Coiling Dragon

Book 4, The Dragonblood Warrior – Chapter 7, Experts Everywhere (part 1)

Under the forced interrogation of his bros, Linley was very honest and revealed the entire story behind him and Alice. This story made those two playboys, Yale and Reynolds, sigh in amazement.

Ever since becoming boyfriend and girlfriend with Alice, although he was separated from her physically during the school term, they made an agreement to meet with each other at the end of every month.

In the blink of an eye, another month passed. December 28th, Linley was in an exceptionally good mood, because he was going to meet with Alice again in Fenlai City.

“Hey, Linley.”

“Yo, David [Da’wei].”

Walking along the road within the Ernst Institute, Linley greeted a number of familiar faces in a friendly fashion.

“Boss, you’re as happy as this, just because you sealed the deal with Alice?” On Linley’s shoulders, Bebe wrinkled his nose. Condescendingly, he said, “Look at that stupid grin. This entire month, you’ve been smiling like an idiot.”

In the past, although Linley wasn’t exactly cold and emotionless, he wasn’t particularly friendly either. But this month, Linley was in an extremely good mood, and so he was often laughing and smiling.

“You little punk, what do you know?” Linley glared at Bebe, before strolling casually into the library. After flipping through two books on wind-style magic, Linley entered a reading booth and began to read.

The reading room was extremely quiet, and in the entire reading room, there was perhaps just twenty or thirty people, spaced far apart from each other.

Linley selected a location off to the side and began to read. At the Ernst Institute library, Linley would read almost anything regarding history, magical beasts, politics, magic…but most of his time was still spent on wind magic.

After all, Linley primarily relied on earth-style and wind-style magic. His earth-style magic had a Saint-level Grand Magus for a personal trainer in the form of Doehring Cowart, but the same couldn’t be said for wind.

While reading, Linley continued to learn and improve, and he often nodded unconsciously.

In the reading room, two hours passed by very quickly. Linley closed the book in front of him. “Grandpa Doehring, it would be a very difficult task to understand all of the profundities of wind-style magic, much less devise a brand new spell of my own.”

When casting magical spells ,usually one would need to have the assistance of a magical incantation to stabilize and launch the spell. Generally, one would just recite the incantation as taught, without needing to understand it. But if one was able to understand the principles behind a spell or perhaps even refine the words to an incantation, or perhaps further refine the usage of spiritual essence, one could allow the efficacy and power of one’s mageforce to reach new heights.

“Naturally. Do you think spells are so easily created?” Doehring Cowart’s voice sounded in Linley’s mind.

“Forget about inventing them for now. I wish I could at least see or learn some spells of the seventh rank. Unfortunately, the Institute is too stingy. Spells of the seventh, eighth, and ninth ranks are restricted and not open for public viewing at all.” Linley was rather dissatisfied, but he also knew very well that behind the Ernst Institute was the Radiant Church. The Radiant Church was not willing to disseminate its most powerful spells to people from other countries.

Linley was fortunate. Thanks to Grandpa Doehring’s guidance, at least for earth-style magic, he had nothing to worry about.

Flipping through the other book on wind magic, Linley continued to read…

“To summarize, all styles of magic, including wind magic, share a commonality in that their spells are formed from mageforce. For example, our wind style’s ‘Wind Blades’, the higher level ‘Chain of Wind Blades’, or the even higher level ‘Wild Dance of Wind Blades’, all the way up to the ninth level spell, ‘Void Extermination Technique’, are all considered to be in one chain of spells. But of course, if the ‘Wind Blades’ spell was developed and advanced in a different direction, down that path, in the end, it will transform into the ‘Dimensional Edge’ spell, that fabled forbidden spell…”

Upon reading this portion which provided details on the ‘Wind Blades’ spell, Linley grew interested.

This book was written from a viewpoint at the highest levels of magic, that sought to classify it systemically. This book was extremely useful to someone who had a narrow grasp of the fundamentals, as it would help them gain a more complete, thorough, systemic grasp of magic.

“The Floating Technique is actually a very simple technique, but using it isn’t simple. That’s because this technique has a strong emphasis on one’s elemental affinity for wind essence. The higher the affinity, the easier one will find it to control wind mageforce and wind elemental essence. This will allow their Floating Technique to be much faster. But by comparison, the ‘Soaring Technique’ is a level higher than this technique. The Floating Technique only allows one to levitate up or down, while the Soaring Technique allows one to soar and fly in the air. Although it looks like it’s omnidirectional, in reality, the Soaring Technique just has a few extra components compared to the Floating Technique, allowing the user to also go forwards, backwards, left, and right. For example, if you want to fly down and right, all you have to do is to control yourself to go both down and right. Frankly speaking, from this line of training, and based on the incantation the Floating Technique uses, in principle it should be fairly easy to figure out what the incantation to the Soaring Technique is.”

Upon reading this, a light went on in Linley’s mind.

Right. The Soaring Technique, compared to the Floating Technique, really just added the additional directional components of left, right, forward, and backward. In essence, it was still controlling wind elemental essence around the body to propel one in the various directions.

“Right, it just adds the components of forwards, backwards, left and right. If this hypothesis is correct, shouldn’t be too hard to extrapolate the incantation for the Soaring Technique.” Linley immediately began to try and mentally work out what the incantation should be.

But of course, whether or not the extrapolated incantation would be correct was something which only experimentation could prove.

Previously, Linley had been under the impression that the Soaring Technique had to allow a person to fly in any which way, and thus the incantation would be quite complex.

But now, given that it just had four more directions compared to the Floating Technique, the level of difficulty for extrapolating the Soaring Technique was much lower.

Linley continued to read, excited.

“Of course, high level magical incantations that could be easily extrapolated are in the minority. For example, the a higher level variant of the Soaring Technique is the Airwings spell, which forces the surrounding air elemental essences to form giant, invisible wings around the caster. This is far more difficult, and its incantation is very different from that of the Soaring Technique. There’s simply no way to extrapolate it at all.”

Linley nodded as well.

The more he read, the more confident Linley was that the author of this book was an expert in researching magical spells, because the explanations this book gave were almost all rooted solidly in the fundaments of magical theory. It gave advice on how to truly understand the mechanisms behind controlling elemental essence and in understanding each magical incantation. But it didn’t say anything about how to improve the power of one’s spells.

Most people, upon seeing how deep and in depth this book went with regards to magical theory and usage of elemental essence, wouldn’t bother to read further.

But Linley understood that if he could understand the reasoning behind each spell, he would naturally also learn how to better control his magic. At that time, the power behind each of his spells would be greater.

“Linley.” Just as Linley was getting absorbed with this book, a clear voice sounded out by his side.

Lifting his head, Linley looked off to the side, where he saw a tall, slender, beautiful girl standing next to him. It was Linley’s good friend, Delia. But the expression on Delia’s face wasn’t too happy.

“Hey Delia, what’s up?” Linley laughed.

Delia bit her lower lips. She was silent for quite a while, before finally asking, “Linley, I hear…you have a girlfriend?” Delia’s eyes, beautiful and large, were firmly fixed upon Linley.