Chapter Ninety-Six: Secret Technique

Peter left his father’s residence with mixed feelings. He regretted that his father would not be competing for the dean’s seat, yet he was also overjoyed that, after so many years, his own long-cherished wish had at last come true. Naturally, the latter feeling prevailed.

After a moment’s thought, he did not go straight home, but headed in another direction. Soon he had taken a carriage outside the academy, and before long it brought him to an exquisitely built villa.

In a sense, this too was his home, though not one he shared with his wife. It belonged instead to him and his lover, Jennie. In this regard Peter had inherited his father’s gifts in full measure; indeed, the three generations of them could hardly have denied the same blood.

Peter greatly enjoyed such pleasures: fine wine, beauty, and a night of indulgence. Especially when he was riding high on success. In the course of it, he could not help boasting to the lovely woman that he would soon become head of the Clark family, soon command riches beyond counting, and that even a little that slipped through his fingers would be enough for her to live quite comfortably.

To his surprise, Jennie did not believe him. How could Peter tolerate doubt from his own woman? He took out the letters and scepter his father had given him from his storage bag and showed them to her.

This time she believed him.

Sensing that Jennie put far more effort into things afterward, Peter felt immensely pleased with himself.

After Peter left, Jennie watched his retreating back with flickering eyes. She had struggled in the royal capital for so long not merely to become someone’s mistress; she wanted far more than that.

Jennie quickly changed clothes, then left the villa and vanished into the alleys of the royal capital.

Not long after, her voice rang out from within an ordinary residence: “First-rank worker bee Jennie reporting!”

...

After this recent period of hawking goods from a stall, Andy’s purse had finally swollen again. On several days in particular, he sold more than a hundred books a day, bringing in nearly ten thousand mana stones in daily income. This secretly delighted him.

Unfortunately, as time went on, his supplementary books gradually began to sell less and less. He knew the market was nearly saturated. What was more, he had also started noticing other vendors in the market who specialized in selling supplementary books.

One day, Andy failed to sell even ten volumes. That, combined with the fact that he was already carrying several tens of thousands of mana stones, made him lose much of his patience for earning money by running a stall. After all, he had come to the royal capital to study sorcery.

Since he felt he already had roughly enough mana stones on hand, he decided to stop setting up his stall for the next few days and focus on learning sorcery.

By now, among the sorcery feats, Andy had mastered Sorcery Potency and Extended Sorcery. The difficulty of Focused Casting was somewhat higher than the first two, and there were a few crucial points he could not, no matter how hard he tried, fully understand.

The magic mirror could only search for knowledge that already existed; it could not search for the reasoning behind a problem. Andy had been stuck on this feat for two days, and in the end he still paid to consult a teacher from the inner academy. The problem was then solved with ease. It turned out he had simply fallen into a mental trap and gotten hopelessly stuck.

This incident made Andy realize that some problems could not be solved merely by reading books or thinking them through alone. Sometimes he needed guidance and direction from someone more experienced.

He had heard that every student in the inner academy had a dedicated mentor, and that they could ask questions free of charge during fixed hours each month. Of course, they could also ask questions at other times, but then they would have to pay.

As for outer academy students like Andy, it was not impossible to seek out an inner academy mentor, but the cost was much higher than it was for inner academy students. Moreover, a matter at the level of Andy’s sorcery feats was already close to the limit of what mana stones could pay for. Anything involving more profound knowledge required academy contribution points.

Since arriving at the academy, Andy had heard more than once that contribution points were actually far more useful than mana stones. But with the Hestyria Magic Mirror at his disposal, Andy regarded the mirror as nothing more than a paid historical information search engine.

He felt that whenever an internal matter arose, he could ask the mirror; and when an external one did, he could ask the mirror as well. There was simply no need to ever use academy contribution points.

This time, when he went to ask a question, he nearly came away empty-handed. At first, the mentor wanted Andy to pay with contribution points. Only after seeing that Andy truly had none, and was willing to increase the mana-stone payment by ten percent, did the mentor reluctantly agree to accept mana stones instead.

This experience made Andy interested in the quest hall, where one could earn academy contribution points. He had not been there once since arriving at the academy, and he decided that once he had developed his sniping sorcery, he would go and see what was there.

Now that Andy had learned Sorcery Potency, Extended Sorcery, and Focused Casting, his Fire Arrow had also remained at the master level for quite some time. Andy believed the grandmaster level was not far off. So he began to think about carrying out his plan and developing a sorcery meant specifically for sniping.

He tested it in the sorcery practice room. At the master level, his Fire Arrow had an energy rating of 60 to 120 units. With Sorcery Potency activated, its power increased by 50 percent, bringing it to 90 to 180. With Focused Casting, a guaranteed critical hit could reach 180 units of energy. Andy also had a 25 percent increase to critical damage from his Infinite Firepower talent, so with the sorcery feats supporting it, his Fire Arrow ultimately dealt 225 units of damage.

That was enough to pierce a bronze wizard’s protective field, and it posed no small threat even to a silver wizard.

However, when using Extended Sorcery to amplify a spell, Andy ran into some problems. This feat increased a spell’s range by consuming more mana, unlike Sorcery Potency, which fixed the mana expenditure and granted a 50 percent boost to spell strength. With Extended Sorcery, the more mana he consumed, the farther the spell could travel.

For Andy, any problem that could be solved with mana was no problem at all, so he directly invested mana equal to half his maximum reserve into Extended Sorcery. Sure enough, his spell range increased nearly tenfold, reaching more than a thousand meters.

But then a new issue arose: this was already beyond the range of his spiritual perception.

Within the range of his spiritual awareness, Andy could manipulate his spells to almost never miss. But once Fire Arrow moved beyond his perception, he could no longer adjust its trajectory or landing point. Its strike location would always deviate somewhat from what he intended. What use was sniping if it could not hit accurately?

After some tests, Andy discovered that only when he kept the limit of Extended Sorcery within two hundred meters could he guarantee accurate impact points. Beyond that range, he could no longer ensure precision.

But what Andy wanted was the kind of covert sniping attack that struck once and then vanished a thousand miles away. A range of two hundred meters was far too short. At that distance, he might as well just hurl a fireball; at least that would have greater power. What he wanted was a method by which the sorcery could remain precise even two thousand meters away, beyond the reach of his spiritual perception.

Since one question had already been asked, he might as well ask the same mentor again.

The mentor looked at Andy as though he were an idiot. “You want precision at two thousand meters? Do you think you’re a marksman from the Charles family, with their secret hereditary technique? And besides, if you use all your mana on Extended Sorcery, what are you going to cast the spell with?”

Then the mentor patiently and earnestly lectured Andy, urging him not to reach for the moon and to keep his feet on the ground, and so on. He also explained that ordinary wizards would not allow their spell range to exceed the limits of their spiritual perception. He further advised Andy that using one-tenth of his mana for Extended Sorcery was precisely the right approach for an apprentice at his stage, since it would bring his range to the very limit of an apprentice’s spiritual awareness. This, he said, was the proper method for using the Extended Sorcery feat, distilled from the experience of countless wizards.

Andy listened patiently, but his mind had already been captured by the Charles family’s secret technique mentioned by the mentor. He decided he would go back and investigate it carefully.