Age of Adepts

The once lively Makren City was now a stretch of ruins.

Apart from the stones and tiles that couldn’t be burned to ashes, all the wood of the buildings had been put to the torch in the great fire.

The magical machine army finally started searching for spoils under the commands of the goblin engineers once the fire had been extinguished and the temperature of the place had cooled down slightly. Greem did not involve himself in this process. Instead, he brought the Crimson adepts straight to the Beast God temple and started a careful, serious investigation of every inch of the land and every single pattern to be seen.

The power system of Strongwoods Plane was starkly different from that of the World of Adepts.

The orcs place more emphasis on unearthing the potential and explosiveness of the physical body. They believed in and followed the Beast God Aruger and, in turn, obtained large numbers of divine blessings from him. However, most of this divine magic was used to improve their Physique and sustained explosiveness. They were considered auxiliary blessings and could not be used as combat techniques.

Moreover, the orc shamans didn’t fixate on the acquisition of knowledge and techniques like the adepts did. Instead, they devoted themselves entirely to the praise and worship of Beast God Aruger. As long as they could win the favor of the Beast God, they could increase their grade through divine power and strengthen themselves through its use.

That was why the Beast God temples were the only way for orc shamans in Strongwoods Plane to communicate with and contact Beast God Aruger!

Greem and the others destroyed the temple in Makren City. No one in a hundred-kilometer radius of this place could obtain the divine blessing of Beast God Aruger. If the Beast God’s divine power did not empower the orcs of Strongwoods Plane, they would only be a group of slightly stronger beasts against the witches. They would no longer be of any threat.

If one were to think of Beast God Aruger as the source of their divine magic, then the Beast God temples were divine power relay stations. It was through the temples relaying divine power that the surrounding orc villages could obtain the chance to communicate with the Beast God using their own crude Beast God altars.

It was what was known to the adepts as the channels of faith.

These channels of faith worked both ways. They could gather the faith power of the orc believers and transfer it to Beast God Aruger. They could also feed back Aruger’s divine power upon his believers. The grander the altar, the broader the channel of faith.

The small Beast God altars of the orc villages could, at best, transfer First Grade power. The larger orc towns could transfer Second Grade power. Meanwhile, medium and small cities like Makren and Witherwater could only transfer power as high as Third Grade.

Throughout the entirety of the Orc Empire, including the main temple of Pompes City, there were only three large altars capable of transferring Fourth Grade power!

As long as the Northern Witches avoided these three areas and survived the first wave of retaliation from the orcs, they would have plenty of confidence in finishing this problematic mission of theirs.

As a veteran of planar invasion, Greem had a profound understanding of this entire process himself.

However, at the moment, he had devoted all of his attention and comprehension to the analysis and research of the Beast God temple before him.

If ordinary orcs were simple one-way receivers, then the Beast God temples were control and relay platforms capable of receiving and sending out power. Greem was genuinely fascinated by how a temple could be capable of such a feat.

If he could figure out the principles behind it, he might, with the help of the Chip, be able to gather the power of his subordinates or even his own power and send it all to another individual or another group of individuals.

Greem had once learned from a tome that a group of extremely special arcanists existed in a particular corner of the multiverse.

As spellcasters, they too were capable of freely casting spells, much like mages, adepts, and sorcerers.

However, the main factor distinguishing them from mages and adepts was their exceptional ability to gather power across many different individuals. They were able to share the most minute of power to all their allies and collect everyone’s strength for their use. That made spellcasting extremely easy for them and meditation much less difficult.

It was said that the greatest inventions of the arcanists were their two terrifying magical facilities: the magic pools and the spell pool!

The magic pools were just as they were named. They were unique facilities used to gather magical energy.

With these magic pools, the arcanists no longer needed to meditate and accumulate magic energy, nor did they need to spend year after year slowly improving their Spirit. All the additional magical energy from their daily meditations would be stored in these magic pools. When they fought against enemies, they could draw on the pure magical power of the pool through unusual methods.

The effects of the spell pools were similar. The only difference was that they did not store pure, chaotic magical energy, but formed and solidified spells.

The arcanists regularly stored spells that they did not require in their spell pool daily. They could then draw on these spells when needed. This way, they had all the magic power and spells they could ever need, turning every single arcanist into a terrifying spell cannon. They could wear down and exhaust any opponent of the same grade with their constant barrage of spells.

However, such arcanists also had a huge flaw. Their Spirits would always be lower when compared to opponents of the same grade. If the opponent managed to disrupt their soul connection with the magic and spell pools, then their power would instantly regress from a master of magic to a mere apprentice.

Consequently, to avoid being separated from their magic pools and spell pools, the Great Arcanists (Eighth Grade) put in the research and developed a strange arcane tower that could follow them around the world.

In such a manner, the Great Arcanists rapidly rose to become an exceedingly powerful force in the multiverse!

Sadly, these arcanists that loved knowledge more than their own lives ultimately fell at the hands of a certain powerful god. The great Arcane Empire that they had once established vanished just like that, leaving plenty of ancient ruins in the depths of various planes waiting for others to explore and excavate.

The reason they were defeated was all because of a mighty Goddess of Magic.

The Arcane Empire was prosperous and powerful then. To obtain magical apprentices with better elementium affinities, they invaded large and small planes under the rule of various gods with no discretion at all. They spread arcane knowledge as they wanted throughout these planes and cultivated magical apprentice as they liked.

Naturally, the powerful gods of the World of Gods were not happy with this and fought plenty of times against the arcanists. Unfortunately, with the aid of their many magical facilities and arcane towers, even the main gods had a hard time defeating the powerful Great Arcanists.

In the end, some arcanists even took their quest for knowledge to the extreme; they started to capture gods to research their secrets.

The World of Gods would not have been so furious if the arcanists had only been fighting over planes and believers against the gods. However, when the arcanists turned their eyes toward the gods themselves and started to dissect them as if they were lowly magical creatures, they became unprecedentedly furious!

Yet, what could do they do? They could neither beat the arcanists nor win in a conflict against them! The powerful gods that had lived for several hundreds of thousands of years got together and started discussing. They came up with an extremely sinister and terrifying combat plan.

With the cooperation of the various gods, a Goddess of Magic with the power of a main god (Eighth Grade), willingly destroyed her own god kingdom, scattered her believers, gave up on her immortal god body, and reincarnated as a small girl with amazing talent.

This reincarnated girl ‘happened’ to be discovered by the arcanists, who brought her back to their arcane towers and cultivated her into a magical apprentice…an arcanist. She became a high-grade arcanist and, finally, the youngest Great Arcanist in history.

Moreover, she started promoting a sort of vast magical network after becoming an apprentice.

It wasn’t until that she had become a Great Arcanist that her ground-shattering idea was picked up upon by the other Great Arcanists. Together, they started research on this network.

The young and pretty arcanist hoped for all Great Arcanists to offer up the magic and spell pools of their arcane towers in the spirit of sharing. They would then use these powerful arcane towers as the foundation to construct a strong magic network that could cover the entirety of the multiverse.

This way, be they Great Arcanists, high-grade arcanists, or even ordinary arcanists, they would be able to tap into the magic network wherever they were in the multiverse. They could then arm themselves with the powerful magic in the magic and spell pools to defeat all enemies.

This tremendous and wondrous plan from the mouth of the pretty young female arcanist instantly moved all of the Great Arcanists. With the support and promotion of all these Great Arcanists, the construction plan for the magic network promptly started.

After a thousand years and the combined power of fifteen Great Arcanists, they finally managed the preliminary construction of the magic network. To commemorate this young and pretty girl arcanist, they decided to use her arcane tower as the core to activate and run the entire system.

Unfortunately, at the most crucial moment of the ceremony, the girl who functioned as the host of the magic network willingly sacrificed herself and detonated the entire magic network.

As the magic network had now connected the arcane towers of all the Great Arcanists, and they, all the intermediate and high-grade arcane towers, disaster struck. This shocking explosion engulfed all arcanists and their arcane towers.

Without a doubt, most of the arcanists died in that explosion, including the Great Arcanists!

Meanwhile, the Goddess of Magic, who only had her physical body destroyed, returned to the World of Gods with only her soul and was received with overwhelming hospitality. With the support of several powerful pantheons, this Goddess of Magic ascended to the throne of the God King, becoming one of the few Ninth Grade gods.

Greem had only been impressed by the gods’ patience and strategic vision when he read these ancient records in the past. However, now that he had come into contact with the World of Gods, he had a strange feeling that the gods had stolen the achievements of these arcanists in some aspects.

The faith channels that he was seeing and their functions couldn’t help but make him think of those arcanists existing in the ancient past!

Perhaps, when that Goddess of Magic restored her identity as a god, she brought along some unexpected changes to the gods of the World of Gods.