Wizard: Starting With Synthesized Gems

Chapter 671: Ten Million Magic Stones in Revenue and the Collective Fury of the Wizard Shoe Shop Alliance

Locke said to Daniel, "Daniel, if you make any progress, would you be willing to share it with me? I'll pay you the corresponding licensing fee."Wizard Daniel paused for a moment. He was seated atop the cloud whale, and said, "Of course. We're friends."

"Right now, Senior Sister Juliana has already helped me bring in a mid-sized energy-focused shop alliance that's interested in this. As long as someone puts in the money, I'll have a real chance of seeing it through. If there are any milestone results, I'll share them with you proactively."

Locke nodded and said, "Then I wish you success soon."

Daniel smiled and said, "In the Fission Mausoleum Plains, there's a saying. When you can't clearly gauge the specific strength of a wizard at the same level as you, look at their seniority, and then look at the caliber of the people around them."

"The quality of a person's friends determines how far they can go."

Wizard Daniel said, "After entering Golden Crown Mountain, I really do think that saying makes a lot of sense. Having powerful wizard friends like you and Witch Juliana around me has quietly raised the ceiling of what I'm capable of."

Locke gave a slight nod. "It's a bit one-sided, but there's some truth to it. Different people draw different lessons from the same idea. A person's social connections are essentially the resources they can draw upon. As long as two people are in contact with each other, it becomes possible to mobilize those resources, at least potentially."

"Of course, it all depends on how you go about it. In this world, everyone is willing to add flowers to brocade. But when it comes to delivering coal in the snow, the people willing to do that are truly few and far between."

Wizard Daniel nodded in agreement, feeling a deep resonance with those words.

In good spirits, Wizard Daniel snapped his fingers in Locke's direction. "Well then, I'll get back to it. My Cloud Marsh Cup champion roommate."

He summoned the cloud whale, commanded it to land, and then made his way toward the peach garden at the peak of Little Peach Mountain, heading for the Peach Gate that led to the Gray Mist Plane.

Locke, meanwhile, rode the Rainbow Sparrow and entered the Dune Plane. At that moment, the sky of the Dune Plane was veiled in a thin layer of gray mist.

The heavy-element particle pollution haze had settled over the plane like the early formation of a new atmosphere.

The overall temperature of the plane had dropped by at least two degrees Celsius.

And as the concentration of heavy particle pollution continued to grow, the temperature was likely to keep falling.

Around the sun, which was as massive as a mountain range in the sky, rings of rainbows had formed. They were produced by the refraction of sunlight through the heavy particle pollution gas.

Locke flew high in the sky of this plane atop the Rainbow Sparrow, crossing the desert, until he spotted the location of Group 2's facility, surrounded by conversion plants and natural gas wells in every direction.

At this point, outside the ecological membrane of Group 2, several magic fields had already appeared.

Of course, most of these magic fields had been planted only to be swallowed back up by the desert due to temperature fluctuations and magic tide issues.

Many golems were currently at work planting in the area.

These agricultural-type golems were extraordinarily expensive and costly to operate. Without the resource allocation channeled through Group 2, it would have been impossible to conduct magic field experiments at this scale.

Through each cycle of the desert reclaiming and swallowing the magic fields, the humus content and total biomass on the surface of the dunes would gradually increase, and a new magic field would take shape.

Locke had the Rainbow Sparrow descend to the ground and walked toward Group 2's facility, thinking, "The results look quite promising. But he's being too hasty. A more gradual approach would be far more reliable."

"Right, he's about to finish his posting soon. If he took the steady route, there would be no way for him to gain any real advantage, so he can only afford to be aggressive. Besides, Zalan Bailey needs to show results in a short amount of time if he wants to secure resource allocation and a large influx of funding."

"And then there's the cost paradox," Locke said. "In ecology, large-scale transformation may actually turn out to be cheaper than local transformation. Because maintaining a localized ecology requires a constant injection of resources, whereas if a full-scale transformation can truly be achieved, there is no longer a need to expend enormous resources just to sustain a small local ecosystem."

"Taking everything into account, for Zalan Bailey, the only way to secure special-grade funding and have a shot at wrapping up a Tier 1 project grant is to act aggressively."

Locke let out a sigh. "He's different from me. I still have five years. And Golden Crown Mountain only allows a researcher to delay finishing their posting at most twice, each extension lasting about a year. That means even if Zalan Bailey pulls strings and delays his departure, he has only two years left."

"Without pulling strings, it would be very difficult for him to stay on once he's already met the requirements to finish his posting. At its core, this is a competition over the resources that the White Wizard Association allocates to younger-generation wizards."

"But even if he does stay, two years is far too short for him. For me, on the other hand, I have five plus two years. So there's simply no way for him to take the same steady, methodical approach that I can."

Locke furrowed his brow. Since he had begun studying ecology, he had accumulated a great deal of knowledge.

And with that, he had formed some definite views of his own.

The other party's large-scale transformation was quite extreme in its approach, and the ecological transformation of a plane involved dozens of different academic disciplines, making it a fundamentally chaotic system.

Acting with such disregard for natural laws and making arbitrary modifications, Locke wasn't sure whether the other party had any foolproof strategy in place.

Locke thought to himself, "For me, when it comes to ecological transformation, long-term benefit takes priority over short-term gain."

"You cannot sacrifice the future stability of an ecosystem for the sake of quick results in the short term. The most confusing thing about ecology is that short-term flourishing is not necessarily true flourishing."

Locke recalled quite a few cases from ecology. "Many instances of ecological prosperity are nothing more than a final burst of brilliance before a great collapse, or a response stimulated by the mass injection of resources, a kind of draining the pond to catch all the fish."

He remembered something he had come across while reading the Moon Goddess Blessing Spell grimoire: the most terrifying aspect of an ecological experiment is that the moment when the experiment's collapse has already been set in motion and has become irreversible often coincides with the very peak of that wizard's ecological experiment, when it appears most vibrant and flourishing.

That was the true complexity of ecology.

Locke said, "So for me, whether it's Group 2's work or my own Grand Magic, both must adhere to the principle of minimum modification. You have to go along with nature's original laws, make use of them, rather than adding and altering things arbitrarily and making the problem more complicated. But following that principle, everything you do ends up moving very slowly."

"Is there a way to have both?"

"My minimum modification principle has a speed bottleneck. It lacks flexibility and struggles to respond to sudden explosive dangers. That is its weakness as well."

Locke pondered this, and he vaguely grasped something essential. "If I want to advance my Grand Magic further, to make the Grand Magic with the Lunar Mirror at its core even more outstanding, perhaps the breakthrough lies right here."

He sank into deep thought, feeling as though he had caught hold of some critical insight, yet because his accumulated knowledge was still insufficient, or perhaps because he simply had no clear entry point, thinking about it left his head splitting with pain, and he still couldn't push the thought any further.

"I always feel so exhausted," Locke sighed. "My mind can barely keep turning. Of course, my current power level has my magic pressure at more than twice the normal maximum of 9,999."

"After entering the soul declining phase, because my soul contains cracks, my magic pressure has fundamentally broken past the upper limit of a First Circle being. It's caught somewhere between the Second Circle and the First Circle."

"Without entering this state, there's no way for me to compete."

"This is a gamble. If I fail to achieve the results I should at the Silent Chalice Competition, my losses will become tremendous."

The moment Locke considered the possibility of the cost outweighing the gain, he was immediately plunged into a sourceless dread.

In the next instant, a Peach Bow Thorn Arrow appeared within his sea of consciousness. Blessed by the Sacred Dragon Star, it fired an arrow into his sea of consciousness, completely extinguishing that unease and groundless anxiety.

"Damn it. To think that this kind of weak, gains-and-losses-obsessed mentality would surface in me."

Locke's gaze steadied. "A move made cannot be taken back. Since I've already placed this piece on the board, why dwell on whether it was worth it or not."

"The cautionary tale of Grand Wizard Sulla stands before me. Whatever has happened in the past, right or wrong, is already set in stone. If I have even half a moment of hesitation or doubt about any of my past choices, it will come for me the moment I try to advance to the Second Circle."

"Without the past, there would be no present me. I have tremendous confidence in myself, and naturally, I would never have any doubt about the me of the past."

Inside the public office of Group 2, Locke heard Witch Mason and two others arguing with the laboratory administrator.

Witch Mason spotted Locke and her eyes immediately lit up. She said to him, "Team Leader, you're here."

Locke looked over at Witch Mason and the ordinary First Circle wizard staff member who served as the laboratory administrator at Golden Crown Mountain.

Golden Crown Mountain had a portion of employees who handled miscellaneous work outside the formal establishment. These individuals were not in a faculty relationship with Golden Crown Mountain. Rather, their relationship was similar to that between a shop alliance and its own employees.

They signed labor contracts.

Naturally, the qualifications required for this group of wizards were much lower, though even so, the bar was still quite high.

After all, anyone who had not become a formal wizard before the age of forty had no chance of entering Golden Crown Mountain.

When this First Circle liquefaction-stage laboratory administrator saw Locke arrive, an expression of awkwardness immediately surfaced on his face.

Witch Freya said to Locke, "Team Leader, you're finally here. We already submitted a request through Team Leader Cis and got approval to use the large metal telescope equipment. But this administrator here has been putting it off day after day, and every single day he says someone else is using it."

Witch Freya crossed her arms over her chest and said fiercely, "What's going on? Is this discrimination against us?"

Wizard Barrett said in a low voice, "It really is unreasonable. We're all researchers in the same group. There's no need for these underhanded moves."

The laboratory administrator was sweating on his forehead and hurriedly said to Locke, "Old man Augustine, please don't misunderstand. I wouldn't dare go after you. I'm just an ordinary staff member."

"I can't afford to offend anyone."

"It's just that recently, Wizard Zalan Bailey's research team has been borrowing all seven of the large metal telescopes in Group 2. If you don't mind, I can arrange for you to use the medium-sized metal telescopes right away."

Witch Freya's brow shot up instantly. She pointed straight at his nose and snapped, "We submitted a request for large metal telescopes, and you're arranging medium-sized ones for us!"

"Even an individual can afford a medium-sized metal telescope!"

The laboratory administrator spread his hands open toward Locke and said with a pained expression, "Old man Augustine, it's truly because Wizard Zalan Bailey's team has been using the metal telescopes far too frequently. There's just no way to arrange it on short notice."

"I've already been doing my best to prioritize equipment access for you and your friends. Right now, the other researchers in Group 2 don't get to use the metal telescopes at all."

Locke raised his left hand to signal to Witch Freya, who was still fuming, to calm down first.

Locke glanced at the laboratory administrator and said to Witch Freya, "It seems that the Tier 1 project Zalan Bailey has recently been working on is also researching the energy-locking structure of magical plants."

"The large metal telescope is the best equipment for discovering the specific structure and characteristics of a magical plant's energy-locking structure."

"Our group and Zalan Bailey's group have simply run into a conflict."

The laboratory administrator was about to respond, but Locke swept a glance at him. "That said, while Wizard Zalan Bailey's research is important, our group's research is equally important."

"Is it possible to spare one large metal telescope for Witch Mason and the others to use, or for me personally to use?"

The laboratory administrator swallowed hard.

Locke was the champion of this year's Spell Combat Tournament. In this administrator's eyes, although Locke was not yet a Second Circle wizard, he was not far off.

If he could help it, he truly did not want to offend either party.

After all, in his view, Locke was only one step away from becoming a Second Circle wizard, essentially a guaranteed future Second Circle wizard.

For someone like Locke, whether or not he could become a Third Circle wizard was the real open question.

The laboratory administrator said quietly, "Let me discuss it with my colleagues and see if we can spare one for you..."

Witch Freya erupted, "You sycophantic, shirking snake. I knew all along you had a way. When we talked to you, it meant nothing. We had to have our team leader step in before anything could happen."

The laboratory administrator immediately apologized and then quickly left the public office.

Locke coughed once. "Freya, there are a lot of outsiders here."

Witch Freya glanced at the researchers of Group 2 around them, all watching with expressions of amusement, and her face flushed slightly.

Of course, she and Locke were well acquainted by now, so she naturally understood that Locke's reminder just then was not for his own sake, but for her image.

After all, Witch Freya had always cared quite a bit about how she appeared in others' eyes.

The four of them returned to their own workstations. Witch Freya said in a low voice, "That administrator is a complete sycophant. Before Zalan Bailey came back to Group 2, he was always perfectly polite to me and never dared to offend me."

"I didn't expect that once Zalan Bailey returned, he'd be this stubborn."

Wizard Barrett said, "It's not so bad, really. What he said was the truth. Zalan Bailey's team has been crowding out everyone else's resources. We still have a little left over, but the rest of the researchers in Group 2 are already severely short on resources."

Witch Mason said, "All the research resources in Group 2 are flowing toward Wizard Zalan Bailey's side. It looks like the water shortage crisis in Group 2 really is quite serious."

"I didn't expect that just a lack of water could put Team Leader Cis under this much pressure."

Witch Freya took out her lipstick, applied it to her lips, and used a small piece of magic mirror lens to adjust her makeup. "I really lost my composure just now. Good thing the team leader reminded me, otherwise that would have been too embarrassing."

Witch Freya said, "According to my sources from the grapevine, the problem in our Group 2 isn't about water at all. Apparently, we've been hit by a Rose Council industrial chain blockade. I've heard the Rose Council has a hundred-billion market plan, and our Group 2's previous research direction happened to encroach on their interests."

Witch Mason couldn't help but say, "Freya, gossip is the least reliable thing in the world. Can we really trust that? A colonial plane, a half-ruined plane's research, touching the interests of the Rose Council's hundred-billion market?"

Locke asked, "How is the work on my ancient flower root and bromeliad combination coming along?"

Witch Mason said, "Oh, the three of us used the finite element cultivation method along with the grafting cultivation method, and we've already successfully induced the appearance of a Glandular Root Pouch structure in the Big Pink Diamond Bromeliad."

"We currently have one acre of Big Pink Diamond Bromeliads planted in this research facility."

Witch Freya said, "But we need the large metal telescope to observe the internal structure of the Glandular Root Pouch."

"And its mechanism of action as well."

"The Three Grand Magic Mirrors can assist, but the most suitable equipment is still the metal telescope. The Three Grand Magic Mirrors combined with the metal telescope, plus a few other smaller auxiliary devices to analyze the key natural magic force components, are what we'd need to have any chance of obtaining a complete picture of the Glandular Root Pouch's mechanism of action."

Locke nodded. "Well done. The Tier 1 project grant comes with one hundred magic crystal cards. Use them freely. I'll leave that portion to you all. I, meanwhile, need to go work on an analysis of the Queen's Chessboard."

Witch Mason and the others nodded without any objection.

After all, Locke was about to head off to the Silent Chalice Competition, with less than three months remaining.

So the group could all accept putting in a bit more effort right now.

Once Locke was free afterward, he would naturally be able to help them in turn.

The group discussed things a little longer, and then Witch Freya brought something up. "Oh, by the way, Team Leader, speaking of which, I never expected that this Dune Plane would actually have indigenous people."

A look of surprise appeared on Locke's face. "Indigenous people? This plane has high-level intelligent life?"

Witch Mason and Barrett also stared at her in disbelief.

Witch Freya said, "Yes. I heard about it while having lunch with the researchers from Group 2."

"Apparently, the Dune Plane was originally a thriving life plane with a highly developed civilization called the Dune Civilization. The intelligent beings of the Dune Civilization, the Dune People, were born with powerful psionic talent but no magical talent in any other school, so they developed along a mixed path of psionics and technology."

"On the inside of every Dune Person's palm, there is a bump filled with neural tissue. They have a highly developed psionic nervous system and are natural lie detectors and empaths."

"Apparently, at the height of the Dune Civilization, it was a civilization where prison culture was deeply ingrained. Because Dune People could easily sense the evil in others' hearts and observe their actions, and because their psionic talent also made them susceptible to being corrupted by evil through psionic contact, there were a great many criminals."

"The Dune People imprisoned those criminals, and appointed those most gifted in telepathy to serve as prison wardens, watching over the criminals."

Witch Freya said, "Of course, all of that is in the past now. Back then, the Dune Plane was a resource-rich life plane. But later, this plane was captured by the gravitational pull of the Solar Plane and drawn into the Solar Plane's void orbit."

"When the entire plane was facing the crisis of being swallowed by the sun, the flourishing prison civilization of the Dune People was destroyed in an instant. Those telepathic masters were of no help to them. Instead, they transmitted their own anguish to the Dune People. Their civilization regressed to a cave-dwelling form, but they managed to survive."

Witch Mason said in astonishment, "They actually survived all of that? The maximum temperature outside in the desert is nearly one hundred degrees Celsius."

"How did they manage it?"

Witch Freya said, "That I don't know. The desert sea is vast, and finding these Dune People is no easy matter. But don't underestimate the resilience of life."

"Perhaps they were fortunate enough to find some areas in this plane where survival was just barely possible."

Locke, however, found himself thinking of far more. "The Dune People can still survive under these conditions? Did they master some special technology, or did something particular happen?"

"I'm currently conducting ecological research. Perhaps I should find a few Dune People and learn more about them."

Locke felt a flutter of excitement in his heart. "Logically speaking, the lower-level animals and plants should have gone extinct long ago. The Dune People shouldn't still be alive. What on earth happened that allowed them to escape being wiped out by the drought and extreme heat?"

Locke felt someone reaching out to him through his Wish Lingzhi magical plant, and he picked it up. He saw that Witch Scarlett had sent him a message directly to congratulate him. "Locke, congratulations. Golden Crown Mountain has just announced the winning bidder for this year's wizard shoe collective procurement within the First Circle-level Demon Realm War gear set, and this year, it's the Augustus Wizard Shoes brand that won the contract."

"They placed a total order of over four hundred and fifty pairs of wizard shoes, making this a twenty-million magic stone deal. Based on our previously agreed profit-sharing ratio, the amount coming to you is, well, ten million magic stones!"

"All the major leaders in Arthas have been asking about this." Witch Scarlett sent another message. "Locke, from this point on, you're officially a wizard with money!"

"Even some Second Circle wizards aren't as wealthy as you."

"And on top of that, you're a breeder who managed to win a contract in the collective procurement for one of the Five Great Wars using purely plant-based wizard shoes, competing against the wizard shoe shop alliances run by magical weavers."

...

Meanwhile, at a technical seminar hosted by Melechi Magic Step, a moon ring wizard executive slammed his documents down on the table and demanded furiously, "Where did this Augustus Wizard Shoes come from?"

"Who is this?!"

"Could this be some sub-brand that another wizard shoe brand cooked up?"