He quickly tried to drop the seed back to the ground, but it stayed attached to his fingers. He didn’t know what to do, but he didn’t panic yet since the rate at which his magic was being drained was fairly slow.
He thought for a minute about what happened to the seed. Then he felt his magic flow was a little different than normal. He realized that his magic was still being absorbed, only the magic was still staying in his mind.
He immediately entered his mind to see what the problem was. He entered the field to see if there was anything causing the change. He saw the two stars were remaining constant, but the third cloud was swirling around one particular location.
There was a thin line that connected the cloud to the ground and the magic was slowly entering the ground. He walked to that location to see what it was. When he got there, he saw the seed that he had bought.
It was lodged into the ground like it had been planted there. The difference was that there was a crack in the seed. From the crack, a small sapling was slowly emerging. As it started to emerge, the rate at which the magic was being absorbed from him increased.
He was initially tensed when he saw this happen, but he decided to let it happen. It wasn’t affecting any of his stars and he could always just gather more magic when he needed to. He wanted to see what the sapling would do to his mind.
His mind was very boring before this. It was just endless fields that were illuminated by the stars in the sky. But with this sapling, he realized that it could become more than that. Moreover, the seed was initially an object from the real world. He realized that he could bring objects from the real world into his mind. This meant that his mind itself was like a dimensional ring. He just didn’t know how to use it.
After a while, the sapling grew to half his height and stopped. The connection between it and the cloud disappeared, but there was barely any magic left in that anyway. The sapling sucked away all of his gains after his breakthrough to the 2nd Star. He was now just an Early-Stage 2nd Star Mage when he used to be very close to breaking through to the Middle-Stage.
The sapling had 5 leaves that had patterns similar to the pattern on the seed. He decided to take a closer look at the leaf. They were obsidian-colored leaves with the same silver runes dancing on the surface. He touched one of the leaves and could feel the soft leaf with his fingers. He tried to pluck the leaf and it easily came out.
He took a closer look for a few minutes and decided to go back to the physical world after making sure that there was no more problem with his magic being absorbed by the sapling.
When he got back, to his surprise the leaf he had plucked was in his hands. It was giving him the same mysterious feeling and he felt that with the leaf he could practice a lot more easier. Also, he could magically understand one of the runes etched on it.
[Elderwood]
He didn’t know why he suddenly knew what the rune meant, but he guessed that it was because of the tome. He realized that the seed was the seed of an Elderwood Tree, but he didn’t know what that was.
He decided to think about it later and tried to start training with the leaf in his hands instead of a normal Beast Core. Normally he would absorb the magic in the Beast Core with suboptimal efficiency, but the leaf wasn’t like that.
The leaf made it a lot easier for him to attract magic to himself. He could normally sense the magic very easily, but there wasn’t any magic density in the room compared to Beast Cores. However, the leaf itself attracted a tremendous amount of magic, comparable to the 2nd Circle Beast Core.
Moreover, because it was not polluted like the Beast Core’s magic, he could easily absorb all of it without any problem. It was so simple that he decided to keep training for the rest of the day. He only stopped when he realized that the effect was gone.
When he opened his eyes, he saw that the leaf had crumbled to dust, but he wasn’t bothered. The amount of magic he had accumulated in that one session was enough to compensate for all the magic that the Elderwood seed had sucked from him.
He was very tempted to keep plucking the rest of the leaves from the plant and keep training, but he wanted to check some other things first. He wanted to see to what extent he could use his mind as a dimensional ring.
He picked up the book with all the auction items and entered his mind first. When he did, he saw that his hand was empty. The book stayed in the real world. He went back and picked up another object – a lamp. He didn’t see any success.
He tried picking up something more magical the next time. He picked up a 1st Circle Beast Core that he had left from his training sessions. It was still there because it had been a while since he had used Beast Cores to train. This time, the core was able to enter his mind with him.
However, the core seemed very ethereal. It seemed like it was going to break in a few seconds. He moved his arm just a little, and the Beast Core disintegrated. The dust from the core still had hints of magic to it though. The dust landed on the sapling that was right in front of him.
The dust settled on top of the leaves of the plant. When it touched the leaves, they suddenly glowed and absorbed the Beast Core dust. He saw the plant grow another centimeter but stopped after that.
The magic in a 1st Circle Beast Core was barely anything compared to all the magic it sucked from him. It made sense that it couldn’t grow from just that. Based on what he saw though, he realized something that would change how he trained.
His mind would only let something with magic enter. However, even those objects would just be reduced to the magic in them and wouldn’t stay as physical objects. The plant was an anomaly that he would have to look into more.
He could stop using Beast Cores from then and only use them to feed the plant instead of using his own magic. And if there were more leaves that grew out, he could start using those leaves to train than Beast Cores. This would help him grow stronger faster than just sticking to Beast Cores.