Warlock Apprentice

Chapter 1302: Section 1303: Suitcase

“`

Clouds soared and mists swirled, the atmosphere extended like a magnificent rainbow.

This was the first time Felton had soared through the sky; the scenery below was grand and moving, yet he had not a bit of desire to admire it. Not only because of the vicious and ruthless person behind him with unknown intentions; more importantly, his whole body was shivering, simply unable to bear such coldness.

His attire was sparse to begin with, adequate for warmth at home by the fireplace, but now he had been whisked away, flying high in the unprotected sky, feeling as if his blood was gradually freezing.

The cold was not the most terrifying thing; the thin air at high altitude rushed into Felton’s nostrils non-stop during the high-speed flight.

Causing his complexion to turn from pale white to purplish cyan gradually.

… Just as Felton began to experience hypothermic hallucinations, trembling with the impulse to strip off his clothes to bask in the “false warmth,” they finally arrived at their destination—the Mount Fear Waterfall.

Felton was tossed into the snowy ground, and while still in a daze, a gentle energy poured into his body.

With the invasion of this energy, Felton felt all discomforts in his body disappear without a trace. Even his muddled thoughts had cleared up a lot.

Not only did he not feel cold, his body felt as though it was in the warm summer.

Felton looked at Suise with astonished eyes; such techniques could only be performed by Transcendents. Thinking his body had recovered, Felton stood up from the thick snow.

However, in Angel’s eyes, there was no improvement in Felton’s condition. His skin remained pale and purplish, clearly frostbitten, and as time passed, it grew even more severe; yet his eyes were bright, seemingly oblivious to the oddity of his body.

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It seemed that the energy Suise had infused into Felton’s body earlier was more of a numbing effect rather than truly effective.

“Speak, where did you bury the box?” Suise asked coldly.

“The last time I was here, it hadn’t started snowing yet. Let me think.” Felton looked around; now, the falls of Mount Fear had ceased to flow, only a few spots unfrozen were still babbling streams. White snow blanketed the wilds, with snow dust whipped up by the mountain breeze, making it a vast expanse of undistinguishable direction, both near and far terrain, difficult for ordinary people to discern.

However, Felton, after all, was a sailor who made his living on the sea, naturally possessed an accurate sense of direction, and his grasp of spatial distance was beyond ordinary people.

Once he had established a landmark as a starting point, he quickly found the direction.

“It should be buried over there!” Felton pointed to a high ground in the distance and said.

Everyone looked and realized that this high ground was actually far from where they were standing. Although it was still within the range of Mount Fear Waterfall, it was already close to the edge. A bit further, and it would be Gru Town.

Felton was picked up by Suise again, and in an instant, they arrived at the high ground.

The high ground was flat and empty, with only one solitary tree, standing tall for a long time.

Looking back from this high ground, the scenery of Gru Town was in full view.

“That person hinted in his words several times that he wanted me to bury it near Gru Town. However, I don’t know what’s inside, and I worried it could be something like poison gas, so I dared not bury it in Gru Town and buried it here instead.” Felton said while walking to the only tree covered in snow, “The box is under this tree.”

After speaking, Felton stepped aside.

Suise carefully observed the tree; he had already felt something underneath it, but it was just a very ordinary box. If any energy was leaking out, it would have been detected by the Alchemy Golem earlier, but clearly, this box had none.

Suise stood still without moving, and suddenly ripples appeared in the air behind him, and a huge phantom of the Hand of Magic appeared near the tree.

The Hand of Magic directly probed into the ground, the earth churned, and a leather suitcase was pulled up.

As Suise had sensed before, this was an ordinary leather suitcase, brown leather with a cross pattern, brass-like rivets, and a black zipper.

It looked very ordinary, but the only strange thing was that there was no sense of what was inside the box.

White Bear murmured softly, “Be careful, fate has given me a premonition that the box could very likely belong to Rolando.”

Bearing any connection to Rolando, even if he wasn’t present here, one could not rule out the possibility of traps inside.

After a pause, White Bear asked, “What could be inside the box?”

“Inside the box of a Transcendent, there could be many things. It wouldn’t be surprising even if it held an entire world.” Suise replied.

That statement was actually not wrong. If someone transformed the Witchcraft Garden into a suitcase, it indeed could be that opening it revealed a world. But as far as they knew, King Gumman didn’t have a Witchcraft Garden, and even if he did, it was unlikely to be so carelessly buried here.

But even if the “world” was not what lay inside, the small size of the space didn’t mean it was insignificant on the inside; it could contain some unknown, terrible thing.

Suise reached out cautiously with his hand, preparing to unzip the suitcase to have a look.

If there really was great horror inside, with the Illusion Demon present, there shouldn’t be any problem.

“`

However, just as Suise was about to unzip, Angel suddenly said, “Wait a moment!”

Suise halted and looked back at Angel with a puzzled expression.

“Do you not think that the thread beneath that stud looks familiar?” Angel pointed at a spot on the suitcase, where there was a thread under a stud. The thread appeared to be stitching and merged seamlessly with the surrounding crosshatched pattern.

Suise and the White Bear saw nothing amiss, whereas Sanders was silent for a moment, then spoke with some hesitation, “A base angle?”

Angel nodded, “It does look like a kind of modified base angle.”

A base angle is a concept from Runeology; every magic pattern holds its own meaning, whether elements or concepts, and they are presented one by one in accordance with the effects the magic patterns correspond to. A base angle is something that appears in the vast majority of magic patterns, as it signifies the maximum edge of a magic pattern’s drafting.

It actually doesn’t carry any particular significance — if one really had to say, it could be somewhat similar to “limit” or “framework.”

That is to say, magic patterns are generally confined within the base angle.

But to simply talk about confinement seems a bit too severe. In reality, the expressiveness of magic patterns is quite broad and free. So the concept of a base angle is, in fact, more of a medium for accommodating other magic patterns.

“A base angle?” Suise knew what a base angle was, but this stitching-created pattern didn’t look like a base angle no matter how he looked at it. To say it was a modified base angle seemed rather far-fetched.

However, as Suise was, after all, a layman when it came to magic patterns, whereas Angel was an alchemist versed in enchantments, if Angel said it resembled a base angle, Suise had no grounds to argue.

If it really was a base angle, did that mean there were magic patterns on this suitcase… or perhaps, a Magical Energy Array?

Suise examined it closely, yet there was no trace of any magic pattern he recognized on the suitcase.

Ultimately, Suise had no choice but to leave the judgment to Angel.

The Hand of Magic held the suitcase aloft, presenting it in front of Angel for him to observe.

Upon closer inspection, the outer appearance of the suitcase was taken in at a glance. It was formed in one piece, the leather very smooth, with the crosshatch pattern applied using some sort of coating. The only indentations were the stitches that emerged beneath the stud.

But upon closer examination, those stitches resembled ordinary sewing thread used to attach the stud more than anything else.

After a while, Angel’s brow furrowed; he too hadn’t discovered any magic pattern, but the pattern that the stitching formed truly resembled a base angle…

“Could you have been mistaken?” The White Bear asked Angel in a low voice, seeing that Angel was still silent with a deeply furrowed brow.

Angel pondered for a long time, still not sensing the presence of any magic patterns. Could it be, as the White Bear suggested, that he had been mistaken? Were those stitches merely designed to look like that pattern?

At this point, doubt began to appear in Suise’s eyes when he looked at Angel.

It wasn’t that he doubted Angel’s abilities; privately, he just thought that perhaps Angel was over-anxious, knowing that his judgment might have been an error and somewhat reluctant to admit it.

“Actually, the absence of magic patterns is a pretty good outcome, isn’t it? Even if there were any magic patterns, you could handle them, right?” The White Bear whispered.

“I want to touch the suitcase directly,” Angel suddenly said.

Because they were wary of traps inside the suitcase, they had not touched it before, only carrying it with the Hand of Magic.

Now that Angel requested to make contact, Suise felt that it was simply a matter of pride preventing him from admitting to a folly, beginning to act somewhat stubborn. With their naked eyes, they had nearly seen all there was to see, and since there were no traces of indentations on the suitcase, touching it seemed meaningless.

But since the discovery of the suitcase was undeniably Angel’s greatest contribution, when he made such a request, Suise couldn’t stop him, though his face grew a bit darker.

Angel glanced back at Sanders; Sanders’s eyes showed no distrust, only calmly asking, “Do you truly think it’s a magic pattern?”

“I don’t know, but you can’t probe inside this suitcase, which in itself signifies something. I have an idea I need to verify,” Angel replied.

Sanders nodded, “Then proceed as you wish.”

Angel reached out and slowly touched the surface of the suitcase, a chill running through his fingertips and into his body.

Angel caressed the so-called “base angle” he had been suspicious of, then pressed lightly, his finger sliding down along the base angle. He closed his eyes and silently felt the sensation on his fingertips.

As time trickled by, the air grew stagnant.

Impatience flickered in Suise’s eyes, but with the presence of the Illusion Demon, he refrained from speaking out.

The White Bear, meanwhile, took out his wand to conduct a detection prophecy… but, as if fate had abandoned him once more, he received no insight.

Just when Suise could hardly wait to speak, Angel suddenly announced, “I was not wrong in my judgment, it is indeed a magic pattern.”