The Tales of Draconic Warlock

Chapter 174: The end of my third year

Before I knew it, the semester came to an end and that means the third year is. In two more years, I would graduate from the academy and settle down in a manner of my own choosing.

The year ended with the exam that was held at the end of the second semester. I came at the top as usual.

Since from the third year, students can take on missions, which would take them outside of the academy, there were no semester exams but there was a final exam at the end of the year.

If there was no exam of such kind, it would be impossible for the academy to observe whether the students had made any progress or not. After all, based on these exams the academy allocates resources to the students.

If they forgo these exams too, then the allocation of resources would be either based on previous year ranks or everyone would get the same amount of resources.

Either of these options is not considered as a good choice.

If the academy distributes the resources based on the previous year's performances, then the ones who made progress in this past year would be at a loss. A lot of people went out on various missions.

A few of them are likely to stumble onto something good in their travels.

Skills not only improve through training but there are other ways to improve them. Those are very rare and mostly discussed in theory.

The first way was through a resource known as Skill Stone. This can upgrade the level of the skill, irrespective of what the skill is or at what level it is at the moment of its use.

Yes, it can improve the skill from level 99 to level 100, even if the person uses a skill stone that can increase the level by one.

Skill stones come in various levels. Most seen ones improve the level by one, which is the lowest grade improvement. The highest that a skill stone can do is a three-level jump.

This means that if one uses the high-grade skill stone, one can reach level 100 if one uses it at level 97. Of course, the skill stones are already rare and a high-grade one was only recorded once in history.

It was used by a prince of a far-away empire.

Of course, that empire fell a few years later because the surrounding nations feared them. Before the act of the prince was known, the empire was powerful and made many enemies due to its aggressive nature of annexing small kingdoms that bordered the empire.

With a prince of that empire emerging as someone who reached level 100 in a skill, the threat to their existence became imminent.

So many kingdoms and two other empires that share a border with this one made an alliance to end this empire and they did so.

Of course, the alliance didn't last long and internal fights started, destroying a few kingdoms.

The alliance that was formed was very powerful. It even had a name, Sha-Rock Alliance.

In their native language, it loosely translates as Enemy of the Rock. The empire that they formed alliance against was called Rock Empire.

The problem with this was that there was only one tree in the known world.

It was located in the Empire of Luxem. This empire is known for its luxury and high-quality goods.

The tree is called "The Enlightment Tree", and is protected by a thousand Tier-7 guards. Moreover, it is located at the centre of their capital city. It's impossible to obtain these leaves unless they sell them, which didn't happen as of now.

It was said that they gave a few leaves as gifts but that was just a speculation.

Who would give away such items as gifts to others?

Probably someone who is rich, like the Empire of Luxem. As I mentioned before, they produce a variety of luxury items and earn a lot of money. To them, cost doesn't matter. if they gave away those leaves, it definitely meant as a favour, that the other side has to repay when the time comes.

There was another problem with these leaves. As I said, these resources would induce enlightenment into one's mind. Enlightenment means that they can grasp something that they want to. The problem was that how much one can grasp depends on one's own talent.

Not many could make the best use of these leaves.

So it was said, that even in the empire, no one would use them on a whim. In the first place, the empire won't hand them to people who lacked talent.

There would be a competition among the youngsters of the empire, that gives them a chance to gain a leaf.

Enlightenment, as I said could be induced but also could be gained naturally, though it is very much rarer than the resources that can artificially induce enlightenment but there is an advantage if the enlightenment happens naturally.

It means you are truly ready to understand whatever you were trying to understand and that means you can understand much more than what you can in an artificial induced one.

Gaining enlightenment on our own means, that talent is very good and as long as no accidents happen, the person with such talent will reach the peak of the world.

Since reaching the peak is a goal of mine, I hope I can gain enlightenment at least once in my life. There are a lot of skills in my bag. It is almost impossible for me to reach level 100 without such a push.

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In this year, as I lead a slow life, it wasn't the same as before.

Though there weren't as many improvements as last two and half years, there is still some improvement and that was in my skill levels.

Now that everyone is thinking that I was Tier-2 and was on the way to reaching the peak of Tier-2, there was no need to improve my rank levels.

The greatest feat that I achieved in the third year was to complete my Tier-6 promotion mission.

Other than that, most of it was very slow.