Roland understood Schuck’s dilemma and helplessness.
On one side were people who were brought up with the same views of the world, life, and values, and on the other side was someone who treated him well.
It was now a clash of personal feelings and philosophies, so Schuck had no choice.
After leaving the bar, Roland didn’t go to the saber arts club but continued to read through forum posts at home.
It was now four days before Roland and the others could leave the dungeon, and there was no telling what the situation would be at that time.
But looking at the situation now, a war was inevitable.
Judging by the number of arguments on the forum, the number of god-protectors didn’t seem to be very large.
After all, most of the players, when they graduated from college, passed in politics.
But even so, the player community was torn apart.
If one added the previous division plan of the Hollevin’s royal family, then the players were now clearly differentiated in alignment preferences.
Roland sighed. In this situation, even if he came out of the dungeon, it wouldn’t be much help.
The alliance of churches sounded grand, and even if Roland could get out of the dungeon, what could he do?
This was a collective order!
All the churches probably dispatched Legends.
Against the alliance of the few great churches, how could the players survive?
With their iron heads?
Even if they did have iron heads, they wouldn’t be able to stop them.
Roland sighed deeply. It was rare that he wasn’t considering a problem related to magic.
He tried to think and see what he could do in this war, but in the end, he realized that he couldn’t do anything.
Because he was too weak.
What if he had Legendary strength?
Perhaps, he might be able to sway some events.
An entire day passed quickly in this helpless mood of his.
Roland entered the game once again.
It was morning in the game, and Mordenkainen, who taught him, keenly noticed that Roland’s spirit wasn’t quite right, so he asked what was going on.
After a while of silence, Roland told him roughly what happened.
Mordenkainen smiled and said, “Don’t think too much, just wimp out when it’s time and wait until you have the strength to retaliate. For men, it’s not ugly to run away once in a while.”
Roland then asked, “Then, old man, have you ever run away before?
“Of course,” Mordenkainen said matter-of-factly. “When I was fourteen, I was invited to a duel by a noble warrior who was so much stronger than me, and three times my age. How could I have won the fight? So I fled, and two years later I returned, broke his legs, and left him in the sun for half a day before I allowed him to go back to recuperate. No one has dared to bother me randomly since.”
Roland laughed after hearing this. “You weren’t strong and you were young, so it’s normal to run away for a bit, right?”
“When I cut the threads of fate, the first time the Goddess of Fortune came to my door, I was terrified and ran away immediately. And I ran away in an ugly way you’d never expect.” Seemingly remembering the past, Mordenkainen smiled a little.
Roland asked curiously, “In what way?”
“I curbed all my mental energy fluctuations, disguised myself as an ordinary person, and jumped into a cesspool. I got covered in sh*t, and although I escaped the Goddess of Fate’s first raid, I didn’t dare to eat meat for ten days afterward. It was disgusting!”
Mordenkainen was brilliant and wise in the historical records… It was all grand, glorious, and proper. It was normal to wimp out in the fight against nobles. After all, at that time, Mordenkainen was still young and hadn’t begun to create his spells. According to the magic records, it was after the age of twenty-five years that Mordenkainen began to improve and innovate in magic.
In other words, fourteen-year-old Mordenkainen was still a weakling.
Wimping out was normal.
However, it was a bit unbelievable that Mordenkainen, who should be close to a Legend, if not a Legend, after severing the threads of fate, jumped into a cesspool for refuge at such a powerful stage.
Roland’s expression immediately turned strange.
He didn’t know whether to say that Mordenkainen was flexible, or whether to laugh at him for actually jumping into a cesspool!
But Roland also understood Mordenkainen’s meaning.
Even such a powerful person like me wimped out before. You’re a young man, so it doesn’t matter if you wimp out once!
That was roughly what the point was.
Roland felt much better when he heard Mordenkainen’s advice.
Mordenkainen’s old, withered hand tapped the tabletop lightly. He thought for a moment and said, “Since you’re from the future, you should know what my greatest achievement is, right?”
“Spell models,” said Roland.
“Wrong.” Mordenkainen was rather disappointed. “It seems there’s still a fissure in history, and of course it could be deliberately caused by certain people who wanted to conceal my greatest achievement.”
Roland gave an oh. “And what’s your greatest achievement, old man?”
“The floating city!” said Mordenkainen, rather proudly stroking his beard.
The floating city?
Roland had no impression of this… or rather, the magic records he read never mentioned the term floating city.
Hollevin also used hieroglyphics and ideoglphyics.
This was why Roland could understand what this term meant.
“Pity. It seems that the historical records at your time are no good either.” Mordenkainen smiled and said, “I’m much weaker now, but still no one dares to trouble me for the simple reason that I have a floating city. And it’s an astral floating city.”
Roland understood roughly what Mordenkainen was saying, but he didn’t have a direct impression.
“Get up and I’ll show you.”
With that said, they went outside the building and Lamia came running out. She looked at Mordenkainen and said excitedly, “Grandpa, are you going to the floating city again? Take me, take me.”
“Okay!”
Mordenkainen responded, pointing to both of them.
Levitation. This spell Roland also knew, but the true inventor of it was the man in front of him.
Then he pulled them both up and flew.
Flying higher and higher, Roland said urgently, “Wait, there’s a ceiling up there, don’t rush up.”
Roland had explored before and found there was an invisible layer of mud on top, so thick that his mental power couldn’t penetrate it.
But Mordenkainen just laughed and flew faster anyway.
Roland couldn’t help but close his eyes.
He sensed an impending aviation accident.
And then something dumbfounding happened.
The sky twisted, and then an unimaginably huge layer of mud and rock appeared in front of Roland.
When this rock formation appeared, the entire city was shrouded in shadow, and the sky and sun seen before were replaced by the rock formation in front of them.
Roland’s entire view was blocked, and no matter if he looked left or right, he couldn’t see the end of this rock formation at all.
This place wasn’t underground. It turned out to be underneath a huge, terrifying floating city.
Roland felt as though he had mistaken the part for the whole.
Then Mordenkainen pulled them to a depression where there was a magic streak of light, and as Mordenkainen approached, a magic stone door opened and the three of them flew into it, then went through a long tunnel to finally reach the exit.
Mordenkainen pulled on the two and landed on a flat blue surface.
Roland looked around and found that the platform was huge, bigger than the city below, almost impossible to see in its entirety, and not far away, there were four majestic giant buildings, lined up in a crescent shape, looking like four small mountains from afar.
The huge flat plaza was paved with blue bricks, each of which was the same size and shimmered with magic.
Roland squatted down and touched themt. He was surprised to find that these bricks were all high-quality magic energy; in simpler words, they were all magic blocks that were deliberately made into this shape.
“You see what it is?”
Roland nodded.
“These are all the result of my magic power coalescing.” Mordenkainen opened his hands, spun around, and laughed. “I extracted some of my magic power every day, made it into bricks, and built it up over time, and then eventually built this great floating city. Standing in this city, I dare to fight even gods, and in the main plane, I never feared anyone again.”
Roland was speechless.
This floating city’s surface area was already at the level of a medium-sized city.
And every piece of brick here was Mordenkainen’s spare magic power—it could almost be described as an endless source of magic power at his disposal.
As long as he didn’t leave this floating city, Mordenkainen was virtually invincible.
At this moment, Lamia began to run to the middle of the square, with Mordenkainen slowly following.
Soon Lamia stopped. There were a few special bricks in front of her.
All the other bricks were blue, but this brick was pure white.
Lamia leaned down and pressed her hand to the white brick, and not much later, the white brick flipped and changed, eventually forming something like an altar.
Finally, there was a magic projection on top.
A blue circle and guideposts—it seemed to be a three-dimensional map.
Lamia put her hands inside and moved a few times, and the entire floating city emitted a faint humming sound. Violent magical currents appeared in the sky, forming countless white vortexes.
The sky was distorting; everything outside the floating city was distorting.
Roland could sense that the floating city was teleporting.
The sky twisted into mush and ended up white.
Then the light around them began to dim and eventually became night-like.
The distortion of space gradually stopped, and not long after, Roland found that the background of the world outside the floating city had turned pure black.
The darkness was sprinkled with many faintly glowing objects.
Some were especially large, some were especially small, and they varied in color.
At some point, a transparent boundary appeared over the floating city, and from time to time, strange things would hit the transparent boundary and then bounce off.
There were some hideous insects that looked like armored black maggots with a mouthful of sharp teeth, but they couldn’t gnaw through the boundary.
There were also many stones floating randomly in space, and a cloud of… round, square, or irregularly shaped fragments that recorded certain images!
Many strange sounds rang out outside the floating city from time to time. Roland couldn’t imagine what kind of sounds they were—they were quite unsettling.
Roland also saw that most of these fragments were intermingled with people’s silhouettes, but they didn’t look real.
This space was strange, weird, irrational, and yet… interesting.
Roland looked around blankly. “What is this place?”
He already had a guess, but still wanted an answer from Mordenkainen.
“The astral plane, Realm of Gods, and the Void… are all here.” Mordenkainen pointed to the bright white sphere the size of a basketball in the distance. “See that thing there! That is the Goddess of Light’s divine kingdom. It looks close, but in reality… the distance is actually infinite, and it’s almost impossible to fly there without acquiring the Divine Spark. What you see here isn’t really the goddess’s kingdom, it’s just a projection sent from a distant world.”
“The green sphere is the Paradise of Life, a little larger than the Divine Realm of Light.” Lamia leaned in and said with a smile, “The purple one is the Goddess of Elves’ divine realm, isn’t it much smaller? It’s about the size of an apple. The more powerful the God is, the bigger and brighter the symbol projected on the astral plane.”
“What are those red ones?” Roland pointed to the distant, red-spotted starts that twinkled once or twice now and then.
“Evil deities,” said Mordenkainen indifferently.
