Chapter 366: The Rebellious Ancestor

"Mage Hashi, may I ask if you have heard of the late Chief Mage of the Qionglin Project Committee, Mage Zheng Hanbin?" Du Zhengyi asked.

"I have heard of him," Mage Hashi looked at Du Zhengyi calmly. "However, I did not have the fortune to know him while he was alive. I heard he believed he had the ability to obtain the Magic of a Progenitor Mage, so he walked into a forbidden land."

"So you mean he definitely didn't come here?" Du Zhengyi asked. "And not to the place where you were practicing a few days ago either?"

"Not this place. We would never practice in the Cursed Land; Highland Mages are likewise unable to escape the curse unscathed," Mage Hashi said. "Although not all dwellings of Highland Mages are adjacent to the Cursed Land, there is indeed more than one Cursed Land."

"Then the place that Luo Qi went to a few days ago..." Du Zhengyi asked hesitantly.

"That is an inauspicious place. We are unwilling to go near it, but it is not a place we guard. Otherwise, we would have sealed it off long ago," Mage Hashi said. "If there were truly a curse there, you would have seen it by now."

Having already seen Luo Qi and Zhou Quan lying dead on the ground, Du Zhengyi understood what Mage Hashi meant.

"Master, what exactly is inauspicious about the place they went to? Could you explain it in more detail?" Du Zhengyi asked.

Mage Hashi looked at Du Zhengyi carefully. "Your interest in that place is quite great?"

"There is definitely no Magic Artifact of a Progenitor Mage there, right?" Du Zhengyi asked. "Otherwise, you wouldn't truly leave it ignored."

"There shouldn't be. Even if there were, it would be of no use, because that place is merely a tomb," Mage Hashi said. "Although many people do not understand and might confuse it with the Cursed Land."

"Whose tomb is it?" Du Zhengyi asked.

"Naturally, it is the tomb of a Progenitor Mage," Mage Hashi said. "The tombs of others do not truly exist. We are but worldly people; once we wither, it is dust to dust, earth to earth. Even the tomb will turn to dust and return to nothingness."

"But..." Du Zhengyi pondered in confusion. "Did the Progenitor Mages not leave?"

"The Progenitor Mages were never just one person," Mage Hashi said. "They came to this world because of a catastrophe. Most of the Progenitor Mages died preventing the catastrophe from spreading, and a small portion escaped to this world. They began to take root in this world and rebuild it. Unfortunately, not long after, a disagreement arose among them. They were originally brothers and sisters; they were the only remaining life in this world. After arriving here, they first found the source of the world and planted the seeds of the World Tree. They created us, so we call them the Ancestors. Their initial goal was to hope the world would gradually prosper, but one of the Ancestors had radical ideas; he wanted to use special methods to accelerate the growth of the Tree of Life. For this, they launched a great debate. In the legends of our Highland Mages, they exhausted almost all the power of the world to deduce right from wrong, yet they still could not reach a unanimous result. Given that they had once created a catastrophe themselves that almost led to their own extinction, most of the Progenitor Mages decided to adopt a conservative approach; they rejected the radical Mage's idea. Ah, you must know that the organization of Progenitor Mages that rejected the radical Mage was the prototype of the Mage Supreme Committee. This disagreement subsided on the surface, but in the deep waters, nothing had ended. This radical Progenitor Mage continued his work in secret, and he obtained the support of our direct ancestors." "Direct ancestors?" Du Zhengyi asked in confusion. He rarely heard stories of the early days of Mages, as if there were only the Progenitor Mages and then the Mages of today.

"We do not come directly from the Progenitor Mages. The Progenitor Mages first created our direct ancestors. They were very powerful and possessed energy almost approaching that of the Progenitor Mages. However, the Progenitor Mages were beings closer to gods, while these Mages were still human."

"May I understand it as—Progenitor Mages, direct ancestor Mages, our current Mages, down to humans—this is a chain of diminishing Magic Ability? In essence, we still belong to the broad category of humans," Du Zhengyi interjected. He knew this was something Luo Qi would be interested in; hearing this would make him even more willing to learn from the Highland Mages.

"Yes," Mage Hashi said. "We are not that different. But this has strayed from our conversation today. Let me continue to answer your question. This Progenitor Mage and his followers began a series of extremely terrifying actions, the most important of which was the creation of Seal Beasts."

Du Zhengyi looked at the Highland Mage in astonishment. "I thought that was a collective action of the Progenitor Mages." "The Seal Beasts were not originally intended for this purpose. We Highland Mages often compare ourselves to gardeners in a garden; in fact, this is us imitating the Progenitor Mages. The Progenitor Mages were gardeners in a higher-level garden of life. They created us and also created many other creatures. However, the Seal Beasts created by this rebellious Progenitor Mage had the sole purpose of destroying humanity. Fortunately, this matter was eventually exposed. The Progenitor Mages' committee wanted to find and destroy these Seal Beasts, and at the same time decided to punish this rebellious Progenitor. These events happened too long ago, and the details are no longer something we can know. We only know that the situation at the time was very complex, and it coincided with most of the Progenitor Mages having already decided to set sail and leave this world to enter the kingdom of gods. So I think, since the Seal Beasts still exist today, it means the Progenitor Mages were unable to find all the hidden Seal Beasts in time. In an ancient ballad of the Highland Mages, it is chanted that the Ancestors punished the rebellious Mage, stripping him of all possibility of becoming a god and banishing him to our world, punishing his soul to remain forever in the cycle of reincarnation. But whether the ancient ballad is a metaphor or a record, we have no way of knowing."

"If what the ballad says is true, then the place Luo Qi and the others entered could be the tomb of this Progenitor Mage?" Du Zhengyi asked.

"Yes. In the past, when humans lived here, there were mischievous shepherd children who entered there. After the children returned, they had nightmares continuously. As time passed, humans added taboos about that place into their own legends, and such things no longer happened. It wasn't until a hundred years ago that human explorers entered the cave. We followed them to clean up the aftermath and made them forget, lest they bring other adventurers there. But these were ultimately not major events. As more time passed, we almost forgot about it too. Until today..." The Highland Mage sighed. "Children have strong curiosity, and explorers have strong obsessions. In thousands of years, only these two types of people have walked in there, so we trusted the Expulsion Magic there too much."

"Luo Qi was not affected by the Expulsion Magic. He is a rare Mind Mage, right?" Du Zhengyi said. "I have been wondering just how rare he is."

"The strength of Luo Qi's Telepathy is something I have never seen before. He is a mutation after the long decline of Mages; his existence is a miracle among our species," Mage Hashi said, not sparing his praise. "So perhaps he was not affected by the Expulsion Magic, and perhaps he even instinctively dispelled those shallow mental interventions. But I must also say, when I guided Luo Qi in Meditation, I conducted a shallow Spiritual Fusion with him. I felt that Luo Qi has strong curiosity and an even stronger obsession. He is a natural Telepath, and even more, he has a powerful will to match it."

If not for that mention of strong curiosity and strong obsession, Du Zhengyi could have been proud of Luo Qi. With that added, one could also say Luo Qi was just a toddler who strongly wanted to eat candy. Du Zhengyi truly had the urge to cover his face, and even more so the urge to drag Luo Qi out and beat him up.

But in the end, this was Luo Qi. Being Luo Qi, he had done nothing wrong.

"Does Du Mage think the mastermind behind the scenes is a Mage of the present, or a Mage of the past?" Mage Hashi asked.

"I'm sorry, no matter how many legends I hear, believing that Progenitor Mages still exist is too absurd," Du Zhengyi said.

Mage Hashi nodded in understanding. In fact, his tone throughout the narration had been very neutral, not revealing much belief or disbelief.

Du Zhengyi asked again, "If these legends are true, is it possible that the rebellious Progenitor Mage also didn't know that what was hidden underground here had already been cursed?"

Mage Hashi nodded.

"The Master just said that most of the Progenitor Mages set off and left this world?" Du Zhengyi said keenly.

"Most of them," Mage Hashi smiled. "There was a small portion, perhaps just one Progenitor Mage, who stayed in this world for a while. His temperament was not quite the same as the others; he wanted to help more people and hoped more people could follow in the footsteps of the Progenitor Mages. The Highland Mages are the believers who followed him; our faith comes from him."

"So that's how it is," Du Zhengyi said. This was somewhat like the Buddhism Luo Qi had once told him about. The Lesser Vehicle saves oneself, the Greater Vehicle saves others. "Then he later..."

"Later, he also left this world and began a new journey," Mage Hashi said.

"I would like to ask one more thing: did Zheng Hanbin actually take away some kind of Magic Artifact of a Progenitor Mage?" Du Zhengyi asked.

"I cannot say for certain, but the possibility of such a situation is very small. In a place riddled with curses, everything will be tainted by the venom of the curse. If he had truly taken away a Magic Artifact, everyone who had come into contact with the artifact would have had only death awaiting them. In that case, you and ordinary humans would have perhaps discovered it long ago. Actually, this is the basic reason why we Highland Mages guard the Cursed Land; we cannot let anyone leave here with a curse and bring the curse back to the human world. Just as you have your mission, the mission of us Highland Mages lies right here."