Chapter 47 Next Chapter: Finished!

Elmer Diaz was a hedge wizard who only knew spells of the transmutation and necromancy schools.

He was not a graduate or a dropout from the Fisher Wizard Tower in the south, but rather a self-taught mage who relied on a spellbook.

The origin of this spellbook was quite peculiar; his miner father had dug it up during a mining expedition. Along with the spellbook, they had unearthed a skeleton wearing a magical necklace, a plain black wizard robe, and holding a long staff.

Millennia after the descent of gods and supernatural powers, anyone seeing these items today could easily deduce that the skeleton was a wizard.

Except for the skeleton and the staff, which were too conspicuous to hide, Elmer Diaz's father brought the other two items home.

Firmly believing that anything worn or draped over the body of a lord wizard must be valuable, the father placed the magical necklace around his son's neck and covered him with the wizard robe every single night.

When dawn approached, to prevent his son from discovering this and blurting it out to others, the father would wake up even earlier and quietly put the two items away.

Though it was purely by chance, the father had indeed done the right thing.

His son, Elmer Diaz, became exceptionally sharp, showing extraordinary intelligence from a young age. Many around them believed that when he grew up, he could go to the Fisher Wizard Tower and become a lord wizard.

However, the father repeatedly refused, making excuses that he did not want his son to leave home at such a young age and that everything would be decided when he came of age.

On Elmer Diaz's sixteenth birthday, his father handed him the spellbook, the magical necklace, and the wizard robe, and built a small wooden cabin in a secluded spot in the mountains, allowing him to study magic in secret. This was because the father vaguely sensed that learning magic in secret might bring retribution from the Fisher Wizard Tower.

Elmer Diaz spent several years alone in the mountains. During this time, his father always told people he had gone away for manual labor, and no one in the vicinity of Copper Mine Town knew that a hedge wizard had emerged.

He was truly talented, and extremely fortunate.

That spellbook did not merely record the spells learned by its previous owner; it was also a diary written in the Common tongue. More importantly, whether due to the passage of time or some other reason, the protective magic cast upon the spellbook had failed.

Whenever he thought about how he had not died from the protective magic the first time he opened the spellbook, Elmer Diaz would feel a lingering wave of terror.

Through the spellbook, Elmer learned that the magical necklace around his neck was called the Necklace of Wisdom, and the black robe on his body was called the Robe of Wisdom.

Both the necklace and the robe increased the wearer's intelligence by 1 point. Ever since Elmer was very young, his father had put the necklace on him and covered him with the robe every night... Perhaps because of this, his intelligence developed at an astonishing rate, far surpassing most people in Copper Mine Town.

Upon opening the spellbook, he even discovered a spell scroll tucked inside—an 8th-circle evocation spell, Earthquake.

However, this streak of good fortune lasted only until the moment he learned his first spell and returned to the tavern in Copper Mine Town.

At that time, his spirits were soaring with boundless ambition. Having mastered his first spell, he considered himself a lord wizard, feeling that everyone he looked at should bow and scrape before him, begging to be his servants.

He walked into the tavern, ordered the most expensive drink the establishment offered, "Enchanting Red Cloud," and tossed a few copper coins to a wandering bard, asking him to share tales about wizards.

Then he almost spat the "Enchanting Red Cloud" right out of his mouth.

The bard recounted that the Fisher Wizard Tower had captured a hedge wizard last month. Because the man had learned stray magic belonging to the tower and refused to enter its service, the inquisitor mages of the Fisher Wizard Tower had cast him into the dungeons for a permanent imprisonment.

The bard stated that the Fisher Wizard Tower enforced a strict monopoly on magic. Within a thousand-kilometer radius of its spatial anchor, the Fisher Wizard Tower was the sole legitimate institution for learning spells.

The bard declared that the Fisher Wizard Tower permitted no hedge wizards to exist; any spells learned outside the wizard tower infringed upon the rights and interests of the Archmage Fisher. One either had to pay exorbitant retroactive taxes or work for the wizard tower until the master of the tower was satisfied, failing which meant rotting in prison for life.

In this world, due to the existence of the Spatial Anomaly, any faction capable of anchoring space was a supreme overlord. Within the range of their spatial anchors, their word was absolute law, holding absolute dominion over life and death.

Elmer Diaz could only thank his lucky stars that he had not exposed his identity as a wizard, and he scurried back to the mountains in disgrace, remaining hidden until he reached the age of forty.

When he turned forty, his aging father ran to the mountain cabin and told him a piece of news: the Amos Mine was plagued by undead.

From then on, he secretly monitored the development of the situation.

Upon discovering that the mine owner had gone bankrupt and the Adventurers' Guild's quest to clear out the undead had been rescinded, he fell into a state of wild ecstasy.

Using two 3rd-circle transmutation spells, Stone to Mud and Mud to Stone, he tunneled downward from the southern foothills of the small mountain south of the Amos Mine, digging continuously for a month until he finally located the lair of the undead.

Yet, when Elmer Diaz first discovered this negative-energy-laden cavern, it did not contain nearly as many undead as Li Rui later encountered. Instead, there were merely a few fragile, decaying undead whose bones had been eroded by time.

The sixty-five undead discovered by Li Rui were accumulated later. Taking advantage of the chaos surrounding the mind flayer incident—when the priests of the Copper Mine Town's dwarven temple were overwhelmed by an influx of refugees and completely unable to guard the catacombs—he had secretly stolen a vast quantity of skeletons and converted them all into undead.

In Elmer's eyes, the only chance in his lifetime to escape the control of the Fisher Wizard Tower and freely learn and use magic under the sun was pinned on this horde of undead.

As long as he gathered a sufficient number of undead, he could rely on this undead army to cross the unknown wilderness beyond the spatial anchor, reaching another stable realm that allowed him to study and cast spells freely!

Yet now... everything was ruined!

Sensing the undead under his control losing their connection to him one by one at a rate of several per minute, Elmer Diaz felt as though his heart was bleeding.

Undead creatures were the sort of entities where if a single one was disturbed, all others of the same kind in the vicinity would be aroused.

Yet the intruder had defied all conventional logic.

Elmer could not fathom how the other party accomplished this, but based on this single feat alone, he understood that the adversary was stronger than him.

Such methods were not something a barbarian class could possess; the only ones capable of wielding such means were mages.

Within the spatial anchor's domain of the Fisher Wizard Tower, a wizard who was stronger than him, possessed more extensive means, and dared to eliminate his undead in his own territory in such a provocative manner...

"The Fisher Wizard Tower..."

Elmer Diaz clenched his teeth tightly, drawing the 8th-circle Earthquake spell scroll from his bosom.

"You forced me to do this!"