Star Trace

In the end, that damned old professor had never told Mo Fan what the actual conditions for special recruitment were.

Following the address provided by Bo City's resettlement office, Mo Fan's family finally tracked down their assigned housing.

Around a thousand evacuees had been settled here in total — just enough to fill one residential compound.

At first glance, the place looked clean and reasonably comfortable, but the entire construction had been cut-cornered from the start. The floor-to-ceiling heights were absurdly low; living there felt like being stuffed into a slightly oversized box. Oppressive was putting it mildly.

As Mo Jiaxing put it, having a roof over their heads was already something to be grateful for — so Mo Fan couldn't really complain.

Because of Xinxia's condition, the housing committee had arranged for them to be on the ground floor. Mo Fan had imagined that arriving in Magic City Shanghai would mean soaring skyscrapers and a city bursting with color — but one glance at the compound's surroundings killed that fantasy dead. *Damn, this place is even more barren than Bo City. Post-disaster Bo City, at that.*

This was the outer suburbs of Shanghai. The very outer suburbs. According to the neighbors who had already moved in, all it took was a twenty-minute bus ride to reach the nearest subway station — and then just another hour and a half on the subway before you could actually see the city proper...

Which meant two hours to get there, and two hours to get back.

*Son of a —* if he had any money left, Mo Fan would have packed his bags and walked out that same day. How had he ever trusted the government to put them somewhere livable? This godforsaken place wasn't even as good as Bo City had been.

Money. He needed money, and fast. He was an Intermediate-Level Mage, after all — income should come quickly enough. Earn enough to move out; renting somewhere decent in the city beat rotting in this desolate Shanghai suburb. He was half-convinced Demon-Beasts would come crawling out here past midnight.

Mo Jiaxing, ever adaptable, had already found work at near-supernatural speed — returning to his old trade as a driver.

Xinxia, meanwhile, had decided against enrolling in school. There was almost certainly no magic school anywhere nearby in these outer suburbs, and commuting to the city was wildly impractical. She planned to study on her own at home and sit the Magic College Entrance Examination next year.

Healing Element Mages were in fierce demand at hospitals throughout the country, of course — but Mo Fan had no desire to push Xinxia into the working world so early. Given her situation, a peaceful campus was far more suitable.

Mo Jiaxing threw himself into his new job. Xinxia settled into self-study and Meditation at home. Both of them seemed to have adapted with ease.

Mo Fan wasn't idle either. Their money wasn't much, but it was enough to sustain their modest lifestyle — barely. The idea of moving somewhere better on a hundred thousand yuan, however, was pure delusion. Worse still, that hundred thousand was already earmarked: Mo Fan had to spend it on Star Traces.

Star Traces were critically important to him. Within his magical Star Nebula, there were exactly forty-nine Star Motes in total.

Previously, he had only needed to link seven Star Motes together to Release a Basic-Level spell.

But Intermediate-Level magic was incomparably harder — by a margin that defied easy description.

First, he had to link the Star Motes into specific Star Trails. Then those Star Trails had to be connected to one another, forming a complete Star Chart. Only by completing that full Star Chart could the door to Intermediate-Level magic be opened, and an Intermediate-Level spell truly summoned.

For a Mage who had only just stepped into the Intermediate Level, flawlessly linking all forty-nine Star Motes from the very beginning was pure fantasy. On one hand, there was simply no way to memorize the precise pattern of the Star Chart. On the other, no one could maintain that degree of intense mental focus for that long.

A Star Trace was a type of magical scroll, and its function was somewhat similar to the Star Chart Books that Teacher Tang Yue had given Mo Fan.

Unlike a Star Chart Book — which directly linked all Star Motes in a single complete connection — a Star Trace was more like... imagine comparing a Star Chart to a Chinese character with dozens of strokes written in a complex sequence. A Star Trace, then, was like a calligraphy copybook for each individual radical and stroke.

Mages who had just entered the Intermediate Level desperately needed Star Traces to guide and discipline the formation process. Without them, any pattern they managed to scrape together would be scrambled nonsense — and you couldn't cast magic from nonsense.

One Star Trace: fifty thousand yuan.

Mo Fan needed two in total — one for Fire Element and one for Lightning Element.

In other words, every last yuan he had scraped together through blood and effort with the Demon-Hunting Squad would vanish in a single shot, blown entirely on these wretched magical copybooks.

At the Basic-Level Mage stage, wealthy families already burned money to give their children every edge. But at Intermediate Level? This was daylight robbery. Fifty thousand yuan for one single Control-assist item — you could buy a half-decent car for fifty thousand these days!

In short, moving to a better place anytime soon was completely out of the question. Well, fine. What better place to buckle down and train than the middle of nowhere?

What was the fastest way to make money?

Hunting Demon-Beasts. Obviously.

Hunting without Intermediate-Level magic was always an uphill struggle — but just picturing that earth-shattering fiery fist smashing down sent excitement surging through Mo Fan. What demon or monster could stand against that? Every last one of them would turn into cash flowing into his pocket!

And besides — he had never once used his Lightning Element's Intermediate-Level magic. Every Star Chart Book Teacher Tang Yue had given him was for Fire Element. If the Fire Element's Intermediate Blazing Fist was already that devastating, just how mind-blowing would Lightning be? Lightning, said to be the supreme element of them all?

Train. Train!

Get to training immediately — he swore he would not step outside until he had these powers mastered!

Brimming with determination, Mo Fan refused to waste a single day and began Meditating right there in the resettlement apartment.

Meditation was indispensable. He had run a rough estimate: his current Magical Energy reserves would leave him dizzy after just three Intermediate-Level casts. Back on the terrace during the siege, if Xinxia's healing hadn't been there to prop him up, he would likely have collapsed the moment the Blazing Fist left his hand.

After Meditation came the practice of Control.

All forty-nine Star Motes — no longer arranged in a single, simple Star Trail, but interlocked into a complex, layered Star Chart. Just watching those unruly little motes careening wildly in every direction gave Mo Fan an immediate headache. He had absolutely no idea where to start.

"Little Loach," Mo Fan muttered at the pendant, "whether your old man keeps his winning streak going is entirely on you. Either help your daddy train properly, or I'll sell you — Stardust Artifacts already fetch a fortune on the market, let alone a cultivation relic like you that swallowed the Earth Sacred Spring and jumped who-knows-how-many tiers."

Since absorbing the Earth Sacred Spring, the Loach Pendant had advanced an unknown number of tiers — so many that Mo Fan no longer had any idea how to assess its current grade.

One thing was beyond doubt: it was far beyond the humble Stardust Artifact it had once been.