Due to deal restructure text to speech player is currently unavailable. Will find a solution soon.

Chapter 903: 903

Chapter 903: Death and Promotion

The oak tree finally stopped growing after it absorbed all the energy . Right now, its trunk was about ten meters in diameter, and its leaves grew so much that its leaves covered a large part of the region . Green flowers bloomed on the branches, and when they were at their ripest, the fruits started hanging at the tips . Just when Abel thought that this was the end of it, unique energy transpired from his palm on its own and entered into his own body . This was pure vital energy, a special power that charged up every cell in his body . It was getting hard for him to describe what was going on with his body . If he had to put it into words, it was like he was becoming a baby that had vital energy growing out of his skin, muscles, and bones .

This vitality energy continued . Any more of this, actually, and he might be the first wizard to ever die to an oversupply of vitality energy . While he was thinking about this, the wide trunk of the oak shook for a bit . After that, it transformed the vitality inside of him into pure wizard mana, which was absorbed by his wizard crystal body as soon as it went into his own body . It felt quite fabulous, to say the least . It took about ten minutes for years worth of mana to be replenished into his own body . He thought about what he was going to do with all this energy, and while doing so, he could feel that the oak tree trying to send some message to him . It made him enter into a promotion state immediately, and promotion started rising inside his own body .

Wizard Malon couldn’t be more afraid of what he was looking at . He just had all the energy inside his body taken away . Now, he’s losing all the special memories he’s stored up inside his brain . He knew what the promotion qi that was emerging out of Abel was . It was the promotion memories that he once had . The oak tree wrapped around him was literally taking every bit of him away to Abel . It was a tree of life, one with all the control it needed to make sure that the creature in control was either dead or alive .

This would’ve been a lot more different if Wizard Malon was in full condition . The tree of life was one of the weakest divine beings there was . It had no particular ways of attacking at all, and it was actually a lot tamer than other species of the same type . It was pretty great in mediating different sorts of energy, all things considered . It might just help Wizard Malon to merge with his metallic puppet better if it allowed him to take control over it . Wizard Malon was fully aware of that fact . From his point of view, he was baffled about how Abel managed to become its owner . Only the elves would ever earn the tree of life . As the elves were the sole defenders of the only tree of life in the world, it just didn’t make sense that Abel would have a second one with him .

That’s when Wizard Malon noticed the mana environment here . He thought about everything that he saw here . Eventually, he concluded that this was another world . This was another dimension they entered . He wasn’t going to say his guess, though . He would die soon, so either way, there was no real point in figuring this all out .

For Abel, he couldn’t care how much Wizard Malon knew . He was too busy getting into mediation . The amount of energy flooding in his body was just too much for him to think about how to handle them . He waited as the rank seventeen wizard rune was engraved into his own body, elevating his power of the Will capacity to a whole new level . Eventually, he became a rank seventeen wizard before regaining his consciousness . He got more and more focused on becoming one with this new flowing energy streaming inside of him . Even now, he’s yet to have seen what the oak tree had grown into .

While Abel couldn’t pay any attention to it, the oak tree seemed to know what its master wanted . It continued to suck the mana from inside of Wizard Malon’s body . The oak tree filtered the mana into a purer form . Usually, it would take about several decades to fill in the wizard crystal body of a rank seventeen wizard, but the fact that Wizard Malon was here just made it all a lot faster . After half an hour, Abel could feel himself entering into a state of promotion once more . A promotion qi rose out of him as he was ready to move on .

For Wizard Malon, he found it hard to accept that this was the way that he was going to die . There was little to no energy left inside of him, and right in front of his eyes, Abel just promoted himself by two ranks within a short span of several minutes . Abel was doing it with the energy that he had gone through so much trouble to gather over the last few centuries . He gave away a lifetime’s worth of achievement over to his biggest enemy, who still had so many years ahead of him .

Abel might not know what this all meant, but Wizard Malon did . This was what he and every other wizard wanted . Abel just became a “life-overlapper,” which was the pinnacle of what one living creature could theoretically attain . As the name suggested, a life-overlapper had two lives overlapped with one another . Life would be in a newborn state, but at the same time, it would gain all the experiences and skills that the previous life owned .

Again, Wizard Malon was very, very distraught to see Abel becoming one . It should’ve been him, in any case . Abel was just nineteen years old . He would’ve been considered a prodigy even if he was still a beginner-intermediate wizard . That’s just too much to take in for Wizard Malon . This was what he was going to see when he went through all the years, the pain, betrayal, and so much sacrifice to get to where he was at .

Without caring for what Wizard Malon was thinking, Abel began to draw his rank eighteen wizard rune right onto his own wizard crystal body . It was quite easy for him, mainly due to the concentrated crystal body had become in a very short span of time . It got him over a lot of the steps the other wizards would’ve been stuck at . He should’ve been grateful to Wizard Malon, actually . He was only there to enjoy the fruit of other people’s work .

While Abel was thinking about what to do with the mana growing inside him, he realized that the mana source was suddenly gone once it grew halfway . He woke up very quickly from his meditation state . As he opened his eyes, he realized that none of the things he experienced were in a dream . He had actually just become a rank eighteen advanced wizard . While it was still not enough to get him face against a rank twenty wizard, he would at least have the power to move without having his wizard crystal body being put under pressure . Like now, he was standing in front of a rank twenty wizard . He couldn’t stand up for a fight, but he had the option to run at any point he wanted .

Back to Wizard Malon . He was already dead . It’s not like Abel wanted to bury his body right here, but there had to be a special way of handling the corpse of a law-defying wizard . Even having to come to mind what that might be, he decided first to put it inside his Valaya’s ring .

He looked towards the oak tree to realize just how big it had become after doing everything here . He was lucky that there was some distance from here to the Rogue’s Encampment . Otherwise, the whole camp would just be covered by a bunch of bushes .

On the oak tree, there were figs that seemed to be breeding some living beings . It’s probably going to take some time for them to fully hatch, and he wasn’t sure how much time that it’d be . As far as he knew, it might just be another oak tree that was being bred . As though having spent a lot of its vital force, the oak tree just rested . There was still quite a lot of energy being stored inside, however . It’s almost like it was about to erupt at any time . Abel decided not to interrupt its rest anymore . He picked up Wizard Malon’s four portal bags, and very quickly, he teleported himself back to the inside of the Rogue’s Encampment .

Whilst inside the Rogue’s Encampment, the first thing he did was to reach his power of the Will inside his own portal bag . Wizard Malon was already dead, so he didn’t see anything that was interfering with him from seeing the content inside .

“I thought this was my portal bag?”

The bag was about ten cubic meters in total . Inside, several “instantaneous movement” scrolls and some other items were not so precious . He recognized them all . When he saw that there was one scroll gone, he pounded his chest with his fist .

“Wizard Malon! Agh! So he’s been using my scroll?”

Having cursed at the dead man, Able reached for the other portal bag . A wide grin appeared on his face this time . There was a large pile of the “instantaneous movement” scrolls inside . It should be about one hundred and ten or more . While he didn’t know what rank the wizard originally owned, he knew that the “instantaneous movement’ scroll” was supposed to be a very rare item . That was the same even for law-defying wizards . They also had a great demand for these scrolls to keep up with their maneuverability during fights .

Having made an inspection with his power of the WIll, Abel realized that all these “instantaneous scrolls” were transformed from max-level spells . This meant that the ones that he had were of secondary quality .

“Wait,” he paused when he saw the thing that he wanted the most . The light stones . Large ones, too . There were just about twenty in total, but each would’ve had to cost the life of one advanced holy crusader . Only a law-defying wizard would be capable of getting such a high kill count to keep these stones all to himself .

Other than that, there were also some top-level gemstones that he just didn’t care that much about . There were a total of one hundred and twenty . This was the first time he’s seen so many stones apart from his own collection . As disinterested as he was in those, he thought that he could at least trade items with them .

Come to think of it . Everything Wizard Malon had was top-level . Having gone through all of them, what he found last was a black card made of very special material . He couldn’t tell what materials they were made of and the properties they possessed . He just knew that they had to be very valuable and that that turned to be correct as he checked what was inside .

This portal bag was full of precious items . The inside was about twenty cubic meters in total, and tons of different things were inside . It made him quite hopeful of what he might find in the next bag . He went on to open the next bag and surprise, surprise . It had the five portal bags that originally belonged to him . He was quite surprised with what he was seeing, but there was still the last bag .

And so he went to open the last bag . Again, this was a bag with a total volume of twenty cubic meters . There were much more items inside, but the quality of these items was not worth the comparison . From what it looked like, this seemed to be the bag that Wizard Malon used the most . It contained his wizard crest, which was already dead and had lost all the functions that it was supposed to contain . There should be points stored inside, but disappointingly enough, there was pretty much no way to recover them .

Other than that, there were some daily commodities and a large number of intermediate gemstones . There were about several tens of thousands of intermediate gemstones in total . Other than that, there were various potions that wizards would often find themselves using . There were no healing-type potions to be found . Most of them were just for training purposes .