Chapter 306

Marshall had a fairly accurate understanding of his own strength.

By the standards of this world, he already belonged among the most powerful Mages alive, and there weren’t many individuals left who could completely block his magical detection.

Yet somehow, all three of the Dragon Slayers raised by dragons had managed to do exactly that.

The coincidence was a little too convenient to ignore.

Marshall now had every reason to suspect that the dragons who had raised Natsu and the others hadn’t actually disappeared. Instead, they might have concealed themselves inside their adopted children’s bodies.

The First Origin was an extraordinary structure, after all.

Although it existed within a person’s magical system, its internal space didn’t necessarily obey ordinary physical limitations.

If something like a dragon could fit inside it, Marshall wouldn’t find that particularly surprising.

Of course, there was another possibility.

Perhaps the dragons existed in a condition similar to Zera’s, having lost their original bodies and leaving only their Life Points behind.

On second thought, that seemed unlikely.

If those dragons had been reduced to nothing more than fragile remnants of their former existence, they probably wouldn’t have possessed enough power to repel Marshall’s attempts to examine their First Origins.

Whatever the truth, this unexpected discovery had opened up an entirely new direction for his research.

If living beings—or even something as enormous as a dragon—could exist within another person’s First Origin, then investigating that space might not be as impossible as he’d previously believed.

Perhaps he really could find a way to retrieve Zera from inside Mavis.

“Marshall?”

Zera had been watching him for some time, and his prolonged silence was beginning to worry her.

“Is something wrong? Did you find a problem with my body?”

“No, nothing like that.” Marshall shook his head. “I was just thinking about a few things.”

He had no intention of explaining his latest theory to Zera just yet.

After all, he hadn’t even confirmed whether his idea was feasible, much less whether he could safely carry it out.

Marshall disliked making promises he wasn’t certain he could keep.

Giving someone hope only to crush it afterward could be terribly cruel, and he generally tried to avoid doing that.

“Your condition is perfectly stable,” he assured her. “More importantly, how are you finding the Ice Magic you’ve been learning?”

“It’s wonderful!” Zera answered immediately. “I think Ice Magic suits me just as well as Fire Magic!”

“That makes sense. Fundamentally, both types of Magic involve controlling temperature. They’re actually closely related, since heating and cooling are both ways of changing how quickly particles move.”

Marshall considered the possibilities for a moment.

“Later, I’ll teach you how to combine the principles behind those two abilities. If you can master them together, you might be able to develop a unique form of Magic.”

“Really?!”

Zera’s eyes lit up.

“That’s amazing! Thank you, Marshall!”

Marshall smiled at her enthusiasm.

He was still considering the possibility of transforming Zera into an Apostle someday.

In fact, his ambitions regarding artificial life had already grown considerably beyond simply creating more servants or convenient magical assistants.

He wanted to develop Apostles with much greater potential than any of his previous creations.

Diligence, the little Tia, had been his first tentative experiment in that direction.

Zera could become his second.

Unlike his earlier Apostles, Zera possessed the remnants of a genuine human soul.

If Marshall could successfully integrate that soul into an independently functioning artificial life-form, perhaps the resulting Apostle would be capable of developing in ways his previous creations couldn’t.

It was an intriguing possibility, and one he intended to investigate carefully.

“Marshall?”

Zera interrupted his thoughts again.

“Are you busy with anything else today?”

Her voice was unusually timid.

Interestingly, Zera didn’t normally behave like this around Mavis.

She had been rather spoiled and bossy as a young child, and even now, her usual personality was much more direct and outspoken.

It was only around Marshall that she became so hesitant, carefully choosing her words and occasionally blushing over perfectly ordinary conversations.

Presumably, she wanted to leave him with a good impression.

Of course, considering Marshall’s information-gathering abilities, there was very little about her feelings that he didn’t already know.

He simply saw no reason to embarrass her by pointing them out.

“No, I’m finished for today,” he replied. “Actually, I probably won’t be going out nearly as often for a while.”

His physical training had reached a plateau, and he suspected his body needed some time to adjust to the enormous improvements it had undergone over the past several months.

Continuing to push himself with the same intensity would produce diminishing returns, so he intended to reduce his training temporarily and concentrate on improving his magical skills instead.

“Really? That’s great!”

Zera looked delighted.

“Then… would you like to come to the Tenrou Tree with me? I know a place nearby with a really beautiful view!”

Tenrou Island wasn’t particularly large, and the two girls had spent so many years living there that they’d already explored practically every corner of it.

Before Marshall arrived, Mavis had survived largely by gathering wild fruit.

Later, after awakening her Magic, she’d gradually learned how to hunt small animals and catch fish, making it much easier to find enough food.

Fortunately, Tenrou Island was located in a tropical region where winter never arrived.

If the island had experienced freezing temperatures and harsh seasonal weather, it was entirely possible that little Mavis wouldn’t have survived long enough to meet Marshall in the first place.

“Sure. Let’s go.”

Marshall didn’t mind spending a little time with Zera when he had nothing particularly urgent to do.

He reached out, took her hand, and casually lifted them both into the air with Flying Magic.

“Huh?! W-Wait!”

Zera squeaked in surprise as her feet left the ground.

“W-We’re flying!”

Marshall laughed.

“With the kind of body you have now, learning to fly should actually be pretty easy. I’ll teach you how another time.”

“Really? Okay! You have to promise!”

Zera quickly recovered from her surprise and pointed excitedly toward the forest.

“Hehe! That way! Let’s go over there!”

Meanwhile, her thoughts were practically overflowing with happiness.

‘Marshall’s the best!’

Marshall’s daily routine gradually settled into a comfortable pattern.

Although his physical development had reached something of a plateau, he discovered that allowing sufficient recovery time between sessions restored some of the benefits of his extreme training.

Rather than forcing himself through the same brutal exercises every day, he began spacing them out and making better use of the intervals.

That freed up considerably more time for practicing Magic.

His experimental research, on the other hand, became less frequent.

Part of the problem was his lack of equipment and materials.

Even after several months on Tenrou Island, the resources available to him were nowhere near what he’d enjoyed in his original laboratory.

More importantly, Marshall’s current priority was improving his personal strength.

Developing new magical technologies and conducting complicated experiments could wait until he’d made more progress toward that goal.

His days could now be summarized by a fairly straightforward routine: deep-sea physical training, magical practice, spending time with Mavis and Zera, conducting occasional experiments, and eventually returning to the ocean for another round of training.

It was a surprisingly ordinary existence, at least by Marshall’s increasingly unusual standards.

At present, Marshall possessed [Life Magic LV5], which had already given him a glimpse of what abilities at that level were truly capable of.

There was technically another level beyond it—LV6—but the experience requirement was so ridiculous that he could barely bring himself to think about it.

Advancing from LV5 to LV6 required the equivalent of 100 million Inspiration Points.

Just looking at that number was enough to discourage him.

As far as Marshall was concerned, LV5 was probably the highest level he could realistically hope to achieve.

And frankly, it was already extraordinary.

A skill reaching LV5 no longer represented a simple improvement in efficiency, power, or technical mastery.

At that level, an ability began interacting with the fundamental rules governing the world.

It was an entirely different category of Magic.

The difference between LV4 and LV5 wasn’t merely quantitative.

It was a fundamental change in what the ability could accomplish.

The Curse of Ankhseram, which allowed Marshall to forcibly extract the lives of nearby creatures, was only one manifestation of what LV5 Life Magic could do.

In reality, his Life Magic was capable of many things that would previously have seemed completely impossible.

The problem was that Marshall didn’t know how to control most of those capabilities.

He had gained access to an extraordinary level of power without gradually developing the understanding necessary to use it properly.

After considering the problem for some time, Marshall came up with an analogy that he found rather appropriate.

If a Mage were like a smartphone, then their various magical abilities would be the applications installed on it.

Each application had its own functions, and some of those functions were locked behind different levels of access.

A basic user could operate the simpler features, while someone with a premium subscription might unlock far more advanced capabilities.

That was essentially how Marshall’s skill levels worked.

He currently possessed an extremely high level of access to the Life Magic application.

Unfortunately, he’d never progressed through the ordinary subscription tiers.

Instead, someone had forcibly granted him premium access to an application he barely understood, leaving him with a collection of advanced functions that he had no idea how to operate.

For example, the feature that automatically collected the lives of nearby creatures.

Marshall still couldn’t find the damned off switch.

That was why he’d become interested in raising another skill from LV4 to LV5 entirely through his own efforts.

If he could experience the complete process of advancing a magical ability to that level, he might finally understand the principles governing the transition.

And once he understood how an ordinary LV4 skill developed into an LV5 ability, he could compare that experience with his existing Life Magic.

Perhaps those insights would allow him to reverse-engineer the parts of LV5 Life Magic he currently couldn’t control.

It was a reasonable theory.

The difficult part was deciding which skill to prioritize.

After considering his options, Marshall narrowed the most promising candidates down to two.

[Spatial Magic LV4: 15.4%]

[Light Magic LV4: 10.2%]

There was a very practical reason for choosing these two abilities.

They were among the easiest skills for him to improve through repeated practice.

In fact, Spatial Magic and Light Magic weren’t even his most advanced LV4 abilities.

The skill with the highest experience percentage was actually Information Magic.

[Information Magic LV4: 21.9%]

But that progress represented approximately eight years of accumulated effort.

For eight entire years, Marshall had constantly used Information Magic to observe his surroundings, gather intelligence, and listen to other people’s thoughts.

Despite all that practice, he’d only accumulated a little over two million Inspiration Points’ worth of experience in that particular skill.

Compared with the rate at which he could improve through repeated teleportation or Light Magic practice, Information Magic was simply far too inefficient.

The difficulty of advancing LV4 skills was genuinely absurd.

Every skill required the equivalent of ten million Inspiration Points to progress from LV4 to LV5.

Ten million!

Marshall had been living in this world for more than eight years now, and even if he combined all the Inspiration Points and skill experience he’d accumulated throughout that entire period, the total might only barely reach such a figure.

His average rate of acquiring Inspiration Points was approximately 600,000 per year.

At that pace, ten years would produce only six million.

Even with fourteen additional years available to him, Marshall estimated that he would have enough time and resources to develop at most one additional LV5 skill.

That really put his sudden acquisition of LV5 Life Magic into perspective.

The Curse of Ankhseram might have brought him an enormous amount of suffering, but from a purely numerical standpoint, it had given him an astonishing advantage.

The LV5 Life Magic he’d received was effectively worth at least 11.1 million Inspiration Points.

One gift from a god had saved him more progress than he’d managed to accumulate through years of painstaking training and research.

If the ability hadn’t come with such horrifying side effects, Marshall would have happily welcomed a few more gifts like it.

Unfortunately, wishes like that weren’t particularly helpful.

He still had to make a decision.

With only enough time to raise one skill to LV5, he couldn’t afford to scatter his efforts across every ability he possessed.

He needed to choose a single LV4 skill and devote most of his magical practice to mastering it.

Marshall examined his current skill levels once again.

[Information Magic LV4: 21.9%]

[Spatial Magic LV4: 15.4%]

[Light Magic LV4: 10.2%]

[Meditation LV4: 8.6%]

[Script Magic LV4: 7.7%]

[Magic Power Control LV4: 6.0%]

[Physical-Conditioning Magic LV4: 5.7%]

[Form Magic LV4: 1.2%]

Each of these abilities offered different advantages, and advancing any one of them to LV5 could potentially transform what Marshall was capable of.

But he could only choose one.

And after weighing his options, Marshall finally made his decision…