Abe the Wizard

After the art pieces, the dwarves were told to resume their work under Lady Carrie’s orders. Soon, 1500 square meters of the area was turned into a fully-functional elven-style garden.

Three days later, the entire fort was turned into an elven garden. From its outside appearance, no one could tell that it was the hideout of one of the most dangerous military forces on the Holy Continent. Actually, no one could really find this place at all. Apart from a few wizards, this place was somewhere that only Abel could find.

While the dwarves’ works were still here, Abel left the rest of the building to them. They did like the food here, and it wasn’t like they planned on leaving soon, either, so he decided to let them do a bit of extra work.

Abel said to Wizard Cyril during breakfast, “If you’d allow me to pay the Goff Family some extra fees, Wizard Cyril, I would like to invite Isiah to help me build a few magic towers for me.”

Before Wizard Cyril said anything, Isiah was already rushing to say yes, “That’s perfectly fine, Grandmaster Abel! A few magic towers aren’t that hard for us! We are very experienced at building them, actually, so you can leave it all to us!”

So that’s how much Isiah liked the food at this place. Actually, that was the case for every worker Abel invited. Ever since the work had come to an end, they started working much slower than they should be.

“I’ll stay with them, then. They do need someone to supervise them,” Wizard Cyril said as he threw a stare at Isiah.

Lady Carrie asked curiously, “Who are you building the magic towers for, Grandmaster Abel?”

Abel explained, “There are six magic towers left that I want to build. Right now, Wizard Yveline has already reached rank seven, so as I’ve promised him one. I’m going to invite him over to my domain and have him leave in a seven-floor tower I’ve built for him.”

“There’s also my teacher, Wizard Morton. As his disciple, it’s only right for me to prepare a 12-floor magic tower for him in my domain. Then there’s Wizard Murphy. He’s good friends with Wizard Morton and Wizard Yveline, so there’s no way he would leave them and be by himself. I want a 7-floor magic tower for him.”

Lady Carrie started shaking her head in disbelief, “You do realize you’re creating a power vacuum in the Duchy of Carmel.”

Abel tried to feign ignorance, “What? No, what are you talking about? I’m not trying to do anything against the Duchy of Carmel! The wizards aren’t even going to leave the Duchy of Carmel! I’m just providing a better training ground for them!”

“Whatever. What about the other three towers?” Lady Carried asked, already giving up on trying to debate with Abel about his true intentions.

Abel continued to explain, “My butler Bartoli is an intermediate wizard herself. I’m planning on building an 11-floor magic tower for her. As for my tower, I can’t possibly reveal my real base to the outside world, so I’m going to have a 6-floor tower as my cover. You know, to get rid of a lot of unnecessary troubles. For the sixth tower, it’s for my teacher’s eldest disciple, Wizard Will, when he comes back. I want you people to build a 6-floor tower for him.”

Being the straight talker that she was, Lady Carrie pointed something crucial out, “You know, Grandmaster Abel, I know you did take a hexagonal circle plate from us. As we all know here, hexagons have six edges, six sides, six corners….”

“Six towers. You’re trying to set up a circle. Aren’t you?”

“Ha, ha, ha!” Abel didn’t seem to mind getting exposed, “It’s all the same, my lady! Like, if I can make a few towers for the people I care about, why wouldn’t I? It doesn’t have to be about that circle. It could be just me trying to be with the people I like!”

After breakfast, Liante City sent out ten intermediate wizards to move all the necessary ingredients to build Abel’s six magic towers. Of course, if Abel didn’t pay a fortune for this, there was no way that the ingredients would be carried over this quickly.

In fact, if it wasn’t him making this order, the Wizard Union would’ve never accepted selling this many magic towers to one client. Magic towers were a war-time resource. There was a limit to how much it could be supplied and sold to specific individuals. They were hard to buy.

To save money and points, Abel decided not to have the Liante City’s construction workers build the towers. Instead, he just had them send a bunch of the necessary materials over to Harry Castle. On the one hand, it was a great way for him to save a lot of the cost. On the other hand, the Wizard Union didn’t want to risk offending the other wizards by helping Abel too much. All the magic towers in stock were already pre-ordered, after all. If Abel did “cut the line,” that would definitely anger a lot of people from all sides.

Anyways, all the construction work was for the dwarves. To them, it was actually a lot easier than renovating the 16-floor magic tower that Abel had.

Before that, though, Lady Carrie first took out her mana-separating circle. She wanted to contain the whole five-mile radius area behind Harry Castle. Once done, she could implement an irremovable seclusion circle that would stop the mana from hurting any nearby humans and other creatures. Abel decided to leave this to her since they were dealing with top-secret techniques of the elves.

After an hour, Lady Carrie and the fifteen elven masters had set up a mana-seclusion circle invisible to the eyes. Strangely, the barrier that only targeted mana. If any living being passed through it, they could do so with no problem.

Now that this barrier was in place, the real construction work of the magic tower could begin. Lady Carrie first set up the hexagonal circle plate. After injecting her druid energy into it, the plate started emitting light that enveloped the entire five-mile area.

And where was the center of the area? Why, the secret sixteen-floor magic tower, of course. As Lady Carrie pointed out before, the six points of the hexagonal circle would be where the six magic towers would be located.

With the amount of energy Lady Carrie injected, the hexagonal circle would last for a total of two days. That was the amount of time they had to finish building the magic tower. As impossible as that seemed to humans, the dwarves could get that done with their industrial puppets and skills in doing architecture.

In just two hours, one of the magic towers was already finished. Then, after one day, all six towers were erected from their designated locations. Not to discredit the dwarves for their efficiency, but the magic towers were meant to be assembled very easily from their parts. Since more floors might be added when the tower owner ranked up, the towers were designed in a way that more floors could always be added at its top.

Of course, some people had special taste. When advanced wizards were stuck from moving to the next level, they would just make purchases for towers that couldn’t be built taller. These towers were mostly tall, and they were meant to be the most expensive and rare type available for purchase.

This was the case for the Cliff Magic Tower, which was something that Abel retrieved a while ago. If he wanted the whole tower to retain its strong defensive capabilities, he had to find more mourning stones to expand the defense barrier on its outside. Otherwise, making the tower taller would make it more vulnerable against outside attacks.