This place lacked many things, but paths were not among them. Tars twisted and turned through the tunnels until he himself began to feel disoriented; only then did he allow his mind to rest.
He stopped sprinting at full tilt, but he had no intention of coming to a halt. His tireless little legs pumped at a steady rhythm, as if trying to shake his feet right off his ankles. He had always thought that the cowardly nature of kobolds was a flaw—a limitation that prevented them from becoming powerful. But after experiencing the recent close call, he felt it wasn't so bad; it was, in fact, entirely understandable.
A kobold's cowardice was a life-saving tool. In most situations, they wouldn't freeze in fear or do something as foolish as standing paralyzed in place. Once terror took hold, they scattered instinctively, driven by a primal urge to run as far away as possible.
Exactly what he was doing now.
Running away is so much easier with a storage pouch, he mused. To a kobold, this place was full of "mansions" to call home—and having exits on all sides simply meant the escape routes were plentiful.
He eventually found a spacious, pleasant-looking spot. Unfortunately, it sat at a junction of three tunnels, so it could only be considered "three-sidedly open." He took a moment to compose himself. The expression on the little Bugfolk’s face when it left had been very unsettling.
His only immediate problem was a lack of food, but that didn't matter. He could starve for a bit; after all, he hadn't made use of the kobold's legendary resistance to hunger in quite a while. He would wait quietly until tomorrow before venturing back out.
"My backup rations, are you doing alright?" He opened the nursery bag, brought it close to his face, and whispered to the large egg.
The egg actually wobbled—it seemed to be shivering. This thing can really understand me?
Since the Bugfolk had spoken to him in the Underground Common Tongue, Tars used the same language to tease the egg. Previously, he had assumed the two brothers communicated through pheromones or some other biological means.
After entertaining himself for a while, he calmed down. He sat against the cave wall, pulled out the spellbook for Frost Ray, and began to read.
Learning a spell from scratch was not the simple matter of memorizing a model that he had imagined. He had learned previously that a spell model was like a specific rune—sometimes simple, sometimes incredibly complex—a synthetic creation of the mind. Without the aid of a legacy scroll and its supplemental power, building a high-quality spell model required a deep understanding of countless tiny, fragmented components. If a single point remained unclear, constructing even the simplest model was impossible.
These fragments could be thought of as "micro-runes." They represented the collision between a mundane mind and the universal truths of the world, manifesting as a strange element—an expression of the world itself. If the world were a speaker, a human might say one sentence at a time, while the world spoke ten thousand sentences simultaneously. To use an imperfect metaphor: these fragments, and even the great runes in a meditation method, were the words, sentences, or even just the punctuation marks of the world’s constant speech that a wizard managed to capture and understand.
And these fragments, while appearing "cute," were actually mischievous little devils that drained one's mental power just through simple observation. At first glance, they all looked the same, yet they were entirely unique; if one split into two and recombined, it would change again. They attracted and repelled each other, creating different variations when grouped. Without a thorough grasp of their nature, the construction of a spell model would stall. Fortunately, predecessors had already cleared the path. The book provided a specific range, listing every "naughty sprite" required for the spell—not one more, not one less—making it a complete and reliable guide.
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
In the eyes of a Great Wizard, such a book was likely considered a "dummy's guide" for step-by-step instruction.
He leafed through the pages while scratching his head, struggling to understand and master it bit by bit. The turning of pages grew slower and slower; sometimes a whole day passed without him flipping to the next. Thankfully, his transformation into a wizard apprentice had made his brain slightly more efficient than before.
It suddenly occurred to him: from a certain perspective, was he essentially having a conversation with the world? Except the world was a chatterbox far more extreme than Old Gold-Tooth, speaking without pause since the dawn of time. What he had spent days deconstructing might only be half a word uttered by the world—or perhaps the gap was even larger, beyond description. Calling it a "conversation" was a stretch given the staggering inequality. They were not so much talking as they were trying to catch an echo of the world’s voice from millions of years ago.
He looked up at the crystal lamp standing in the corner. Within the hourglass-shaped frame, the diamond-shaped crystal had dimmed and brightened through several cycles.
In the blink of an eye, five days had passed without food. He repeatedly told himself that this wasn't just excessive caution, but rather the "selfless state" of his first self-taught spell combined with the kobold talent for starvation. It seemed that after becoming a wizard apprentice, his ability to endure hunger had also improved.
Finally, he decided to move. Several days of self-study had left him with a pile of "gifts" (questions) to present to the half-man. He briefly considered bringing the half-man a grub, though he wasn't sure if the creature would eat it or if the food would just leak out of its broken head.
He didn't follow the path from his memory. After hiding for so many days, he couldn't afford to be careless at the very end. It took him half a day of exploration to find his way back to the familiar ravine hunting ground.
The first thing he saw was a dark, beautiful figure with pointed ears. It had to be the Dark Elf Old Gold-Tooth had mentioned. By human standards, she was quite stunning, though kobolds and lizardmen might have had a different opinion.
Having emerged from hiding, he kept a low profile and did not activate Fetid Skin, appearing as nothing more than an ordinary little kobold. At that moment, he performed an act perfectly in line with the image and temperament of his race.
He wailed, flailed his arms, and turned to bolt in the opposite direction.
The Dark Elf was about the height of a human, standing with a straight, sharp posture that exuded a sense of lethal grace. She didn't even look toward him when she first heard his footsteps; she only spared him a glance once he started running away. This was exactly the effect Tars wanted. In this moment, he was just an ordinary kobold—at least, that was the first impression he wanted to give.
The fact that this Dark Elf was wandering alone so far from her homeland in the territory of other subterranean races meant she was formidable. There were plenty of places to catch bugs now; he could afford to let her have this one.
When he saw the elf wasn't pursuing him, he slowed his pace, quieted his steps, and shut his mouth. He thought back: the point-eared stranger hadn't looked like she was there to hunt for food. She seemed to be surveying the entire ravine.
Tars decided not to worry about it. He would catch his grubs and hurry back to finish learning the spell. He had already decided not to wait until he reached the Second-Level of a wizard apprentice; as soon as he mastered this spell, he would set out. He would first scavenge the two relatively close sites where wizards had fallen.
Thank you, little Crybaby Bug, for the map of the wizard legacy.
His last meeting with the Bugfolk might very well have been their final goodbye. If there was any real danger, it was surely centered around that little creature; he was just an insignificant bystander on the sidelines.
