Abe the Wizard

“Can I drink this? Should I?

Abel was hesitant, but he trusted the Horadric Cube. After all, it gave him all the skills he had in this world. With that in mind, Abel poured the strange-smelling potion into his mouth.

As he swallowed, Abel felt the blood rushing towards his brain. At this moment, his mind was like the CPU of a supercomputer, running faster and faster.

All the knowledge he learned in the past few months, the 3rd-level, 4th-level, and 5th-level apprentice wizard’s rune, ‘fireball’ pattern, ‘frozen armor’ pattern, the noble tongue of the elves and so on, they had been reanalyzed by his brain — the two spell patterns, especially. After learning how to draw their rune patterns, he just kept using the Horadric Cube to cast them.

It was convenient with the Horadric Cube’s skill tree, but the only way for him to memorize the patterns was to do them manually. Without the correct understanding of these runes, there was no way that he could learn the extended versions of them.

The long noble tongue of the elves for issuing the spell was an important reason for limiting the speed. In Abel’s brain, a virtual Abel was using this tongue, and each ‘fireball’ pattern was reflected in his mind. As the virtual continuously issued the spells, he mastered the spell gradually.

Inside Abel’s imagination, he would have an infinite amount of mana. Not only that, but the number of words he needed to chant out in the noble tongue of the elves was also reduced. It was cut from the original four sentences to three, to two, and finally just one sentence.

As Abel imagined himself firing the fireball one by one, he tried to deconstruct the entire spell. He tried to alter the sentence structure of the spell enchantment, which, in the end, made it possible to activate the spell “fireball” with just the word “fireball.”

Abel didn’t have to go so far to do this. The noble elves that invented this spell could’ve done the same thing, but they decided to add words of praise into the enchantments. They probably did this so that everyone would subconsciously praise them when the spells were activated.

Next was the ‘frozen armor’ spell. When the frozen armor was placed on Abel (the imagined version), it automatically disappeared so that the virtual one could continue to perform it.

Again and again, the spell was completely mastered by him. Just as he attempted to reduce the spell enchantment of this technique, his brain suddenly ended the simulation.

The effect of the soul potion had passed. Abel felt like he just got a strong adrenaline rush, but it quickly reduced after a few minutes.

This soul potion was very powerful. So powerful that it almost brought him into the state of realization. Like some sort of high-quality fuel, it forced his brain to exceed his limit to imagine and analyze things.

Shockingly enough, Abel fully recharged his mana in a very short time. After realizing, he decided that he want to try the spell that he had just mastered.

“Fireball!” As Abel said, his finger flicked in the air. In just spent half a second, a fireball was thrown from his hand. Yes, even without the help of the Horadric Cube. From what Uncle Sam told him, he had spent more than 20 years to decrease the speed of his fireball to 1.5 seconds.

What Sam also told Abel was that the Yveline Wizard could release a fireball just half a second. Half a second was just as fast as Abel’s fireball just then. So, with just one bottle of the soul potion, Abel became as good as the Wizard Yveline.

“O the Ice elf! Use your divine power to weave pure white armor around me!” Abel sang as he drew the pattern in the air. A second and half seconds later, a frozen armor was placed around him.

Because the ‘frozen armor’ spell was more complicated than the fireball, the speed of the pattern drawing was much slower. And because Abel didn’t finish his simulation in time, the enchantment for this technique was not yet simplified.

Abel was a bit unsatisfied, but under normal circumstances, each spell must be used for tens of years before their activation time could be reduced. He had reached the level of others who spent many years learning spells, which was already a remarkable achievement. That being said, there was always a chance for improvement.

“Huh?”

As Abel checked inside his head for the other progress that the soul potion has helped him to make, he found a small ball next to where his second-level novice wizard runes were. It was so small that he had almost missed it.

Actually, how did it get inside his mind at all? When Abel used the power of the Will to examine it, he could see that this tiny ball was a part of him.

With the infusion of the will power, this tiny ball seemed to come alive. Abel’s mouth opened wide. He found that there were two of himself, one looking at the ball and one looking out of the ball.

Is this his soul? Or was it the original Abel that died when he was a kid? But didn’t their souls fuse already?

The original Abel’s soul had traveled through time and merged with the current Abel’s soul. What was left behind was a small fragment of itself, and because of how small weak it was, it would disappear slowly over time.

As it turned out, despite Abel using most of the soul potion for his training, some of the liquid was used to strengthen this tiny soul shard. Because of this, the shard was starting to share its mind with Abel. Like a new-born baby, it wasn’t capable of complex thoughts, but that was not to say that it wasn’t alive at all.

Abel didn’t know this was the soul shard, but he knew one thing: there was one big and one small soul inside his body. He could think like two people now. The other half was not fully developed yet, so he wasn’t going to let it deal with matters that were too hard for it.

Abel was eager to get another soul potion. Because of this meditation, both mana and combat qi had been full, and he could fight again.

Looking at the piles of dead quill rats on the ground, Abel turned them over one by one. He wanted to look for more potions, but there was nothing among them. After chopping up a few rats’ bodies, he still couldn’t find anything.