<h4>Chapter 123. Starling Party (1)</h4>


    After the Founding Day celebration ended, winter vacation began.


    Romantica left on the train to the Prillecha Empire. She was unwilling to leave, but couldn''t turn down her parents’ request toe home for the holiday.


    Her trip home was unavoidable, but Desir made sure to emphasize that she needed to continue practicing her imagery training during the vacation. This was both a necessity and the fastest way to ensure she could safely enter the Fourth-Circle.


    Freechel and Takiran also left for their hometowns like Romantica.


    Desir gave them their own assignments to allow them to be productive and to keep them from frittering away their time justzing about.


    Pram, Adjest, and Desir stayed in the academy. They had no ce to go, so they decided to stay and focus on their training.


    With renewed vigor and the recently afforded extra time to focus on his training, Pram had be rather proficient in using his aura.


    Pram had grown stronger by ending his reliance on his nk?um rapier. He could now bring out his full power with ordinary swords.


    At first, Pram couldn’t control his aura very well and ended up breaking many of these ordinary swords. When he called forth his aura, the swords would crumble under the pressure. Up until now, he had only used his nk?um rapier that boasted the ability of holding an infinite amount of aura. As a result, he had never needed to improve the fine control of his aura.


    Pram’s training had been aplete sess. He could now control the strength and intensity of the aura infused in his sword, drastically boosting his overall fighting ability.


    At this point, Pram was at a level that made it difficult for a wizard, like Desir, to offer further advice on.


    Fortunately, there was a suitable person avable to offer the much needed mentoring at the Hebrion Academy.


    Hersaint-nc Tistachia.


    He served as the master of the Knights of the Golden Hawk and was now a professor at the Hebrion Academy.


    In the future, he would earn the nickname “Knight of Dawn” and contribute greatly to the clearing of the Shadow Labyrinth.


    Hersaint-nc was one of the few top-ss Bishop-Rank swordsmen in the kingdom.


    Since Desir could no longer offer effective advice to Pram, he could only approach Hersaint-nc and ask him to mentor Pram.


    After Desir had pledged allegiance to the Emperor, a sort of cooperative rtionship was easily established with the Emperor’s closest swordsman, Hersaint-nc. Due to this mutual understanding, he was more than happy to ept Desir’s request.


    Adjest was finally able to achieve the Fourth-Circle. It only ended up taking her three months to reach the required level ofpetency in using her imagery sense. While this had seemed like an eternity to her, reaching the Fourth-Circle at her age demonstrated her outrageous talent.


    Her talents far exceeded themonsense and left Hebrion Academy’s curriculum in shame inparison


    Desir felt he couldn’t be left behind, so he also devoted himself to his training.


    A clue on how he could improve his new magic system had finally been found. All that remained was tranting this theory into practice.


    Winter break gave him the perfect opportunity to seek out a perfectbination for at least one of his spells.


    Although there were thousands of ways his basic arrays and formations could bebined into new spells, only a handful of these would produce powerful yet cost-effective spells. Desir knew it would be very difficult to find the perfect formation for a single spell, due to the number ofbinations that needed to be considered, multiplied by the fundamental nature of this new magic system. This magic system had a structure reminiscent of the Tesseract artifact he had seen Crow mask use, meaning multiple magic spells needed to be calcted simultaneously.


    Desir decided toplete his new spells one by one. First, he selected some of the most versatile magic amongst the Third-Circle spells and began experimenting.


    However, there was one significant problem with this process:


    In order to verify the effect of changing the arrangement of magic formations in the spell, it was necessary for him to invoke thebination. However, considering that the magical power required to fuel these spells was typically at a level higher than the Fifth-Circle, he would struggle to find a suitable ce to practice.


    Even though the Hebrion Academy is well equipped, even their training grounds could not hold up against Fifth-Circle magic.


    ‘But I will not give up with just this road block.’


    Desir thus got in contact with Zod and suggested that he test the defence of the Aurora System. Doing this, he could hit two birds with the same stone. He could ascertain howplete the Aurora System was, while also improving his magic system.


    As soon as Zod approved the request, Desir headed straight to Althea, where the headquarters of the Magic Tower was located. The Hebrion Empire and Althea were not close, but this was no longer a problem as the Emperor had given Desir permission to use the transportation gate as he saw fit.


    The experiment began with Zod running the Aurora System in arge, open space.


    The Aurora System whirred to life. The magic stones powering it began to hum. Arge film shot across the ground,pletely covering it from any assault. This technology was the culmination of years of dedicated research by the future Zod Exarion, widely referred to as the Great Sage.


    Using his new magic system, Desir mentally formted his first arrangement, and invoked the spell, firing it straight at the barrier cast by the Aurora System.


    The ground shook as a spell equivalent to the Fifth-Circle struck the shield. *Grrrrr*


    A deafening st threatened to burst their eardrums while the ground continued to shake as though it was the epicentre of a major earthquake.


    But that was it. The Aurora System hadpletely neutralized Desir’s magic without leaving behind any trace of it. Furthermore, the shield was still in perfect condition; its defensive powerpletely unaffected by Desir’s literal earth-shaking power…


    Zod checked the Aurora System to make sure it was still working properly and shortly afterwards informed Desir of the results.


    “The power of that magic is weaker than the previous one. Desir, how’s the mana consumption of that spell? ”


    “No change. Rather, it must have been an inefficient arrangement.”


    Desir continued to study new arrays and repeatedly experimented with newbinations, but this didn’t mean he spent all of his vacation on these experiments.


    He recalled the details of incidents from his past life, not yet forgotten, and gave simple advice where necessary to avoid idents from uring.


    “Hasn’t it been a long time since youst inspected the power source installed in each Magic Tower? Just in case, it would probably be a good idea to conduct arge-scale audit at least once.”


    “You’re right.”


    Zod always heeded Desir’s advice. After just a few days, a full investigation of each location’s power generation had beenpleted.


    “You were right. I found a power pipe leaking at one of our branches. This could have led to a major incident. By the end of the year, a branch could have been frozen and suffered great losses.”


    “Good.”


    Through Desir’s directions and Zod’s diligence, the many disasters that gued the Magic Tower of Desir’s time werepletely avoided. Such incidents ranged from minor mishaps all the way to severe catastrophes.


    The Magic Tower wasn’t the only recipient of Desir’s advice. He also regrlymunicated with the Western Kingdom Union through Prisci.


    Meanwhile, the battle between the Western Kingdom Union and the Outsiders was still underway.


    At first, it seemed as though the war would freeze in an eternal stalemate, the two powers equally matched for one another. However, thanks to Desir’s interference, the scales tipped drastically when the Hebrion Empire joined the Western Kingdom Union.


    The alliance between the Hebrion Empire and the Western Kingdom Union had been much more effective than expected. By sharing intel with each other and establishing strategies together, the movement of coalition forces had be more efficient and easier.


    As a result, the number of active hotspots of Outsider activity plunged swiftly and steadily, and by the end of Hebrion Academy’s winter vacation, the Outsiders had begun to group up in a desperatest stand against the coalition forces.


    The allied forces judged that this was the opportunity to exterminate the threat of the Outsiders once and for all, so they poured almost all of their resources into the northern ins of Adenia where the Outsiders had rallied.


    Lines of troops stood in formation on opposite ends of the ins. The two groups stood off, monitoring and probing each other.


    Amidst the stand-off, small-scale skirmishes asionally broke out.


    As the Outsiders weren’tmitting to a full assault, and were heavily entrenched on their end of the ins, it seemed like this stand-off was not going to be resolved in the short-term. ‘It looks like thest struggle of a rodent caught in a rat trap… ’


    If so, defeating this band of criminals wouldpletely wipe out the Outsiders forces.


    But Desir felt a rising sense of difort. So far, the Outsiders had yet to y one of their strongest pieces.


    “Crow mask still hasn’t made an appearance here, or anywhere else for that matter.”


    Desir received his information from Prisci who was participating directly in this Battle of the ins.


    “It’s really strange.”


    Desir tried to make sense of this discrepancy.


    If the Outsiders lost this battle, their fate was as good as sealed.


    It was truly perplexing that they would keep a wizard on the level of the Crow Mask in reserve. He should have shown up by now.


    In his past life, the Outsiders had never made a move like this. Desir wasn’t able to solve this with his knowledge of the past, like he could fix the power leak or find Pram a mentor. The Outsiders were a rogue element, where Desir had no trick up his sleeve, nothing to guide his actions. All he could do was provide his insight and give rmendations on which tactics to pursue and what to be wary of.


    “They may be nning something. Please remain careful.” “I’ll keep that in mind.”


    As the vacation came to an end, Desir had managed to achieve tangible results in his magical system research. He sessfully developed spells powerful enough to affect the Aurora System. Zod looked in sheer incredulity at the cracks that tarnished his pride and joy.


    “It seems this spell is a bit too much of a heavy burden on the Aurora System. It has power that is less than the Sixth-Circle, but definitely amongst the higher tiers of Fifth-Circle spells. What makes this incredible though, is that the base of it is formed purely out of Third-Circle spells.”


    In addition to the increase in power, the mana consumed has been greatly reduced by interweaving and arranging the corresponding spell arrays so that they were simultaneously derived, instead of being derived one at a time.


    It was a bit of a let down that Desir had only managed to improve a single spell to this level, but being able to sessfully improve upon his magic system in the end, he could not help being excited none-the-less.


    His choice to focus on the ordering of spells in the arrays had ended up being the right decision.


    He had now proven that the power and efficiency of his spells could be improved by re-arranging the spell arrays, and further work would doubtlessly achieve further results in the future.


    After much trial and error, Desir had started to get a feel for the optimal arrangement of spells. It probably wouldn’t take too much longer to find perfect arrangements for his other spells.


    It was finally time for the new semester to begin.