Chapter 17 Vestige (1)

In the room, Lynn was flipping through the Sleeping Curse spellbook. Perhaps due to the influence of alcohol, things that had seemed obscure and incomprehensible earlier now strangely clicked into place, giving him a surge of inspiration.

Constructing a spell framework required anchoring it first. 

Visualizing the mental sea as a three-dimensional space, anchoring meant manifesting mental energy in a special form as nails to secure nodes in this space. 

Then, connecting these nodes would construct the corresponding spell framework model. This was the basic requirement for constructing a spell framework.

For beginners, however, anchoring wasn’t easy. 

It was akin to achieving deep meditation in Zen Buddhism. The principles were there, but very few could truly achieve it. Even professional monks required a long time to reach this stage. 

Knowing something and being able to do it were entirely different matters.

However, Lynn wasn’t entirely without a foundation. Meditation was the prerequisite, and being able to meditate allowed him to enter the mental sea. 

Lynn had practiced meditation, and for most people, that was already a significant foundation.

Initially, Lynn had considered other methods, like finding shortcuts to bypass the anchoring step. But after some thought, he realized that manifesting mental energy as nails in space to secure nodes was essentially about making the spell framework more precise. 

The tiniest error could lead to significant issues.

Lynn understood the importance of precision like the saying “a small part out of place could cause a thousand-mile error.” 

He was still an apprentice, so it was best to follow established procedures and not rush to create new paths. Trying to take shortcuts for immediate progress could jeopardize his future.

But how should he anchor? The mental sea was a three-dimensional space, at least as he perceived it. It wasn’t a flat canvas. 

How could he solidify his mental energy like nails in a three-dimensional space?

Lynn tried various methods, but couldn’t budge his mental sea in the slightest. 

However, when he saw the Earth Ring slowly rotating in place at the center of his mental sea, a sudden insight struck him. Practicing the Sleeping Curse, fundamentally speaking, it was a skill framework.

According to his teacher, when the Earth Ring Meditation technique was perfected, it would generate the Earth Ring, a one-ring spell in the practitioner’s mind.

This spell level couldn’t just appear out of thin air, right? So, wasn’t the floating and rotating Earth Ring in his mind an, in a sense, unformed skill framework?

When he meditated on the Earth Ring, he condensed the prototype of each ring in his mind and then compressed them continuously. 

Through this process, he attracted soul fragments from the surrounding air to generate the Earth Ring.

Of course, there were some technical principles involved, but after meditating for months, Lynn had thoroughly grasped these principles. In other words, there was no technical difficulty in implementing this.

The book recorded that soul fragments were a kind of energy that diffused in the air after the death of all things. 

Essentially, they were a materialization of mental energy. 

So, anchoring was using this compressed mental energy technique to fix mental energy at a specific point?

Although he hadn’t tried it yet, Lynn felt it should be something similar.

He had been fixated on turning mental energy into nails due to empirical influence. Since the rings of the Earth Ring could form in his mental sea, he didn’t need to make anchoring overly complicated. He just needed to condense it into simple circles.

Next, Lynn gave it a try, and soon, he condensed his first anchor.

In his mental sea, a ring of mental energy was fixed in place.

Lynn looked left and right. However, no matter how he looked at it, it seemed ugly. This anchor had a rather irregular appearance.

The problem was that he had only learned the Earth Ring Meditation, so he could only compress mental energy in this shape. Well, now that he had the basics sorted out, he could work on improving the shape later.

After all, if he could draw circles, what was stopping him from drawing triangles, squares, straight lines, and dots?

Knock, knock, knock.

The knocking at the door startled Lynn from his meditation.

In the room, Lynn opened his eyes.

“Who is it?” Lynn frowned.

“It’s me, Master,” came Lauren’s voice from outside.

Lynn sensed it for a moment, using the runes he controlled through his mind— he confirmed that it was indeed Lauren at the door, not an imposter.

So, Lynn went over and opened the door, standing behind it.

“Come in,” he said, and as soon as he finished, he smelled a strange odor.

The source of this smell was the half of something that Lauren was carrying.

“What is this?” Lynn asked.

“Master, this is something good,” Lauren replied as he entered and closed the door.

He then proceeded to tell Lynn about his recent experiences.

“Are you saying that you encountered some monsters in the mine, and then the lizard almost devoured all the monsters in the mine, leaving only half a corpse?” Lynn looked at the half of the corpse Lauren was holding.

It felt strange to him— this monster’s head was incredibly smooth, like it had a layer of metallic film. 

Besides that, the body behind this monster was pink, segmented, with a faint golden ring in the middle of each section. This monster was only half intact, its lower half had been forcibly torn apart by some external force.

“How come there’s a metallic shell, it looks somewhat like human-made traces,” Lynn speculated in his mind.

This monster gave Lynn a very strange feeling, an indescribable sense of eeriness.

“When you came up, no one else saw you, right?” Lynn asked.

“No, I avoided everyone else,” Lauren replied.

He knew that he didn’t look human right now, and exposing himself to human sight would only cause panic. Moreover, he didn’t have the ability to conceal himself like that lizard monster.

Lynn nodded at Lauren’s words, then focused his attention on the monster in Lauren’s hand.

Perhaps it was from reading his teacher’s recent experimental notes too often, but Lynn couldn’t help but feel eager to try something.

The part of the monster that had been bitten open revealed tender white flesh. There was no discolored liquid coming out of the wound— the only thing flowing from the monster’s body was a transparent, viscous liquid, which might be its blood.

Lynn took a sample of it and, through some tests, determined that this liquid was not corrosive.

He also tapped the monster’s head, and it had a metallic sound to it. At the very top of the head, upon inspection, Lynn found a flower-shaped mouthpart that could open. Inside were many silver-white, high-hardness teeth.

What followed shocked Lynn— these silver-white teeth were even harder than iron!

Lynn looked at the button in his hand that had been easily pierced by the teeth, and a hint of dread flashed in his eyes.

Lauren, who was crouching beside him, watched Lynn’s examination with an adoring look, as if Lynn were a professional inspector.

At this moment, Lauren felt that the monster’s corpse he had brought back had fully realized its maximum value! Just swallowing it like the big lizard had done earlier would have been the greatest waste.

“Master, I saw it emerged from the ground and instantly devoured half a person,” Lauren pointed at the monster’s teeth.

“Are you saying it can move quickly underground?” Lynn asked.

Lauren nodded vigorously.

Lynn rubbed his chin with his finger— he didn’t know the reason. It might be due to the effect of some kind of a spell, or it could be something related to its skin or some other reason, just like that big lizard that could turn invisible.

Lynn then continued to examine the monster’s corpse with a curious attitude. However, the more he inspected and explored, the stranger it seemed to him.

This earthworm monster really gave him a sense of being artificially created, somewhat like alchemy, but he hadn’t seen alchemy before, so he couldn’t be sure.

He thought of the records related to alchemy mentioned in the notes and tried to compare the knowledge in his mind with what he was seeing.

It was said that some wizards studied alchemy to transform monsters or magical items. There were even some wizards who specialized in creating alchemical golems to protect wizard towers from disturbances by pesky robbers while they conducted experiments. There were even wizards known to establish laboratories near precious ore deposits, making it convenient to use the ore directly for creating a continuous supply of alchemical puppets.

There was said to be an iron mine near the small town.

Could it be that a wizard had conducted some experiments here?

However, it was just an iron mine, and if it were really a wizard, it seemed a bit shabby.

Of course, these were all Lynn’s speculations.

It was also possible that these monsters had originally lived in the ore deposits, and the workers accidentally dug into their nests, releasing these monsters.

But this still couldn’t explain the artificial traces on these monsters. Could it be that these monsters were sealed here and were accidentally released by the workers?

Lynn’s eyes flickered continuously.

“Do you remember where that mine is?” Lynn asked.

Lauren nodded. “I remember.”

“Take me there. Let’s first find that lizard brother,” Lynn added. 

If it were only him and Lauren, it might be somewhat dangerous. But if that lizard was willing to accompany them, their safety would be greatly increased. Although they didn’t know the level of this lizard monster, one thing was for sure— its combat power was definitely higher than the two of them combined.

At Lynn’s words, Lauren hesitated. 

That lizard apparently seemed to be female.

——
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