Nascent Soul Rebirth: Starting as a Wizard

For a fleeting moment, Gareth's expression was complex and difficult to decipher—surprise spread like ripples on water, only to be suppressed by long-held suspicion.

Ultimately, all these emotions were suppressed into a nod by the rigid lines of the scars on his face.

"I will inform you," he said, his voice even harsher than before.

"But whether they listen or not is none of their business. Wizard apprentices never take the knights' advice seriously; they think we can't even tell the difference between the front and back of runes."

"That's enough to convey the message." Solo gestured for him to leave, his gaze already returning to the bustling production line below.

Watching Gareth stride away—his steps so heavy they seemed to crack the ground—Solo sighed softly, his breath instantly dissipating in the dusty, metallic air.

In the ten days or so since he arrived at the limestone production base, he has figured out the power structure here.

The entire base, like a miniature, morbid Emerald Academy, is roughly divided into three types of people.

The first category is wizard apprentices.

There are about four hundred junior apprentices here, as well as many young people who have just been assigned here, whose eyes still retain a naive fantasy about the path of witchcraft.

There were also thirteen intermediate apprentices who had learned to mask their fear with indifference.

Most of them are concentrated in the simple magic workshop at the center of the base—that place is called the "inner perimeter".

They engage in tasks that only wizards can perform, such as making talismans, assembling alchemical artifacts, and concocting potions.

A small portion were assigned to various production lines to debug machinery, monitor rune sequences, and manage production processes; these people formed the "outer circle."

The foreman on the perimeter was a mid-level apprentice named Malcolm, a man in his thirties whose hair was beginning to thin.

Despite being only a mid-level apprentice, his status in the base was on par with Solo, the commander of a knightly order with dozens of men—no, perhaps even half a head higher.

In the eyes of wizards, knights are nothing more than ordinary people who know a little bit of martial arts, secondary products of the academy system, and not worthy of being treated equally.

The second category is the knights.

The limestone base has forty-seven official knights, a number that has remained unchanged since Solo arrived.

They are responsible for guarding, patrolling, and defending against the periodic attacks of rock creatures.

With few people and heavy tasks, they have to deal with attacks of varying sizes every three or four days.

The only consolation was that there was an ample supply of low-quality life potions—the kind made from cheap herbs and the lowest purity magic crystals.

Drinking it can stop the bleeding, but it will leave you with a severe headache and nausea that lasts for several hours.

The base management was shrewd: bringing in official knights from other places to supplement the supply would cost far more than these mass-produced potions.

The third category is slaves.

More than three thousand indigenous people and prisoners of war from various conquered planes, speaking more than a dozen different languages.

They were responsible for the most physically demanding tasks: moving ore, cleaning machinery, and repairing conveyor belts.

There is also a special slave legion, consisting of three hundred trolls.

These creatures, reaching up to three meters in height, possess astonishing resilience; severed limbs can regenerate within days, and internal organ damage can slowly recover as long as the person doesn't die.

They are the key meat shields against the impact of rock creatures, always at the forefront of every battle, using their rough metal shields and giant clubs to buy time for the knights to counterattack.

Above all of them were three advanced apprentices.

They stayed in a specially constructed, simple alchemist's tower—a three-story stone building covered with energy-conducting runes, its spire constantly shimmering with magical light.

Solo only met Master Thane, the leader, once on the fourth day after taking office.

He was a middle-aged man who was so thin he was almost emaciated, with deep-set eyes and bloodshot eyes, but his hands were frighteningly steady.

That was in the workshop on the second floor of the Alchemy Tower, where the air was so thick you could almost cut it with a knife.

The pungent smell of the mixture of magical residue and alchemical volatiles caused Solo's eyes to instinctively produce protective tears.

Master Sain stood with his back to the entrance, his hunched back resembling a bow stretched to its limit.

He was so thin he was almost emaciated, and his gray apprentice robe hung on him as if on a withered branch, swaying erratically with the slightest movement of his body.

From the side, you can see his deep-set eyes and the taut lines extending from his temples to his jawline. The surface of his eyeballs is covered with spiderweb-like blood vessels—a double mark of long-term overuse of his eyes and exhaustion of his magical powers.

But his hands were frighteningly steady.

Those hands, with their distinct knuckles and bulging veins, were now hovering above an unfolded talisman.

It is no exaggeration to say that it was "a scroll"—the carrier of the talisman was a long scroll made of some kind of dark silver metal and secret silk, which was more than two meters long when unfolded and covered the entire specially made worktable.

The scroll was covered with a dense array of runes, and thousands of magical pathways intertwined and extended like living blood vessels, emitting a faint blue light.

Solo could tell at a glance that the scroll of talismans had already completed most of the processing in the "inner circle".

Basic rune etching, conduit laying, and energy node solidification—the foundational work that would have required dozens of junior apprentices to work together for weeks—has been completed.

What lies before Master Sain now is a semi-finished product that has entered its final and most crucial stage: the finishing engraving.

Sion's left hand spread out five fingers, each fingertip extending a strand of magic of a different color—crimson, indigo, amber, silver, and dark purple—like living probes that wandered over key points on the surface of the rune, checking the smoothness of each energy pathway.

In his right hand, he held a carving pen sculpted from a single piece of void crystal. The pen tip was as thin as a hair, yet it shone with a sharp light that could pierce the retina.

Just three seconds after Solo stepped into the room, Sion's right hand moved.

That wasn't drawing; it was branding.

The engraving pen pierced the last blank node in the upper right corner of the talisman at a speed imperceptible to the human eye—the detonation control hub of the entire "Advanced Directional Explosive Talisman".

The moment the pen tip touched the metal surface, it burst into a brief but dazzling white light, and a high-frequency buzzing sound filled the air, like a thousand glass bees flapping their wings at the same time.

Solo saw that in that contact lasting less than a tenth of a second, a miniature array of seven nested complex runes was completely imprinted.

Each layer of runes has lines less than one-third the diameter of a human hair, yet they maintain a strict equidistant spacing of 0.03 millimeters. Any deviation from any layer would lead to energy leakage or even premature detonation.

The moment the engraving was completed, all the guides on the surface of the entire scroll of talismans lit up simultaneously, the light flickering three times like breathing, before completely receding.

The talisman was complete—transformed from a highly complex unfinished product into a high-level sorcery talisman powerful enough to collapse half a mountain.

Only then did Sain slightly turn his head and glance at Solo out of the corner of his left eye.

As his eyes moved, his right eye remained fixed on the completed talisman, while his right hand, holding the engraving brush, moved to the other side of the workbench—where another scroll of "higher energy barrier talismans" awaited completion.

"The new commander of the knights?" Sain's voice was hoarse and dry, like sandpaper rubbing against rusty iron.

As he spoke, the five-colored magic threads controlled by his left hand did not stop, and were synchronously detecting the thirty-seven energy nodes of the new talisman.

"Yes, Master. Solo, summoned—"

"Maintain proper guard duties," Sain interrupted him, speaking so quickly it sounded like he was reciting a memorized text.

"Production cannot stop. The periodic impacts of rock creatures, the replenishment of the slave legion's losses, and the safety of the production line—these are your responsibilities."

In the forty-three seconds it took him to say this, his right hand completed the imprinting of the first control node of the new talisman, while his left hand checked the first twelve energy nodes.

He lightly tapped the ground twice with his left heel—that was to adjust the output power of the constant temperature array under the worktable.

"Don't bother me unless it's important." As Sain finished speaking, he turned around completely, his back arching back into that taut curve.

His entire attention was focused on the second volume of the talisman, as if Solo had never existed.

Solo stood there, watching as the newly completed high-level explosive talisman was lifted up by an invisible force and floated towards the teleportation array in the corner of the room, where it merged with the talismans that had already piled up into a small mound.

Meanwhile, on the worktable, the third volume of talismans was slowly rising from the elevator platform.

This is the true state of advanced apprentices in the rear production base: they are not simply producers, but rather the finishing touchers.

The semi-finished products, which take hundreds of junior and intermediate apprentices several weeks to complete, are all sent here to be finished by them in the most precise, dangerous, and error-free finishing work.

Every stroke of the pen carries the weight of hundreds of hours of work done beforehand, as well as the lives of the soldiers waiting for this equipment on the front lines.

It is said that these advanced apprentices were spared from going to the front lines—a meat grinder with a mortality rate of over 40%—because each of them bore more than ten times the heavy production load that a normal advanced apprentice would normally have to do.

Every high-quality healing potion, every piece of enchanted knight plate armor, every transmission component of a war golem, and every talisman needed for the front lines of the Giant Rock Dimension must originate from this production base.

They are the academy's production machines, recklessly overdrawing their own resources in exchange for the privilege of not having to go to the battlefield.