Toia-Stephen, the third-rank earth mage stationed at the Harri City mage guild, was having a terrible day.
He was also the guild master—the same position for the mercenary and warrior guilds.
Their job was simple: spot talent and report it to the higher guild in Luya City.
Here in Harri, though, it was all training.
But lately Toia-Stephen had been miserable.
His magic books had vanished—including the one he’d been using, a low-level skill tome.
These books were expensive, and this one had been a gift from Luya when he first arrived.
Worth thousands of gold coins and impossible to replace.
It only recorded spells up to fourth rank.
The guild rules were strict: you couldn’t own a magic book for a level you hadn’t reached.
The protective array around the whole building had been drawn by the number-one assistant of Luya City, Fifth-Rank Mage Payne.
Anyone below fifth rank needed a key to enter.
Toia-Stephen carried the only one in the city.
Had a fifth-rank mage passed through?
The thought made him laugh at himself.
Fifth-rank mages already belonged to the mid-level category—wherever you went, you were someone important.
(Roughly: 1–4 rank = low-level mage, 5–7 = high-level mage, 8 = silver mage, 9 = gold mage, 10 = legendary mage, 11+ = Saint Realm and beyond.)
Toia-Stephen’s eyes kept drifting to the offices inside the same building.
No one here held a higher than fourth-rank title.
This only made him more uneasy.
“Master Toia, should the apprentice mages be sent home?
New Year’s is almost here.”
A young apprentice asked politely.
Toia-Stephen also taught the gifted children.
The moment one became a full mage, he would report it to the guild superior in Luya City.
Out of a hundred apprentices, the odds of even one reaching full rank were slim.
Hearing that two of his students had a real chance, Toia-Stephen’s mouth curved in a small smile.
He would have plenty of gold.
“Hmm.
Gather everyone.
I have something to say.”
“Understood, Master.”
The apprentice bowed.
“You are all the pride of Luya City.
You are all geniuses among ten thousand.
But remember two words: hard work.” The guild master gave each child a first-rank magic core of the same attribute.
“Go home and enjoy the New Year.
I hope that after the holidays some of you will be wearing mage badges.
That’s all—off you go.”
Toia-Stephen had taught eight children.
The oldest was thirteen; the youngest seven or eight.
A five- or six-year-old simply could not focus on meditation unless guided by someone from a wealthy family.
Toia-Stephen himself had become a full mage at eighteen, reached second rank at thirty-three, and third rank at forty-five.
Even his age-mates had advanced to eighth-rank silver mages.
Talent decided everything.
“Effort” was only something he said to these hopeful little children.
A mage was different from a warrior.
Once a mage couldn’t move, he could still speak, and that was enough to keep fighting.
A warrior’s golden years were before sixty; after that, further advancement was impossible.
(Of course, if a warrior reached eighth rank before sixty and gained fifty extra years of life, that was a different story.)
The children were ecstatic with their magic cores and left in a happy crowd, but Toia-Stephen still felt uneasy.
He went to the storage room, fed his mana into the magic key, and opened the door.
“My God!
What… what have you people done?
My magic books!
My magic cores!” A huge wail echoed faintly in the distance, but Niu Niu was already hurrying home.
“Little Qing, let’s go.” Niu Niu reached the edge of town and saw a huge cyan wolf larger than the one from before.
She tossed her bundle onto its back and slipped into the fluffy fur behind its ears.
The wolf bounded off at once.
A streak of cyan light flashed past, leaving no trace on the snow.
“Five Elements… right now I’m fire.
Fire produces earth.
Earth is the color of yellow.
Let’s absorb a little and see.” Kent carefully sorted his thoughts.
He remembered the Earth concept of the five phases generating each other and assumed the local elements included gold, wood, water, fire, and earth.
He decided to focus on just these five and ignore the rest.
If that meant slightly smaller bottlenecks later, so be it.
He laid out the next step: absorb earth.
This time he was extra careful—one element at a time, retreat immediately if anything went wrong.
Safety first.
Kent carefully fed a single strand of earth mana into his mind.
Surprisingly, it settled in beside his fire mana without any violent reaction.
Fire and earth coexisted peacefully.
Kent kept a tight grip on the flow and temporarily shut down his fire circulation so he could observe clearly.
He felt a ball of bright red power in his mind and increased the speed of earth absorption.
He thought: Perfect cycle—fire produces earth, earth produces metal, metal produces water, water produces wood.
So far, everything was going smoothly.
Now he began absorbing metal.
The previous magic beans stayed obediently put.
Kent had built a pentagonal power source.
Strangely, his own energy obeyed him perfectly.
He had expected to need great willpower to reshape his mana, but the moment he thought of it, the shape changed on its own.
Kent’s forehead was already slick with sweat.
He had been on edge for hours; the outcome hung in the balance.
He now wanted to stop and rest, but he suspected that if he did, his head might explode.
Right now there was no stable cycle—if he released his spiritual control, the mana inside his mind would go completely out of control.
“Damn it!
I’ll do it!
Who knows, maybe I’ll transmigrate back and go back to being my shut-in self?” Kent feared death, but facing a dead end, he would fight with three times the desperation.
Kent carefully controlled his spiritual force.
Wood mana was just approaching water when his mind suddenly jolted.
The other four mana spheres suddenly came alive, and Kent’s pentagon began to rotate.
To his surprise, the excess fire mana could flow through the pentagon and convert into each other, achieving a delicate balance.
In other words, if he used earth mana, the other four attributes would automatically share it evenly.
That was an excellent development!
Kent felt the mana in his mind reach perfect equilibrium.
He slowly relaxed his spiritual force and prepared to rest for a while.
“Ah!
Yin and Yang, I forgot them!” Kent cried out in alarm.
The moment he let go of his control over the mana, a surge of qi carrying a torrent of elements rushed toward the power source—white light-element mana, pitch-black dark-element mana, purple lightning mana, gray death-element mana, deep-blue ice mana, light-cyan wind mana, and transparent spatial mana—all flooded toward the tiny balance he had just established.
In an instant, Kent lost all control.
The multicolored magic elements began to churn and surge—expanding, shrinking, expanding—while lightning flashed violently.
Our classmate Kent was stunned by the mana shock.
In the face of such a massive element torrent, if Kent’s spiritual force had been at its absolute peak, there might have been a tiny chance of maintaining the balance.
But that was sadly not the case.
The instant Kent fainted, the accumulated fire mana surged straight toward his mind.
But the mind was like a bottomless pit, mercilessly swallowing the enormous fire mana.
If it had been pure water or any other single element, the massive fire mana might have prevailed.
However, since fire produces earth, the fire mana was immediately absorbed by earth and wood, neutralized by ice and water, and then earth, you’re so powerful, your mana grew larger—earth produces metal.
Water also went to the rich, wood lent a hand, metal skimmed a little—such a vicious cycle was born.
No matter what mana entered, it was useless.
Fortunately, Kent had already fainted, so no outside elements rushed in.
But if the process continued for too long, who could say what might happen?
Kent’s face was now a strange sight—alternately blazing red, gold, and holy white, or heavy with deathly pallor.
His body twitched like a crayfish out of water, jumping and bouncing in every direction.
At least it was moving; if it had stopped, God only knew what fresh qi surge would erupt from his feet.
As the twelve elements—five natural ones (gold, wood, water, fire, earth) plus the seven esoteric ones (light, dark, lightning, ice, death, wind, space)—collided and supported one another, the mana clusters grew steadily smaller while the chaos inside them became more violent.
Then Kent’s body suddenly stopped.
Inside his mind, the mana source, the mana spheres that had been fighting one another, seemed on the verge of exploding.
They ballooned outward again and again, growing larger and larger.
It looked as though Kent’s power core was about to detonate.
In that exact instant, time itself froze.
A block of multicolored mana suddenly shattered.
Then another.
The power clusters expanded like balloons—swelling, inflating—before they were torn apart once more.
All of them were sucked toward the center of the mana source, toward a small silver-white dot.
The incoming mana was like water rushing into an endless drain.
Even the space-attribute mana, which had never joined the battle and was only a single tiny drop, was pulled in and swallowed whole.