Chapter 161: A Vast Treasure 2

Kent returned to the teleportation gate and, without giving it much thought, used his mental power to activate the other short-range coordinate.

Just as he had expected, he found himself back at the place where he had first entered.

He quickly returned to the dimensional space. Then, gritting his teeth, Kent activated the extremely long-distance coordinate.

This time, he used nothing but eighth-rank magic cores.

He was afraid that anything weaker might fail to provide enough magical energy.

“Boom! Boom! Boom!”

After a violent sensation of weightlessness, Kent had barely set foot on solid ground when a series of tremendous noises thundered from outside.

He steadied himself and carefully examined his surroundings.

Only then did he realize that he seemed to be somewhere near the top of a massive structure.

And beyond it—

Sunlight.

Warm, familiar sunlight that he had not seen in far too long.

“Heh... I’m back above ground.”

Kent grinned with excitement as he walked toward something that resembled a window and cautiously looked outside.

The instant he saw what lay beyond it, however, he jerked his head back.

“The Mages’ Guild Headquarters... My gods!”

Kent finally understood exactly where he was.

He was inside one of the defensive towers of the Mages’ Guild Headquarters.

According to legend, the energy accumulated within these towers could be released to form a defensive barrier so powerful that even a legendary domain-level expert would be unable to break through it.

As for the internal structure of the towers, that was said to be one of the highest secrets of the Mages’ Guild.

“Highest secret?” Kent muttered with a mocking smile. “More like they don’t even know how it was built.”

The thought amused him.

The defensive towers were among the most heavily guarded places in the entire Mages’ Guild Headquarters, yet Kent had never once heard anyone mention that they were hollow inside.

For now, however, there was something far more important he needed to do.

He had to put a lock on this teleportation array.

Kent reached into his spatial ring and took out several pieces of arcane silver.

Arcane silver had a lower melting point than adamantine, but when it came to conducting magical energy and responding to magical fluctuations, it was among the finest materials available.

A magical key, in essence, consisted of three main components.

The first was a mental-imprint magic array.

Kent would inscribe his own mental imprint into this array. The imprint array would then be connected directly to the spatial coordinate used to activate the teleportation array.

That coordinate itself would be concealed beneath a hidden formation.

Beside it, Kent would also place a small but extremely precise magical trap.

Its purpose was simple—

to erase the coordinate.

The most critical part of any teleportation array was its spatial coordinate. Without it, the array had no destination to lock onto.

As long as the mental imprint of the person attempting to activate the teleportation array matched the imprint stored within Kent’s control array, the coordinate could be accessed normally.

But if the two mental imprints did not match, the coordinate would refuse to activate.

And if someone attempted to force the array open—

the magical trap would immediately trigger and destroy the coordinate itself.

Kent began arranging the formations on the teleportation array with painstaking care.

Fortunately, arcane silver had a relatively low melting point, so he did not need to expend too much magical power to work with it.

Under the control of his mental power, a mass of molten silver-white arcane silver slowly rose into the air.

From it, a thread of liquid metal no thicker than a strand of hair stretched downward and continuously traced intricate lines across the surface of the teleportation array.

Tiny magical runes flickered along the hair-thin silver filament from time to time, appearing and disappearing like sparks of pale light.

Kent’s face gradually grew paler.

His breathing became heavier.

By the time he finally completed the entire formation, he was on the verge of collapsing from exhaustion.

“This... is considered beginner-level alchemy?”

Kent stared at the completed array and gave a bitter laugh.

He had consumed an enormous amount of mental power just to finish it.

By his own estimation, his mental strength had already reached roughly the level of an eighth-rank mage.

And yet a formation capable of nearly draining the mental reserves of an eighth-rank mage was regarded, within Divine Alchemy, as nothing more than an introductory exercise.

Kent could only shake his head and smile helplessly.

The more he learned about Divine Alchemy, the more terrifying its standards seemed.

Kent carefully sent a strand of mental power into the magic formation woven from arcane silver.

Still not entirely reassured, he followed it with a small amount of spatial magic.

This was a method recorded in Divine Alchemy.

For a moment, Kent sensed nothing more than an obscure ripple of magical energy. Then, before his eyes, the formation he had just completed began to fade.

Its lines grew dimmer and dimmer until the entire array vanished completely.

Even when Kent focused his senses on the spot, he could no longer detect the slightest trace of it.

That was the effect of infusing spatial magic into the formation.

The entire array had been concealed within space itself. Unless a spatial mage happened to be present, no ordinary mage would ever be able to discover it.

Kent was rather pleased with the result.

He privately named this kind of magical key his “double safeguard.”

Looking over his handiwork, Kent felt a deep sense of satisfaction.

All of these formations had already been imprinted directly into his mind through Divine Alchemy, saving him a tremendous amount of time that would otherwise have been spent studying their structures from scratch.

What he lacked now was simply practice.

A great deal of practice.

Even this supposedly beginner-level formation had taken him far too long to complete.

Still, Kent was confident that if he were asked to construct the same array again, he would be able to finish it faster while consuming less mental power.

The process demanded far more concentration than it appeared to.

He had to maintain a steady flow of magical energy, keep the molten arcane silver suspended in midair, and at the same time concentrate on tracing every line and rune of the formation with absolute precision.

Handling all three tasks simultaneously placed an enormous strain on his mind.

Kent rested for a while, and eventually the discomfort began to fade.

At that moment, however, he found himself desperately wishing he had a mental-restoration potion.

If he possessed something like that, recovering from this sort of exhaustion would be far less painful.

Once a mage’s mental power fell below a certain threshold, all kinds of unpleasant symptoms began to appear—nausea, vomiting, dizziness, confusion, and mental disorientation.

In short, nearly every miserable condition imaginable seemed capable of striking at once.

Kent was still worried about Daphne.

As soon as his mental strength had recovered somewhat, he hurried back into the dimensional space.

Unfortunately, his mind was still clouded by exhaustion, and he failed to notice the faint magical presence slowly approaching from outside.

Kent entered the dimensional space, passed through the teleportation gate once more, and returned to the place where he had originally entered.

“Bang!”

Kent immediately deactivated the magical trap on the doorway.

Then he dismantled the entire doorframe.

In truth, the frame itself was the teleportation gate.

Without hesitation, Kent stored the whole thing inside his spatial ring.

Only then did he finally feel at ease.

Even so, he had no intention of leaving behind any evidence.

Kent turned toward the heap of discarded objects piled in one corner of the hall and began collecting anything that might still be useful.

Among them was the strange cage forged from deep-sea dark iron.

Kent found the cage deeply unsettling and did not dare open it casually.

The magical runes carved across its surface were enough to tell him that it was anything but ordinary.

Fortunately, Kent possessed extraordinary physical strength.

He simply lifted the entire cage and transferred it directly into the dimensional space.

Once everything worth taking had been removed, Kent began erasing the traces of his presence.

He cast several large-area sixth-rank earth spells in succession.

“Quicksand!”

The earth beneath the hall immediately began to loosen and sink.

Stone cracked.

Walls groaned.

The passages twisted inward as the ground collapsed beneath them.

Within moments, the entire hall and the connecting tunnels were swallowed beneath layers of earth and rubble.

Fortunately, the defensive magic formations within the ruins had long since lost their source of power.

Had they still been functioning, Kent would never have been able to damage the place so easily.

“Daphne, you’ve been waiting a long time, haven’t you?”

The moment Kent came back up, he saw the anxious expression on Daphne’s face.

After everything he had just discovered, Kent was in an excellent mood, and he greeted her cheerfully.

Daphne’s face immediately flushed red.

But when she saw that Kent had returned completely unharmed, the tension in her expression eased considerably.

Then she seemed to remember something important.

Her expression changed, and she hurriedly said, “The Grand Elder has already invited representatives from the Human Council of Elders, the Dwarven Blacksmiths’ Association, and the Gnomish Merchants’ Guild to deal with the matter of the dark elves being imprisoned here in Salt City.”

She looked at Kent and added, “They’ve invited you as well.”

“Hmph.”

Kent barely needed to think about it.

“Daphne, we’re going back to Muan City. We’ll leave everything here to the Grand Elder.”

Kent was no fool.

If he showed himself now, he would instantly become a target for every faction involved.

He had no interest in placing himself at the center of such a troublesome affair.

More importantly, Kent was eager to bring some of the strange new ideas filling his mind into reality.

And Muan City was the perfect place for him to do it.

He already had a strong foundation there, whether among the dwarves or the dark elves.

He had people he could rely on, resources he could use, and enough freedom to pursue his own plans.

As far as Kent was concerned, whatever happened here from now on could be left to the others.