After seeing Dave off, Angor fell into his own thoughts.
“Shameless fools will use scrolls in every match,” Angor thought about Dave’s words.
Shameless? If he had that kind of money, Angor would not mind turning into a “shameless fool” right away, which… he could not.
But Dave mentioned something else that Angor was interested in. The Sky Tower did not have any restrictions on how to defeat your opponent.
No restrictions… that meant there were a lot of viable ways to win the matches. Poisoning someone before a match, or buying someone off, were all acceptable means. But they could not guarantee a final victory. Spamming magic scrolls, on the other hand, was safer. Yet scrolls were expensive. Angor tried to figure out whether there was something else that could do the trick in place of scrolls.
This was a good line of thinking.
After lunchtime, Dave delivered three Echo Flowers to Angor’s place. Without tarrying, Angor placed the flowers to the attic and left them in Toby’s care right away.
Angor had barely stepped down the stairs when Toby began singing its quartet.
Angor shook his head. It was a bit noisy, but Toby’s voice was not terrible. However, Angor still needed a quiet environment. Thus, he hid in the soundproof room in the basement as he went through his memory, trying to find something to help him challenge the Sky Tower.
In the evening, Angor got himself another unexpected visitor.
“Hey, Sailum. What brought you here?” Angor invited the boy inside with a smile.
Sailum looked a bit depressed. He tried to say something, but he did not know how.
The boy’s terrible reaction caused Angor to feel bad too.
After bearing an embarrassing silence for a while, Angor decided to speak first, “Just tell me if you’ve something to say. It’s good for your health.”
Sailum curled his lips and asked, “Angor… how long will it take you to become an apprentice?”
That was unexpected. Sailum and Nausica had always been good friends with him, so they usually did not ask each other private questions just to be polite and considerate.
Angor did not hide his condition, but he was still curious about why Sailum suddenly came to ask him this.
“I’ll probably break through in several days. Why do you ask though?”
Sailum seemed to be relieved at the answer. He took out a crystal ball from his pocket, somewhat hesitantly, and placed it in front of Angor. “Look at this. Those… bastards.”
Sailum injected some mana into the crystal ball, causing it to give out light.
“Ohh, good job,” said Angor. He was never stingy when praising kids.
“It’s nothing big. I just released some mana. You can do that too after you created your mana pool.”
However, Sailum still revealed a tiny grin upon hearing Angor’s compliment.
The crystal ball showed a letter. A red wax seal was on the top-left corner of the letter with a tiger totem printed on it.
The letter was short. Angor read through it quickly.
This was the general meaning: Following the rules of Brute Cavern, the one with the weakest strength and training progress among new recruits shall be officially named “the disappointment of apprentices”. I, the composer of this letter, suggest that the title is given to, Angor Padt.
Angor could not hold back a sneer.
“Hookdick did this?” He asked.
“How did you know?” Sailum looked surprised.
“Look at his ugly, kid-level handwriting. He messed up several characters too. Well, he was the only semi-illiterate fool in our year, no?” Angor pointed at the obviously miswritten words.
“Yeah, Hookdick wrote this. The tiger totem appears to be a symbol of belief of his previous tribe,” said Sailum. He looked agitated as he said, “I saw the letter from Orlando. Orlando said Hookdick had distributed the letter to many people, including apprentices of the last term, and the term before the last. The coward can’t face you head-on, so he did this petty trick to ruin your name. A*shole.”
“You came all the way here with a sad face just to tell me this?”
“I’m not sad! I’m worried!” Sailum was a bit angry. “You’re fine with this?!”
Angor only smiled and said, “It’s just my name, not like it’s going to do any real damage to me.”
Angor thought about how he wanted to “become shameless” just not long ago.
“It’s a rumor anyway. As I said, I’m going to break through real soon, so his rumor will become a lie,” said Angor.
“B- But, even Balba already became a level-1 apprentice. It’s true you are the last one!” Sailum realized his words were a bit offending. He relaxed when he noticed Angor did not mind at all.
“The real challenge comes after you become an apprentice. Most people spent dozens of years getting stuck there while others only needed a short time to develop further,” said Angor as he patted Sailum’s shoulder. “Trust me. You, I, and Nausica are those who can break through faster. This letter will become a complete joke by then.”
With Angor’s “sweet talk”, Sailum looked reassured and put away his crystal ball.
“Oh, right. Miss Nausica kept accepting all kinds of quests to earn merit points. At first, she did safe jobs like patrolling, house cleaning or helping out wizards with small tasks. But I saw her arranging her pack and grinding her weapon these days, so I think she’s preparing for a quest away from here. It hasn’t even been a year yet, why is she working so hard?”
“Maybe she has a good reason just like Orlando,” Angor commented.
Sailum said goodbye after some random chats. Before he left the villa, Angor considered something and spoke to Sailum, “Next time you run into Nausica, tell her to come. I want to tell her something.”
“No problem,” Sailum agreed right away without asking why.
“Thanks. You come with her too. I’ll tell something to both of you.”
When Sailum left his view, Angor quickly grimaced.
He acted plain and nonchalant in front of Sailum. But Angor was really worried. Not about his name, but about the fact that someone was bothering him from behind his back.
“Hookdick…” For the first time, Angor wanted someone to die.
…
Time went by rapidly. Another five days passed.
The countdown on the hologram tablet was now: 0 hour, 1 minute, 31 seconds.
Angor locked up the door to the basement as well as the soundproof room door and waited for the countdown to finish.
When the countdown reached zero, Angor was so tensed that he grabbed his toes with great force.
[Calculation completed. Optimal coordinate data is as follows:…]
Angor felt great joy upon seeing the twelve coordinates on the display. It only took him less than four months to acquire such results when wizards usually spent more than a decade! He did not work out the results by himself. But so what? They would help him build a perfect model in the end, so the process did not matter.
Angor felt too excited. Instead of starting his training right away, he chose to hunker down to calm himself before slicing up the remaining four surfaces.
Although calming himself in such a situation was not easy. As he tried to suppress his joy, it only grew stronger.
Angor simply gave up. He opened the “entertainment” folder in the tablet and looked for “music”, hoping to distract himself by enjoying some melody.
He never looked at the music folder before. His knowledge about Earth music only lied in several children’s songs Jon used to sing to him. But the man was really bad at this, so Angor never managed to enjoy music from Jon.
Angor was quite eager to see what kind of music the Earth had to offer. After receiving the tablet, he had not gotten any chance to play music on The Redbud or on the cloud whale.
And this was the first time he tried it out.
There were a lot of sub-folders in the music folder either for music from different countries on Earth or for other classifications.
Angor only wished to get some distraction, so he did not care what kind of music to pick. He chose a random folder and the title of a song drew his attention.
City of Sky.
It reminded him of the Floating Mech City.
Without further ado, Angor tapped the play button.
The prelude of the song sounded like a stringed instrument, gentle and distant. But it was not plucking-action, so there was nothing too harsh. Angor used to listen to the harp songs played by traveling bards. Those sounded good too. However, they often created sharp noises that irritated his eardrums. Probably because the bards were not famous musicians.
Angor was really satisfied with the prelude of the music.
The interlude brought a beautiful piano melody combined with a slow and delicate string. Angor’s eyes brightened up with the development of the melody. The music piece knew how to seize the hearts of its audiences as if it had magic. There were no strong emotions in the music, only a soft trend of a flowing river dipping at people’s minds.
Angor closed his eyes to enjoy the peaceful music. As the song proceeded, he could see the image of a giant city among the misty clouds in the blue sky.
When the song ended, Angor slowly opened his eyes.
It sounded so beautiful. Using his own sense of art, Angor would totally consider the song among the works of master musicians. It was such a pity that he could not watch anyone play the song in reality.
After going over his train of thought, Angor was quite shocked to find out that his excitement had quieted down.
“That’s a pleasant surprise.” The God-given masterpiece helped him achieve his original goal.
Since he was ready, Angor did not intend to wait any longer. He closed his eyes again and proceeded with his training.
This time, he was going to open up all 36 sections in one attempt!