The main entrance of the Logistics Hall appeared at the end of his vision.
Ethan pushed the door open and walked in. The hall was as bustling as ever, filled with a cacophony of buzzing conversations and footsteps.
There were still lines of various lengths, with apprentices queued up in crooked, messy rows.
The black stone tablets were still scrolling to display the exchange prices of supplies, their faint light flickering.
Ethan swept his gaze across the room, looking past those anxious faces, and let his eyes fall on the exclusive Wizard windows on the left.
The queues in front of the apprentice windows were incredibly long, but three of the Wizard windows were empty and deserted.
He walked over and chose the one on the far left.
Behind the window sat a middle-aged witch with graying hair. Wearing a dark gray robe, she was looking down and flipping through a thick ledger, the pages rustling softly.
Hearing footsteps, she looked up, her sharp gaze sweeping over Ethan.
“What are you processing?”
Ethan retrieved his identity plaque and the blood-colored crystal from his storage ring, placing them on the counter.
“Collecting magic crystals.”
The middle-aged witch's eyes fell on the blood-colored crystal, and her pupils contracted instantly.
She snapped her head up, took a deep breath, and picked up the crystal, turning it over to examine it twice.
“Please wait a moment.”
She turned around and called out toward the booth behind her, “Team Leader!”
The sound of a chair scraping came from the booth, and a tall, thin male wizard poked his head out.
His eyes fell on the blood-colored crystal, and his expression mirrored the witch's exactly.
“This is...”
“It's Dean Blood Fury's.”
The tall, thin wizard walked out of the booth and picked up the crystal to inspect it closely. A few seconds later, he set it down, fished out a palm-sized black stone tablet from under the counter, and pressed the crystal into the groove of the tablet. Dark red lines lit up on the surface of the stone.
“Step one of verification: Identity confirmation.” The tall, thin wizard looked up at Ethan. “Identity plaque.”
Ethan slid his identity plaque over. The wizard pressed it into another groove, and Ethan's basic information appeared on the stone tablet.
He looked down at it and swiped his finger across the stone tablet.
“Step two of verification: Mental power fluctuation matching.”
The dark red lines on the surface of the stone began to flash, lighting up in sequence from the edges toward the center.
“Step three of verification: Mana frequency calibration.”
The flashing lines turned dark gold.
“Step four of verification: Soul imprint confirmation.”
The dark gold turned emerald green.
More and more people began to gather behind the window.
Three wizards on duty set down their work and approached. Two poked their heads out of their booths, while another simply walked around from the adjacent window to stand behind the tall, thin wizard, craning his neck to watch.
The middle-aged witch closed her ledger and stood up, stepping aside.
The light on the stone tablet shifted repeatedly. Emerald green turned to deep blue, deep blue to dark purple, and dark purple to silver-white.
With each verification step passed, another ring of runic lines would light up around the edge of the stone tablet.
When it reached the thirteenth verification step, the stone tablet suddenly went dark.
All the light contracted and condensed in the exact same instant, gathering into a fist-sized silver point of light at the center of the stone tablet.
The point of light burst, transforming into a short line of text.
【Verification passed. Authorization confirmed. Permit to withdraw one million magic crystals.】
The tall, thin wizard let out a long breath.
He pulled out a dark silver ring from under the counter. “This is your storage ring. Your magic crystals are inside. Only your identity plaque can open the restriction on the ring. The ring is yours as well.”
Ethan took the ring and pulled his identity plaque out of the groove.
He pressed the identity plaque against the runic lines on the ring's surface, sending his mental power inside.
The moment the restriction dissolved, the space inside the ring expanded in his consciousness.
Magic crystals.
Piles of magic crystals.
One million magic crystals were neatly stacked in the ring's space, piled high like a small mountain.
Ethan withdrew his mental power and slipped the ring onto his left index finger.
“No problems.”
The middle-aged witch's expression relaxed.
The tall, thin wizard wiped the sweat from his forehead, pulled out another stone tablet from under the counter, and quickly swiped a few lines of characters onto it.
“The withdrawal confirmation is complete.” He looked up. “Do you need anything else?”
“I want to build a Wizard Tower.”
The tall, thin wizard's finger paused on the stone tablet.
“A Wizard Tower?” He flipped the stone tablet over and swiped it. “Ah, you've just advanced and haven't built a Wizard Tower yet, right? For that, you need to go to the Map Room. Please follow me.”
He pushed open the barrier on the side of the counter, stepped out from behind the window, and walked toward the east side of the hall.
Ethan followed behind him, passing through several rows of exchange windows, bypassing the corridor that led to the assembly point, and turning into a hallway he had never walked before.
The hallway was not long, ending at a heavy stone door.
The wizard fished out his identity plaque from his waist and pressed it into the groove on the doorframe. The stone door slid open silently.
The room was not large, about fifty square meters.
Standing in the center of the room was a massive, sandbox-like map, occupying two-thirds of the room's space.
The map was polished from a kind of dark gray stone, with extremely faint patterns of energy light flowing across its surface.
The locations of all the buildings in Blood Bone Tower were densely marked on the map.
The Teaching Area, Logistics Area, Enforcement Department, Academic Department, Dormitory Area, and Cultivation Area were each marked with different-colored points of light.
The points of light varied in brightness; they practically merged into solid blocks in densely populated areas, while they were scattered sparsely in others.
There were plenty of empty spots.
But good spots were few and far between.
He had to choose carefully.
Ethan's gaze slowly swept across the map.
On the far east side of the map, there was an open plot at the boundary between the Teaching Area and the Dormitory Area. The area was quite large, but it was surrounded by dense clusters of light. One could easily imagine how noisy and chaotic it would be.
Too noisy. Pass!
In the northwest corner of the map, near the Conquest Department's training ground, there were several open plots of even larger size.
But those battle-crazed lunatics from the Conquest Department caused a ruckus on the training ground all day, shaking the earth and making the ground rumble. That wouldn't do either.
Pass!
On the far south side of the map was a region marked as the “Undeveloped Area.”
This area was massive, with almost no points of light around it, save for a few scattered, independent markers along its borders.
Ethan leaned in for a closer look. Those markers were merely small laboratories and material warehouses. There was no Teaching Area, no training ground, and no teleportation array hub.
Remote. Quiet. Perfect!
He pointed to a location in the deepest part of that area.
“Here.”
The wizard glanced at it, then searched and confirmed on his stone tablet.
“No problem. The construction will take three months. During this time, all basic materials will be covered by the academy, with a basic quota of 100,000 magic crystals. If you have any additional needs, you can let me know.”
Ethan took out the pouch containing the one million magic crystals. “100,000 magic crystals is too basic. Let's go with the full million first. If my requirements are too difficult to meet, I'll add more. Any issues with that?”
The wizard accepted the pouch and took a glance inside. “No problem. Leave it to me.”
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