Chapter Ninety-Seven: Spark the Revolution

Eve began studying and working at the same time.

She soon realized she had been tricked again. Linley had said he would help her, and in one respect he had: he taught her better ways to work, greatly improving her efficiency.

But beyond that, he had not helped her with the actual labor at all. Far from lightening her burden, he had made it heavier, since she now had to stay up late every night to study.

And that was not all. Rumors had begun spreading through the royal palace that she and Linley were sleeping together every night and the like.

Eve was furious. She wanted to confront Linley, but he dismissed her with a single sentence.

“Do you want me to help you with chores, or do you want me to help you study?”

Faced with that vast ocean of knowledge, Eve chose to yield. She longed to grow stronger. These recent experiences had made her realize just how weak she was. She wanted to absorb every useful piece of knowledge she could, so that no one would ever look down on her again.

In the days that followed, however, several royal mages came to help her with her work, easing a great deal of her pressure.

From them, Eve learned that Linley had sent them in his place.

As for why the mages had taken over Linley’s duties, the matter went back to the agreement between Linley and the king. When he agreed to merge the Night Elf Kingdom with the forest elves, Linley had made two demands.

The first was Sky Song, and the second was the right to use the Light Orb.

Cultivation had first been something Linley had devised entirely on his own. Only after he succeeded did the royal mages and the guardians follow in his footsteps. Linley’s abilities had all been researched for him by the Light Orb, and he admitted that he knew nothing at all about spellcraft. The Light Orb’s research had saved him a great deal of trouble.

But after this incident, Linley realized that cultivation was far too hollow. He intended to start over from the beginning and do the programming himself.

The reason he had not done so before was that the mages had forbidden him from using the Light Orb.

Over the course of three years, Linley had written two programs. But after reviewing them, the mages all felt that the programs were far too complicated, and since they could not be certain no mishaps would occur, they never entered the programs into the Light Orb.

The Light Orb was an essential tool of the forest elves. It stored vast and intricate data, and any problem could easily lead to chaos. In the name of data security, the mages had banned Linley from using it, but that also infuriated him. After that, he had not programmed again.

This time, the king allowed Linley to use the Light Orb, and Linley was eager to begin. No one had foreseen, however, that his very first idea would be to overhaul the Light Orb’s operating system.

That nearly scared everyone senseless. The royal mages’ purpose in coming this time was partly to escort Sky Song, and partly to stop Linley.

“Your Highness, the Guardian is not complete enough right now. Its system can’t withstand your tinkering,” the mages pleaded with Linley for days on end, trying to persuade him to abandon the plan.

But Linley was unmoved. “If cultivation is to succeed, then altering the teacher’s system is inevitable. It hasn’t been updated in so long that it’s grown dull. At the rate it works, it would take decades to produce anything worthwhile.”

He had waited three years. The best programmer in this world was himself, so why not let him do it?

“Your Highness, what exactly can’t the Guardian satisfy for you?” the mages asked in complete bewilderment. “Why go to all this trouble?”

No matter how one looked at it, to begin by saying he wanted to modify the Guardian was simply too outrageous.

“Its cultivation techniques are no good,” Linley said.

The Guardian was indeed formidable. It searched spells for useful elements and then adapted them into cultivation programs. That approach was workable.

But after all, the Guardian was a magical weapon. Its calculations came from the magical system, and all of its subsystems had been created for spells.

The cultivation techniques transformed by the Guardian still retained a strong magical flavor, and they were extremely rigid. In truth, they were not well suited to cultivators, and Linley always found them strangely awkward to use.

He wanted to upgrade the Guardian’s system and transform it into one that could better support cultivation programs, breaking it free from magical thinking, eliminating its rigidity, and allowing cultivation to be studied at an entirely new level.

After three years of exploring cultivation, Linley had a rough idea of what kind of system would meet those requirements.

No matter how hard the royal mages tried, they could not persuade him, and Linley could not persuade them either. After several days of debate, Twin Moon City arrived at a solution: retrieve one of the Guardian’s other components.

The Guardian had several scattered parts, and those parts each contained an independent system. If they could recover even one of them, they could use that part for the system overhaul.

The king promised he would find a way to recover one of the Guardian’s components, but in the meantime, Linley had to prepare the system in advance.

How difficult it was to create a new system from scratch. Linley did not begin from nothing. Instead, after obtaining data from the Guardian, he started modifying and upgrading the system. Some of the royal mages helped him at his side, while others helped Eve handle the Night Elf affairs.

Because of this, Eve was not as angry with Linley as before.

Still, she could not understand his priorities.

“Is the system really that important?”

Late at night in the library, Eve asked Linley, “Why not wait a few more years before doing it?”

Linley was bent over the desk, writing in ancient script. At her words, he paused his pen. “The teacher’s magic is too heavily biased. Without a brand-new system, cultivation can never truly be put into practice.”

The reason he wanted to build a completely new system was that he had discovered just how empty the cultivation framework really was—so empty that he could not even tell what his true strength was.

“I want to create a system, not just for the teacher. A system that can guide every cultivator.”

That was Linley’s answer. He wanted to start from the true foundation, first constructing a cultivation framework independent of magic, with clearly defined levels of strength, and then slowly building the theory of cultivation piece by piece.

It might be a very long task, and the beginning would matter most.

“This is also the best way to make the Night Elves and the forest elves merge quickly.”

Linley had another layer of reasoning as well. Nothing changes a nation faster than a technological revolution.

He intended to launch a top-down cultivation revolution. The system would be the cornerstone upon which cultivation theory was born, and it would be refined gradually in the future. If that system could include the Night Elves as well, and both races accepted cultivation together, the sense of identity and belonging it would give the people would surely take effect far faster than any treaty.

“But...” Eve was still a little worried. “Is cultivation really suited to our world?”

She had seen Linley’s dreams and had already come to believe in cultivation. But the problem was that the civilization there was too different from this world. It was hard to imagine Linley simply transplanting it here.

“I’m not going to create the kind of cultivation you’ve heard about.”

Linley lowered his head and looked at the draft on the paper, anticipation flickering in his eyes. “This is a brand-new way of using energy. It is the cultivation of our world.”

He had already boarded the ship bound to cultivation, and now he could no longer get off even if he wanted to.

Linley did not possess enough knowledge to spark a technological revolution in this world. He had made up his mind to study cultivation seriously. What this system would ultimately become, he himself did not truly know, but he did know one thing.

At the very least, it would make the elves stronger than they were now.