Mage Legend
Chapter 36: Episode 1 Awakening

Chapter 36: Episode 1 Awakening

This is the city of the dwarves: Spider Cave, a massive underground city that has long been the largest gathering place for northern dwarves. They have lived here for nearly a millennium. Here, you can see landscapes entirely different from other places on the Anriel Continent. Houses are built on tiered platforms, with various lines, levers, and winches stretched everywhere. One after another, "automated" sliding doors, drawbridges, and rail-mounted carts exist amid machines spewing black smoke and rotating giant mirrors at the top of the caves, accompanied by ceaseless hustle and bustle. This is the Spider Cave: Dwarf City.

Even the most adaptable humans, when first arriving in this city, become dizzy and confused by the myriad of "mechanical" devices and cannot fully adapt to this "automated" lifestyle. For instance, in the kitchens here, cooking is almost automated. You can place a carrot at the machine’s entry, pull a lever, and then the carrot will slowly advance on a conveyor belt powered by steam: washing, peeling, cutting, shredding, plating, pouring sauces, stirring, and eventually, a plate of carrot salad will appear before you. It’s indeed very convenient. But if you accidentally pull the wrong lever—which happens often, as all levers look the same—the roast process will begin. The lovable carrot is sprinkled with various spices and tossed onto the roasting rack, with flames below ignited by something called "fervor gas," which continually roasts it. This fervor gas is actually a flammable gas drawn from the toilets’ cisterns (certainly, it couldn’t be called "dung gas," who would eat food made like that?—as a dwarf scholar would say). Unfortunately, a carrot is no roast pork chop; it quickly chars and shrivels, falling through the grate’s gaps, potentially blocking the fervor gas’s combustion point. This leads to what dwarves commonly refer to as the "backburning" phenomenon. The flames follow the fervor gas path and begin burning back until they reach the gas’s source. When the frantic dwarves in the kitchen try to open the oven door—for children’s safety, the oven door cannot be opened before the program ends—then, on the other side of the city, a loud explosion occurs, and one fervor gas cistern explodes, scattering black and yellow debris everywhere. Dwarves call such an event "fervent upward progression."

The lives of dwarves are a process of experiencing fate through research. Across the continent, they are a weak race. They do not have strong bodies, nor outlandish magic, but they constantly think with their never-ceasing minds.

Lynch once saw a travelogue from his mentor, Master Caso, describing the dwarf race: "Diligent but not clever enough." While dwarves always have innovative ideas, their heads are indeed small, often forgetting this or that when considering things. Thus, they can always create surprising inventions, but in terms of stability, they fall short.

The inventions of dwarves are largely inseparable from their unique creation magic. This special creation magic can easily create some magical or non-magical products. Mages of other races on the continent, such as elves and human mages, have come here to investigate, learn, and study. But each dwarf capable of using this magic describes it differently. Moreover, the magic can only create a limited range of things and cannot construct any magic items. Combined with such a chaotic magic system, mages of other races eventually gave up on research, dismissing it as a "racial ability of dwarves."

When Lynch read that travelogue, he held a significant degree of skepticism towards the dwarves’ "creation" ability, thinking that perhaps it merely stemmed from dwarves habitually crafting numerous items, becoming second nature. Those mages who went to study were merely deceived by some blinding technique, and no dwarf magic truly existed.

What he hadn’t anticipated was that he is now enjoying a treatment from this dwarf magic.

Now, the scene shifts to the dwarf’s experimental hall, where a complex-structured machine groans painfully. Its mechanical structures, such as levers, gears, conveyor belts, and valuable gemstones, scatter on the floor. The machine itself smokes, emits electric sparks, and burning flames flash all around.

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