthur has been around for so long now, everything that you can think of or even tricks you could never even imagine, have been tried by countless people before you.”

“Including how many new wizards always think of how they can earn money from lending their spellbooks out to others to copy.”

Before Zhao Xu had learned about Enlightened Spellcaster, he had the same idea too. Since he could earn some money by letting others copy spells, then only an idiot would decide against doing that. He wasn’t the only one with spells either. 𝘧𝑟𝘦𝒆w𝚎𝙗nov𝘦𝗹.𝐜o𝓶

“Think about it,” she said. “Why doesn’t anybody just use a spell to duplicate these spellbooks? Or why not find someone with an incredible memory? He would be able to memorize everything in no time. Why do you need to study it for one day? Why can’t you just copy without spending that day?

“When you copy spells, you have to fully understand how the entire spell and its components work, so every stroke you write down represents your understanding of the spell. But this sort of understanding doesn’t last long, so you have to go through the understanding in your spellbook to be able to prepare that spell again. That’s decided by the way wizards cast spells.

“When a wizard starts copying spells, he will understand this.

“But what they don’t know is that if the original owner of the spellbook you borrowed was on the same path as you to prepare the spell, then there’s no problem there. But if someone else tried to understand it in a different way, then the original flow of the form will be damaged. So there’s the risk of damage to the original spell in the spellbook whenever it gets copied by someone else.”

Zhao Xu’s heart trembled when he heard this. So there was the risk of the original getting damaged whenever it was lent out.

If that happened, then even if the one who borrowed it was done with copying the spells he wanted but caused damage to the spells inside your spellbook, you had to spend either 50 or 12.5 gold pieces to borrow the spellbook from the one you lent the spellbook to to copy your own spell back into your spellbook.

This was ridiculous. At this rate, unless you were really good friends with a wizard, most people wouldn’t lend their spellbooks out easily. Who knows how much damage would be done in the process by doing such a thing?

As Zhao Xu was thinking about these things, Antonya was already using the materials that the servant girl brought over to draw on the floor of his room.

For Wizards in Arthur to cast spells, besides making the right gestures and saying the right incantations, sometimes, they also needed certain materials.

But very few spells required someone to draw so much on the floor like that. So it seemed like Antonya wasn’t going to cast a spell.

“This is a ceremony.” Antonya finished drawing a six-pointed star, then continued to use a special chalk-like item to draw a few other strange symbols.

“Ceremonies are an independent system outside of spell-casting. It does have some things in common with spells, so you can spend a long time using several ceremonies to get a similar effect to certain spells. But because it takes too long to do that, it’s not suitable for use in battles. But it’s a way for ordinary folks with no spell slots to display supernatural abilities.”

“Some ceremonies are like the one I’m preparing now, used to activate class features. They can be used for all sorts of class features.”

“After going through this ceremony, the two features you were supposed to get when you hit Level 1, Scribe Scroll and Summon Familiar, will be removed in advance and you cannot get them back. Are you sure about this?”

Zhao Xu nodded, determined.

Since he had made this decision, then there was no reason to second-guess it now.

More importantly, Antonya had chosen this path for herself when she was in his place. He was sure he wouldn’t get the short end of the stick.

“Sit down in the middle then.”

Zhao Xu immediately stood up and sat down in the middle of the completed formation according to Antonya’s instructions.

He looked at the lit white candles at the points of each of the six points of the star, then he looked at the mysterious powder Antonya poured around him, and finally at his own shadow, which seemed to be hovering between reality and illusion.

Zhao Xu couldn’t help but get goosebumps. This looked totally like the way those western movies depicted their methods of communicating with the dead and those normally didn’t end very well.

“Even if the king of the demons comes, I can kill it off. What are you worried about?” said Antonya.

Zhao Xu could only try to stifle his doubts.

It was true that, given Antonya’s Legendary Wizard status, she wasn’t boasting when she said that she could kill off even clones of the king of demons.

“Hold this piece of paper and read the incantation on it. After that, start meditating and imagine your heart as a long, endless path.” As Antonya said these words, a piece of paper floated neatly into Zhao Xu’s hands.

Zhao Xu started wondering exactly how many cantrips this mentor of his had prepared.

But after he looked at the crammed incantations scribbled all over the paper that almost couldn’t fit into one piece, Zhao Xu suddenly started to suspect...

His mentor had a ridiculous 50-point Intelligence score. Had she chosen some natural flaw of sorts that made her forgetful? Why did she always give him things at the last minute?

Thankfully these incantations weren’t too hard to pronounce. Under the pressure of this mysterious ceremony, Zhao Xu immediately memorized them.

After that, he shut his eyes and imagined that he was walking down a long and endless path.

Zhao Xu had shut his eyes and didn’t notice that Antonya had taken out a sacred insignia of the goddess of magic, and she had placed it on one of the symbols drawn in the formation.

After that, she took out a bottle of holy water and poured it over the sacred insignia as she started chanting strange incantations without stopping at all.

The complicated formation that she had drawn suddenly seemed to have come alive. It glowed a bright red, as if it were on fire.

With a loud boom, Zhao Xu felt like his heart had been hit by a huge hammer, and the impact had crushed the depths of his heart open.

He opened his eyes with a start and he looked forward.

The glow of the formation on the floor completely disappeared the moment he opened his eyes.

The drawing on the floor faded like it was being rubbed away, and it collected itself into that sacred insignia.

Zhao Xu was about to ask Antonya if the ceremony was successful when he noticed his character stats.

In the field for class features, the words Enlightened Spellcaster were already sitting there.