Wizard: Starting With Synthesized Gems

Locke ultimately chose not to intervene. For someone like him, with magic pressure and psionic power as high as his, staying undetected by two indigenous people whose civilization had nearly regressed to that of cave dwellers was a trivially simple matter.

He followed behind the two, watching as they entered a place filled with natural limestone caves, where the surviving remnants of the Dune People were eking out their existence.

According to materials Locke had read before, at the height of the Dune Civilization, the population had been approximately sixteen billion. After all, the original area of the entire Dune Plane had been more than three times its current size.

But in the past, the plane had been drawn too close to the Solar Plane, causing many regions along the plane's edges to be swallowed up by the Solar Plane.

This situation actually bore a close resemblance to something Locke had seen during the Era of Stars, only it was like a miniaturized version of what had happened to the wizard world. Back then, the wizard world itself also seemed to have suffered severe damage due to certain events that occurred during the Imperial Age.

But the depth and foundation of the wizard world was not something the Dune Plane could compare to.

So the wizard world still had the chance to start anew, while the Dune Plane's life force had been utterly drained dry by the gravitational pull of the Solar Plane. Over the years, solar storms had evaporated at least two-thirds of its total area.

The current Dune Plane was, in essence, only the core region of what the original Dune Plane had once been. The half-planes and small-scale plane worlds that had once depended on the Dune Plane's crystal wall system, along with the regions at the plane's edges, had all been absorbed into the Solar Plane.

The Dune Plane as it stood now was the main material world of the original plane, and specifically its core area of that main material world.

By all reasoning, buried beneath the endless desert lay the ruins and remnants of the Dune People's civilization spanning tens of thousands of years.

The two Dune People Locke had first encountered, including the one who had been infected by residual heavy-element particle toxicity from eating contaminated cold fish, had already collapsed onto the rocky ground, his entire body swollen.

Had Locke not covertly used moonlight to administer some Holy Spring Nectar potion on his behalf, the mortal would have already died, and even his corpse would have dissolved into a pool of blood and fluids.

At that moment, a new transformation appeared on his body. Something like a steel bone erupted from his chest, piercing through his chest cavity in a twisted, grotesque shape.

With every breath he drew, he screamed in agony.

Locke watched this unfold and furrowed his brow. "The contamination from the heavy-element heavy particles would only cause the bloodline essence to collapse entirely. This physical transformation he's undergoing seems to be something he was born with from the very beginning."

"In other words, in the midst of this apocalyptic environment, the Dune People themselves have already undergone some kind of deformed change."

Watching this, Locke knew the mortal would die within another ten minutes, and within that time, whatever passed for a doctor among these primitive Dune People would have no way of treating him in time.

No, wait.

Locke shook his head. "Where would there be a doctor anymore? The Dune People's civilization has collapsed. The Dune People here are nothing more than the descendants of what was once a highly advanced telepathic civilization."

"Even their bloodline essence has changed."

Locke thought, "If I don't directly step in to help them, this mortal will die, and the entire tribe will eventually perish because of that polluted water."

"Although ecological transformation must adhere to the principle of minimum intervention, sometimes things are just this straightforward. If I don't intervene directly and stop this immediately, the ecology here will be destroyed in an instant."

Locke simply stood before them all. Yet all the Dune People around him seemed as if they could not see him at all. This was because the gap in magic pressure between them was simply too vast.

So vast that it was as though they existed on two completely different planes of existence.

His overwhelming magic pressure formed an insurmountable barrier, bearing down on the minds of the Dune People so heavily that their consciousness simply could not perceive Locke.

This was just Locke, as a wizard approaching the Second Circle, casually drawing on his rudimentary knowledge of the Mind School, combined with his distributed psionic power, to produce a third-rank apprentice-level Mind School spell.

But for these Dune People, it was something as incomprehensible as the power of a god or demon.

Locke thought, "Should I save them? But even if I save one, what good would it do? These Dune People are still going to die off because of the environmental destruction. Am I supposed to save all two hundred or so Dune People here?"

"Following that line of reasoning, should I save every Dune Person in the entire world?" Locke's eyes grew emotionally detached. "Feeling grief at seeing something akin to oneself perish miserably does not mean I am weak-willed. It is simply that when one sees its own kind, the heart naturally feels compassion."

"It is only my personal respect for life."

"Otherwise, I would not be studying life magic. I would be studying necromancy."

"But I am only a wizard, not a creator, and not a god. Therefore, I genuinely have no obligation to act."

At that moment, Locke was considering simply channeling the remaining power of the Holy Spring Nectar potion over the tribe's heads, giving them all a collective purification from the contamination, and then turning to leave. It would at least fulfill the goodwill he felt within himself.

However, just at that moment, Locke noticed that these Dune People were wasting some of their hard-earned food and their precious clean water, offering them up before a strangely shaped rock.

At the same time, the Dune People moved the suffering Dune Person and laid him atop that rock.

Then, these Dune People smeared and painted their faces with some of the dirt from the ground, wasting what little resources they had left, seemingly intent on performing something ceremonial.

Ten of the relatively healthier young men were selected from among the Dune People. They gathered around the rock and began dancing in strange patterns, chanting peculiar syllables.

Locke had already written these Dune People off in his heart, and had been planning to scatter the potion and turn away. But upon seeing this, a flicker of interest crossed his eyes. "Interesting. In such desperate circumstances, these Dune People are still wasting what little resources they have left, performing a divine offering ritual before an ordinary rock."

"In the ancient wizard world, as far as I currently know, one of the oldest forms of magic was sacrificial magic."

"At least for the Era of Stars, that was certainly the case."

"There seems to be some kind of instinctive resonance between sacrificial behavior and intelligent life. Is this nothing more than a psychological comfort that wastes resources, or is there another reason?"

Upon seeing this, Locke immediately abandoned the thought of leaving, and instead prepared to stay and continue observing. At the same time, he retrieved a True Sight Orb from his astral ring and began recording the scene at once.

He watched as the Dune People surrounded the sick man, howling in rage one moment and singing with joy the next. One of them administered a special plant-based drink to the sick man and had him consume it.

A middle-aged Dune Person said through telepathy, "Great Stone Spirit, you guided us in finding our homeland, sheltered us and allowed us to survive to this day, and led us in our evolution. Great Stone Spirit, please grant this warrior the evolution to transcend his suffering!"

"Great Stone Spirit, guide us in our evolution!"

"Great Stone Spirit, grant us the power to go on surviving!"

Eleven minutes later, the Dune Person lying atop the rock had breath as faint as a flickering flame, nearly on the verge of death.

It would not have been surprising if he had died in the very next moment.

And yet the ritual the Dune People were pinning their hopes on continued to unfold.

Through the elder's ritual words, Locke came to understand that this tribe had developed a specific rock worship, born from their practice of searching for rocks that tended to appear near water sources, using them as a way to locate water. Over time, this had evolved into the worship of stones.

At some point, someone had fabricated a belief that this group of Dune People was under the protection of some divine spirit.

The Dune People naturally had no understanding of what a deity was, and did not know the difference between the true gods of the heavens and the false gods worshipped in various colonial worlds. But through their own needs, they had come to believe that a powerful divine spirit was watching over them.

Crucially, they did not merely believe they were under divine protection. They also believed that this divine spirit had been guiding their evolution all along.

Over the long stretch of the past several hundred years, whenever they had faced a crisis that threatened to wipe them out, they would collectively pray to the Stone Spirit, and then something inexplicable would happen.

Although those rituals of the time appeared to be utterly useless in the moment, the extinction-level crises always disappeared in ways that defied explanation, and some plant the tribe needed would grow up around the stone.

It was as though the Stone Spirit truly existed.

At the same time, the bloodline essence of the Dune People had indeed undergone specific changes. This phenomenon of having one's bloodline essence undergo particular changes through worship of the Stone Spirit, which appeared in their own ritual language, was described as the reason their civilization had managed to continue to this day.

From the elder Dune Person's words, Locke also learned that over recent years, the population of this Dune People tribe had been steadily declining.

On one hand, the environment had continued to deteriorate. On the other, this evolution seemed to be approaching some kind of dead end, with the mortality rate of newborn infants rising higher and higher in recent times.

And Wizard Zalan Bailey's Dune Plane transformation plan had delivered the final blow to this last surviving remnant of the Dune civilization.

Locke furrowed his brow. "The Stone Spirit?"

He walked directly to the rock in front of all the Dune People, placed his palm against it, and carefully sensed whether there was any magic pressure, any special magic tides, or any special spiritual fluctuations.

But there was nothing.

It was just an ordinary rock.

Locke looked at the Dune Person lying atop the rock, his entire body swollen. The special heavy-element heavy particle contamination, though only a trace amount, was rapidly destroying this man's bloodline essence. Eventually he would dissolve into a pool of pus and fluids and lose his life.

Locke had originally intended to prevent this fate from befalling him. After all, from his perspective, it was nothing more than something he could do in passing.

The scene made him feel unsettled, and his own mood was of the utmost importance to him, so naturally he wanted to prevent this scene from playing out in front of him.

But now, he furrowed his brow. "I estimated he had ten minutes left, and it's already been nearly thirteen minutes. This man still hasn't died?"

"He does look like he's about to go at any moment."

Locke looked on with a puzzled expression, then turned to look at the Dune People conducting the ritual. "No, there aren't any magical fluctuations whatsoever. No special spiritual fluctuations either. There shouldn't be any supernatural force at work here."

"But could this actually be doing something?!"

Locke turned around with a completely baffled expression. He looked at the Dune Person lying on the rock. The man's life was like a dying lamp, growing dimmer by the moment.

"Did I calculate it wrong? No, that can't be right. I calculated it based on the estimated value drawn from his residual spiritual power. And I calculated on the generous side. If I, as a potion master approaching the Second Circle, can't even calculate the time of death of an ordinary mortal, then I've really failed in my duties."

"Even if the Dune People have a special resistance to heavy-element heavy particles, there is no way he should still be alive thirteen minutes in. And moreover, the Dune People are a low magical-talent race. Apart from their decent aptitude for the Mind School, their talent in all other magical disciplines is utterly dismal, with a severe case of lopsided and low magical resistance."

Locke thought, "Taking all the available information into account, I can conclude that this ritual is working. Or rather, some substance this person consumed during the ritual has taken effect."

"If I had stepped in directly and intervened earlier, I would have prevented this ritual from occurring at all. And if I had been in a poor mood and simply ignored these two people, that would have been entirely within the realm of normal behavior."

"Then I would never have witnessed this."

"If I hadn't calculated this man's life expectancy, I would never have noticed that the ritual had extended his life by about four minutes. I would have thought it was a useless ceremony and that this native had died in ignorance and superstition. But I happened to follow them, happened to do the calculation, and happened to notice that his life had been extended somehow."

Locke's eyes lit up with intense interest. "An unknown phenomenon, for me, is a treasure that doesn't come easily."

"Behind any unknown phenomenon, there must be some principle and mechanism that has yet to be discovered, or at the very least something I haven't read about yet, something that is still niche and cutting-edge research."

"Whichever it is, I've struck it big."

Locke realized the Dune Person before him was about to die and immediately furrowed his brow. If he died, Locke would be forced to stop observing.

The next opportunity to witness something like this might not come for a long time, and he would have to conduct daily monitoring.

If necessary, he might even need to call his two students, Williams and Gregor, to come and monitor them daily, or even artificially engineer a situation that would compel these natives to perform the ritual again.

Furthermore, he couldn't be certain whether this phenomenon was something that appeared by chance, or whether it was something that occurred with a degree of probability.

So the best option was still to prevent this native from dying.

Locke guided moonlight and channeled more of the Holy Spring Nectar potion's power into the native's body. At the same time, he opened a vial of Bear Spirit Jade Bile Elixir and used the moonlight to inject its power into the man's body, boosting his magical resistance.

The Holy Spring Nectar potion elevated his fundamental essence, and the Bear Spirit Jade Bile Elixir elevated his magical resistance.

With both working in tandem, combined with the unknown force produced by the ritual, the Dune Person's complexion actually began to improve, and his body began to recover toward normalcy.

Of course, this was only a trend.

Because Locke had not directly intervened to treat him, and because a mortal's soul had no magic pressure structure and was even more fragile than a block of tofu, Locke could not administer too potent a dose. So the man remained half-dead.

An ordinary First Circle potion master might not necessarily have been able to save him at all.

After all, consuming a potion itself introduces a specific kind of magical contamination.

A mortal's soul is so fragile that if you gave them a potion even slightly too potent, they would simply die on the spot.

"Based on my approach, the effect shouldn't be that pronounced," Locke said, watching the mortal. "The two elixirs I gave him were both diluted over ten thousand times before being delivered through the moonlight. Only then did I dare give them to him. Otherwise, my own elixirs would have poisoned him to death first."

At that moment, the Dune Person on the rock had regained some capacity for speech. He said with joy, "The Stone Spirit has manifested... it has guided my evolution!"

"Look at my chest! Can't you see, my deformed bone is starting to become normal. I've evolved, I've evolved..."

The Dune People were overjoyed, and immediately began jumping with even greater enthusiasm and singing even louder.

"He evolved, he evolved! The Stone Spirit has been guiding our evolution all along!"

"The Stone Spirit has granted us everything needed for our evolution!"

Locke suddenly thought of something. "The Dune People have long had a rock worship that originated from the practical goal of finding water. And on top of that, they developed some kind of evolution-worship tied specifically to stones."

"They believe evolution can help them overcome their current predicament. Could it be that they believe the Dune Person now lying on this rock is undergoing some kind of evolution?"

"Because they believe it, are they actually accelerating his evolution in reality?"

Locke looked at the deformed bone on the chest of the Dune Person atop the rock. "This steel bone must have developed to combat extreme drought, a means of retaining water."

"I've looked through the materials on the Dune People. Their speed of evolution is indeed abnormally high."

"Life science requires the courage to propose hypotheses. That is how you push past the boundaries of your own understanding." Locke thought, "Though this line of thinking sounds outlandish, I can genuinely propose a hypothesis. The Dune People, by believing that the Stone Spirit helps them evolve and that they receive evolutionary energy and capability from it, have experienced a corresponding acceleration in their evolutionary speed."

"The Dune People's rituals have accelerated their own evolution."

"Some kind of collective consciousness resonance may be capable of accelerating the evolution of a biological organism in a particular direction."

Locke looked at the Dune Person on the rock, realized the man was about to die, and immediately furrowed his brow. "In that case, I simply won't allow you to die."

He took out from his astral ring one of his own personally prepared Lucky Potions, the last bottle he had on hand, and used moonlight to deliver it into the mortal's body.

The Lucky Potion was one of the rare potions that, after consumption, did not require the recipient to bear a heavy magic pressure. It placed very little burden on the soul.

Even an ordinary person only needed to dilute it ten times to consume it safely.

Using this mechanism, he could dilute it a lesser number of times while still applying the Lucky Potion's power to its greatest possible extent, protecting this mortal's life.

The fragment of luck he had gathered while refining the Lucky Potion would now bestow its favor entirely upon this mortal, guiding him toward the outcome most favorable to him.

This could indirectly steer him away from death.

Most critically, it would not disrupt the effect of the ritual itself. Locke was only enhancing that effect, not twisting it completely out of shape.

It would not interfere with his ability to observe.

At that moment, a full moon appeared in the sky above the rock.

The Dune People paused for a moment, then seemed to decide that this was the Stone Spirit manifesting, and they named that moon the Moon God.

Locke sensed some kind of cognitive force converging toward him.

"This feeling... the Kingdom Domain? I understand now. For ordinary life forms, the collective cognitive awareness of a group cannot normally pool together. It would be like a tree without roots, or duckweed without water."

"But the Dune People are a race with innate telepathic ability, possessing considerable magical talent in the Mind School. Every one of them, even the children, can achieve brief telepathy."

Unlike Locke's vast distributed psionic network, built upon mature spell models, the Dune People's telepathy was more like two people standing face to face and speaking to each other through walkie-talkies.

The moment the distance between them was slightly too great, or the environment slightly too complex, the synchronization would break down.

But even this level of telepathy was enough.

Their desire to survive was channeled into the worship of a divine being, which in turn produced a conviction that they could definitely overcome their current environment. That conviction flickered in and out of existence from moment to moment.

But because of the existence of the Dune People's telepathic field, it had persisted over a long period of time, echoing down through centuries as a kind of collective consciousness resonance.

This special collective consciousness reflected the collective ideal of the entire Dune civilization. And that ideal was guiding this group of Dune People to accelerate their evolution and to cope with this crisis.

Once Locke realized this, he immediately thought, "The researchers in Group 2, as well as the researchers from other wizard academies, very likely never noticed this."

"There are many reasons for that. Because the Dune People's survival is indeed owed to certain special underground structures in the Dune Plane, such as the underground glaciers."

"This so-called collective consciousness resonance evolution acceleration hypothesis, even if it truly exists, is merely adding flowers to brocade. It is not the real reason they managed to survive. So if other researchers don't observe carefully, it would truly be very difficult for them to notice."

"And there is another point. This is only a low-level, underdeveloped colonial plane. If those wizards hold themselves in high esteem and believe they have already figured out why the Dune People are surviving..."

"Then it is genuinely very hard for them to push their thinking any further."

Locke himself was only able to notice this because he was a skilled potion master, and had, by a fortunate coincidence, estimated this native's normal survival time due to Wizard Zalan Bailey's wastewater contamination, and had noticed that the native had lived three minutes longer than expected.

It was in trying to figure out what had allowed this native to live those extra three minutes that he had followed the chain of thought all the way here.

Thinking about it carefully, Locke almost felt he owed Wizard Zalan Bailey a word of thanks. Because if it had not been for his heavy-element particle wastewater contamination, he would have had no reason at all to calculate the time of death of a native mortal.

If that had been the case, even if he had seen this ritual, it would have been very difficult to notice the anomaly in a native's time of death from within a frantic life-or-death crisis that was unfolding minute by minute.

"The Dune People have exceptional innate gifts, and in their struggle to survive, they may have unconsciously produced something that trends in the direction of the Kingdom Domain. Of course, it is definitely not the same thing."

"After all, a bicycle and a car are both vehicles, but they are completely different things. And yet they do move in a similar direction."

"If that's the case, then I really should thank Zalan Bailey." Locke's expression turned odd. "I knew he wasn't my enemy."

"But if this is all true, then my Lunar Mirror should be able to reflect this collective consciousness resonance and amplify its effect. If it can be amplified, it could further accelerate the evolution, and I would be able to observe this change more clearly and prove my hypothesis."

"And once it is successfully proven, I... will have found a new way to drive life evolution." Locke swallowed hard. "I have not read any literature on anything similar to this. Though of course, it is also possible that my knowledge is simply too limited. But this is at the very least an extremely cutting-edge and rare area of research."

"If I can incorporate this into my Grand Magic..."

"I'll give it a try. Everything is riding on this moment!"