Chapter 161: Plane War

However, right now in the back room of the goblin’s small shop, Greem and Kabi were engaged in a secret conversation.

"My lord, here are the materials and magic nuclei you requested." Goblin Kabi respectfully presented a leather pouch, which was fully packed with the items Greem needed. In addition, the pouch contained a knowledge crystal, which was also the data Greem had specifically requested to be gathered.

Greem picked up the knowledge crystal, pressed it against his forehead, and the voice of the chip immediately rang out in his mind.

"Beep. External data interface detected. Does the host authorize data entry?"

"Authorize!"

"Beep. Command accepted. Commencing data entry..."

With a faint blue glow flickering in the depths of his black pupils, it took Greem only a dozen heartbeats to imprint the entire contents of the knowledge crystal into his mind. As for the subsequent categorization and organization, he left it all entirely to the chip.

Having processed the knowledge crystal, Greem opened the leather pouch. Inside, magic nuclei of various attributes and tiers were dazzlingly arrayed—ranging from the most common water, earth, fire, and wind nuclei to rare dark, plant, poison, and light nuclei. As for their tiers, they spanned from novice to quasi-adept levels; almost every tier could be found within.

Pity that there was not a single wizard-level elemental nucleus!

Greem had long been mentally prepared for this situation, so he felt no surprise. After a brief inventory, he tucked them away into his pouch.

After becoming a fire-type wizard, these apprentice-level magical puppets were no longer as immensely helpful to him as before. However, in certain special circumstances, these low-tier magical puppets could still play a significant role. Therefore, while slowly gathering the necessary knowledge, Greem was also gradually sculpting his own magical puppet legion.

When he was still a wizard apprentice, Greem's understanding of wizards had been overly narrow and one-sided. In his mind, a quasi-adept was merely a wizard apprentice whose spiritual force had reached 20 points, and a newly advanced wizard was simply a spellcaster with 21 points of spiritual force!

Yet, through this immensely perilous breakthrough on the line of fire, he had himself become a wizard. Only now did Greem truly and personally experience the despairing chasm of strength between wizards and apprentices.

Becoming a wizard was not simply a matter of raising one's spiritual force from 20 points to 21 points; rather, it was a qualitative transformation process that altered the fundamental existential form of one's spiritual essence. Before the advancement, his spiritual force stood at 20 points, but after the advancement, his displayed spiritual force data plummeted sharply to 0.9 points.

This did not mean his spiritual force had decayed; rather, the base character templates of a wizard and an apprentice were now completely different. An apprentice's character template was still largely modeled after the physical data of a normal adult human, using them as the baseline to measure an apprentice's combat power. A wizard, however, had already become entirely akin to a magical creature.

Magical beasts and monsters in nature would, based on their innate spellcasting talents, condense a crystalline substance at the core of their bodies, enabling them more easily to manipulate the free-floating magical elements in space. Wizards were clearly mimicking them, yet with a difference.

The magic nuclei of magical beasts and monsters were physically real, and could be found within their bodies after they were slain. A wizard's conscious heart-core, however, existed within the spiritual space, resembling an illusory, abstract elemental crystal.

Even if outsiders were to kill a wizard, they would never harvest a trophy resembling a beast's magic nucleus. Yet the conscious heart-core undoubtedly existed, because all wizards depended solely upon it to manipulate magical elements more conveniently and easily.

If the standard spiritual force for a newly advanced wizard was 1, then Greem currently fell short of the threshold. His spiritual force was only at 0.9! However, this was also related to the fact that he had not undergone a normal advancement ritual. Given time, after nurturing his violently fluctuating spirit, reaching and surpassing this baseline of 1 point was only a matter of time.

During the month or so since arriving in Fertnan City, Greem had more than once compared and weighed the gap between wizards and quasi-adepts. If 20 points of spiritual force was the upper limit for a quasi-adept, then 1 point of a wizard's spiritual force was nearly equivalent to 100 points of a quasi-adept's.

This meant that, setting aside differences in spiritual coercion, arcane equipment, spell knowledge, and casting techniques, even purely in terms of the strength of spiritual force, a single wizard was fully capable of fighting 5 quasi-adepts simultaneously. If given free rein to cast spells as they pleased, a veteran wizard could easily contend with 7 to 8 quasi-adepts.

A wizard is always a wizard!

As long as you have not reached the wizard tier, you are, in the eyes of a wizard, nothing more than an inferior species. Although, adhering to the principle of protecting the source of wizards, most wizards would give exceptional cultivation and care to apprentices with potential, deep down they still would not regard wizard apprentices as peers on par with themselves!

Having acquired what he wanted, Greem did not linger too long in the goblin's small shop and headed straight back to the wizard tower in the northern suburbs of the city.

Compared to the simplified version of the wizard tower in the Magic Swamp, the wizard tower in Fertnan City was a wizard tower in the truest sense of the word. The entire wizard tower stood 17 stories high, with each floor utilizing special methods to expand its internal space. The arcane facilities inside were even more complete and advanced, leaving the swamp tower far behind.

However, despite such a powerful wizard tower, the number of permanent formal wizards stationed inside was not large.

Aside from the Tier 2 Lord Fugen, there were three Tier 1 family wizards. Such a sparse number meant that during Greem's month-long temporary stay in the wizard tower, the number of times he met other wizards could be counted on one hand.

These wizards all possessed paranoid and eccentric personalities. Every day, they were either hiding in their laboratories conducting extremely dangerous arcane experiments, or out gathering necessary knowledge and resources; one could hardly ever see them idling about or wandering aimlessly. Furthermore, in half a year's time, the Sarubo family would initiate a plane war. Without thorough preparations, even veteran wizards ran the risk of perishing.

Consequently, these family wizards were all the more preoccupied!

Through this period of precipitation and accumulation, Greem's concept of a plane war was no longer so unfamiliar. From the information he had compiled, it was evident that a plane war was an irresistible choice for any wizard family!

How does one make a wizard family rise rapidly? A plane war!

How does one cause a wizard family to decline rapidly? A plane war!

A plane war is both a heaven-sent shortcut for wizards to rapidly usurp massive amounts of wealth and resources, and a terrifying nightmare that can drag a wizard family into the quagmire of war!

Choose the right target and successfully invade an alien world, and the massive amounts of rare resources and precious esoteric knowledge within that hostile plane can propel a weak wizard family into a top-tier major family. Once these resources and knowledge are continuously shipped back into the family, the wizard family can entirely rely upon them to nurture more and better new wizard recruits.

Thus, using the resources and knowledge gained from plane wars to cultivate more new recruits for oneself, those new recruits would in turn become the catalyst for the family to expand and open up even larger plane battlefields. Only in this way could a wizard family embark on an enviable virtuous cycle and grow stronger step by step.

However, one succeeds because of plane wars, and fails because of plane wars.

Once a wizard family falls into ruin within a plane war, with a large number of wizards perishing and massive resource investments yielding zero return, even top-tier wizard families would find it difficult to withstand such a heavy blow. Never recovering again would be the better outcome; once hostile families or ill-intentioned factional forces seize the opportunity to invade, the entire wizard family could face complete annihilation!

In the Scattered Tower Isles region of the central Wizard Continent, hundreds of wizard families are scattered like stars in the sky. These wizard families have formed factions large and small through intermarriage, alliances, and mergers, making the familial relations here increasingly complex and chaotic.

Moreover, every wizard family, academy, school of thought, or alliance possesses a secondary plane uniquely belonging to them.

The so-called secondary planes are actually maturely developed small and medium-sized planes. Although their resources and overall strength cannot compare to major planes like the Wizard World, they are nonetheless material planes with complete world structures and comprehensive power systems.

If given sufficient time to develop and grow, they might not fail to become new large planes. But once their plane worlds are discovered by wizards in the deep starry sea, they become like lambs targeted by savage wolves, and invasion becomes inevitable.

As a rare large plane within the endless starry sea, the Wizard World boasts an overall strength that ranks among the very best of all material planes. Whenever wizards traveling through the deep starry sea discover another material plane, they will strive to evaluate its overall strength. Once they deem it profitable, they will return to the Wizard World to gather powerful forces and launch an invasion against it.

Major planes rarely go to war with other major planes lightly; otherwise, the difficulty of invasion is too high, and the invested resources are hard to recoup adequately in the short term. Therefore, the so-called plane invasions are primarily focused on small and medium-sized planes!

Individual powerful medium-sized planes might require major factions such as the Scattered Tower Isles, the Northern Witches, the Wizard Association, or the Silver Alliance to successfully invade. As for ordinary small and medium-sized planes, ordinary wizard families are fully capable of handling such tasks.

Consequently, among wizard family factions, the number of material planes invaded and the amount of rare resources that can be squeezed from these planes each year have become the most important benchmarks for measuring a wizard family's strength. Meanwhile, within each family, the coordinates of the invaded and enslaved plane worlds become the most precious asset, which must be tightly guarded in their own hands and never allowed to be discovered by hostile forces.

Rumor has it that the Sarubo family possesses two small secondary planes, though both operate under a regional cooperation model with a relatively low degree of development, falling far short of the abundant returns gained from full enslavement.

The regional cooperation model actually occurs when the wizard family faction that invaded the small plane is too weak to suppress the internal resistance forces of the opposing plane. Therefore, to avoid incurring greater losses, the invading wizard family reached a reconciliation with the indigenous inhabitants of the plane, conducting bilateral trade under the guise of regional cooperation and joint development.

Although the invading family needs to use currency recognized by both sides to purchase resources, reselling them back in the Wizard World still yields extremely high returns. While this lacks the crisp satisfaction and hundredfold effortless profits of forcible occupation and enslavement, the risks of war are significantly reduced!

It was precisely by virtue of these two small secondary planes that the Sarubo family managed to secure a mid-tier position in the Scattered Tower Isles region, where wizard families abound. And this upcoming plane war will clearly bring the family its third secondary plane.