Chapter 689: Elemental Hunting

Translator: imperfectluck  Editor: Kurisu

The entire world was filled with red flames, scalding magma, and an active sea of fire.

At a great distance, this would feel like a sauna, but at a close distance, it would be no different from being baked in flames, and if you tried to walk through here, you would burn to death unless you had fire-resistant equipment and potions.

The sea of fire wasn’t quiet at all. Various strange creatures of fire were crawling out from within. They furiously attacked everything before them, including their own kind. And when their short lives reached the end, violent explosions and a return to the sea of fire would signify the end of their lives.

Fire element creatures were everywhere. Fire lizards, low-level fire elementals, magma monsters, flame wolves, and so on were all cruelly killing each other. The victor would be able to devour the loser’s elemental core for swift growth.

If it wasn’t for the fact that I knew how all of this came about, it would be quite difficult to imagine this taking place in the famously frigid Northlands. This seemed just like a nightmarish scene out of a story about the Fire Elemental Plane. But, in a way, this place really had become a part of the Fire Elemental Plane due to elementalization.

However, amongst all the flames, there was a throne of ice and snow that attracted a great deal of attention from all the fire element creatures.

This throne was more than 10 meters tall. It was enveloped with an aura of ice and snow. Even the sea of fire would instantly be frozen upon coming in contact with this aura. Any fire element creatures that approached would also be instantly frozen solid.

There was a figure that appeared to be thinking about something while wearing heavy ice armor. It seemed almost as if he had fallen asleep on the throne of ice. However, his bright eyes shone with the light of intelligence, proving that he was still awake.

Obviously, it would attract a lot of hate for someone to be summoning ice in a world of fire. Countless fire element creatures charged over, yet they all transformed into popsicles the moment that they got close. In fact, the ice-armor-clad person had yet to be forced to personally attack.

The ground was already covered in shattered ice shards. Those had previously been shards from the fire element creatures. Being able to kill and defeat such fire element creatures in such large numbers was more than enough evidence of the ice-armored man’s strength, even if this was still only the very outskirts of the volcano.

He remained silent on his throne, ignoring the fire element creatures roaring at him from below. His thinking pose made him seem like he was waiting for something that never came. Finally, he spoke when dusk began to set. His words were quite simple and meaningful, and his voice was deep…

“…Damn it, my butt’s frozen to the throne!”

Ahem, ahem, at this moment, I finally had a realization. No wonder why a certain prince could sit on his frozen throne for so long! He was probably in the same condition as me, having gotten stuck to his throne from sitting for too long, and when his home was invaded, he probably had to helplessly stand up… which likely hurt his butt immensely.

I made up my mind to stop cosplaying as that unlucky prince, and that I should find a new look as I began to analyze my harvest here. But of course, before that, I first tossed out a signal flare to transmit a message to the outside world.

10 or so minutes later, two gigantic red dragons appeared in the sky and charged at me with the speed of lightning.

Since red dragons were of the fire element, they wouldn’t be viewed with hostility by the denizens of this elementalized area which had the traits of the Fire Elemental Plane. Red dragons also had incredibly high fire resistance, so they completely ignored the fire elemental creatures’ fire attacks against them. The two red dragons simply dived down, grabbed the throne which had retracted its aura of ice, and then turned around to fly off.

And since I was hunting on the outskirts of the volcanic area to begin with, we soon returned to the regular Northlands. The moment that I started breathing the cold air again, my harvest was obtained by me as a tremendous amount of ice magic mana poured into my body, chilling me to the bone and almost killing me from frostbite. It took nearly half an hour for me to finally slowly recover.

“…It seems that I need to hunt less next time. I didn’t expect the Great Snow Mountain Magical Realm to be so generous, giving me this much again.”

The Great Snow Mountain Magical Realm had just given me ice magic mana as a present. As for the reason? I would have to first talk about elemental wars and dimensional wills.

Dimensions had their own wills. Although this sounded ridiculous, it was a fact that was accepted by all mages. Dimensions would be the amalgamation of various rules. Although dimensions were simplistic and mechanical, they would indeed follow those rules… The exception would be the will of the Chaos Abyss, which was an unreasonable bastard that constantly cheated.

Most of the time, the great majority of ordinary people wouldn’t even notice the existence of the dimensional will. They would also be unable to come into contact with the dimensional rules.

Every dimensional will would set different rules. Treating all of its residents equally was the only rule in common (with the will of the Chaos Abyss again being the only exception as the Chaos Abyss was controlled by an individual). Still, even the Chaos Abyss had its rules, such as the law of the jungle where the strong preyed on the weak being one of its basic rules. Killing an enemy would mean obtaining a reward from the will of the Chaos Abyss, and the swift growth obtained after demonization would be an even stronger lure for you to follow the rules of the Chaos Abyss and continue to kill in order to become ever more powerful.

Perhaps some people would say that devouring was the source of all growth. However, allowing… no, creating the rule of “devouring” was something up to a dimensional will.

In the mortal plane, if you made a contribution that benefited the dimension of Eich, the dimensional will would also support you. For instance, back when I successfully transformed the power of Law into a brand-new Concept, the dimensional will (the Source of Order) had given out great rewards and support. Not only did the Source of Order incorporate the Concept of Law into the power of Order, it also rewarded Wumianzhe with divinity and Divine Concepts. That was a tremendous reward, the ability to become a God.

The mortal plane’s rewards were rarely actual items. The rewards were usually special abilities and invisible preferential treatment. You could take advantage of them if you knew about it, but in most cases, you wouldn’t even know what you had been rewarded with. Of course, the most common type of reward would be a mysterious amount of good luck (blessed by the heavens), while the most obvious punishment for invaders and those who endangered the dimension would be mysterious bad luck (this was actually one of the true reasons why demon kings would always be defeated in the end).

Damn it, I felt like I finally discovered why my Luck rating had always been E…

The Elemental Planes would also have their dimensional rules. As I mentioned previously, the elemental creatures would devour each other. This was common for any Elemental Plane. The elemental creatures would constantly evolve through devouring, eventually evolving to become Elemental Suzerains, who would then fight with each other and evolve into Elemental Lords. The Elemental Lords would then war against each other and compete to become the next Elemental God.

It could be said that the Elemental Planes’ dimensional rules were quite simple and direct. The reward would be power from the Elemental Plane. This was actually quite similar to the Chaos Abyss’ dimensional rules, but elemental power would at least come without the downsides associated with the power of Chaos. As for who had plagiarized whose idea? I really didn’t know, but when considering the age of the dimensions, it was likely that the will of the Chaos Abyss had been the one to do it.

So, during any elemental war between Elemental Planes, only sufficient benefits would motivate the elemental creatures to try their hardest to fight, and only the purest and most powerful elemental power would be the most practical reward for the elemental creatures.

Did all of this sound familiar? This should be quite similar to two major companies fighting both openly and in secret over a share of the market. The companies would reward the employees who contributed the most in helping them to obtain the market, encouraging them to continue working hard for the company’s sake… This was a highly suitable analogy to explain the truth behind elemental wars.

Mages had discovered the simple dimensional rules of the Elemental Planes long ago. In an elemental war, using your element to defeat enemy elemental creatures (all Elemental Planes would have this same basic dimensional rule) would see you rewarded by your own Elemental Plane. Since the Ice Elemental Plane and Fire Elemental Plane were at war now, and I had just used ice element magic to kill numerous fire element creatures, the Ice Elemental Plane had rewarded me with pure ice element power that could help any ice element creature to swiftly power up. But since I was an ice magic mage, I could instead transform this ice element power into ice magic mana, which would be far more practical for me.

This was the main reason why the Mage Country had bases in each of the major Elemental Planes. In the Elemental Planes, mages of the plane’s respective element could swiftly improve their power there. However, mages of the same element fighting each other would barely be rewarded by the plane. Only by fighting an enemy element in a time of elemental war would they get a great reward… and to continue my company analogy from earlier, no company would support their own employees fighting each other for market share, but would always encourage and reward their employees for successfully stealing market share from the company’s competitor.

For us element mages, elemental wars would be incredibly dangerous as we were no elemental creatures. Just having stronger elemental power would be mostly meaningless. Magical cultivation was the accumulation of knowledge and experience. If your magic power exceeded your control of magic, you would basically be risking self-destruction at any moment.

However, in my case, what I lacked the most right now was elemental power. Not only did I need to replenish myself for how weak I was after casting Ice Aeon, I also needed to strengthen my foundation so that I could increase my power level. My ice magic abilities were already at the realm of Level 4.

It was now the third day that I had been hunting fire elementals. Yet, for all three days so far, I could only do a small amount of hunting on the outskirts of the volcano. This wasn’t because I was too weak, but rather because the Ice Elemental Plane was being far too generous to me, giving me far too much. I figured that this was because the elemental war had just begun, so there were too few ice element creatures hunting down the fire element creatures. In fact, it was likely that I had become the Ice Elemental Plane’s “#1 Salesman”, and was receiving the “Best Employee of the Day” reward each day.

When calculating the time, the ice element creatures from the Great Snow Mountain Magical Realm should be arriving soon. At that time, I would likely be receiving a more normal amount, so I could also consider hunting higher-level fire element creatures at that time. Hunting down flame wolves, fire lizards, and so on every day was way too boring, reaching the point where I wanted to find new tricks to amuse myself with… Wait a moment, I needed to first figure out how to unfreeze my butt from this throne—using force here would be too dangerous. Perhaps I might not even be able to ride on steeds anymore… Wait, was this why a certain person had fallen off from his steed!?

Cough, I should probably get serious now. Over the past few days, I had been rather pitiful. Hunting low-level fire element creatures during the day was incredibly boring, and at night, I would have to spend all-nighters taking extra lessons. Not only that, it was the same ice magic teacher as before who was giving me those lessons…

“…Roland, for today, turn to chapter 153 of ‘Compound Effects of Water and Ice’. Let us properly discuss the effects of water and ice. But first, you need to forget everything that I taught you previously, because back then, I was digging pitfalls for the students…”

I felt like I was rendered speechless. Was there such a teacher out there!? Digging pitfalls for the students on purpose? As expected! I knew already that there had been something wrong with the situation back then! I failed my ice magic classes three times back then… all because of Harloys!

“…No, it’s because you were too stupid. Everybody else passed their ice magic classes. The pitfalls I dug were only to make the students take longer paths, but you were heading in the wrong direction before you even took your first step.”

[I can guarantee that she’s telling the truth.]

Even my System made a remark at such a time to give me a bigger impact. Was my talent for magic that terrible?

“Believe me, I’ve seen plenty worse students than you. Those students weren’t even able to become acolyte mages. I truly don’t understand how you managed to become an official ice magic mage back then.”

How had I become an ice mage? I had relied on my System’s cheat-like powers.

But when I focused my attention on my System, the reply I received made me feel even more helpless.

[From a certain standpoint, you aren’t really an ice mage. More accurately speaking, you’re more similar to an ice element creature than a mage. Other mages analyze and understand theories in order to create magical spell formulas to control the power of the elements. However, you directly use your instinct and will to forcefully control the power of the elements. Other mages use their brains, but you rely on instinct… Other mages are sketching the exact object that they see, replicating it as faithfully as possible, while you’re using watercolor to draw what you sense, projecting your own reality instead. There’re tremendous foundational differences.]

At this moment, countless memories entered my mind. How my understanding of ice was so connected to the Northlands, my mysterious foundational ice sculpting magic, and how Harloys had later changed her teaching method for me, no longer telling me magic theories, and instead telling me to go sense the essence of ice… What exactly was sensing the essence of ice supposed to be? Was that something that a mage who was supposed to rely on research, knowledge, and experiments supposed to do? Now that I remembered all this, it all sounded like such a scam.

“Of course it was a scam! Have you ever heard of a mage trying to ‘sense’ things? That’s so unmagical! And the most unmagical part of all is that I was just trying to fool you back then, but it actually worked… So that’s why I switched to the method for teaching magical beasts with you.”

Although I was quite displeased, I had a nice comeback prepared.

“Hmph! You scientists wouldn’t understand, because you only know how to play with your data! I’m a literary student who believes in pursuing the romantic! Theories are crutches for idiots. Geniuses only need to rely on intuition and instinct!”

“…Okay then, dear romantic literary genius, would you like help curing the frostbite on your butt? Or, do you intend to crouch and apply medicine yourself? I definitely won’t do something such as taking pictures to sell to the fairies and Reyne…”

“…Dear Teacher Harloys, please continue your class! I can’t wait to become an outstanding mage who’s a master of magic theories!”

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