WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Coughing Baby

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◈ Surviving in the Magic Academy

Chapter 56

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- Hao: Lately, a bizarre face sometimes appears on my mirror bug. What is this?

I thought something like a soul might have seeped into it, so I talked to a necromancer, but they said nothing was wrong....

Yesterday, when I closed my eyes to sleep, I felt someone watching me. Something is seriously off about this.

┗ Omon: Didn’t you just see your own face reflected in the mirror?

┗ Hao: No, I’m being serious. This isn’t a joke.

┗ Luka: You saw it too? I thought I was imagining things, but I guess it was real.

┗ Hao: Luka-ssi, you saw it too? I didn’t see it wrong, right?

┗ Evron: A minor problem occurred while reinforcing the message board. It is an entity that cannot affect reality, so you do not need to worry about it too much.

┗ Hao: How am I supposed to not worry? I’m telling you, someone keeps watching me.

┗ Hao: Can you really not get rid of this, Evron-ssi?

┗ Hao: Evron-ssi?

I could feel my whole body going rigid with tension.

In the middle of the workshop stood a tree that had grown a little taller than I was. Its form was translucent, revealing what lay inside.

And inside it, several hazy faces drifted past. The tree’s flow was extremely strange, and the grotesque shapes contained within it were also circulating along that flow in a consistent grain.

Was it a success this time? Clinging to that hope, I opened my eyes wide and watched the tree.

But the tree began to blur little by little. Then it suddenly twisted and collapsed.

The collapse happened in an instant. If I had blinked without thinking, I would not have seen it happen at all.

“That makes ten.”

I sighed. No. 0, who had been manipulating the magic circle beside me the whole time, held out a towel. I cooled my heated face with it and went back over the cause of this failure.

Had the circuit of the magic circle been wrong? No. I had formed it perfectly, without the slightest error.

Had there been a mistake in the process, then? That was not it either. It had proceeded exactly as planned, without so much as a single second’s deviation.

Then why had this tree, which I had spent a week creating, collapsed?

In the end, the answer became clear. It was the conclusion I had not wanted to think about.

I retrieved the wraith tree brain wandering at the center of the magic circle. Worried something might have gone wrong with it, I projected magical power into its interior.

Thankfully, it was still in perfect condition, without the slightest depletion. The many souls swirling inside it were intact as well.

This was the greatest trait it possessed. It perfectly preserved whatever was inside it.

The wraith tree fed mainly on souls. It grew by absorbing the memories and emotions of the dead drawn in by its roots, then digesting them and making them its own.

That was why the brain I had possessed such exceptional storage capacity. It was a space created after countless souls had accumulated over the course of a thousand years.

Although it had lost its body, and with it the vast majority of the souls it possessed, quite a large number still remained inside.

If I removed those wraiths, the brain’s power would weaken too, so I could not get rid of them carelessly. That was why I had instead tried to use the souls contained in this brain to revive its body once more.

If I could reconstruct it, and if I could command it, then I would not simply gain storage space. I would also be able to wield powerful soul energy.

And I failed.

At first, I thought it was because I did not properly understand its structure. So I spent points to grasp that information as well.

After several experiments, I could confidently say I understood everything about it. With that confidence, I put quite a lot of effort into starting this experiment. But now, the tree had collapsed again.

There was only one problem. I lacked magical power.

This was not simply a matter of quantity. The density of that magical power, the will contained within it, and the force behind it were all lacking. In other words, my realm was too low to make this experiment succeed.

Of course, if I invested more time, I could probably find a method somehow. About a year, roughly.

But I could no longer continue the experiment. Countless pieces of information were surging through my shadow tree. It was certain to fill up soon.

“I really didn’t want to do this.”

I sighed. Now that every plan to revive the wraith tree had failed, there was only one way to use this right away.

I had no choice but to make it into a puppet.

It was something I truly wanted to avoid. The reason was simple. Efficiency.

If I had revived the tree, it would have freely wielded its power and souls with its powerful body as a foundation. Its existing ego would have been reborn and harmonized with my shadow tree.

But if I made this into a puppet, I could not expect that kind of power. The ego I created was far too immature, and incomplete as well. There was no way something like that could handle what was contained inside this.

It would only be usable as storage space. Of course, that had been my original goal, but I could not help feeling disappointed anyway.

This was material worth two hundred thousand points. Countless ideas had come to me while handling it, and yet I had to choose the option I had most wanted to avoid. It was a shame.

Still, since I had made up my mind, I had to do my best to make the puppet.

“Bring out everything we prepared.”

I said that while looking at No. 0. It began taking an enormous number of bottles out of the drawers on the workshop wall and carrying them over. Inside each bottle, a tree stem slept quietly in magical power fluid.

When I saw that, an ache pulsed in my chest. My tree was trembling. It had every reason to. Those countless tree stems were things I had cut from its body.

I gave a bitter smile. If anyone else saw this, they would say I had truly lost my mind. This was an act of shaving down my realm, and beyond that, shaving down myself.

In truth, I was certain I could not beat anyone in the same realm. Perhaps even facing those who had only grown Saplings would not be easy.

But it did not matter. I knew my own shortcomings. If I had been alone, I probably would not even have made it past the Sapling realm. Through this shaving away, I had been able to cross walls.

The same would be true from now on. The countless puppets created this way would lead me to higher places. For that, my personal strength did not matter.

I gathered the bottles together. I had already planned out how to make this into a puppet. I had only delayed it until the very end. It was something I could execute at any time.

No. 0 began preparing a new magic circle. Inside it, I took the tree stems out of the bottles.

Once freed from the magical power fluid, they began to wake little by little. Then they slowly released the magical power contained within them. If left alone, it would clearly scatter just like that.

So I wove together the magical power they released and artificially created a single flow. The tree stems moved along the flow I had made and began connecting to one another.

Soon, it took the shape of a huge sphere. Then it perfectly sealed the magical power being released inside it. No more loss occurred.

But that form was unstable, as if it would scatter at any moment. That was because the core that should have been inside did not exist.

I took out the wraith tree brain again. This would become that core and stabilize it. I carefully brought it to the sphere.

It seeped inside without any resistance. Then it began devouring the magical power flowing within. It looked exactly as I had expected.

Truthfully, I had spent quite a long time wondering how to make this thing into a puppet.

The wraith tree brain had almost no physical substance, so its shadow was only faint as well. Because of that, I could not gather its shadow separately, nor could I plant my tree stem inside it.

So I decided to approach it from the opposite direction.

If I could not put the tree stems into the shadow, then I only had to put the shadow into the tree stems. For that, I brought out every tree stem I had cut off until now. In terms of sheer quantity, it was enough to be twice the size of my current tree.

No. 0 carefully activated the magic circle. The magical power grew murky, and the inside began to darken. An artificial shadow world had begun to form. This magic, which had undergone many improvements over time, was forming a fairly convincing otherworld.

I quickly retreated outside the magic circle too. From here on, it was entirely up to that thing. I tensed my body, ready to protect at least the brain if it failed.

Within the strange magical power of the shadow world, the sphere made from my tree stems began rooting into the brain contained inside it. The brain that had been devouring its magical power also extended its spinal cord and formed a connection with it.

Through that connection, my tree stems instinctively emitted magic. It was my innate magic. Like that, it tried to create a single ego centered on the brain.

The magic worked perfectly normally. If this had been another puppet, it would have awakened an ego here.

But the result it created was different from what I expected. It could not become a star. Its ego had not been fully formed.

But that did not mean failure.

The wraith tree brain assimilated with the tree stems and stretched its spinal cord all the way to my shadow tree. It was an extremely instinctive movement, possible because it had no physical substance.

Then it dug into the shadow tree and began connecting to the stars that had risen inside it. From it, I could feel only a strong instinct to form a connection with the shadow tree. So I quietly let this new puppet do everything it wanted.

In that way, it formed connections with a great many stars. Then it began slowly pulling them. Drawn by that force, the stars moved closer to one another.

Like that, a single clear flow was engraved inside my shadow tree. It looked like a river. A shining galaxy made of stars.

At the center of that galaxy was the sphere made from my tree stems.

It began absorbing all the information contained inside. The pieces of information that had almost filled my shadow tree flowed along the galaxy and entered it.

I let out a sigh of relief. It was an unexpected result, but success was success. I glanced at No. 0. Receiving that signal, it dispelled the magic circle.

Then the dark world disappeared, revealing a sphere the size of my head. I carefully approached it and held it in my hand.

This sphere existed both in my shadow tree and in reality. The trait the wraith tree possessed had transferred over exactly as it was. I filled it with magical power and carefully checked its interior.

The brain contained inside had been perfectly assimilated into it and existed as the core. Thanks to that, even though no ego had formed, it had probably been able to stabilize.

The brain had barely changed. Only a tiny portion of its enormous capacity had filled up. At this rate, it was clear it would hold steady even after absorbing information hundreds of times.

It had not been a perfect process, but it was a perfect result.

During the process of forming this connection, a few wraiths that existed in the brain did flow into other stars, but that was a very minor matter. After a few days, they would lose their power and disappear on their own.

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