Chapter 810: The Idea of Atavistic Evolution

Locke produced his borrowing pass. After examining it, Witch Lana showed a peculiar expression and said, "Follow me, Locke Augustine."

"It has been a long time since I have seen such an interesting young wizard as you."

"Only, our Rose Council's library is unlike those of Bonifacius University and Golden Crown Mountain. Without someone you know here, you will find it nearly impossible to get anywhere."

Witch Lana turned and gestured for Locke to follow.

Locke of course chose to follow. After all, every wizard in this library was looking at him strangely, and having a familiar sun ring wizard lead the way made things considerably easier.

Witch Lana brought Locke to a human wizard at the Second Circle free section. This generalist wizard, Wizard Bill, was a tall and thin man with a close-cropped haircut, wearing a black wizard robe, as thin as a bean sprout.

Wizard Bill looked at Locke with surprise and said, "An outside wizard? Now that is rare."

He looked at Witch Lana and asked, "This person is..."

Witch Lana raised her chin and folded her arms across her chest. She was wearing a wizard robe decorated with a pale blue rose called the Ocean Princess at the shoulder, and she looked extraordinarily beautiful.

"Consider him an admirer of mine. Whatever he needs, do your best to accommodate him."

Wizard Bill bowed to Witch Lana.

"Understood, Teacher Lana."

Witch Lana looked at Locke and explained, "In the Rose Council's library, when you ask a generalist wizard to search for a magical book and give them the relevant keywords, the answer you receive will often be one of two results."

"If it is someone outside our inner circle, a casual, perfunctory reply is all you will get. After all, only the generalist wizard knows the full scale of the data available. Whether something exists or not, only they know."

"So if you have no acquaintance among the generalist scholars here, you will have to search for books entirely on your own."

Locke understood now. He turned to look at Wizard Bill. That tall and thin Wizard Bill's expression had not changed, and he was looking at Locke with a faint smile, as though what Witch Lana had just said had nothing to do with him.

Locke bowed to Witch Lana and said, "Thank you."

Witch Lana gave a nod.

"For me, this was nothing at all. I simply find you interesting, and was surprised you dared to come to our Rose Council's library. Locke, good luck. Oh, and I would like to see your ecological alliance-type spell. Show me the effect."

Locke smiled ruefully. She had still noticed that he had walked a different road from hers.

Locke did not refuse, withdrew his hands from the pockets of his wizard robe, extended his right hand, and a clear, bright moonlight appeared in his palm.

Witch Lana, as a sun ring wizard, understood immediately.

"I see. It uses the moonlight of your Grand Magic? Interesting, but for me, it offers no reference value. Moreover, a physical ecological corridor allows for a much more powerful exchange of biomass."

Locke nodded in acknowledgment.

"That is true, but Lady Lana, I only need to establish a connection with other forests."

Witch Lana flipped her slender left hand over, and a divine path formed by trees on either side appeared. This ecological corridor divine path collided with the moonlight in Locke's hand, and the divine path in his hand was effortlessly shattered.

Witch Lana curved the corner of her mouth.

"As I expected."

"You see, an ecological corridor protected by a divine path has powerful resilience, while an ecological corridor without divine path protection can be easily disrupted."

The pupil of Witch Lana's left eye lit up with a golden ring of light, and she looked through to Locke's essence. In Locke's being she saw a vast forest, a full moon hanging above it, connected through moonlight to four other forests.

She showed a mildly surprised expression.

"Quite an interesting magical force. But still far too fragile and immature. If you encounter someone truly wise, you will suffer greatly for it."

Witch Lana was, after all, a sun ring wizard, and from her high vantage point she had pointed out the current problem with Locke's ecological corridor easily.

His ecological corridor was like an egg without a shell. Far too fragile.

Locke looked thoughtful, a deeply contemplative expression on his face, and then bowed to Witch Lana and said in thanks, "Thank you for your guidance. However, I believe my path is not wrong. I simply have a great deal of room to grow compared to you."

A look of surprise crossed Witch Lana's eyes.

By her nature, if Locke had accepted her advice and changed course, she would have immediately shifted into the mode she used when instructing students. But Locke's insistence on his own judgment made her regard him more highly.

Witch Lana smiled and said, "Perhaps that is indeed the case. I owe you an apology for having stopped you from walking this path during the crystallization. At the time, I felt you had not yet reached that point. But looking now, it is clear you have the level for it."

Witch Lana looked at Wizard Bill and said, "Look at that. This is the attitude of a true wizard. This is what it means to seek knowledge. If my students had even half of his independent spirit, I would be able to rest easy."

"They each and every one of them want to become another me, but their wisdom is insufficient to learn from me at all."

Wizard Bill continued to maintain his unchanging smile, but thinking of Witch Lana's unpredictable temperament, he suddenly felt a chill.

"Yes, Teacher Lana."

Witch Lana appeared to have her own affairs and departed from the library shortly after.

Only once she had left did Wizard Bill finally let out a long breath.

Locke looked at Wizard Bill strangely and asked, "Wizard Bill, you seem quite afraid of Witch Lana. She seems very pleasant?"

Wizard Bill's expression became complicated.

"It is not that. You have simply spent too little time with her, and so you still see her through a favorable lens."

"If you spent a long time with her, you would certainly come to feel afraid of her too. Now then, Wizard Augustine, what documents are you looking for?"

Locke put on a serious face and named the keywords for the two areas he needed, primarily mechanics analysis of foot pressure for wizard shoes, along with materials related to virtual roots.

Wizard Bill's expression did not change. He was not a magic weaver, so telling Locke about magic weaver materials posed no psychological difficulty for him.

"So many keywords? If it were anyone else, I would certainly just give a perfunctory answer and hand over a few books. Give me a moment. I will use my Memory Palace to find them properly for you."

Locke nodded.

The inner circle culture of the Rose Council's library was evidently even more pronounced than anywhere else.

Golden Crown Mountain still had quite a few lone wolves, but in the Rose Council it seemed that without joining a team, one would be unable to take a single step.

This was perhaps related to how insular the flower speech association and magic weaver association circles were.

At its core, this was directly connected to the personalities of the high-circle wizards at the upper reaches of this discipline, as well as their numbers and intentions.

After receiving the pile of documents, Locke found a spot decorated with magical flower bouquets. The fragrance given off by the magical flower bouquets could actually help clear the mind and speed up thinking somewhat.

Locke settled onto the sofa and began to read.

The first matter was that Witch Lana had given him a reminder. The ecological corridors of his Forest Alliance needed protection, though right now he had no good way of improving that.

Because this forest alliance spell involved the very foundation of his power system.

And every incremental improvement of such a foundation required a great investment of resources and time, and likely a great many experiments as well.

Three days later, Locke discovered that the Rose Council's approach to breeding studies was actually fairly similar in direction to Golden Crown Mountain's.

Bonifacius University's breeding studies primarily leaned toward urban greenery, while the magical plants produced by Golden Crown Mountain and the Rose Council's breeding studies were undoubtedly tilted toward agriculture.

Whether it was food crops or the large numbers of rose-type magical plants cultivated to support the Rose Council's flower speech studies as a third-tier discipline, this magical plant breeding all fell under a category of agriculture.

Simply a form of leisure agriculture.

At its core, all of it was high-value agricultural production.

"The Rose Council and Golden Crown Mountain are, in essence, two high-added-value agricultural universities."

Locke thought, "No wonder a conflict arose between the Rose Throne and the Red Dragon Throne." ℯℯ𝑙.

"And this mechanics analysis of foot pressure for wizard shoes is something I had never considered before, namely the comfort of a person wearing wizard shoes. It is only a detail, but perfecting this detail could make my products even better."

Locke copied down some key points he needed and continued to ask Wizard Bill for more materials.

Two weeks passed, and by now nearly half a month had gone by. Most wizards in the Rose Council were very busy and naturally paid no attention to him, but a small number, magic weaver wizards, had clearly heard about matters related to Locke.

These wizards whispered among themselves in the background, speculating about Locke's purpose.

Moon ring Wizard Hormuz stood at a high level and looked down in the direction of where Locke was. His expression was grim. Clearly he had not expected to see in the Rose Council's library the young wizard who had been giving him headaches recently.

Who the hell had let him in?

Hormuz's face wore an extremely forced smile.

At the same time, the magic weavers around him were discussing in low voices, "This fellow obviously came here to learn from us. Even though it is just free materials, it is still a nuisance to let him get his hands on them. What is more, we cannot figure out what connections he pulled to get Wizard Bill to serve him faithfully and hold nothing back."

"Is this still the same Bill?"

One magic weaver looked aggrieved.

"That sly fellow Bill extorted me for a hundred thousand magic stones just to get him to do a proper document search for me once. That man will not lift a finger without seeing a benefit."

"How can Augustine, an outside wizard, make Bill that obedient?"

Another magic weaver threw up his hands and said, "How would anyone know that. This fellow really is well-connected. He even managed to get on in the Rose Council."

"Who is going to find out what he came here this time to do?"

A magic weaver said, "I asked around. According to what he himself said, he came to look through documents and see if he could find a way to mass-produce virtual roots."

Hormuz could not help letting out a soft laugh.

The magic weavers exchanged glances and immediately relaxed.

"Our Rose Council's own breeders at the breeding studies college are not this capable. What good could looking through free documents do him? They are all fifty-year-old research."

"You will not find anything useful in piles of old paper."

Wizard Hormuz's expression turned cold and he let out a snort, "What a pipe dream. I think this fellow has gone mad from being unable to crack that technical bottleneck for so long. Just let him be."

"He only has half a month left anyway. If he is smart about it, he should focus on mining our magic weaver technology from fifty years ago to improve the technical details of his crude wizard shoe toy."

"That way his thirteenth-rate little wizard shoe store alliance might manage to survive."

Hormuz looked around at the magic weavers and said quietly, "Solas Light Foot remains the pride of the Rose Council. Colleagues, the themed event half a year from now, please do attend."

"Only with the full support of alumni and colleagues like yourselves can Solas Light Foot stay ahead forever."

Some magic weavers present nodded in agreement, while others wore difficult expressions. Even a small portion of the magic weavers showed a look of anger on their faces.

The Rose Council's magical shoes were divided into two factions.

One side stood with Solas Light Foot, the other with Melechi Magic Step.

The way to tell the two apart was simple. Just look at whether the shoes on their feet were products under Solas Light Foot's brand or under Melechi Magic Step's.

There were also Rose Council breeders who looked at them with displeasure. What did he mean by saying even their academy's breeders were not capable of this?

Though many of these people were students or subordinates of Witch Lana, and so they currently had no grievance with Locke. After all, Locke had no conflict of interest with them, and moreover seemed to be on good terms with Witch Lana.

So these breeders all glared furiously at the magic weavers who had said that.

...

Second floor, the main hall. Locke sat on an exquisitely crafted platinum-colored sofa, reading magical books by the light of a wonderful fragrance. It had to be said that the Rose Council's library had a serious problem, yet it possessed one excellent quality.

That was the fragrance that permeated the entire space of this library.

It was truly beautiful beyond measure.

The sense of smell seemed to almost concretize some marvelous image, presenting it before one's eyes. The Rose Council's academic standards in aesthetic feasts were eye-opening.

Locke looked at his notes. At this moment his main body was here reading, while his clone was in Golden Crown Mountain using the second group of laboratory equipment in the Dune Plane to interpret the Necromantic Lich's ritual spell model.

Locke looked at his notes and thought with mild frustration, "I still have no real idea about the virtual root non-contact bridging method, but the half-completed project sent to me by Teacher Sophia, I actually have some ideas about."

Previously, Sophia's senior had sent him a project that used yellow robe mushroom extract extracted from yellow robe mushrooms to degenerate the Gold Foxtail Grass and Green Foxtail Grass back into Golden Spike Wheat.

Golden Spike Wheat was one of the emblems of the Twilight Border and was currently extinct.

From this project, Locke could see the advantage Witch Sophia held in simultaneously being a potion-maker and a breeder. She had evidently attempted to use alchemical methods to carry out magical plant breeding.

That was how such a project had emerged.

Although it was a half-completed work, she had already succeeded in using yellow robe mushroom extract to induce atavistic traits in two varieties of foxtail grass.

The Star Domain Sea's view was that even after a magical plant evolved, it would retain a large number of past plant factors, because the plant factors in its plant essence core were redundant.

This was perhaps to deal with certain mutation scenarios, or so that in the event of major environmental change, the redundant plant factor library in the plant essence core could be searched for plant factors suited to the new conditions.

In any case, if this were so, Witch Sophia had put forward two ideas.

First, since a magical plant would retain many past plant factors, there must be a way through magical power to awaken those dormant plant factors.

Second, since those excess plant factors still existed in the plant essence core, it meant there must be one or more mechanisms present together inside a magical plant that suppressed the expression of those redundant plant factors, thus keeping the magical plant in its current form.

So she discovered that yellow robe mushroom extract could, through multiple mechanisms, damage these expression-suppressing mechanisms, causing the plant factors of Golden Spike Wheat dormant within the two varieties of foxtail grass to emerge.

True, they no longer possessed a complete set of Golden Spike Wheat plant factors, but...

There was still the finite element cultivation method.

One could simply use a magical force magnetic field to cut out specific scattered Golden Spike Wheat plant factors, and through purposeful design, there was a possibility of allowing Golden Spike Wheat to be revived in the modern age of magic.

Of course, this was still only a beautiful aspiration for the time being.

Moreover, the two varieties of foxtail grass would certainly not contain a complete set of Golden Spike Wheat plant factors that could be assembled. The scale of the work involved was truly immense, and without the participation of a hundred or more formal wizards, completing such a workload would be impossible.

Locke flipped through the magical books. Originally when he had received this project he had not given it much thought, but now he had figured it out.

The revival of Golden Spike Wheat was a form of atavistic evolution.

And his own Moon of Evolution was a Grand Magic centered on evolutionary studies. If the Moon of Evolution could gain an additional form of magical plant evolution, that would certainly be of great benefit to his Grand Magic.

It was clear that Witch Sophia had taken the project halfway, judged that while it could be completed it would not yield the value she had imagined, and so had set it aside, passing it to him in the process.

But looking at it from another angle, she had done all the preliminary work, and then at the stage right before results were about to emerge, passed the project to him.

Which greatly reduced the difficulty for him of completing the atavistic evolution component of the Moon of Evolution.

Locke looked at the magical books in thought. 'The reason Witch Sophia stopped was that she realized that the yellow robe potion brewed with yellow robe mushroom extract, while it could cause soaked magical plants to produce an effect that damaged the expression-suppressing mechanisms, could not control which expression-suppressing mechanisms specifically were damaged.'

'This meant that the atavism of a magical plant was entirely random. Once she recognized this, she decided that continuing offered her no value and stopped, publishing the relevant articles. After all, making it this far was already enough to publish some papers.'

Locke thought, 'But she and I are different. My first Grand Magic is founded on evolutionary studies. If I can produce an atavistic evolution to stand alongside surge evolution, this would greatly advance my development.'

'And, the Rose Council's approach to handling the same variety of rose magical plant in order to induce flower color mutation actually gave me a solution to the problem of fully random mutation, which causes a magical plant's plant factors to become disordered, leading either to self-collapse, or to turning atavistic evolution into simple degeneration.'

Locke looked at the magical books in his hands. The Rose Council had rich experience in using magical potions to induce flower color mutations in rose magical plants and produce different enchantment effects.

These potion solutions also came with various side effects, including random flower color mutations and enchantment effect confusion.

And their approach was low-concentration immersion combined with precise trimming.

That is, using low-concentration immersion to reduce the magnitude of flower color mutation, then manually using various equipment to trim away the dangerous plant factors that had been expressed, gradually eliminating the plant factors they did not need.

What Locke was looking at was only fifty-year-old technology, but that was fine. He only needed to draw reference from this thinking and borrow a little from their experience.

Because he was different from these wizards. His Moon of Evolution had a spell model incorporating a Grand Magic Rune that he had obtained in a trade from Wizard Edgar.

That was the Firetree Silver Blossom.

"As long as I use the Lunar Cultivation Method to externalize the magical plant's spirituality sequence, and then fine-tune the Firetree Silver Blossom spell model, I should be able to remove some of the plant factors from the magical plant."

A look of deep thought appeared on Locke's face.

"Using this approach would likely be considerably faster than the Rose Council's wizards using all sorts of equipment."

He owed Witch Yekaterina another word of thanks for arranging his entry into the Dune Plane, where he had discovered the special stone spirits.

The Lunar Cultivation Method was too useful for him.

Locke thought, "In this way I might be able to complete atavistic evolution through low-concentration immersion combined with manual trimming. Teacher Sophia has already cleared most of the obstacles on the path ahead for me. What remains only requires more experiments to accumulate experience, and I should be able to overcome it."

"All right, I will set that aside for now. Later I will use the second group's laboratory to do some experiments in this area and see whether atavistic evolution can be achieved."

"My main objective right now is still to think through how to bring down the production cost of virtual roots."

Locke looked up, and found a crystallization wizard standing before him.

Locke said with an expressionless face, "Is there something you need?"

Wizard Michael gave an awkward cough. "Hello, Mister Locke. I am Solas Light Foot's First Circle chief designer, at least temporarily still."

Locke's expression turned strange.

Wizard Michael placed a magical painting before him. "I wanted to tell you that the Black Giant Hummingbird is an excellent wizard shoe. One could say it is the best-performing First Circle wizard shoe currently in the Cloud Marsh Wetlands. But it is not the most outstanding First Circle wizard shoe possible."

"This is a foot pressure map for a First Circle wizard that I drew."

He turned around and walked away quickly, as though he had a guilty conscience.

Locke picked up this person's magical painting and raised an eyebrow, while a faint expression of surprise appeared in his eyes.

"Hmm? Do magical shoes research wizard shoes to this level of detail?"

This turned out to be a series of images.

It showed forty-seven types of general First Circle wizard foot pressure distribution maps, marked with the pressure each foot sole's magic pressure exerted on the sole of the wizard shoe, along with the shape and dimensions the wizard shoe sole should ideally take to conform to the magic pressure of each wizard's foot sole.

Locke said, "This person... this is indeed something I currently need."

A gleam appeared in Locke's eyes.

"Right, I can look for records of historically failed projects at the Rose Council. There might be things I can use among them. Just as I did in the Land of Six Towers."

At this moment, Wizard Michael turned around and walked to the library entrance, a slightly lost look in his eyes. He was not sure whether what he had done was right.

He only wanted to make a truly perfect pair of wizard shoes.