336 Successor
William’s words silenced everyone present.

Of course, the reasons for the silence varied from person to person.

To Ebony, who had been in danger, silence was a relief from surviving a disaster.

Floral, who had suddenly lost sensation of mana, fell silent because she didn’t understand what had happened to her.

To the Webweaver, who had just walked forward and had found a rare opportunity to showcase its skills, its silence was because it understood why the Whispering Empress didn’t execute it after it committed a mistake in the conspiracy network. Instead, she gave it a chance to prove its worth.

It was better to say that She had given it a more creative death.

As for Quayle Wolfspeak, he fell silent because—

“Who are you?”

Quayle was the first to break the silence as he watched the human mage suddenly walk out of the Canopy Temple.

As a mortal, how dare he had such insolence? After the Daughter of the Forest lost the Holy Tree Matriarch’s favor, he actually shamelessly said that she would be under his care in the future?

Quayle’s tone was half puzzled and half provocative.

William couldn’t be bothered with such a small fry. He slowly walked to Floral’s side, and the Holy Tree Duke turned to look at him.

“Presiding Judge, I just…”

“I’m aware,” William, who had understood the problem from Zamara, said casually. “You can’t feel mana in your ether domain, right?”

Floral nodded in confusion.

“Don’t ignore me! You…” Seeing that the two people in front of him didn’t seem to take him seriously at all, Quayle couldn’t help but raise his tone in anger.

As he spoke, he looked at the empire ambassador and gestured for the foreigner with unfathomable strength to take down the ignorant magic chanter.

However, he never expected…

“Shut up!”

The empire’s ambassador, who was usually bossy and never polite to anyone, interrupted him with a trembling voice.

Not only that, but the other party also turned her head abruptly and glared at him with a fierce gaze that revealed fear—as if he had just said something incredible.

Quayle was about to say something when he realized that he had literally shut up.

His upper and lower jaws were stuck together by countless silk-like objects. They were so tightly shut that he felt that he couldn’t separate them at all even if he tore his mouth apart.

Quayle looked at the empire ambassador. In his shock, he could only nasally produce simple syllables to express his puzzlement.

On the other side, the ambassador’s body trembled as she looked at the unknown gray-haired magic chanter in fear. The latter only glanced at her and casually said, “You should know who I am, right?”

If he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes today, Quayle probably would have felt that nodding crazily at such a scale and frequency would have snapped her neck.

Could this physiological structure still be considered human?

“Then, you should understand that resistance is futile.”

Seeing the other party nod, the man said calmly, “But…”

“Running away or praying is equally futile,” the unknown man continued. Then, he suddenly revealed a faint smile of disdain. “But perhaps you can fight for a reason for me not to draw my sword… If you can all keep quiet from now on.”

The moment the man finished speaking, the Wild Hunts, who had been roaring behind Quayle, instantly fell silent.

Even without turning his head, Quayle knew that those people’s upper and lower jaws were glued together like his.

Who was this person who could make the empire’s ambassador so afraid? A member of the empire’s royal family?

…

After calming Floral down with a few words, William looked at her and said,

“What you said previously resolved a question of mine. How did you forcefully advance to the Divine Realm under the blockade of the Astral Laws?”

As a Forest Elf, even if Floral had a pair of adoptive parents with a Platinum Ring background, it was impossible for her to obtain a spot to advance to the Divine Realm through the Astral Council.

“I remember that I passed…”

Floral frowned in thought, but she found nothing even after flipping through her memories… It was clearly impossible for her to forget such an important matter.

After struggling repeatedly and realizing that she couldn’t recall any scenes, Floral said firmly,

“But my mana source does come from the Astral World.”

William shook his head regretfully and said, “Your mana comes from the staff, not coins,”

To make the truth seem more acceptable when it was revealed, William specially used the terms of the classical magic system that had long been eliminated.
In the High Elves’ classical magic system, the path of obtaining mana, or rather, Creatons, was divided into three paths. Its symbols were coins, swords, and staffs. Coins represented communicating with the Astral World and obtaining mana that hadn’t solidified into reality as material for change. Swords represented communicating with the Moon Realm and turning the power that reflected the thoughts of countless mortals into a weapon to wield… As for staffs, they represented controlling others as fuel to effect change by burning the mobility of mortals.

Floral, who was educated by her adoptive parents and had excellent magical knowledge, instantly understood what William meant.

However, she couldn’t admit this at all.

How could he be a heretical mage who burned the souls of others as fuel?

She could clearly communicate with the Astral World’s mana…

William saw through her thoughts and said, “That’s just an illusion.”

“Illusion?” Floral looked at William in confusion.

“I only figured it out after obtaining a clue. Your master, Nehe, was actually transformed into a lich in an accident. He also directly leveled up to… Ahem, I mean, advanced to the Divine Realm. Before that, he was only an ordinary forest druid. He wasn’t compatible with the modern magic system at all.”

The best way to min-max the game—after completing the beginner’s quests to activate the Twilight scene, players could bring powerful plot NPCs to Ravenwood and save Nehe, who had just been transformed into a lich by a necromancer. This way, they could obtain the only teammate at Level 80 in the early stages of the game.

Although Nehe couldn’t learn any spells as a magic chanter before completing the Rebuild the Mage Guild quest and would refuse to kill any living person because of his faith, his high-level interface attributes and the powerful talent of a lich made him a virtual God of War in the early game, the boss of grinding, and a model as a diligent worker.

This was also why Nehe was ranked third among the Judges—other than William, the Presiding Judge, and Dewey, the second-in-command of the Twilight Fortress, Frost Lich Nehe was the first to join the Doomsday Watchers and had the most experience.

William recalled Nehe, who had helped him defeat a group of difficult dungeons in the early stages of the game. He wiped the smile off his face and said,

“After Nehe became a lich, the scale of his magic power soared to the Divine Realm. However, before he systematically learned magic, he couldn’t safely control his strength. And you, who inherited his legacy and used the same conversion ritual to become a lich, should be theoretically the same.”

William’s words reminded Floral of a terrifying possibility. She widened her eyes and said, “You mean? Mr. Nehe is also…”

William simply nodded.

“Nehe had the scale of magic power at the Divine Realm from the beginning, but he was unwilling to accept his talent back then. It wasn’t until he joined the Mage Guild and began to relearn magic from an Apprentice that he gradually reached his later achievements.”

William remembered that after starting the Mage Guild’s plotline, Nehe would leave the team for a long time to study at the academy. However, there were no level changes during that period.

William originally thought that it was a patch created by the game to balance the difficulty of the early stages of the game, but he unexpectedly received a reasonable explanation…

Back then, Nehe wasn’t willing to study and use magic in the early stages because he knew, or at least vaguely sensed, the truth about his Divine Realm mana—that mana didn’t come from the Astral World, but from using the souls of his own kind as fuel.

In that case, his subsequent guilt as if he was torturing himself and his pathological obsession with Ravenwood Forest could be explained.

Then, how many true thoughts did his former teammates have hidden under those texts and branch plots that he didn’t know?

A faint melancholy filled William’s heart. He sighed and looked at Floral before continuing,

“I think your adoptive parents probably just… don’t want you to discover the truth of your mana source and give you the illusion that you can communicate with the Astral World.”

“Then, am I just a… joke?”

Floral’s expression was a little dazed—her power didn’t belong to her at all, but came from the remains of the people she had sworn to protect.

“No.”

William denied it succinctly and said, “Nehe isn’t, so you aren’t either. What’s a joke is the so-called gods who think they can control your fate. Even if She can cut off the source of your mana, She can’t snatch away your strong casting will or the countless spells you’ve studied. It’s just rebuilding the magic power pathway to the Astral World. As long as you come to the Dawn Fortress in the future, it won’t be long before you can truly step into the Divine Realm with the help of the astrolabe given your talent. As for finding a substitute for the Divine Realm-level mana flow, I have as many as you need.”

As William spoke, he took out a few resplendent Soul Storage Crystals and a few bottles of potions that overflowed with light.

With William’s recovery speed after reaching maximum level, as long as he excluded certain limitations, he didn’t need any tools or potions to recover mana. However, in order to increase his proficiency in alchemy and enchantment, he accumulated many recovery tools that were collecting dust in the consumables tab in his inventory.

He could take this opportunity to clear his inventory.

William turned to the Webweaver and said, “I’ll give you a chance to live. If I don’t attack, you can escape now. Escaping will be proof of your strength.”

William didn’t care about the Webweaver that was frantically escaping in the forest. Instead, he threw the items in his hand to Floral.

“You should know how to use it, right? Ah, it’s good that you do. You can kill the others, but please bring that Webweaver back alive. Oh right. She’s the empire ambassador in your eyes.”

“There’s no reason. If you’re Nehe’s successor, I believe you can do it.”