WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Coughing Baby

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Chapter 50: 50

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“I’m already done reading it?”

I looked down at the paper in my hand. Thanks to every security magic and preservation spell I knew being layered over it, it was harder than steel.

It could probably withstand even the turtle stepping on it, and I was certain it would remain exactly like this even after a hundred years.

I carefully stroked the corner of the paper. It felt as if I had only just started reading, yet here I was, at the end again.

I wondered how long it had taken. Sensing my will, a mirror bug floated up and told me the current time. It was four o’clock.

This close reading had taken two hours. Just to read this one sheet of paper. If I tried to read it quickly, I could probably finish it in less than ten minutes.

But the moment I looked at this writing, I could not take my eyes away from even a single letter. This had been my fastest reading yet.

I remembered the first time I had read it. It was two weeks ago, on my way back from Professor Heisen’s tower. I opened the paper out of curiosity. When I came back to my senses, I was here. Almost two whole days had vanished.

I closed my eyes and slowly reviewed what had been written on the paper. Admiration rose in me again.

I had already read it thirty times, but there were still plenty of things inside it that I had failed to notice before.

How could so much be contained in a single sheet of paper? I could hardly believe it.

Quietly, I opened my eyes. The aftertaste of the writing still lingered.

Before this realization faded completely, I decided to read it one more time. I began again from the very first line. Time disappeared in an instant, and the tree in my chest accepted new things and grew.

What a beautiful piece of writing this was.

I read, reflected, and understood. That process repeated itself countless times. Only after reaching the end did I finally understand most of it.

A powerful strength filled my whole body. I opened and closed my hand. A strong root that had not been there before had seeped into it.

That root spread through my entire body and was half-assimilated with my shadow. It held a strange quality where substance and illusion coexisted, and it felt as if not only my body, but even my soul and mind had been woven together with that root.

I observed the inside of my chest. A massive tree stood there. Its shabby old appearance was gone without a trace.

All this time, the tree had filled out its own body by weaving together countless realizations. It had not only regained its former shape, but grown even larger.

As my realm rose and my foundation became far wider, it could finally stand tall.

Beneath it, shadow spread out faintly. The shadow tree had grown deeper, wider, and cozier. It had settled into the foundation, making the stars within it glitter.

The way those two mingled looked like a tree growing out of the night sky. This was the form I had dreamed of, and the form my tree had wanted.

Still, I could not be satisfied yet.

This writing had taught me that I lacked three things.

I lacked magical power, my knowledge was shallow, and my will was weak.

Professor Heisen had written one simple breathing method inside it. It was named Shadow Root.

The breathing method I had used before was one Ojo had taught me. It was the Nutrient Accumulation Breathing Method, something every mage knew.

In truth, it was not even a breathing method suited to the Sapling realm. I had learned it back in the Germination realm, after all.

Even so, I had gathered magical power with nothing but that until now. I simply had no way to obtain any breathing method more useful than it.

When I was outside the university, I had never even seen such a thing as a breathing method. How could a wandering mage possibly come across one?

A breathing method was like a treasure refined across long years, so it was not something that could be bought with mere gold.

That was why wandering mages kept breathing with poor methods no matter how high their realm rose. I was the same.

At the university, I could at least look at them. The problem was that they were far too expensive. Even the most basic breathing method cost over ten thousand points, and the price rose even higher the more stages it skipped.

Professor Irian had actually taught me a few over time. But the breathing methods she handed me were far too advanced.

Both back then and now, they were filled with content I could never understand. She knew nothing below that level. After all, she only collected things of value.

To me, this breathing method was like sweet rain in a drought.

Through it, my tree newly rooted itself throughout my body and mixed with shadow. That was how it could take its current form. In this way, I was able to make up for part of my lack of magical power.

Then what was knowledge? Magic began from knowing. If one did not know, then no matter how lofty that magical power was, one could not use magic.

Before I met Professor Irian, I knew very little. I had only studied a few spells rolling around in the underground auction house and reconstructed them into usable magic. I had never dared to think of obtaining anything beyond that.

Professor Irian taught someone like me many things. Magic, knowledge, history, and more. The books she threw to me contained such things. Through them, I was able to become a fairly capable mage.

But that was only outside the university. Inside the university, I was nothing more than an ordinary low-floor mage. Compared to others, my knowledge was shallow and insignificant.

How crude must the magic I created be? Within the simple flow Professor Heisen wrote about my ego-generation magic, I was able to discover countless points for improvement.

Professor Heisen had written a piece of advice below it. If I gave up on knowing, I could not move forward.

Thinking about it, he was right. After coming to the university, how much magic had I properly learned? I had almost no memory of learning new magic.

The most recent things I had read were only a few old magic books placed in the library on the third floor. Even then, I had merely skimmed through them a few times and never truly studied them.

After coming to the university, I had forgotten those things because I was too busy surviving day by day.

And then there was the weakness of my will.

The will he spoke of was not mine, but the wills of the ones created in the shadow. This was also connected to the subject he had handled earlier.

Because I lacked magical power, the magical power forming them was also lacking. Because my knowledge was shallow, the magic forming them was terrible.

And because my will was weak, the tree branch at their center also contained only weak power. In the end, that was why only such faint wills had been born.

He had written about a direction for cultivating these wills. The trial and error he had experienced was woven into it.

As I endlessly chewed over the writing on this paper, I came to understand what I lacked and how I needed to move forward.

I bowed my head toward the paper, filling the gesture with gratitude toward Professor Heisen.

I had to cultivate these star-like wills embedded densely in the shadow tree. The more they grew, the more complete my tree and unique magic would surely become.

If I reached the end of that path, I might be able to see the next realm. I had that feeling.

Then the problem was how to raise them.

When I learned cooking, these egos also became a little familiar with cooking. When I used puppetry, they too could learn how to handle puppets.

In this way, these egos grew by feeding on my experiences and knowledge. For that, I learned and studied many things.

But that alone was not enough. I had only one body, and even hundreds of years would clearly not be enough to raise them all. The old me had only felt lost in the face of this situation.

Professor Heisen showed me a clear answer to it in his writing. It was also something I had personally experienced throughout his lectures.

While conducting his lectures, he had distributed shadows to many people. Those shadows absorbed each person’s experiences and knowledge, creating perfect forms that resembled their owners.

For a thousand years, if calculated simply by numbers, sixty thousand mages had been raising shadows. He divided them into pass and fail.

The shadows that failed and were retrieved all seeped into the shadow world. Then they became a more perfect mass of shadow and formed that world.

The shadows that passed stayed beside their owners and continued to grow. When the owners died, they returned to the shadow world, he said.

After confirming this simple structure through the writing, I was deeply impressed. I never knew such a perfect method existed. If I could not do it alone, I just had to make others do it too.

I needed to imitate that.

Then how could I do it? That method was the most important part. I could not create perfect shadows like Professor Heisen, nor could I form a space like the shadow world.

But I quickly realized that this was a useless worry. I had already achieved a small part of it through the puppets.

People more outstanding than me were staying in this tower right now and cultivating shadows. The shadows dwelled inside puppets and watched their owners.

Through that observation, they took on the forms their owners wanted. Professor Irian’s Butler had done so, and Cassian’s bear puppet had done so too.

The more attention their owners gave them, the more they grew. In this way, their faint wills were absorbing their owners’ experiences and knowledge, changing into distinct forms.

Even so, a problem remained.

That change was far too subtle. I needed a way to maximize it a little more.

I found that possibility in the mirror bug.

The message board. I would use that place. If I made them write there, all of it would surely accumulate inside my shadow tree.

Even trivial things did not matter. As long as I put as much as possible inside it, the ego watching it would grow too.

Footnotes:

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