A Sorcerer’s Journey

Lips brushed against cheeks, against lips, against neck, gently and carefully; not a word was spoken as the growling and the purring noises rose. Veins throbbed as breaths were stolen and given back.

Glenn reached his arms across Lafite and pulled her up against him. Shivers ran through their nerves and made them both tremble.

Glenn woke up the next morning and was enjoying the afterglow of the make-out with Lafite. It was as fabulous as the time he was accepted as a potential sorcerer back in Bi Seer City. It was so wondrous that he doubted it was real, until something moved beside his pillow.

‘Lafite! It was Lafite on my bed,’ Glenn almost cried out.

The next moment, all the pleasant feelings rushed back to Glenn. He then slung his hand over the arm of Lafite, who was lying with her bare back facing him, and stopped at her bosom. He touched and stroked her lightly so as to not wake her up.

“Erh…” Lafite murmured something in a low voice as if the whisper came from her throat. She then turned her face to Glenn and stared at him affectionately with her pair of startling eyes, which were glowing under her slender eyebrows.

Glenn gulped on seeing that tender love.

At the same time, he was tortured by the fact that now he had to take care of someone while he could barely do that for himself. Lafite seemed like a liability to him, an albatross around his neck!

‘How could I possibly survive in this cruel world with an extra burden on me,’ Glenn rebuked himself in his heart. ‘But I just followed my instinct. One can’t blame his instinct, I guess,” Glenn consoled.

Lafite put her hands around Glenn and dictated, “My dear, from now on, you belong to me, and to me, alone.”

“But there is a long road ahead of us. I mean, we are only students. We have to be sorcerers to keep our love going.” Lafite’s plump breasts nearly pressed Glenn out of breath. “And I need you to pass the Sorcery Test and come back to me, safe and sound.”

Lafite had rattled out everything Glenn wanted to say.

‘Maybe that’s it. We will keep loving each other, and I will look after her.’ Glenn came to terms with this fact.

Lafite pecked Glenn in his forehead and left.

‘I wish Old Ham could have had a chance to see this.’ Glenn had accepted Lafite as the love of his life as he watched her walked out of his sight.

Glenn then went to his experiment table.

There has been no progress in the study of Life Code, since no better microscope was available to Glenn yet. So, he had been working on the Element Matrix lately.

Despite the fact that he had cured and re-permuted the Matrix and thus had his mental strength lifted accordingly, there was much more that could be tapped from it — the one(s) that hadn’t been found out besides the 26 existent symbols and signs.

But to dip further, a living person would be needed as experiment material. But the experiments on living people would come at dear costs. He/she would be wanted by all sorcery schools on the Sorcerer Continent, and there would be dedicated hunters to track them down and get them, just as had happened to the two sorcerers who had tested potions on Sam. And sorcerers who went bad were tagged the Black Sorcerers, a stain that would never be erased.

Sorcerers would neither kill nor run tests on humans. That was the bottom line.

But there was an alternative to testing humans — to buy a human-like slave from the Foreign Land. And Glenn could get one from some sorcerers if he paid heavily.

Human-like slaves from the Foreign Land were practically not humans. They just had similar level of intelligence as humans, that was all. That meant that they were not protected by sorcerers.

Glenn had been reaching out to get a Foreign Land slave but did not get anywhere. But there was something extremely valuable that Glenn thought might make up for it a little bit.

It was a length of a twig from a tree, which was said to have been stricken by a thunder. That was the reason that a store on the trading market at the Black Tower could sell a blackened, seemingly worthless twig. It contained some raw force from the thunder when elements collided mutually.

That store owner was selling it as a material for Alchemy. Soon, Glenn found that the twig was not helping for making a magical tool after heaps of failed experiments. Instead, he found out something else about the twig.

In the process of the chemical experiments with the twig, Glenn discovered that the twig had a highly-condensed and stable power in it, and once, a symbol appeared at one end of it. It was a complex pattern and could barely be discerned.

Glenn exclaimed at this observation. The symbol contained high energy and shared similar shapes with the 26 symbols and signs. He concluded that it must be a rare element, which had been transferred from the thunder and was conserved in the twig.

Sorcerers desired rare elements dearly. But it was extremely hard to find one, not to mention the pain and difficulty one had to go through to add it to his/her Element Matrix.

But the power it generated, as a result, was stunning. Sorcerer Dior had been assigned the mission of recruiting Kyrie and Bionna, largely because of his strong power resulting from the fact that he had succeeded carving a newly-discovered rare element into his Element Matrix. He had the school’s trust because of, essentially, a rare element. That was why Nilmar, a level two sorcerer, had to arrange Sam to use the pre-concocted powder to call up the Hurado Leviathan to consume Dior’s strength before he showed up on the ship to battle him.

And it was said that a rare symbol could not be simply recorded in a sorcery book; it had to be carried on to another one by separating a part of the host’s soul.