Wizard: My career panel has no upper limit

Ron sighed again and put down the Rubik's Cube.

I've only solved the second level so far. When will this ever end?

Just then, the voice of the King of Perfection suddenly came from the inner room:

"Number 34, you've gone too far."

The puppet's expression remained unchanged:
"Your Majesty, I am merely following the rules."

"You are using the rules to do things outside the rules."

The King of Perfection was somewhat helpless:

"Remove all projections of external circumstances."

The puppet tilted its head, and after a moment, the cut surfaces disappeared.

The interior returned to its quiet state, with only stone and light.

“Ralph.” The Perfect King turned his attention to him:

“Number 34 has its own detection logic, which I cannot change for you, but…”

"Let me remind you of something: since it is the one that sets the difficulty first, the rules can be used, or they can be used in addition to the rules."

The puppet did not refute.

It walked back to the chair and sat down.

Looking at the entrance leading to the depths of the inner chamber, it was as if nothing had happened.

Ron picked up the Rubik's Cube from the low table and put it down again.

He had actually been thinking about doing this since he came in, but other concerns were weighing on him:

This is, after all, the territory of the Creator; reckless actions could lead to unpredictable consequences.

But the King of Perfection's words were essentially a reminder for him to take the initiative to try.

He looked up at the puppet sitting upright in the chair.

Then, the Void Remains were opened.

Of course, we shouldn't directly attack the puppet; that would be too disrespectful to the Creator.

The doors of the [Threshold of Darkness] opened, and starlight spilled out from the cracks.

The puppet heard the noise and turned to look at him.

"What are you doing?"

"Summon people."

Selna's ethereal remains exist in a faint but stable form inside the [Threshold of Darkness] gate.

He immersed his spiritual energy into it and gently resonated with it.

The response came faster than he expected.

"……What's wrong?"

Selna was awakened from her slumber: "Where am I? I feel a very peculiar sense of confinement."

"The Creator's Labyrinth of Craftsmen".

After a brief silence, she spoke:

"You dragged me here because you can't solve some puzzles?"

"Yes."

Ron stabilized the spatial nodes, allowing her projection to take shape:
"It's not just you."

After Selna's projection materialized, he continued his actions, extending his mental energy to another location.

The remnants of Lanthhevit remained in his consciousness in another way when he became an ancient alchemist.

It's not complete; it's a core echo that he finally gathered before he vanished, the most important part of his research.

"..."

Lance came out, a few beats later than Selna.

The projected outline is initially unstable, like a photograph in development waiting to become clear.

"here it is?"

He first checked the surroundings, then glanced around before fixing his gaze on the Rubik's Cube, his brow furrowing slightly.

“The Craftsman’s Labyrinth, I need help,” Ron said.

Lance glanced at him but didn't say anything more: "Okay, how many more people do you want to call?"

Alexander followed closely behind, adapting even faster than the previous two.

He stopped and glanced around, his gaze finally settling on the puppet:
"Is that thing the gatekeeper here?"

"Ah."

"..."

Alexander looked at the puppet for a moment, somewhat curious:
"The materials are very interesting."

Upon hearing this, the puppet glanced at the guy in surprise, as if to say: Ancient alchemists were indeed research fanatics.

The last to arrive was Elena, whose situation was fundamentally different from the other three.

She truly exists in this world, somewhere in the Emerald Forest.

Although it is an immortal being, its physical form remains intact, thus making its projection more real than any other being.

After she entered, she first glanced around at the environment, then her gaze fell on the projections of the other three people. She paused for a moment, and finally looked at Ron.

"You're trying to find a way to get through that door."

"Yes."

She walked to the low table, picked up the Rubik's Cube, and flipped it:
"Is this riddle a condition left by the Creator for entry?"

The puppet stands up from the chair:
"This is against the rules."

It looked somewhat unhappy when it said this.

"What rules? The rules you made?" Elena scoffed.

"The rule for entering the inner room is to solve a Rubik's Cube." The puppet emphasized.
"Now it's five people working together to solve it, which doesn't comply with the rules."

"Did the rules say how many people would interpret them? I'm talking about the rules set by the Creator, not the rules you set." Elena's question was direct.

The puppet paused for a moment before answering, "No."

"Then there is no violation of the rules."

The puppet stopped speaking, and its expression no longer held any playfulness.

Lady Blood, her face beaming with excitement, began studying the Rubik's Cube: "I need a little time."

"What are you doing?" Lance walked over.

"Who among you has the best biological configurational basis?"

Lance and Alexander exchanged a glance.

Alexander raised his hand without speaking, which was his response.

"I need a computing power foundation."

The witch turned the first layer of the Rubik's Cube, feeling the logical echoes within:

"Solving this Rubik's Cube using only logical deduction is not impossible, but it's too slow."

"It is layered... Each layer of variables depends on the destructuring result of the previous layer, so it cannot be processed in parallel and can only be processed serially."

"However, if we can transform the logical relationships of each layer into signal codes."

"When a sufficiently complex neural network is used to process it, its parallel processing efficiency will be several orders of magnitude higher than any magic logic circuit."

Lance was already doing what he was good at, standing to the side.

He broke down each layer of the Rubik's Cube into a programming language that could be converted.

He peeled away the layers one by one, marking out the definite quantities that he could confirm first.

Those complex variables were isolated, and a rough but effective overall framework was established.

He studies "the nature of logical chains".

In his eyes, this Rubik's Cube is first and foremost a program, and only secondly a puzzle.

Elena did not immediately join the three men in their technical work:
"You must have been thinking about whether you could use underhanded tactics."

"Ah."

“I know what you’re worried about. This is the Creator’s territory, and we shouldn’t mess with it.”

She found a spot at the low table and placed her hands on it.

"But you've already done it."

Ron glanced at her and said, "Hmm."

"Then let go of that burden."

Elena turned her gaze to the puppet in the center:

"Perhaps this puzzle isn't a test of whether you can solve the Rubik's Cube."

"It tests how you would handle a situation where you encounter a difficult gatekeeper who uses the rules as a shield."

Ron went over the sentence in his mind.

Yes, this is more than just a puzzle.

Before the Creator fell asleep, He left a question for those who entered this inner chamber:
What's your opinion on the rules?

Are rules an end in themselves or a means to an end?

When the rules are enforced by a gatekeeper with unclear intentions, what would you choose?
He turned to the puppet and said, "Number thirty-four."

The puppet turned its gaze away from the entrance and looked at him.

"The King of Perfection made this Rubik's Cube, and you've made it the sole condition for entering the inner chamber. Who set this rule?"

"It's me," the puppet replied without hesitation.

Did the Creator set it up?

"……No."

What were the original rules set by the Creator?

"Ancient alchemists may enter."

"What are the conditions?"

"...with the approval of Themis (the Steadfast King) or Hephaestus (the Perfect King), the Gatekeeper's puzzle is of secondary importance."

The room was silent for a few seconds.

Low-frequency magical fluctuations emanated from the low table, indicating that Lance, Alexander, Selna, and Elena were all operating simultaneously.

Four highly precise consciousnesses are simultaneously handling the same task, each working independently.

………………

The highest point on the core boundary of the Central Lands is the point with the widest field of vision in the entire Central Lands defense structure.

Looking out from there, the protective barrier of the floating city's core area forms an arc in the night.

On the other side of the arc is the outer area where various abnormal signals have begun to appear.

Cassandra was standing there.

Her posture is very similar to that in the portrait of hers in the Zudi Gallery.

Back straight, chin slightly raised, gaze fixed on the distance, unfocused, looking at something farther away than the view in front of him.

For those with keen enough senses, the very fact that Cassandra was standing there was a signal.

The signal was so simple that it required almost no decoding:
There's someone here, someone you know.

Or at least you've heard of this person's name.

The results were surprisingly good.

Eve had anticipated that the results would be good, and Cassandra herself had thought so too.

Surprisingly, it was only "good".

Many of the prisoners who escaped from the park's boundaries in the first few hours carried complete memories.

This includes how they were imprisoned and what in that era posed a real threat to them.

Cassandra's name appeared quite frequently in that memory.

She wasn't everyone's nightmare in that era, but she was a nightmare for enough people.

Several of the great wizards changed course along their route.

When Cassandra was first promoted to Archmage, she began taking on many jobs to capture criminals.

Most of those that turned around as soon as they sensed the presence were ones she had personally caught and dragged inside.

In the guard channel, someone noticed this phenomenon:

"The North District Remnant Collective has withdrawn from the defensive line contact area, and no combat has occurred."

"Two Grand Wizards have been detected on the east side. Their trajectory has been changed, and they are expected to avoid the core area of ​​the Central Land."

As these reports came in one after another, Eve listened from her command post, marking each one in her mind, but her expression remained unchanged.

Because she was also waiting for another report to come in.

"High-density heterogeneous signals have been detected. The location is on the outskirts of the central area, in the northwest direction, and is approaching the edge defense line."

"Signal type does not match known files, priority recommended..."

"Highest."

The Lord of the Star Domain, He has arrived.

As they approached the defensive line, two small sections of the arc-shaped protective barrier experienced violent disturbances.

At the top of the defensive line, Cassandra stood.

The light from the ethereal figures behind her did not dissipate, but remained quietly suspended around her. Like old clothes that had been worn for a long time, the outline fit her perfectly, but they were already worn and faded.

The Star Domain Lord noticed the changes in Cassandra's ethereal remains and seemed somewhat puzzled, so he began to emit scanning waveforms.

Since the Star Domain Lord didn't move, she naturally didn't move either.

The two are separated by the outermost edge of a protective barrier, but this barrier is so fragile that it could collapse at the slightest touch.

Sensing the standoff between the two sides, some of the guards on the defensive line breathed a slight sigh of relief.

Travel's voice drifted in from the channel: "He hasn't moved."

“He is just analyzing, and once he finishes analyzing, he strikes with deadly precision, just like what happened to me in Vital’s ‘cradle’.”

These words, spoken calmly, made the guards in the channel, who had just breathed a sigh of relief, involuntarily break out in a cold sweat again for her.

From the command post, Eve was tapping lightly on the edge of the communications console with her right index finger.

The battle situation display screen unfolded in front of her, with several information streams scrolling simultaneously.

Her gaze moved quickly between the numbers and labels, then suddenly stopped on a line of text.

That was a record from last month. Because I had other things to deal with at the time, it was left at the end of the queue and wasn't archived.

"Normandavenport, current location: Central Lands Academic Literature Section, Reading Room Seven."

Eve stared at the words and felt as if a lightbulb had been turned on in her brain.

She removed the record from the archive queue and opened a separate window for it.

She also opened another communication channel, a separate link she maintained with Cassandra, specifically for use when it wasn't appropriate to use the main channel.

"Mom, I have an idea."

"explain."

Do you know Norman Davenport?

Cassandra hesitated for a moment, then said, "I know."

"The prisoners of Paradise back then were later released by the End of Death."

"A stubborn madman, with a morbid obsession with historical truth—are you planning to deal with him?"

"Yes, I plan to lure the Star Domain Lord over there."

"Eve!"

Cassandra raised her voice in the communication, and the static noise on the link jittered:
"Is your assessment of your capabilities incorrect?"
Norman was just a great wizard, not even a top-tier one, but the Star Lord was a quasi-Witch King.

Moreover, he is in the Library of Higher Knowledge, and you know very well how much stuff is archived there.

"If Norman can't stop them, you're essentially leading the Star Lord to demolish our library."

“Mom,” Eve comforted, “your information is outdated.”

"……What's the meaning?"

The black-haired princess retrieved the intelligence document from the table, scanned it, and sent it over.

After Norman Davenport's identity as the Great Wizard was exposed, he claimed to be the restorer of historical truth.

Through cognitive modification techniques, he formally entered the academic literature section of the Higher Knowledge Library and began his so-called systematic "revision" work.

Ostensibly, it's about exposing lies and restoring the truth, but the actual operational logic is:
He replaced the history he believed was distorted by the narrative framework of those in power with a version he considered correct.

Technically, he did a very solid job.

Every revision is cited, and every footnote points to the original document, making it seem impeccable.

The problem is that Norman's "objective reconstruction" itself is also biased.

His hatred for those in power has permeated his narrative style, perhaps without him even being fully aware of it.

The pen, honed through eight hundred years of dedication, is incredibly sharp, and even when it touches the paper, it carries a tilting force.

No great wizard would be willing to go to a library and fight a notoriously difficult madman over the wording of a batch of documents.

Putting aside whether they could win, even if they could, in a core area like the Library of Advanced Knowledge, any battle between a Grand Wizard would cause serious damage to the Central Land.

Ron has already put this into practice.

Those revised drafts were left there, accumulating year after year, stack after stack, on the bookshelf.

“My supervisor had already noticed this matter before.”

Eve continued to explain:

"He joined forces with other great wizards and used the academic archive access of the Crystal Spire to make off-site backups of all the truly valuable original documents in that area."

Cassandra understood: "So that means..."

"What remains in that area now are basically the versions modified by Norman."

Eve chuckled softly: "The truly important information is no longer there."

"So, you're planning to have the Star Domain Lord clean up the data that Norman altered?"

"Yes, this way we can take both sides into account."

On the one hand, it would allow them to take the opportunity to clean up the files that Norman had altered;
On the other hand, Norman certainly wouldn't just stand by and watch the Star Lord come in.

He's been running that library for decades; he can at least hold off the Star Lord for a while.

At the other end of the communication link, the sound of the wind at the top of the defense line and the resonance of the protective barrier mingled together.

"Was this plan your idea, or was it a backup plan left by that brat?"

"Cooperative products".

The black-haired princess put the intelligence report back on the table: "But I'll be in charge of carrying it out."

On the other hand, the Star Domain Lord has his own internal logic in handling matters.

That logic does not rely on emotions or stances, but only on a judgment system based on "effectiveness" and "redundancy".

To Him, everything that exists is either a valuable information node or a source of noise that needs to be eliminated.

The protective barrier of the Central Lands belongs to the former, while Cassandra's chaotic ethereal structure belongs to the latter.

Eve seized upon this characteristic.

She opened the security channel, found the dedicated team responsible for information flow scheduling, and gave them a very specific instruction:

In the next routine communication broadcast, it will be marked as "Information misrepresented and needs verification".

To allow content with specific wording to enter the public information flow.

For a star lord whose core operating mechanism is information perception, this broadcast is practically transparent.

The wording of that passage was carefully considered:
"In the seventh to eleventh reading rooms of the Higher Knowledge Library, it has been confirmed that there are multiple unverified records of revisions to historical documents."

The reviser's identity: Archmage Norman Davenport, whose work is suspected to contain dozens of reinterpretations of core events in wizarding civilization.

About one minute and forty seconds passed after the announcement was broadcast.

Cassandra stood atop the defensive line, sensing a subtle shift in the star system's attention.

"...It turned around."

"Ah."

What's the next step?

"Let's wait and see Norman's performance."

Cassandra said nothing more and turned her attention back to the Star Lord's trajectory.

………………

In the seventh reading room, the lighting is warm and makes people feel a little more comfortable when working at their desks for long periods of time.

On Norman's workbench, seven or eight original documents were laid out at the same time.

Each book is marked with a different colored bookmark, the color of which corresponds to his own annotation classification system.

Orange represents "clear error", and green represents "biased stance";
Blue indicates "questionable and pending verification", while red indicates "key points of contention that need to be addressed in a separate chapter".

The book with the red bookmark currently has twenty-three markings.

He was working on the twenty-fourth document, which was the Third Era's official historian's description of the details of the ascension of the "Seventh Reigning Wizard-King - King of the Evening Bell."

There are several subtle word choices in that description.

Each word is fine on its own, but when put together, they create a specific narrative tendency.

This made the ceremony appear to be an act of voluntary support from the entire wizarding civilization, downplaying the less-than-honorable power transfer process behind it.

Norman's pen underlined those words in his distinctively dense small handwriting and added three lines of annotations.

Just then, he sensed the appearance of that enormous aura.

The pen paused on the page, he sighed, removed the pen from the paper, and put it back on the pen holder.

He took off his glasses, wiped the lenses with a folded cloth, put them back on, and glanced out the window.

Outside the window is a small open space in the library's inner courtyard, where an unidentified tree grows with dense leaves that block out half of the courtyard lights.

At that moment, the leaves of that tree were completely still, the wind couldn't get in, and the cicadas had stopped chirping.

Norman looked away and glanced at the three stacks of documents on the workbench.

"We need to buy some time; the last half of the chapter isn't finished yet."

He sat down, found the unfinished note, pushed his glasses up his nose, and continued writing.

When the Star Domain Lord entered the Advanced Knowledge Library, the several official wizards on duty inside immediately chose to evacuate.

The magic lamps in the corridor went out one by one as He passed by.

There is a barrier at the entrance of the seventh reading room.

The Star Domain Lord stopped in front of the door, scanning, judging, and modeling.

The first delay occurred during the modeling process.

When Norman constructed that barrier, he drew upon a framework he had studied in Paradise for hundreds of years.

Any judgment will encounter processing obstacles when faced with a sufficient amount of contradictory information.

For humans, that barrier is almost imperceptible.

To the Star Domain Lord, it was a fog made of real data.

Real data is key.

Those controversies are not fabricated; each one is a real academic debate, and every source can be verified.

The Star Lord could not classify them as redundant noise because every piece of information was valid.

He stopped at the doorway.

Over the channel, the guard's report was tinged with surprise:

"The Star Domain Lord has stopped moving... for three hours now..."

Travel also received this report during a break while coordinating the defenses in the South District.

She put the deployment map aside and managed to utter a sentence:

"Your Highness, are you saying... we're currently relying on that madman who spends his days rewriting history books in the library to hold off the Star Domain Lord?"

That's roughly it.

"……Reasonable."

After Norman maintained the barrier for most of the day, he sensed that it had been breached.

The Star Lord found His own way of dealing with the situation, lowering the priority of the information sent by the other party and temporarily bypassing it.

This is also an effective solution, and Norman had foreseen this possibility long ago.

Unexpectedly, the other party was so slow in switching processing strategies, taking most of the day to complete the process.

Half a day is more than enough time.

During this time, he finished writing the annotations for the last half of the chapter.

He took the steel seal out of the right drawer and pressed it down on the lower right corner of the manuscript.

He put the thinnest stack of manuscripts into his personal storage pouch, got up and walked to the center of the reading room, looking at the bookshelves around him.

The bookshelf is dark brown with fine wood grain, indicating it is made of excellent wood.

Norman felt that the library probably put more thought into the selection of the wood used for the bookshelves than into the selection of the books themselves.

He stood in front of those bookshelves for a while, mourning his own work:
“I’ve said it before: my real purpose is to make the ‘record’ itself questionable.”

In the reading room, the Star Lord ignored the bespectacled man who was talking to himself; His scans only moved between the documents.

"Go clean it up, just do whatever you want."

Norman put his hand on the doorknob, ready to leave:

"This perfectly illustrates my point: any form of 'authority' can ultimately be eliminated by external forces."

He turned the doorknob:

"The changes to the annotations in the Third Age Almanac of the King of Records were due to the intervention of 'Apocalypse,' and 'The End of Death' was later revised."

"My revisions disappeared because of you."

He pushed up his glasses: "Whose things will disappear next time?"

After the man finished speaking, he pushed open the side door and walked out.

The manuscripts on the bookshelves in the reading room were gradually cleared away.

Row after row, spreading from the leftmost bookshelf to the right.

Those orange bookmarks, green bookmarks, blue bookmarks, and densely packed annotations.

Everything Norman wrote down, word by word, while he was hunched over his desk, was erased.

Reports kept pouring in through the guard channel:
"The Star Domain Lord has begun processing the seventh to eleventh reading rooms of the Advanced Knowledge Library, and it is expected that the original versions will be restored within a week..."

"Formal wizards and apprentice laborers have been evacuated from the Library of Higher Knowledge; there were no casualties..."

Norman sat alone by the tree, looking somewhat disappointed despite having been mentally prepared.

A figure completely shrouded in a gray robe silently approached him: "Want some coffee?" (End of Chapter)