Chapter 325 – Peak Sorceress

Compared to Magic primarily focused on attack and defense functions, combining auxiliary Magic from different schools was far more difficult and complex.

Only the combinations of water and ice, and water and lightning, achieved a one-plus-one-greater-than-two effect, producing several decent cards.

For example, the Mist Technique combined with Electric Net produced a card similar to the Greengrass Plains’ Night of Thunder—{Rain Lightning Field}—and the Water Prison Spell combined with Flash Freeze created the {Frozen Seal Card}.

When combined, the card effects were much better than the individual spells alone.

Other Magic combinations, however, yielded less impressive results.

For instance, the Water Mirror Technique combined with the Origin-Tracing Spell produced a {Scrying Mirror}, which merely displayed the results of origin-tracing on a water mirror so that others could see them too.

That could only be considered a simple merging of both effects, with no synergistic enhancement between them.

Lost in card-making, Mo Lan combed through every spell she knew again and again, until she could no longer design a single worthwhile new card. Only then did she stop.

With no more inspiration for card-making, it was time to further expand her knowledge reserves and magical abilities.

It just so happened that she had nearly finished reading all the books she had transcribed from the Third-Year Reading Room into her Grimoire.

Setting aside the knowledge-based books—once read, every single word was committed to her memory without exception.

She had read and memorized all the Intermediate and Advanced stage spell books in the reading room, but her actual Magic proficiency levels still had a long way to go.

Currently, aside from Summoning Magic—which had no inherent level since its strength was determined by the summoned creature—all her other schools of Magic had fully broken through to Beginner level.

Among them, elemental and Spatial Magic stood out the most, having fully broken through to Intermediate level. A few individual spells like Metal Detection spell and Mining Magic had even reached Advanced proficiency.

During this period, she had released quite a few new cards. The card shop had suddenly expanded by dozens of pages, and card sales had increased considerably, earning her a substantial amount of disposable Mana.

However, sales of Card Magic itself grew slowly. More than two years—nearly three—had passed since she first put Card Magic on sale, and the total number of witches who had purchased her Card Magic had only just reached eight hundred.

Of those, over two hundred were young witches from the Academy.

Of course, this was partly because she was still underage, and the Witch Council hadn’t done much to promote it.

This was already the combined total of young witches in the Academy, witches who had lived in Witch’s Town in recent years, and those at the Witch Council Library.

By now, her Contract Mailbox might go ten days to half a month without receiving a single new contract.

Fortunately, thanks to the permanent Mana income from Gem Coin storage limits and card storage limits, Mo Lan’s total Mana had steadily broken through five thousand. Only after that milestone did growth truly slow to a crawl.

Mo Lan glanced at the Mana column on her Status Card.

【Mana: 3,215 / 5,890 Mana】

Recently, her Mana growth had been basically relying on natural accumulation.

Fortunately, as her magical abilities improved and her body matured, her Mana growth rate had also increased slightly.

She wasn’t far from 6,000 Mana now.

On the Continent of Valen, all extraordinary beings had their ranks calculated based on the energy they possessed.

In the past, when angel force, demon force, and dragon force reigned supreme, everyone used the units of those three—Starglow, Obsidian, and Wingclaw—as standard units for conversion.

After the Well of the Sky opened, Mana became supreme, and the continent unified under the Mana unit for calculating energy ranks.

Below 100 Mana was Apprentice level, reaching 100 Mana was Beginner, reaching 500 Mana was Intermediate, reaching 1,000 Mana was Advanced, and reaching 5,000 Mana was Peak level.

With her current total of 5,890 Mana, Mo Lan could already be considered a Peak level witch in terms of Mana alone.

Beyond that, Mo Lan only knew that reaching a total Mana of ten thousand qualified one as Beyond Peak level.

At Beyond Peak level, one could reach the Well of the Sky and explore other worlds.

Peak level was already considered the apex of strength visible on the Continent of Valen. Beyond Peak level powerhouses had mostly gone to the Well of the Sky and were rarely seen.

Mo Lan was only seventeen years old—still underage among witches—yet her Mana had already reached Peak level.

Many witches needed to accumulate for over a hundred years before their magical power could reach this level.

Compared to witches, who were a bloodline-dependent extraordinary race, human mage prodigies actually grew faster.

But for someone like Mo Lan, reaching Peak level Mana before even coming of age was virtually unheard of.

Being able to rapidly increase Mana through Sorceress Magic—that was the formidable advantage of being a Sorceress.

Of course, reaching Peak level in Mana rank didn’t mean her actual combat strength was at Peak level.

Mana rank was the foundation for practicing Magic, but Magic proficiency level was what truly determined one’s strength.

Magic proficiency could never exceed one’s Mana rank, but having only Mana rank without Magic proficiency was like sitting on an ammunition depot without a single weapon—you might not even beat someone with just one bullet and a pistol.

However, now that her Mana had reached Peak level, she could also upgrade her Grimoire and Golden Pen Technique to Peak level.

Peak level Golden Pen Technique could sign Peak level Sorceress Contracts, and a Peak level Grimoire would expand the Grimoire’s book capacity to one million volumes.

But after the Grimoire’s capacity expanded, she would still need to prepare the corresponding paper before she could transcribe books.

Originally it had been one hundred thousand pages. Now at one million pages, she needed at least nine hundred thousand sheets of paper—preferably parchment—to fill all the blank pages in the book.

Mo Lan simply crafted nine {Parchment Cards}, each containing one hundred thousand sheets of parchment the same size as her Grimoire’s pages.

After materializing them, she began attuning the stacks one batch at a time.

The {Parchment Card} was also on Lady Amisha’s restricted purchase list.

No young witch who hadn’t graduated could buy them.

No wonder that even though the Academy Library was fully opened to young witches starting in fourth year, not a single young witch could transcribe the entire library’s spell books by graduation! Just preparing the paper for transcription was trouble enough.

Finding materials, washing, polishing, cutting, trimming—it was endlessly tedious.

And buying them after graduation? One might not have enough money for that either.

Even in her card shop, the high-capacity {Parchment Cards} weren’t cheap.

The free Gem Coin storage limit wasn’t large, so one had to save up bit by bit to accumulate enough money for paper.

So most of the time, young witches could only choose to transcribe the important spell books first and set the rest aside.

Mo Lan had no such worries.

Never mind the fact that she remembered every book she’d ever read—she could free up vast amounts of blank pages in her Grimoire, and this parchment was something she could produce at will using the Book of Cards.

The card-making energy it consumed was negligible compared to the disposable Mana she earned from Card Magic.

The only thing that cost her some time was attuning all that paper.

Fortunately, with her abundant Mana now, her attuning ability had greatly strengthened, and she could attune a large stack of paper at once.