In the silent stillness of the log cabin, six Soul Essence Crystals from the Snow Apes floated before Bailey's chest, radiating pure blue light.
Bailey squeezed his eyes shut. He drew a deep breath and used his mind to guide the streams of energy from the six spheres into his body.
*SHRRK...*
Ice-element mana, frigid as a raging flood, poured into his meridians. The wild energy was rapidly crushed by the Snowflake Sigil in his sea of consciousness, transforming into the purest primal mana.
Layer after layer of invisible barriers within his body shattered in succession.
Tier 1... Tier 2...
*BOOM!*
A dense white mist erupted from Bailey's pores, freezing the entire wooden floor around him within a three-meter radius. In his sea of consciousness, the Snowflake Sigil blazed brilliantly, condensing into something as dense as an eternal crystal.
**Beginner Tier 3!**
In less than a month after the Awakening Ceremony, Bailey had completed a leap that ordinary teenagers needed an entire year of arduous training to achieve. The Ice-element mana within him was now abundant, surging as violently as an underground glacial river.
And yet, as he looked at the hand wreathed in icy mist, Bailey's gaze fell.
He tried circulating his mana to condense a ball of ice, then transformed it into a thin sheet of ice, an ice cord, and finally a small ice net spread across the floor.
Although his mana was several times more abundant, lasted longer, and formed denser, harder ice, it still stopped at nothing more than **crude physical forms**.
He had absolutely no genuine **Techniques or Spellcraft**.
In the world of Elantra, mana was only the foundation. To turn mana into devastating attacks or formidable defenses, a Mage had to learn how to draw magic formations, arrange strings of mana characters, and activate them through **Magic Scrolls**.
Without formal training and Scrolls suited to their elemental affinity, a Mage could reach any level with their sigil and still do nothing more than mold an element into bare physical objects. They could not cast powerful long-range spells, create versatile protective barriers, or maximize the element's killing power.
That was why the great houses coveted places at the Royal Academy—the institution that stored thousands of ancient Magic Scrolls. It was also what drove Bailey forward. He had to enter a Mage Academy, where he could find the library and the magical materials he needed to decipher them himself and build a set of techniques of his own.
That wasn't all. House Dermott held an even greater privilege. When a child of the main branch reached Beginner Tier 3, they would be allowed to enter the Ancestral Altar and activate the soul-resonance ritual, awakening a unique **Bonded Divine Beast** tied to their life and enhancing their overall combat ability.
Now that he had been erased from the main branch, the altar's doors had closed forever. He had no Bonded Divine Beast, nor did he possess a single Magic Scroll.
Bailey lowered his head and gazed at the old dagger at his waist. The deep-red gleam in his eyes gradually regained its usual icy sharpness.
Without scrolls, he would rely on his fundamental knowledge to survive. Without spellcraft, he would turn the crudest forms into blades that could take lives.
One week later.
Bailey stepped into the ancient-tree section of Snow Forest once again.
After breaking through to Ice-element Tier 3, he immediately discovered a strange change in his Translucent Hexagonal Sigil. Although the mana capacity of his Space element had not increased, his **range of spatial perception and control** around his body had expanded considerably.
Within a five-meter radius, Bailey could sense every falling snowflake and the slightest tremor in the earth, as though they were brushing directly across his skin.
He stopped in the familiar clearing.
From behind an ancient cedar, a pure-white beast slowly stepped out. The wound along the White Wolf's flank had completely closed.
Its deep-red eyes stared straight at Bailey.
Without a single growl, the wolf approached and spat three gleaming Ice Soul Cores onto the snow before him.
Bailey didn't hurry to pick them up. He stared into the wolf's red eyes, slowly drew the dagger at his waist, and pointed its tip toward the depths of the ancient forest.
"Three is too few." Bailey's voice was calm but steely. "Let's work together. Snow Forest has enough prey for both of us."
The White Wolf narrowed its red eyes slightly. It looked at the dagger in his hand, then sensed the space around him warping faintly with each breath of the white-haired boy.
It growled low in its throat, planted all four claws deep into the snow, and nodded in agreement.
A strange hunting alliance between man and beast officially took shape along the border of the Far North.
The next two weeks became a brutal extermination campaign against every demon beast in Snow Forest.
Without Magic Scrolls to learn complex spellcraft, Bailey fully exploited his ability to transform elemental forms in combination with his Space element:
* He stretched out **spatially compressed ice nets**, invisible and tangled between the cedar trunks, creating unseen obstructive traps. * When prey stumbled into the traps and lost its momentum, **extremely compressed ice sheets**—thin as cicada wings and transparent, flying from his hands without a sound—shot straight into the target's eyes, leg joints, or throat with pinpoint accuracy.
And the instant the beast fell into panic, the wolf's white shadow would shoot forward like a bolt of lightning, tearing its prey's throat open with a savage bite.
Long-range attacks sealed off every blind spot—close combat finished the kill in a flash.
In a mere fourteen days, every Ice Demon within a **five-kilometer** radius of the outer perimeter had been thoroughly wiped out by the pair.
Thursday of the third consecutive week.
At Wolf Castle's rear gate, the servant in charge of the storehouse leaned against the door, a bag of rock-hard rye bread in hand, anxiously watching the snow-covered trail. The collateral-branch youths had gathered along the corridor to watch the show, but the figure of the "good-for-nothing from the fourth branch" was nowhere to be seen.
Deep inside a warm stone cave in Snow Forest, a campfire crackled.
A slab of Ice Demon meat roasted golden over the flames, sizzling fat dripping down and filling the cave with a rich, mouthwatering aroma. The meat of wild demon beasts contained a dense elemental essence that not only restored stamina quickly but also nourished the meridians a hundred times better than the rotten, moldy black bread from the castle.
Bailey sat beside the fire, leisurely cutting off a piece of meat and putting it into his mouth. A meter away, the White Wolf gnawed on a large marrow bone, its expression utterly satisfied.
Beside Bailey sat a bulging beast-hide bag.
He opened the bag. Inside, dozens of Soul Essence Crystals in various sizes glittered with an otherworldly azure light, their radiance reflected brilliantly in the deep-red eyes of the fifteen-year-old boy.
Snow continued to fall outside. But the winter of the outcast... had officially become a season of accumulating strength before the day he left.