Chapter 10: The Old Mage’s Moment of Breakdown

Victor Laurie, the Chief Mage of the Igor Family, considered himself a man who had seen enough of the world in his lifetime.

He had witnessed things that ordinary people would find impossible to believe. He had seen the magical light suddenly bloom at the top of the white spire in Academy City, and he had watched the Saint Mage Ferenc walk alone into the dark abyss. He had seen the moonlight in the Imperial Capital and the sunrise in Divine Wood City. He had held the ceaseless heavy snow of Beiwang County in his hands, and he had tasted the perpetually fishy sea breeze of Eagle’s Rest Castle.

But he truly never expected that his Lord, Eliot Igor, would cast a fucking Group Resurrection Technique!

Master Victor Laurie’s mind went completely blank as he stared dumbly at the absurd scene before him. Five Igor Family guards, who had perished in the tide of corpses and had absolutely no chance of survival, were now standing alive and kicking in front of the master. These rascal guards were bragging to their colleagues about how many zombies they had chopped down before they died, all while allowing the Lord to check their pulses and body temperatures.

When the Lord solemnly announced that these resurrected guards, just like Captain Alice, were in a state of the living dead with no heartbeat and ice-cold body temperatures, they actually rejoiced and even started competing over whose temperature was lower.

Master Laurie felt that compared to these guards eagerly celebrating their own resurrection, he, an old man in his seventies or eighties, was the one who looked lifeless like a zombie.

The master asked himself: even if the Lord had successfully resurrected that one guard just now, he wouldn’t have been too surprised. After all, there was already the brilliant precedent of successfully resurrecting Captain Alice.

But the Lord had actually resurrected five people at once by simply chanting a spell! Five! Five fucking people!

Master Laurie suddenly felt very sorry for that genius Necromancer in history. If he had known that resurrecting the dead was this easy, why would that genius Mage have bothered with Netherworld Magic Power experiments, which ultimately led to a catastrophic mistake?

Watching the Lord humbly accept the sincere thanks of the guards—looking as if he were just short of delivering an acceptance speech—Master Laurie couldn’t endure it any longer. He grabbed the Lord’s sleeve.

"Lord Eliot, how do you feel right now?"

"Me?" Xiahou Yan thought the master was being a bit baffling. "Everything is normal, of course! I’m not the one who got resurrected. Why would I feel anything unusual?"

"Me! Master! I feel something unusual!" A guard, known in life for his humor and bad jokes, raised his hand. "I feel... I’m dead cold!"

"Shut up, I wasn’t asking you!" Master Laurie roared, frightening the guards into shrinking their necks.

To be honest, they had never seen the Chief Mage looking so furious.

Seeing that the guards didn’t dare utter a sound, Master Laurie continued gripping the Lord’s arm and asked, choosing his words carefully, "Lord Eliot, I am asking, do you feel any dizziness, shortness of breath, or difficulty breathing? Or, more seriously, do you feel like you are about to die?"

"No!" Xiahou Yan frowned, thinking this old geezer’s words were truly unpleasant to hear. "As for my current physical condition, while I might not live forever, I’m at least relatively healthy. Is there a problem?"

"Then that’s strange..." Master Laurie pinched his chin.

"What do you mean?" Xiahou Yan asked angrily. "Would it only be normal to you if I were on my last breath, hanging by a thread?"

Master Laurie quickly shook his head in denial. "No, no, no, Lord Eliot, that’s not what I meant. But I have to tell you something. In theory, the Resurrection Technique is a Grandmaster-level magic, meaning only Mages of the seventh tier and above can cast it! But in reality, even a seventh-tier ’Senior Master Mage’ wouldn’t use Grandmaster-level magic in everyday life. Do you know why?"

"Why?" Xiahou Yan asked foolishly.

Grandmaster-level magic—this topic was completely beyond the scope of a certain second-tier Mage’s knowledge.

"Because the Magic Power consumption of Grandmaster-level magic is too great!" Master Laurie was exasperated, grabbing the Lord’s shoulders and shaking him. "You see, Mages are divided into a total of nine tiers: Magic Apprentice, Junior Mage, Intermediate Mage, Senior Mage, Junior Master Mage, Intermediate Master Mage, Senior Master Mage, Grand Mage, and Saint Mage. With every tier crossed, the amount of Magic Power within a Mage’s body increases tenfold!"

"Oh... and then?" Xiahou Yan was a bit dizzy from the master’s shaking.

He also felt a slight sense of displeasure inwardly. He wondered if this meant Eliot Igor had studied at the Mage Academy for seven or eight years, only to end up as a second-tier Junior Mage. What a joke.

"A seventh-tier Senior Master Mage’s Magic Power reserves are a full hundred thousand times greater than yours as a Junior Mage, yet casting a Grandmaster-level magic like the Resurrection Technique would still hollow out nearly half of the Magic Power in their body! Therefore, it is usually only the eighth-tier Grand Mages whose Magic Power levels can support the daily use of Grandmaster-level magic!"

"And so?" Xiahou Yan didn’t understand what the master’s point was.

"Lord Eliot, you resurrected five living people at once! Five!" Master Laurie extended his palm and waved it, making Xiahou Yan almost think the other party was going to slap his face. "Logically speaking, the Magic Power consumed by your casting this time should be more than five times that of casting a single Resurrection Technique!"

Five times the Magic Power of casting the Resurrection Technique? Xiahou Yan did a quick mental calculation. A single Resurrection Technique would use up half the Magic Power of a seventh-tier Mage. And the Magic Power capacity of a seventh-tier Senior Master Mage was a hundred thousand times that of a second-tier Junior Mage like him. Therefore, resurrecting five people at once would theoretically consume an amount of Magic Power equivalent to roughly... two hundred and fifty thousand times his current total Magic Power reserves?!

Xiahou Yan nearly bit his tongue.

"And that’s not even taking into account that your Resurrection Technique didn’t resurrect them as zombies, but as living people with cognitive abilities. The Magic Power consumption might be even higher!" Master Laurie felt his worldview collapsing. "With such a massive drain of Magic Power, you should have logically had your body completely emptied of magic and dropped dead a long time ago!"

"But I’m still alive..." Xiahou Yan looked down and checked himself, not feeling anything unusual.

"That is the problem!" Master Laurie was on the verge of crying. "The Magic Power in your body hasn’t been consumed at all! Magic Power cannot appear out of thin air. Where on earth did the colossal amount of Magic Power needed to resurrect five people at once come from?"

Xiahou Yan was also a little dumbfounded. Indeed, he hadn’t felt any changes to the Magic Power in his body. Where had the Magic Power consumed by the Resurrection Technique he just cast come from? Did he borrow it from a loan app? Put it on a credit card? Rob a bank?

At this moment, Xiahou Yan suddenly remembered the phantom of King Yama from earlier. Could this matter... perhaps be related to Lord Yama?

Xiahou Yan pondered it carefully, and the more he thought about it, the more plausible it seemed. After all, the biggest difference between the Resurrection Techniques he cast these two times and the authentic Resurrection Technique was that the phantom of the Divine Spirit summoned had changed from the Death God, who controlled Netherworld Magic Power, to Earth’s Lord Yama. It was very likely that King Yama had bestowed a blessing upon him, providing Xiahou Yan with the Magic Power required for his casting!

However, given the countless inextricable links between Lord Yama and Earth, Xiahou Yan wisely maintained his silence out of his professional discretion as a Transmigrator.

This left Master Laurie crouching on the ground with a vacant stare, his face filled with existential doubt.

In order to comfort his family’s Chief Mage, Xiahou Yan could only pat Master Laurie’s shoulder and probe tentatively, "Master, if you haven’t figured out what’s going on, how about I try it again to show you? Are there any extra corpses in the camp?"

Victor Laurie, the Chief Mage of the Igor Family, felt like he was experiencing the prodrome of a cerebral hemorrhage.