Leilin looked at the Wizard standing guard before him and lightly tapped his right finger forward!
Hum!
From the shadows, countless dark shapes suddenly erupted, layering over each other around Leilin. As the shadows accumulated, the tip of his finger began to glow faintly, forming a small inward vortex that seemed poised to devour one's very soul.
Opposite Leilin, the Wizard's skin instantly turned into a layer of blue-grey stone.
It was the Stone Skin spell—one of the most popular first-level spells for earth-affinity Wizards to permanently inscribe.
Pop!
Leilin's finger, slow in appearance but swift in truth, landed on the surface of the Wizard's Stone Skin, producing a sound like a touch upon water ripples.
Before Leilin's fingertip, the Wizard's Stone Skin suddenly began peeling off flake by flake, like snakeskin. The Wizard's face wore an expression of utter disbelief before Leilin's finger struck his forehead. His eyes rolled back and he collapsed unconscious in an instant.
"Laura?!" The team's captain cried out in alarm and fury.
Immediately, a scroll appeared in his hand, while Blake, standing beside him, pulled out a small palm-sized shield.
Both items radiated powerful waves of energy, as though they could be activated at any moment.
"You can both join him!"
Leilin merely smiled faintly at this. He thrust both hands forward.
Sizzle sizzle!
Black currents poured from each of his five fingers. Ten streams of black energy, writhing like small serpents, enveloped both Wizards.
On the spot where those two Wizards had been standing, two black cocoons now sat, with the occasional hiss peculiar to snakes drifting out.
A dozen seconds later, the black mist dispersed, leaving behind the two collapsed, unconscious Wizards.
On their faces, wisps of dark mist—shaped like tiny black snakes—still coiled and slithered back and forth.
Snap!
Having captured all three Wizards, Leilin dismissed the shadow vines that had been blanketing the sky overhead, withdrawing them back into his own shadow.
"I can feel it! As my bloodline continues to awaken, my control over shadows is growing stronger and stronger!"
The darkness in Leilin's eyes deepened, yet his expression grew more and more intoxicated. He murmured softly to himself.
After securing the three captured Wizards, Leilin waited in place for several more minutes.
Swish swish!
Two figures, nearly invisible to the naked eye, darted across the ground at blistering speed toward Leilin. Even with his sharp eyesight, Leilin could only catch a few fragmented afterimages.
Thud thud!
The two dark figures carried something slung over their shoulders. Arriving before Leilin, they dumped their cargo onto the ground.
"Master!" Number Two and Number Three knelt on one knee and bowed.
"Per your orders, we've brought them all in! Not a single one got away!"
Only now could one see that the two figures lying on the ground were exactly the two Wizards who had fled moments ago.
Both Wizards bore several deep wounds that cut to the bone. Their faces were deathly pale—a result of massive blood loss. One could imagine they had been through a brutal fight before being battered into this state.
"Mm! Well done!" Leilin nodded in satisfaction at his two subordinates' performance.
Although those two Wizards had only just broken through to the most basic tier, the fact that Number Two and Number Three could still take them down spoke to the formidable combat power of the Imprint Swordsman—an ancient branch of the Wizard profession.
Perhaps this was also an inevitable outcome of Number Two and Number Three having burned through so much of their potential and life force.
To gain strength, Leilin had been forced to rush things, employing numerous forbidden methods on Number Two and Number Three to allow them to break through their limits in a short time and become Imprint Swordsmen.
Precisely because of this, both of their lifespans had been massively depleted. According to the Chip's calculations, they had less than two months left to live.
"Bring them along. Let's go!" Leilin sighed inwardly, pointing at the five Black Bone Forest Academy Wizards sprawled across the ground.
He still had many questions that needed answers from these people's mouths.
Moreover, Wizards at the official rank did not come as slaves or experimental subjects so easily.
Leilin also harbored numerous thoughts and hypotheses about Imprint Swordsmen that he needed to verify on these Wizards.
After all, in ancient times, Imprint Swordsmen had been a Wizard profession branch—not a Knight one!
Therefore, using Great Knights as experimental subjects, even with the Chip's assistance, always felt like something was missing. The results had been incomplete versions like Number Two and Number Three.
Perhaps it was precisely because they lacked the vast spiritual power of a Wizard that Number Two and Number Three found it several times harder to draw upon ambient elemental energy particles than the Chip's simulations had predicted.