Age of Adepts

Northern Lands, the Tower of Fate.

Today was the day the Fate Witches gathered for their routine astrology ceremony.

From afternoon to late in the night, the highest floor of the tower glowed bright like a lamp, illuminating the entirety of Dragonblight. Meanwhile, projections and lights flickered in the astrology hall. It was a sea of light.

Lucia squatted on the astrology platform, listlessly popping the bubble-like illusions that drifted past her with her finger. The strange silent image of a particular location of the planar world flashed in each of these bubbles.

Naturally, anyone whose actions could be captured and projected by the Tower of Fate was no nameless individual. Almost every one of these bubbles showed an image of a powerful individual in the World of Adepts with enough influence to cause ripples throughout the world with a single action.

Obviously, it included the legendary fire adept Greem among them; Greem, whose name could be heard everywhere in the Central Lands, and who reigned supreme over all other adepts there!

“Hm? What’s happened to him? To think he could fall asleep when he’s reading.”

Lucia casually grabbed the bubble projection and slowly angled and moved it around. She peeked at the ‘napping’ man within.

“Something’s…not right. This doesn’t look like he’s sleeping, but…”

Lucia mumbled to herself when, suddenly, she heard a low but elegant voice beside her ear.

“Dream Assassination…this is Dream Assassination! It seems like Ivana couldn’t hold back any longer.”

Lucia turned to look at the woman who stood beside her dressed in an intricate, starry robe. Alice’s face and skin glowed with a crystalline radiance. Lucia couldn’t help but speak out in surprise, “Teacher, your lover has been caught in a Dream Assassination. Are you…not concerned?”

A sweet smile appeared on Alice’s beaming face as she said, “If Greem was so easily killed, he wouldn’t have lived to this day. Ivana has always been very patient and would never have struck if she wasn’t confident of her victory, but this time, she’s in for a rude surprise!”

“Why…why do you have such confidence in Greem?” Lucia asked out of surprise.

“You’ve grasped many applications of the Fate powers now. Can you not see the trend of Greem’s Fate? Do you think that it looks like he is about to die today?” Alice smiled and responded with a question.

“Er,” Lucia was speechless.

She still regarded herself as an arcanist, after all. Even though she now possessed the power of a First Grade Fate Witch due to the favor of Fate, she was still used to observing and analyzing everything with the attention and knowledge of an arcanist most of the time.

That was why she was having a hard time becoming used to the way in which Alice easily trusted and believed entirely in Fate.

Perhaps this was why Alice was Fate’s lamp holder and could only toy around with a few simple Fate spells!

…………

Silver Union, the Castle in the Sky.

An ugly witch with a hunched back and messy hair stood before a mushroom cottage inside a small swamp. She silently looked up at the starry night sky above.

Faint yellow candlelight shone out of the cottage behind her, painting the side of her body with a soft layer of gold.

Twelve main stars traveled through the dark sky, illuminating different regions of the sky as they progressed down their paths. Thousands of stars filled each part of the sky. Sometimes they were bright, and sometimes they were dim, giving a sense of constant change and transformation.

The night sky tonight was especially strange, as the stars were shifting and changing more frequently and intensely than unusual.

Some stars would suddenly become unnaturally bright, so much so that they even threatened to outshine the twelve main stars. Others would become completely lightless and vanish from view. If it weren’t for the faint light they still gave off, one might have assumed the star to have fallen.

Witch Liana was staring at a certain region of the sky in the southeast.

As she watched, one of the region’s minor stars began to glow excessively, almost illuminating half of the night sky. At the same time as it began shining brightly, it also seemed to have ignited. A dark red rim of light encircled the star, making it seem as if it had caught on fire.

Liana couldn’t help but bare her yellowed teeth in a broad smile and chuckle coldly when she saw this.

“Ivana, oh, Ivana. I have waited five hundred years for you. I never expected you to walk out of the Misty Lands! I might not have been able to do anything while you were hiding in the Misty Lands! However, now that you’ve walked out of your own accord and even started a fight against someone of the same grade…kehkehkehe! Do you think that I have forgotten what happened five hundred years ago? The shame and anger you bestowed on me? I will return all of it today.”

Liana hurried back into her mushroom cottage. Clattering could be heard as she rifled through her shelves until, at long last, she dug out a wooden carving from a dusty old box.

The carving was only the size of her palm. The wood looked old and yellowed, with several cracks running all over it.

The carving was in the likeness of a pretty and slender woman, with delicate, gentle eyebrows. In fact, it looked somewhat similar to the woman that had appeared in Greem’s dream.

Liana tossed the carving into a large, ugly pot in a corner of the cottage without hesitation. The carving landed in the sickly green stew with a plop and quickly sank to the bottom.

The moment the carving fell into the poison stew, which had been brewing for over a hundred years by now, a furious and pained cry could be heard from the distance.

“What a moving and pretty scream…what a nostalgic voice. Ivana, the hatred you have inflicted on him, I will return ten-fold, a hundred fold…kehkehkeh.”

Liana continued to chuckle sinisterly, her voice almost like that of a hooting owl as she continued to form more and more sickly green runes between her hands, which she swiftly put into the pot.

The flames under the pot burned even more furiously and started to become stained with a trace of ghastly green when they licked the pot.

The screaming in the air seemed to grow louder and higher in pitch!

“Despair! Scream! Suffer! Ivana, this is your retribution.”

It seemed like the despair magic alone was insufficient, for Liana moved a stool over and picked out the largest jar hanging from her ceiling. She then opened the jar and poured out its filthy contents into the pot, along with the giant eyeball swimming within, of course.

The moment the eyeball touched the stew, it transformed into a massive eyeball-like monster, which wrapped itself firmly around the carving.

The carving seemed to have come to life. She screamed out hideously and began sinking to the bottom of the pot with the eyeball monster.

The pot immediately started shaking violently. The sickly green soup inside bubbled and roiled as if two monstrous beings were fighting within.

“How is it, Ivana? This Banquet of Despair that I’ve spent a few hundred years preparing just for you and the Eye of Despair. You must be enjoying yourself! Why not something with a little more kick, then?”

Witch Liana didn’t hold back. She started grabbing jars and bottles with both her hands, tossing the Eyes of Despair she had specially prepared for this occasion into the pot, one after another.

These Eyes of Despair had no special effects other than being one of the most terrifying corruptors known to exist. They could inject a spiritual essence known as ‘despair’ into their victims through physical attacks.

Moreover, such attacks could not be neutralized by magic resistance!

While Liana gleefully danced around the pot, a sharp, furious, and terrifying female voice rang out in the cottage.

“Liana, you are digging your own grave!”

The next moment, the sharp voice turned into a shrill scream, causing a terrifying sonic wave to ripple through the room.

Aaaaaah!

The sonic wave was incredibly destructive and instantly tore apart every substance unprotected by magic.

The mushroom cottage disintegrated before the fearsome sonic wave.

Everything from the fungus, the wooden pillars, the metal hooks, the books, jars, to all the mysterious, tiny little trinkets, shattered in the sonic wave before being minced into miniscule particles and blown into the distance.

Even the seemingly mad Liana appeared to have been struck violently by the scream. Streaks of purple blood started to flow out of all her orifices. Her skin began to crumble, inch by inch, revealing the dry and shriveled flesh beneath.

Liana might have been an incredibly powerful Witch of Despair five hundred years ago. However, due to her severe injuries, her power had regressed to that of an advanced Second Grade. She was far from her prime.

She was cursing a Fourth Grade False Witch as a Second Grade. Moreover, that was no ordinary Fourth Grade, but the very leader of the False Witches. To survive a retaliation like this without instantly dying was already fortunate.

If Ivana wasn’t caught up in her Dream Assassination, this reprisal would have been enough to kill Liana!

A short moment later, Liana struggled and got up from the ground.

The cottage she had been living in for three hundred years had vanished without a trace. Nothing existed in this swamp apart from that giant pot and herself.

Liana showed no signs of regret or agony, despite her grievous wounds. Instead, an even more hideous and wretched expression took over her face.

“I can’t live for much longer anyway. Today is the perfect day to drag you down to hell with me. Ivana, I’ll be waiting for you down there!”

Liana leaped straight into the pot. Her entire body rapidly melted, like she was made out of ink, quickly turning the green stew black.

A massive and terrifying essence of despair surged around the wooden carving. The essence then started to contaminate the spiritual node in the distance through the spiritual channel.

In a northwestern corner of the sky where the skies were bright with stars, a dim star abruptly lit up with radiance before turning into a comet and falling out of the sky.