Wizard: Starting from the Skill Tree-Chapter 613: Stone

A brief stalemate was broken by an impatient male voice: "I’ll go scout ahead, this damned place looks sinister. The sooner we understand the situation, the sooner we can act!"

The speaker was a guy dressed in brown leather armor, with two short-handled war axes hanging from his waist, looking like someone who dabbled in both wizardry and knighthood.

He was evidently quite confident in his skills and didn’t want to waste time here; before he finished speaking, he swiftly moved forward towards a relatively open, rocky slope with agile movements.

The other three, including a witch holding a magic wand with faint green vine shadows entwining around her, a young warlock dressed in a lavish robe with an arrogant expression, and a skinny man crouching on the ground quickly sketching probing runes with his fingers, merely watched coldly or continued their investigation, neither stopping him nor following.

The Duke also remained still, but his Eye of Darkness had silently activated, with shadow perception spreading out while his spiritual power was highly focused, alert to any anomalies. 𝗳𝐫𝚎𝗲𝚠𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝘃𝚎𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝗺

This place felt very off to him, and the premature actions of the one who moved first seemed unwise in his view.

The speed of the man in the brown leather armor was very fast, with a few strides he had charged nearly a hundred meters, appearing about to cross a seemingly unremarkable gray-white stone slab half-buried in the ground...

Just as his right foot was about to step over the stone, it seemed to come alive, with an oily, multicolored bizarre sheen flashing across its surface.

The man’s running figure suddenly stumbled, as if an invisible force had tugged hard at his ankle, or like he stepped onto a block of ice smeared with super lubricant.

"What?!" He barely managed to let out a short gasp of surprise before losing his balance and tumbling forward heavily, in a posture far from his agile capabilities.

Falling over should have been harmless to a Level 1 Mage; he could even adjust his pose before hitting the ground.

However, a frightening scene unfolded.

As his body touched the gray-brown sandy earth, there was no sound of impact, no dust cloud.

His body, along with the leather armor and war axes, melted away like a snowman in the scorching sun, like water droplets in a boiling oil pot, silently and swiftly, under the horrified watch of everyone.

Flesh, bones, clothes, metal... all transformed within a fraction of a second upon contact with the ground into a pool of dense, dark red, lightly bubbling thick blood water, then quickly seeped into the sandy soil, disappearing, leaving only a slightly darker trace and an air filled with a bizarre mix of sickly sweet and rusty smell.

The whole process was so fast it left no time to react.

Death-like silence enveloped the remaining four.

The witch holding the vine wand turned pale, instinctively stepping back half a step, the vine shadows around her trembling violently.

The arrogant young warlock’s pupils shrank, as his arrogance was replaced by fear.

The fingers of the skinny man crouching on the ground froze in mid-air, the glow of the probing rune flickered uncertainly.

The Duke’s breath also slightly halted, his gaze sharp as a knife, staring at the now ordinary gray-white stone slab and the seemingly innocent sandy ground surrounding it.

"A normal Level 1 Mage should never be tripped by a stone..."

The warning bells in his heart rang loudly; the weird and lethal scene far exceeded ordinary traps or magic.

That stone, or the patch of land, contained some kind of bizarre, instant-death power.

The gruesome melting of the man in brown leather armor felt like a cold steel needle piercing the remnants of any carelessness or fluke in the minds of the remaining four.

The sweet, rotten smell permeated the air, making the desolate forest even more eerie and unpredictable.

The Duke’s heartbeat quickened slightly, but his gaze grew more calm and icy.

Unlike the other three who merely showed fear or stood frozen, he immediately pushed his perception ability to the limits allowed by the current environment.

The sharp perception ability granted by the Eye of Darkness swept across the sand that had swallowed life and the gray-white slab that triggered the catastrophe.

To the naked eye, they seemed indistinguishable from the surrounding environment, even the mottled marks on the stone appeared so natural.

Yet, the Duke’s shadow perception detected a subtle, almost environment-blending residue of negative energy lingering in the area, carrying a silence that unsettled the soul.

However, the most crucial hint came not from the darkness and shadow, but from the earth beneath.

The Duke’s High-Level Earth Element Affinity Talent Ability revealed itself; his Earth Element Perception Ability, like plant roots, cautiously probed the ground below and the area ahead.

Ordinary wizards’ perception of the earth element might only identify the soil’s texture, density, or detect obvious earth vein energy fluctuations.

But under the Duke’s high affinity perception, the earth element seemed to have more subtle emotions and states.

In the normal surrounding area, the earth element activity was uniform, deep, and steady, like the slow breathing of a sleeping giant beast.

However, in the sandy area ahead, especially around the central gray-white strange stone, the earth element activity showed bizarre gaps and inertness.

The feeling was like a lively forest suddenly had a patch drained of all sound and life signs, leaving only an absolutely silent blank area.

Normal, lively earth elements flowed there, like streams into a fathomless dark pool without ripples, becoming stagnant, cold, and carrying a hungry inertia.

That strange stone was the core and most dangerous anchor point of this inertness zone.

"It’s not merely a spell trap... more like the land itself or some curse attached to the land and rocks being triggered." The Duke quickly deduced, "High-Level Earth Element Affinity can sense this anomalous inert zone, but without this kind of affinity, or without being cautious enough, it’s extremely difficult to detect early. That guy didn’t die unjustly."

It seems the difficulty of this competition is higher than expected; initially thought being all Level 1 Mages wouldn’t present much challenge.

But now, it seems the difficulty of the competition lies not just from other contenders but also from the competition site itself.

Exploration was completed in the blink of an eye as the Duke nonchalantly withdrew his perception, while his body had slightly adjusted position, shifting his center of gravity backward, completely dismissing any notion of approaching or passing through that direction.

His gaze swiftly surveyed the surrounding paths available, the left side featuring denser, increasingly twisted and sinister gray-white stone forest interspersed with iron-leaf shrubs, seriously obstructing view, with too high an unknown risk.