Chess Mage of Faerûn

Chapter 104 The End and the Beginning

Without experience points or an upgrade system, Zhang Yuan is destined not to be able to ascend to legendary status like the Son of Slaughter; he can only rely on his own personal struggle and the opportunities he seizes.

Leaving aside the path of a warrior, which is inevitably forged through trials of life and death, it is impossible to reach the end by simply staying at home to practice. Almost all legendary warriors are heroes who, amidst the carnage, calmly watch the sunset. Zhang Yuan really didn't dare to expect himself to go that far.

The path of a mage seems easy to survive on, since shutting yourself away to do research is much safer than fighting to the death with others. This has led to the fact that although there are far more warriors than mages, there are actually a few more archmages and legendary mages than warriors. Of course, it's only a few.

However, the pinnacle of this field cannot be reached even through so-called hard work.

When people are desperate, they can do anything. It's even possible for them to unleash their full power to fight a legend and ultimately become a legend themselves by stepping over the corpse of their opponent. This is the kind of reckless behavior that berserkers love to do. If they succeed, they become heroes; if they fail, they die. Even priests have a history of desperately completing some great tasks to gain divine favor and thus become legends.

However, this doesn't apply to the realm of arcane magic. Mystra's belt is like a calculus problem; if you can't solve it, you can't solve it, and even if you're desperate enough to kill someone, it won't help.

The time Zhang Yuan spent with Tyrantir may not necessarily have brought him much knowledge or improved his spell level, but Tyrantir has subtly pointed him in the right direction. Even if this is Tyrantir's own path, it at least offers a glimmer of hope for the foreseeable bottlenecks and uncertainties ahead.

Of course, Zhang Yuan was not the only one who benefited from this. The sparks generated by the collision of wisdom from the two worlds also illuminated the Grand Master's world of thought, giving him a lot of inspiration and ideas.

Tyrantir drained Zhang Yuan's resources in almost a month. In the following month, Zhang Yuan was less of an assistant to the Archmage and more of a cheerleader and flatterer, only occasionally exchanging ideas on the logic circuits needed to achieve certain functions.

Time flies. After more than two months of discussion, research, reassembly, and debugging, the new core of the idea has finally taken shape. Although it is far from successful, it is a leap forward compared to the previous sluggishness and bloat.

Based on the souls of ordinary animals, the magic circuits are activated through rigorous yet refined logical language, thus giving the Ironwood Golem a preliminary level of intelligence and mobility. Although it is far inferior to other golem constructs, its core thinking is itself a semi-finished product, with much room for improvement.

More importantly, using the souls of ordinary animals as the new core of the processor greatly reduces the cost of the construct.

After all, neither the souls of elemental beings nor magical creatures have anything to do with the word "cheap".

As for intelligent life forms like humans, or the souls of elves?

Zhang Yuan, who asked this stupid question, was severely scolded by the Grand Master:
"Putting aside the fact that using the souls of intelligent beings as materials will directly lead your camp toward chaos and evil, what's even more deadly is, what do you think a soul is? A pumpkin that can be found everywhere?"

The Grand Master's tone was somewhat wary:
“Almost every soul on the continent of Faerûn is considered the property of the gods. Apart from those unscrupulous guys in the lower planes, no one dares to openly snatch the souls of mortals from the gods. These are their lifeblood. If it's just one or two occasionally, they might not bother with you. But if you dare to collect and plunder on a large scale? You don't think divine punishment is just for show, do you?”

Zhang Yuan finally understood why those mages would rather go to great lengths to communicate with the elemental realm and abduct elemental beings than dare to collect large numbers of mortal souls for their own use.

The thrones of the gods are raised high above the stars through the faith of mortals, and the faith of mortals naturally comes from their souls.

This is Faerûn's ironclad rule, a forbidden domain that the gods cannot touch. In any case, with the new core technology of thought becoming more complete and on track, Zhang Yuan's mission has come to an end.

In fact, in the last month or so, Zhang Yuan's focus had shifted away from this area. Tyranitar had almost returned to a state of working on development alone, and Zhang Yuan spent more time on self-study and reading.

Four months of self-study, practice, and communication have resulted not only in a spellcasting level of five, but also in the formal recognition by the system panel of two specializations: Basic Alchemy and Armored Spellcasting.

This means that the door to the third-circle arcane arts has been opened to Zhang Yuan, and powerful combat spells such as Fireball, Lightning Bolt, and Immobilize have finally come to the stage.
This also means that not only can level 3 pieces be called upon to join the battlefield, but level 1 pieces can finally be combined into two-star pieces.

Although the skill of casting spells without hand gestures was extremely difficult, and Zhang Yuan, who also had to attend to other things, had not been able to fully master it, it was just a matter of spending time and practicing repeatedly.

Zhang Yuan didn't dare to synthesize the chess pieces inside the mage tower, under Tyrantir's nose, for fear of causing some trouble again. Although the archmage had no ill intentions towards him, and could even be considered to have given him guidance and cultivation, Zhang Yuan's selfishness ultimately prevailed, and he planned to keep some trump cards for himself.

This was a win-win situation for everyone, and Zhang Yuan felt it was time to say goodbye to Tyrantir.

Looking at Zhang Yuan bidding him farewell, Tyrantir's expression was unusually dazed. It had been more than half a year since the other party left, but perhaps it was because he was getting old, he always felt that some things had happened as if they had happened yesterday.

The other party only stayed with him for four months, and the time he served as an assistant was less than half of that. In Tyrantir's eyes, this little bit of time was just a fleeting glance at the calendar while he was buried in his experimental projects, and that's how the days passed.

However, this short period of time allowed me to discover a new direction in the field of structural engineering, and this entirely new approach and method can even be described as groundbreaking.

This was largely due to the contribution of the kid opposite him, a mere level five mage apprentice. His programming language was actually impossible to apply to the core of the golem's thinking, but the logic it contained gave him great inspiration. The way out that he couldn't find no matter how hard he thought was suddenly clear in front of him.

That's the power of inspiration; with it, everything is easy, without it, even racking your brains won't help.

Perhaps keeping him around isn't such a bad thing? Perhaps one day in the future, this still somewhat immature young man will truly amaze me?
A young mage is nothing in his eyes, not even a genius, and he wouldn't value a visitor from another world too much.

However, an interesting soul, an interesting soul from another world, is something that the Archmage should truly value.

Of course, what Tyrantir found amusing was not Zhang Yuan's silly antics; he wasn't that shallow.

What he found interesting was the novel ideas and concepts revealed by the other party during the exchange, those perspectives and ideas from a completely different world.

(End of this chapter)