Furan carefully examined the tattered book before her and cursed loudly several times on the spot:
"(Expletive), Lord of Radiance..."
"(Expletive) Lord of Radiance (Expletive)."
After she finished speaking, the book showed no reaction at all, and the air fell silent.
Furan raised an eyebrow, knowing the book had returned to the state it was in when she first got her hands on it.
The other party seemed largely unable to hear her speech and could only issue commands like this; it was possible that even transmitting information required careful deliberation over every word.
Otherwise, if the Lord of Radiance had clearly explained His situation from the beginning, Furan wouldn't have had such a bad impression of Him.
However, now that she was in the Material Realm, Furan had no intention of helping this Lord of Radiance find believers. In the Spirit Realm, it was because she needed the other party's help, but in the Material Realm, Furan had plenty of means to find others to assist her.
She tossed the book directly under the bed, clapped her hands, and then thought of something.
"Can I still use those Divine Arts?" A question arose in her mind, and she immediately began to try them out.
Her Divine Arts all originated from the Lord of Radiance. Although they were still on her Panel, Divine Arts were, by definition, bestowed by a god. If the god wasn't there, what were you supposed to cast?
She quickly gave it a try and discovered something unexpected.
Except for the Light-Praying Art, a Divine Art she could release in the Material Realm before, she could cast all the other Spells. However... the Divine Arts, including the Radiant Shield, had their consumption vastly increased, nearly doubling the original Spiritual Power cost.
The most terrifying among them was the Radiant Blessing. Casting it just once consumed half of her Spiritual Power, a cost dozens of times higher than before.
"I'll just treat it as an attribute boost then."
The massive increase in the cost of these skills made using these Divine Arts extremely inefficient. Furan already had techniques stronger than these, and now with the cost spike, the skills the Lord of Radiance gave her had become useless.
So she simply stopped using them, deciding to treat her training as a Radiant Priest as a way to boost her attributes.
Unless absolutely necessary, she actually had no desire to develop the Priest class.
"Next, I need to find a Tier One melee class."
Her current Mage class was nearly maxed out, and her Spiritual Power had long since surpassed that of an ordinary First-Order Mage, making further improvement difficult. To increase her combat power now, she needed to pick up a melee class.
"But just like the Formal Mage, Tier One melee classes are also secret treasures and are quite difficult to find."
She knew that the advancement methods for any Tier One class were basically hidden, held in the hands of major factions. If you weren't one of their own, you could forget about getting them.
"I'll take it slow. For now, I'll practice Spells and get a few of them to the extraordinary level to obtain the Tier One versions. In a few months, I'll go find Mentor Harbos."
She formulated her future practice plan, deciding to first practice Sword Dance and Earth Spike Technique—two Spells she had seen Tier One versions of in the future she witnessed—to get those two first.
---
Two months later, with about three months left until the Apprentice Assessment, it was also exactly one year since Furan had arrived in this world.
Furan knocked on the door of a peculiar building.
The building occupied a massive area, roughly the size of two football fields. The floor was about five meters high, and from the outside, there was no second story.
The exterior walls were entirely white without any patterns, except for a design of a casting hammer on the main door. Aside from that, it was very clean.
This was the exclusive workshop of Furan's mentor, Harbos. He had placed an order with the Construction School when he first arrived at Apprentice City, and it was only successfully delivered three months ago.
Furan had been busy practicing Spells to push her proficiency up, so this was her first time visiting Harbos's workshop.
Harbos, for his part, assumed Furan wanted to focus on researching her Spell creation, so he hadn't taken the initiative to look for her.
In Harbos's view, after learning the basics taught by a mentor, one should practice slowly on their own; that was how he had done it back in the Elemental School.
Furthermore, he already knew that Furan had successfully created a Spell and finished writing the textbook. All she needed was to secure a ranking in the Assessment to become a First-Order Mage.
He didn't interfere much. Much of the content could only be learned after becoming a First-Order Mage. Although there was plenty of time before the Assessment, learning it now would just lead to frustration.
Thus, aside from their frequent interactions during the first few months when they confirmed their mentor-student relationship, they hadn't seen each other for a while.
"Come in."
The door opened along with the voice, and Furan could hear the sound of gears turning and steam venting within that voice.
It seemed her mentor had also researched many mechanical things during this time, Furan thought to herself.
As the door opened, the first thing that met her eyes was a pile of massive machinery still operating rapidly on the floor. The air was extremely humid, and the entire workshop was filled with a thin white mist.
Furan watched in shock as huge pipes and massive wheels spun rapidly, gears interlocking tightly at certain points and rotating along with them.
There were many ventilation facilities in the workshop, but they were useless against these giants, still allowing the white mist to permeate the air.
"Isn't this just a scaled-up version of the steam engine I made?" she thought, looking at the massive horizontal equipment.
She had thought that the productivity of a Fourth-Tier Mage would be far faster than her hand-crafting during her apprentice days, but she hadn't expected it to be this fast.
The machinery occupied almost the area of three basketball courts, and on the remaining open ground, there were many piles of metal materials.
Harbos's figure was hidden behind the machinery. He flew down from the air and landed in front of Furan.
"Is there something you need?" Harbos inquired.
Furan extended one hand forward and performed an apprentice's salute before saying:
"Mentor, I have become a Formal Mage."
Harbos had still been in a daze from having his thoughts interrupted and hadn't immediately shifted his full attention to the conversation with Furan. He froze upon hearing her words.
"You've become a Formal Mage!!" Harbos's pupils constricted, his hands stopped in place, and he spoke in shock.
At the same time, the nearby machinery seemed to sense the shock. The entire mechanism suddenly stalled, and then a cacophony of metal colliding erupted.
Furan could hear the sound of gears spilling out from their fixed positions and clattering onto the ground, as well as the ear-piercing screech of a crossbar slipping against something.
"It's fine, I just didn't maintain my Spell properly. I'll fix it slowly later," Harbos explained to Furan.
For him, machinery was not his area of expertise. Even after studying it for a while, he often couldn't get the machines to run, so he used Spells to forcibly maintain their operation and would troubleshoot them later.
Immediately after, Harbos looked at Furan with a complex gaze.
"Now, let's talk about your situation."
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