magician in town

Chapter 672 Ancestral Gift (62)

The dwindling energy of the magical world still answered Du Zhengyi's call, but high-energy magic, like the magical world itself, was waning. Du Zhengyi tried a few high-level spells in an instant, but the effects were like a roadside light bulb short-circuiting—a few sparks later, it vanished. Something within the sealed land exacerbated the magical decay, making high-level spells particularly difficult to use in this place and at this time.

Perhaps it was at this moment, as he reached the end of his life, that Du Zheng truly felt the world of mages, like himself, had entered a deep twilight. It wasn't just that he was powerless; the magical world itself felt the same.

But then he briefly thought of Roach, unaffected by the decline of the magical world, whose magic shone exceptionally brightly in this mundane twilight. Roach's magical system was different from other mages; other mages' magic required incantations, their power derived from the magical world. But Roach's magic came from himself; he didn't need incantations, nor did he have any. His power came from within himself.

If one day the power of the magical world completely disappears, Roach's abilities will still remain. Whether Roach likes it or not, he will be one of the few remaining magicians in the world at that time. A hidden old world will vanish without a trace, leaving only a few remnants.

Du Zhengyi's original mission included eliminating the "high-level anti-magicians" defined by Qionglin, which was practically equivalent to erasing all traces of them. Part of Qionglin's responsibility seemed to be ensuring the silent and complete disappearance of the magical world. These thoughts flashed through his mind in an instant; there were things he wanted to tell Luo Qi, but he no longer had time.

His nerve conduction speed had been pushed to its limit. To enhance his dynamic visual abilities, his pupils split into several layers, making him somewhat inhuman. The details of static objects became blurred and distorted before his eyes, but when a pale blue trail disturbed the air, his vision more easily captured the attack trajectory that was almost invisible to the average human eye.

A fleeting pale blue glow glided behind Du Zhengyi, followed by a sharp, piercing pain near his spine. Almost simultaneously, Du Zhengyi jerked to the side, dodging a vicious attack aimed at his spine. In the instant the pain shot through him, he clearly saw the claw-shaped blade again. In the afterimage left in his mind by his heightened visual nerves, he saw a human figure. It was definitely a person, but covered in strange armor, the helmet particularly peculiar, only covering one eye, the other seemingly damaged. As he had guessed, the Invisible Man wasn't completely invisible; he would become visible whenever he made contact. In other words, the Invisible Man would lose his invisibility advantage if he attacked, forcing him to act like an assassin. But Du Zhengyi could only retaliate the moment he was attacked, a passive situation that made him feel like a predator being hunted.

However, Du Zhengyi seized the opportunity to retaliate, attacking the invisible man with incredible speed. A black blade materialized in his hand and stabbed backward at high speed. The invisible man had his own attack principles; if he missed, he would retreat and revert to his invisible state. Du Zhengyi felt as if he had plunged into a slightly viscous liquid, and then the blade completely missed its mark; the invisible man vanished once more.

This was only Du Zhengyi's first test. He had already roughly determined that if he couldn't control the invisible man, even increasing the intensity of the attack probably wouldn't have much effect.

He had never witnessed true invisibility magic; telekinesis could barely achieve the effect of invisibility. For example, Roach could make others see him or perceive him as someone else. But in essence, that wasn't invisibility; it was merely deceiving others' minds to create an illusion. As long as they knew he existed, they could still touch him, or rather, they could still attack a telekinesis.

The Invisible Man's situation is completely different. When he becomes invisible, it's as if he doesn't exist in this world, somewhat like an intermediate state during teleportation. When Du Zhengyi first gained the ability to teleport, he wondered where he was when he disappeared from one location and reappeared in another, in that intermediate state between the two places—did he really exist? Unfortunately, the knowledge he had acquired focused on how to calculate beacons and how to quickly and accurately determine the target location.

Perhaps the world exists in different dimensions, or perhaps from another perspective, space travelers traverse between folded worlds, thus achieving their destinations instantly. The world can certainly be folded; it's not just space that can be folded, but time as well. If Roach were to discover that time could be folded, given his personality, he would undoubtedly activate this mechanism at any cost. Moreover, the cost would only be an exponential decline in magical energy, practically negligible for Roach. Roach might even be happy to see it happen; Du Zhengyi even imagined that if Roach's perverse sense of humor were to surface, he might frequently travel through time, exhausting the magical world's energy and reducing the mages to mere mortals. If the clownfish had achieved time travel, why didn't it use this method? But then Du Zhengyi realized that if the clownfish wanted to destroy the magical world, it had far too many methods at its disposal, and the clownfish seemed uninterested in any of them. However, if the clownfish were Roach traveling back in time, it would still choose a meaningful point in time.

When he first met Du Zhengyi in Qionglin, Du Zhengyi was still a teenager. Luo Qi in this timeline was even younger, just a clueless kid. Therefore, that time couldn't possibly be a significant point in his relationship with his lover. This point can seemingly be ruled out.

The clownfish told him many things, and some of them must have been true, including the timing of his own death in that timeline. He didn't have the chance to meet Roach in that timeline because he died early in Qionglin, at the hands of the reckless Lotus Burners. The clownfish's appearance may have hindered some of the Lotus Burners' progress, but it certainly did more than that.

The clownfish was lame, but Roach wasn't. Roach once said he was tied to a train track by a group of thugs, but a passing wizard saved him. If that wizard hadn't appeared, Roach would have lost a leg and become like the clownfish. Du Zhengyi was now certain who that wizard was. Being a wizard, yet crippled, was a mark of "incompetence and stupidity" that accompanied a wizard throughout their life. The clownfish could conceal his appearance, but never his disability. This indicated both his indifference to the disability and, conversely, his extreme sensitivity to it. He silently roared at the world by displaying his disability. But if one could go back in time, wouldn't they try to save themselves, to find liberation from a certain obsession? Perhaps it was indeed Roach who saved Roach.

However, magicians don't easily become disabled. Given enough time, a healing magician can repair some damage, and with timely treatment, even a severed leg can regrow. Roach's father was a healing magician, perhaps the most renowned and capable in Qionglin. He must have had a medical connection with such a young child; he should have quickly sensed Roach's serious injury and rushed to his aid. He was fully capable of regrowing the child's leg, even if it left some neurological damage, it wouldn't result in the complete loss of a limb. Yet, the clownfish was still disabled, meaning that at that time, Magician Roach was in a situation where he couldn't leave.

Du Zhengyi suddenly understood what that scene was. Even in a state where he couldn't feel emotion, Du Zhengyi still felt a tremor. It was highly likely that it was the moment in that timeline when his life was hanging by a thread, and Qionglin, with unquestionable authority, kept Master Luo on the run, hoping that Master Luo would prioritize saving Du Zhengyi. Master Luo must have tried for a while, but the rescue failed, and his counterpart in that timeline still died. Luo Qi lost a leg, was bullied even more severely by the magical world, and was eventually exiled or self-exiled from magical society. At that time, Luo Qi was still alive, perhaps because he was discovered by humans and taken to a human hospital, where he was treated as a human. The clownfish that traveled back in time must have, through extreme manipulation, either before or after encountering him, managed to rescue Luo Qi from the railway tracks at that precise moment.

Ten more seconds passed, and the pale blue movement trajectory around Du Zhengyi disappeared. The invisible figure seemed determined to wear him down by stalling for time.

For a fleeting moment, he couldn't help but wonder: if it were Roach, the Roach of today, which point in the past would he want to return to? The worst possible point would be the moment when the clownfish and Du Zhengyi met in Qionglin. But knowing Roach as he did, Roach was far more intelligent; he wouldn't get himself involved in chaos. Yet, he truly couldn't guess Roach's thoughts. He suspected that the Entanglement hadn't been able to restrain him because, logically, he genuinely didn't know what Roach would do, perhaps not even the mechanisms behind the Entanglement. Whether Roach was the threat to Lonely Mountain's greatest secret remained unclear.

But suddenly, the very idea of ​​a point in time struck him like a thunderbolt. He realized he had figured out something far more important. The clownfish hadn't gone to find his lover, nor had he fought the Lotus Burners to rid the world of them, because what he wanted to eradicate was all mages, the entire magical world, and the entire history of mages. Space travel requires beacons, and time travel also requires points in time. Mages don't have a discipline of history; to find a mage's timeline, one can only search for vague clues in human-recorded history. But mages aren't truly devoid of history. It's just that for those who can travel back in time, history is the coordinate system of time. Therefore, accurate historical dates and events have always been one of the greatest secrets of the magical world; only mathematicians are allowed to precisely record and calculate time.

Lonely Mountain holds many secrets, but perhaps all the clownfish seeks is a coordinate of time. He longs to return to the timeline of the Primordial Mage, or perhaps even more ancient—to a point in time before the Primordial Mage existed. This idea deeply shocked Du Zhengyi; it was an almost impossible concept.

But if it were Roach, he would have the courage and the imagination to do so.