[Vol. 8] Chapter 182: The Source of Magic Power
Malcolm didn’t have time to argue with the impatient young people anymore. He quickly walked over to a white crystal that had grown straight out of the ground, mixed in with the surrounding rocks so well that it was hard to notice without close inspection. He squatted down, pulled out a few simple tools from his backpack, tools that didn’t need magic to work, and started examining the crystal nervously.
The more he tested, the more excited he looked. Even his long white beard began to tremble slightly, and his cloudy old eyes shone with uncontrollable excitement.
“Yes... Yes! It really is a magic crystal! And the purity, this little crystal contains so much power, even before refinement, it’s almost at fifth-tier level! This is it! The Source of Magic Power really exists, and it must be nearby!”
“What?! A fifth-tier magic crystal?!”
As soon as he said that, Rowan’s expression changed completely.
What did a fifth-tier magic crystal mean?
Even the lowest quality ones, those with no special properties, only usable for refining raw magic power, could sell for hundreds of thousands of Holy Light Coins, the most valuable currency in the world today. And if it had any extra effects, the price could easily reach millions. That kind of money was hard to imagine.
To give some perspective, even at a top-tier elite school like Frederick Royal Academy, which was famous for its expensive tuition, the total annual cost of tuition, food, and lodging was only a few hundred Holy Light Coins. Rowan came from a merchant family and considered his background fairly wealthy, but the most money he had ever seen at once was during year-end accounting, helping his father review nearly a million Lion Coins, which only converted to a little over 500,000 Holy Light Coins.
His family’s entire business revenue for a year couldn’t even buy one fifth-tier crystal.
And now, this crystal was just sticking out of the ground, like a treasure chest left wide open with no owner!
The sheer value of it made Rowan’s brain almost stop working.
But clearly, the others didn’t react the same way. They weren’t from business families and didn’t understand the true value of such luxury items. They weren’t nearly as shocked. One of the female students who had previously argued with the professor even asked curiously.
“Rowan, aren’t you overreacting a bit? So what exactly is a fifth-tier magic crystal worth? Is it like five first-tier crystals? Hmm... but if a second-tier one is worth about three first-tier ones by weight, then... fifteen? Twenty first-tier crystals maybe?”
“...?”
You couldn’t really blame them for being so clueless. Everyone here belonged to a group of people who had no real connection with magic or anything related to it. Unless they were part of a special department that received academy funding to research such things, normal students had zero chance of ever coming into contact with something like a magic crystal.
They were luxury goods. Even the most basic first-tier magic crystal was worth about a hundred Holy Light Coins. But to them, something so expensive was basically just a shiny decoration. Since they had no use for it, they never bothered learning much about it.
Rowan only knew the values because he occasionally helped his family with accounting. In fact, fifth-tier crystals were so rare they were considered legendary, even if you had the money, you probably couldn’t find one for sale. Most of the time, they were sold only through auctions.
Calling them world-class treasures wasn’t an exaggeration at all.
When the girl named Nidiel asked him that question, Rowan hesitated for a moment. But in the end, he didn’t answer. Instead, he quietly glanced over at the old professor, who was still crouched on the ground, fully focused on analyzing the magic crystal and completely ignoring the students around him.
The others might not know much, but as a well-known scholar at Frederick Royal Academy, Professor Malcolm definitely understood how valuable a fifth-tier magic crystal was. But it seemed like he didn’t care much about that. What really mattered to him was what the crystal represented, the truth behind the place known as the Source of Magic Power.
He truly deserved his reputation as a respected senior scholar.
Just the fact that he could treat money as something unimportant and focus only on the pursuit of knowledge was something Rowan admitted he could never do. No wonder Professor Malcolm had achieved so much in his career and had become one of the academy’s top figures, even though he wasn’t born into a noble family.
As Rowan silently admired the professor, he noticed the man didn’t say anything more. In the end, Rowan had no choice but to shake his head and give a vague answer like “I’m not sure” to brush off the others' questions.
The value of a fifth-tier magic crystal was just too high, so high that it could easily make a normal person go crazy. It could make people act out of greed and even do dangerous or reckless things. Even though his classmates all seemed decent so far, Rowan didn’t want to gamble on human nature.
How to divide the magic crystal was something they could think about later. Right now, the bigger problem was how to separate the crystal from the hard rock layer below with their limited tools. As scholars, the most important thing to understand first was what caused the formation of this crystal, the place the professor called the Source of Magic Power.
If just the leaking energy from that place could form a crystal worth millions of coins, then what would the inside of the Source look like if it really existed? What level of pure energy might be hidden there?
Sixth-tier? Even seventh-tier crystals?
Those were treasures so rare that even Rowan had only heard rumors. He had no idea how much they were even worth. If such crystals were found, the discovery would cause a huge shock around the world.
Thinking of this, Rowan couldn’t help but feel excited too. He looked around carefully.
The first thing he had to do was remember this place.
The Chaos Magic Valley was a dangerous and unusual place, but only for creatures that used magic. For normal people like them, moving around the valley was actually quite easy. The area looked like many other valleys, covered with green plants and home to wild animals, but only to animals that didn’t rely on magic to survive.
But the spot they were standing on now was the most unusual part of the entire valley. It was located at the very center and looked like a huge crater, as if something had smashed into it from above. The area was filled with broken rocks and animal bones, and there were no signs of life.
When their team first arrived, they had been very careful and stayed near the edge, but soon they found that the bones scattered around were probably from animals that had fallen in by accident. Because the hole was so deep, those animals couldn’t climb out without ropes or tools and likely starved to death. So in the end, this place wasn’t actually dangerous for them.
In fact, the size of the basin was truly massive. If it really was created by something crashing into the ground, then the object must have been several kilometers wide.
What kind of thing could have caused that?