Chapter 8

Salin's slow progress can be attributed to two main reasons. Firstly, his elemental affinity has not improved despite taking the pills Jason provided daily, leaving him unable to perceive the elements clearly. Secondly, Salin insists on achieving optimal results with each magic he learns before moving on to the next.

In other words, Salin can now proficiently perform secondary spellcasting and has also mastered secondary spellcasting.

Presently, he can consecutively cast four 0-level spells. These spells can be cast individually, simultaneously, or in sequence. When cast in sequence, the latter three spells are essentially instant.

Since he has inherent limitations, Salin strives to excel technically. He believes that once he masters the art of spellcasting, he will become a perfect magician.

Through six months of training, Salin gradually came to understand that Jason, despite his appearance, was only thirty-five years old. A fifth-level magician at thirty-five was exceedingly rare in the Qin Empire.

Not only was Jason exceptionally talented, but he also had a formal magical heritage. His teacher was a ninth-level magician. Jason left the Qin Empire because he had reached a bottleneck in his training and was on the verge of reaching the sixth level.

During the transition from fifth to sixth level, magicians develop their unique styles, only achieving perfect evolution of their magic strings upon breaking through to the seventh level. Jason, being confident, left the Qin Empire to distance himself from his teacher's guidance. He aimed to become a unique magician.

Salin was fortunate; ordinary magicians didn't have the means to provide such a vast array of magical books. Even if they did, they couldn't necessarily carry them to Sylan City. This required powerful spatial items.

Ordinary spatial items were only a few cubic feet in size and couldn't hold the books of several rooms. Jason traveled far and wide until he arrived in Sylan City just as Salin was on the brink of starvation. For Salin, it was a miraculous stroke of fate. Salin's earnest attitude towards learning matched Jason's temperament, and Salin was clever enough. After a year of testing, Jason decided to formally guide Salin.

Typically, a magician apprentice would only receive guidance from their teacher once they surpassed the level of a sixth-level apprentice. Salin achieved the level of a second-level apprentice within a year. Any other magician would have long given up on him, as the apprentice stages from levels one to three were the simplest. Most people would enter the level four apprentice stage by the second year.

Salin finally finished studying the basics of magic, and the shelves began to display deeper content such as magical principles. Understanding this required more than just rote memorization, so Salin faced a choice.

Understanding magical principles required gradual comprehension and guidance from Jason. With the remaining time, he could practice new spells and learn more knowledge. Alchemy, potion-making, magic arrays, summoning, and more were available options.

Salin excluded summoning magic; it was highly unstable, summoning creatures with wildly varying capabilities. During the Second Dynasty, magicians could summon specified creatures at will. However, by the Third Dynasty five thousand years ago, summoning magic had become random.

Salin didn't want to risk summoning a mere grass-eating rabbit or even a fly during battle. Magic arrays were also discarded as learning them required a strong elemental affinity, an area in which Salin was lacking. His magical elements were insufficient even to draw a level 0 magic array.

Between alchemy and potion-making, Salin ultimately chose potion-making. While alchemy might be profitable, it didn't significantly aid in combat. After understanding the importance of strength, Salin had already planned his learning goals. He wanted to become stronger.

Potion-making was undoubtedly the most practical for Salin. With inexpensive materials, he could create auxiliary potions. As long as he had sufficient mental power and precise control over potion blending, the failure rate would decrease.

Once he decided on his direction, Salin began the arduous learning process.

There were tens of thousands of materials for making magic potions, mostly plants, with about ten percent being minerals. The rarest were biological materials such as blood, hair, and horns from magical creatures.

Salin asked Jason for a set of potion-making equipment and set up a small laboratory in his bedroom. Salin's ancestral home was a noble building with fortress-like structures, impervious to explosions from experiments. Jason had been attracted to Salin's house because of this feature.

With the ability to consecutively cast four Read Magic spells, Salin's learning speed increased. He spent three months memorizing tens of thousands of diagrams, relying on meditation to replenish his energy instead of sleep.

Once he mastered the material diagrams, Salin didn't systematically study formulas. Apart from common potions, he began searching for rare formulas.

One day, while Salin was sitting on the floor, reading a book titled "Overview of Magic Potions," he felt a vibration above his head. As he looked up, a massive book descended, hitting him squarely on the nose, causing blood to splatter.

Salin hadn't learned the Invisible Shield spell; despite feeling the danger, he couldn't avoid it. Holding his nose, he searched his pockets for a hemostatic potion. The impact had been severe; the book must have weighed at least ten pounds, and Salin felt as though his nasal bone might have been broken.

After applying the hemostatic potion, Salin felt his head buzzing, and his vision blurred. Was this what was described in pathology as a concussion? He hoped he hadn't been hit hard enough to knock himself out.

Picking up the hefty book, Salin held it with both hands, feeling its extraordinary weight.

The book was nearly square in shape, a foot wide and almost half a foot thick. The black cover bore no text, only adorned with dark golden patterns. Salin was familiar with magical patterns, but these on the cover seemed unfamiliar, belonging to an unknown era.

Opening the thick cover, the title "Absurd Magic Potions" was written in Melsonian on the title page. Intrigued, Salin began reading from the beginning.

The author of this book began by negating the structure of magical potions, considering it an empirical academic field with numerous theoretical flaws. Only through continuous experimentation could the field progress; otherwise, it would stagnate.

As Salin continued reading, he initially dismissed the author's claims as nonsense and attention-seeking. Magical potion-making had a history of tens of thousands of years, longer than the formation of magic itself. The author must be delusional.

However, as he delved deeper, Salin grew increasingly alarmed. The author pinpointed the logical errors in magical potion-making accurately. Even the purest minerals couldn't correspond to a single element alone. The same applied to herbs and animal materials. The magical potions formulated according to the recipe charts were merely the most basic and far from perfect structures.

The process of purification in magical potion-making was also a significant error. True potion-making should be investigative, determining the structure of potion materials through magic detection, then continuously experimenting to obtain the most perfect formula. The same material could vary subtly depending on its origin, and a true potion master should be able to discern this.

Salin continued reading, discovering that the author was not only a genius in magical potion-making but also highly proficient in magic itself.

In the section on Elemental Condensation Potions, the author pointed out their flaws and listed three spells. These spells detailed how to use them in conjunction with actual potions and how to mitigate the harm caused by potions.

Salin had never heard of these three spells, despite them being high-level magic. He used Read Magic to memorize them for verification later. However, the formulas provided by the author left Salin with a headache; there were as many as six hundred basic materials. Among them, over fifty provided alternatives, and most materials were detailed with their properties and analytical proportions.

Salin simply flipped the book to the beginning and memorized everything with Read Magic. From afternoon until evening, he read until the last page, feeling his eyelids twitch.

The last spread was written in magic language, with tiny and barely discernible characters. They were all in red, seemingly warning of something. Salin's heart skipped a beat as he read the words, "Magic String Potion Formula!"

In this world, one out of ten people could become a magic apprentice, but only one or two out of a hundred apprentices could advance to become full-fledged magicians.

This was because forming a magic string was incredibly difficult. Yet, the author of this book provided a potion formula specifically designed for this purpose—a potion that could help magic apprentices form magic strings.

Salin thought he might be overly eager, perhaps hallucinating. He reread carefully to confirm he hadn't misread. This formula was indeed tailored for forming magic strings. Regardless of the apprentice's level, once they consumed this potion, they could immediately form a magic string.

Salin's hands trembled, his breath became difficult, and his nose seemed to be bleeding again.

It felt like going half a month without food and suddenly getting a whiff of aromatic bread. Salin clandestinely carried the book "Absurd Magic Potions" back to his bedroom. After much thought, he found this miraculous formula somewhat unrealistic. If forming a magic string could be achieved this way, why had no magician understood it in the thousands of years?

He cast a detection spell on the facing page and, indeed, beneath the red text emerged another layer of golden text. Salin read each word one by one, breaking out in a cold sweat.

The golden text contained the true magic string formula. If the potion was prepared according to the red text and ingested, even a ninth-level magical beast could be poisoned to death. Was the author joking? Someone with such a malicious sense of humor would surely be hated during their lifetime, hence the lack of a name in the book.