Badge in Azure Chapter 191

Chapter 191: A Shocking City (Part 2)
Translator: Nyoi-Bo Studio Editor: Nyoi-Bo Studio
Noticing that they were about fifty miles from Alchemy City, Saleen asked, “Lex, what does Alchemy City look like?” At this point, they were able to move at full speed. Sika’s injuries had completely healed, and a distance of fifty miles could be covered within an hour.
“No idea,” Lex replied simply, making Saleen scratch his head in confusion. He thought that Lex knew the affairs of the Qin Empire like the back of her hand. That should have included Alchemy City.
“All of us were in such a rush that I had no time to contact my people,” Lex explained. Upon seeing Saleen’s ignorant expression, Lex laughed. “Alchemy City is not just any city. Its structure constantly changes. Even the magic towers outside the city are like this.”
Instead of feeling enlightened, Saleen was even more confused by Lex’s words. However, he stopped questioning her. He believed that he would get all his answers when they reached their destination. After all, seeing was believing.
Saleen had never been to Alchemy City, but since his mentor, Jason Statham, had originated from the area, he had a good feeling about the place.
Initially, Saleen had thought that after seeing Holy Rock City, the grandeur of other cities would not impress or shock him at all. However, he had been wrong. Saleen could clearly see the outline of Alchemy City, even though he was dozens of miles away from it.
He did not see city walls. He did not see magic towers, either. The sight that greeted him was a vast urban network of towering buildings.
Left with only five miles to the city, Saleen utilized his icy sight to get a better look at the magic tower located just outside the city borders. However, the buildings inside the city were far taller than the magic towers.
Just what kind of buildings are they? They’re even taller than a ten story magic tower! Saleen thought, bewildered. He did not even need his special powers to know that most of these buildings were taller and bigger than the main gates of the imperial palace. He vaguely remembered reading a book about the holy church in the glorious city being the Myers Mainland’s tallest building. However, upon seeing the buildings in Alchemy City, he began to doubt the book’s claims.
People who did not know better might have thought that Alchemy City had no walls. However, that was not the case. The walls had been designed to suit the styles of different parts of the castle. Hence, they were not uniform. The walls were rugged, although pleasing to the eye. To further enhance the artistic beauty of the walls, the designers had even included sculptures to them. Not only were they beautiful, but they were also practical. Fully trained swordmasters no longer needed to use ladders to climb over the walls anymore. They could simply consider scaling the wall as a rock-climbing activity.
Most castles like this were built out of low-quality magical materials. However, no matter how inferior these materials were, they could still be used to construct magic towers. The walls of the castle – the sculpted areas and magical patterns – were not painted on, nor had they been artificially colored by other means. These features had been solely determined by the natural colors and textures of the stones themselves.
The main gates leading to Alchemy City did not appear to be average city gates to Saleen.
At the end of the road leading into the city were two tall statues standing as if they were waiting for a person’s arrival. They were so tall, standing eighty meters high, that a person would get vertigo trying to gaze up at them. They looked eerily lifelike, and were clad in animal skin clothing. Their eyes were designed such that they looked downwards. One of them even had a sword in its hand.
As soon as Saleen saw a third eye on the forehead of the statue, he realized that the statue was actually an homage to three-eyed giants.
The giant dimension had vanished long ago. Unlike the death dimension, where there were living, breathing creatures that could be summoned by necromancers, the giant dimension was nothing but a myth. It was a legend told in folklore.
Beneath the sword lay a statue of a giant dragon’s head. Besides fulfilling its function as a decoration, the dragon head statue was also the main gate leading into Alchemy City. All of a sudden, Saleen felt a gust of power surge through him.
He had seen giant dragons in real life. Yet, the amount of power radiating from this dragon head statue rivalled that of a real-life dragon.
The design of this main gate had definitely been inspired by the only Myers-based mythological folklore. The event had supposedly taken place thirty thousand years ago.
The gods had their eyes on the Myers Mainland for a long time due to its abundance of fertile land. In order to obtain it, they started a war between dimensions. Humans, along with hundreds of creatures from different dimensions, fought against the gods for the right to rule Myers Mainland.
The three most fearless tribes under the command of the humans were the devil tribe, the dragon tribe, and the giant tribe. When the gods were forced to retreat, all seemed lost for them as they prepared to give up the portal that allowed them to travel to different dimensions. However, it was a frail-looking runt-like god that managed to tempt one of the most important figures of the dragon tribe. This caused at least half of the giant dragons to betray the humans.
Rumors spread like wildfire. In no time at all, almost all of the magical creatures from different dimensions came to a consensus. All magical beings that existed in the human dimension had to be eliminated. This sparked many wars and even more rumors, the stories becoming even more distorted each time they were told. Despite having sewn discord amongst the humans and magical creatures, the gods had still lost the right to rule the Myers Mainland. However, it was because of this that the humans allegedly severed all ties with their best companions – the giant tribe.
The giants had expressed their disappointment over these wars time and time again, hoping that humans could at least make peace with the gods. They felt that wars were unnecessary and almost always implicated the innocent. After helping mankind slaughter the dragons who had betrayed them, they disappeared. Legend had it that they broke through the physical limitations of the magical dimension and travelled on to another world – one that was much larger than their homeland.
No one really remembered what happened after that, but one could probably imagine how chaotic it must have been and the amount of mayhem and pandemonium that must have arisen because of these wars. The only thing that people could remember was the emergence of a new god – Myers.
The Myers Goddess did not care if nobody believed in her. She bestowed gifts upon everyone, regardless of whether or not they were loyal followers. A shrine was erected in her honor to thank her for cleaning up the mess left behind after the war between dimensions.
Saleen did not know whether the events that had occurred thirty thousand years ago were real. What he did know was that these legends would never be recorded in history books. Even if they were, these books would be impossible to find. The Holy See had previously raided three-fourths of the Myers Mainland in order to locate these books and burn them.
For the past one thousand years, aside from being referenced in several written recordings, this story had been passed on solely through the wandering poets of the Qin Empire.
Writing these words on paper was highly disrespectful to the Lord of Glory. Gods loved humans. Why would they start a war? Moreover, since history had been covered up for so long, some people did not even believe in this story anymore and dismissed it as a mere myth. They just could not bring themselves to believe that they had such a glorious history.
The main gates of Alchemy City had definitely been inspired by this legend. No one from the Holy See would fail to understand the message behind the design. Even without constructing ten story magic towers to prove that they believed in magic more than god, this design alone had done a good job sending a message that mages would never believe in god.
The dragon’s claw was over twenty meters in height. The giant dragon’s mouth was open, and a magic array was carved onto six unevenly sculpted dragon teeth. There was no need for the gates in the first place. The magic array could simply attack anyone who wished to enter Alchemy City. Saleen started feeling a little dizzy again. He started counting the number of magic arrays and concluded that there were twelve of them. While doing so, he felt his mental power rapidly slipping away, almost as though a vacuum were sucking it out of his body.
Saleen even had suspicions that the two eighty meter tall statues were also weapons of mass destruction. However, he just could not figure out the magical artifacts needed to power them up.
Saleen had been deeply affected by these sculptures. He thought, Why do humans choose to forget their glorious past? Why is it that mages pursue the truth in order to progress, despite how hard it is for them to do as well?”
Many people might have felt that mages were eccentric and unapproachable. Even the mages who served royal families or noblemen found it hard to strike up simple conversations with the people around them. However, Saleen knew that it was not as though they thought they were above everyone else. It was simply that their worldviews were vastly different from those of common folk.
What kind of normal person would think about events that could potentially occur centuries from now? Did humans ever think about the chemical compounds present in the food that they ate? They did not even bother trying to count the number of bones in their bodies. Most importantly, they did not bother trying to understand why mages were always far stronger and superior to them.
More and more human beings were only concerned about the present. They had lost their desire for knowledge. Many mages actually felt sorry for common folk. Even humans who wanted to become mage apprentices did so in order to make a living using those skills.
The prospects for a mage apprentice were huge. Some people only became mage apprentices in order to master recollection magic. From there, they would go on to become one of the most successful accountants in the world of business.
The Myers Mainland had a population of more than one billion people. Yet, mages took up less than one percent of the population’s demographics. Moreover, most of them were concentrated in the Qin country. Even with Lex’s best efforts, she had been fairly unsuccessful in getting junior mages and apprentices to relocate to other cities. In a span of one decade, she had only managed to relocate slightly over ten thousand of them to the Bitter Water Prefecture.
A large percentage of these ten thousand people were mage apprentices. There were only a little more than one thousand junior mages. These one thousand junior mages took up less than one percent of the entirety of the Myers Mainland’s population.
The reason for the existence of Alchemy City suddenly dawned on Saleen. This city had been constructed by mages as a symbol of hope. Every mage that entered the city would see those sculptures, and recall the glorious years that humans had once lived.
Alchemy City had no guards and the doors leading into the city were never shut. There was no such thing as the collection of entry tax either. The roads seemed narrower than the roads back in Holy Rock City. The road designs were not done to pay homage to the royal family. They were designed to accommodate the unusually small size of the carriages that travelled in and out of Alchemy City.
There were many archmages here. The spatial equipment in Alchemy City was expensive, and frankly, not worth purchasing. No one really needed a carriage the size of an empire to store these low-grade wooden boxes.
The roads in the city were windy. The mages there did not need any cavalry. Instead, they had a variety of puppets to play with. Plus, no one dared to attack Alchemy City. Saleen had seen more than a hundred magic towers outside the city alone. However, he had not seen the nine nine story magic towers as told in the legends and myths. These nine towers were supposedly located to the east of the city, and were positioned in such a way that they were facing the sea.
Alchemy City had thousands of years of history. The lifespan of a grade-9 sorcerer far exceeded that of an ordinary mage. Out of the hundreds of magic towers that were situated inside and outside of the city, at least half of them belonged to mages that were already deceased. Nobody would enter these towers ever again. Thus, these towers would end up becoming their eternal resting places.
The paved roads in Alchemy City had no gaps. All the rocks that had been used had been sealed tightly using alchemy. Nothing could pass through once they had been fused together. These roads would be maintained every year. The reason why these roads had wear and tear in the first place was due to the overwhelming number of mage apprentices and junior mages.
The shockingly big buildings were found almost everywhere in the city. Saleen even spotted a tower constructed using metallic bones. The walls were decorated with crystals. Even if these crystals looked like scraps, they were still far too valuable to be bought using gold coins. Everything in Alchemy City was expensive. In Alchemy City, gold coins would only get you items of inferior quality, like low-grade magic nuclei.
Upon seeing a war horse puppet lying in the streets, Saleen immediately took it for a spin. The windows of the houses Saleen passed by were all decorated with crystals. The disposed crystals did not make up a huge portion of the decorations used. However, the amount of glass used to make these windows was enormous. Saleen even spotted a shop that had a five meter tall window. That in itself was equivalent to one story.
What a wealthy and invincible city! Saleen’s instincts started to kick in. He felt that even with a magic calculator, there was no way to tell how much Alchemy City was worth.
“Hi, do you need any help?” A man in his mid-fifties asked as he walked towards Saleen. He was wearing an outfit that matched the style of a mage apprentice.