Chapter 173 - 74. The Trap of Knowledge

Chapter 173: 74. The Trap of KnowledgeFisher reeked of booze, but he was still relatively lucid. He rubbed his shoulders and turned around to instruct the servant at the staff quarters to prepare some hot water for his bath. Soon he would have to take off his dirty clothes and hand them to the laundry staff.

Saint Nali University provided many benefits for its faculty and staff, including free clothing cleaning and room cleaning services, which were quite valuable to the students, as most students washed their own clothes.

He didn’t let the servant into his room because Carlo was still there, and it would be bad if he was exposed.

However, when he pushed open his room door, he saw the wide-open window and a somewhat breathless Carlo. An orange cat, which had come from nowhere, was squatting on Fisher’s desk and licking its paws, looking adorable.

"Meow~"

Fisher glanced at Carlo, then at the window and the cat, and asked,

"Did you go out?"

"...A cat jumped in from outside just now, and then tried to run out, so I secretly touched it."

Carlo pursed his lips and then sat on Fisher’s bed plank. It was already evening, and he had shed some of his waiter’s attire, revealing his body wrapped in bandages.

To prevent the softness at the front from protruding too much from the waiter’s clothes, he had to wrap two layers of bandages, but even so, her curves were still obvious.

"If you rashly run out and get caught by someone from Nali Official, I’ll deny ever having seen you."

Fisher took off his suit jacket and folded it, then began to strip off his waistcoat,

"By the way, tonight you sleep on the floor, I’ll take the bed."

This guy...

Carlo gritted his teeth but, recalling the sturdy male he had encountered when chasing the cat, hesitated for a second or two before saying,

"I didn’t... meet any strange person, you can rest assured."

"Hopefully."

The servants outside knocked on the door, and after Carlo hid, Fisher went out to bring back the wooden bucket filled with hot water. He also handed them the dirty clothes to be returned the next day. Fisher nodded and went back to his room to wash up.

Carlo forced himself to look natural. He took a blanket and made a bed on the floor, then lay on the bed holding the kitten. Closing his eyes, he didn’t know why, but the image of the man he had bumped into, who was shirtless, suddenly appeared in his mind.

But soon, she cast that small thought aside. She forced herself to fall asleep, because the annoying noise of that man washing up was still in the room.

The next day, Fisher didn’t do anything else but took out his previous paper to review. Pondering, he made some notes in the notebook by his side.

Carlo, meanwhile, lay on the floor playing with the cat. For some reason, she seemed to have a constitution that attracted cats. The orange cat from Saint Nali University was particularly clingy to her. It stayed inside Fisher’s room without going out, occasionally letting out meows.

When the afternoon arrived and everything was roughly ready, Fisher rubbed his temples. Having nothing else to do, he planned to engrave some magic on his Handcane. He had used the Spinner quite a few times before, but now that he had the Fluid Sword, he might be able to use this weapon instead of the Spinner, as it was quite flexible.

Fisher took out the black sword handle and ran up to the top floor of the staff residence to practice. He discovered that this thing was extraordinarily useful; it only required intent to morph the blade into various shapes, making it either sharp or more versatile.

What if he were to engrave a Magic Emblem on it?

Just as Fisher had this thought and lit up his Magic Circuit, he suddenly furrowed his brow.

At that moment, he found the ends of the Magic Circuit in his arm unexpectedly starting to grow again, causing his Magic Circuit to deform in a different direction.

A Magic Circuit could be trained to be more robust, but Fisher had never heard of a Magic Circuit being able to deform.

The only shape a creature’s Magic Circuit could have is one, yet at this moment, his Magic Circuit had begun to emit sound changes, also implying that his Magic Circuit was slowly deviating from human form, gradually undergoing a qualitative change.

Could it be that after his body became stronger than a human’s, his soul started to adapt to his body? This made no sense, for although Fisher’s constitution far surpassed that of a human, he was still a human after all, without scales, wings, or a tail.

Then why would his soul undergo such a change?

Fisher tried to use his magic power and discovered that both the quantity and quality of his magic power far surpassed his former self, and he did not even feel a bit of fatigue when using engraving magic. Could this look more like an improvement?

Confused, Fisher wanted to ask Renie, who as a witch was very sensitive to magic power, but when Fisher took out the photograph, he realized that the lark in the picture had vanished at some unknown time.

He remembered that when Renie left, she had mentioned she couldn’t be contacted for a while as she had some matters to handle.

It seemed he could only rely on himself for the time being.

Fisher sat back down and carefully recalled when his magic circuit began to change. Previously, his magic circuit had always been normal; otherwise, Renie would definitely have noticed while she was with him. It must have been after Renie left.

Had anything unusual happened during this time?

It was just meeting Elliog and replenishing magic with her, going out with Moli, and... reading the Soul Completion Manual and acquiring knowledge about the essence of souls from it.

Fisher’s expression changed slightly, and he quickly took out the Soul Completion Manual from his chest.

The current effect of the Soul Completion Manual was only to train Fisher’s magic power; it definitely could not change the shape of Fisher’s magic power, unless Caleb Wuz had malevolent intent toward the person who obtained the manual, leaving a trap in the text that would change the reader’s magic circuit upon reading.

But that didn’t quite make sense either, because Fisher now felt that his magic circuit was improving towards a higher level. So, what was the reason for the improvement of his magic circuit?

As Fisher pondered, he suddenly remembered how absorbed he had been while reading the knowledge in the Completion Manual. At that time, he had no awareness of the outside world happening around him; he didn’t even feel discomfort from his magic being drained. If it weren’t for the Demi-human Girls Completion Manual helping him out of that predicament, his soul would soon have been drained by the knowledge involved, or perhaps, led astray by that knowledge...

Fisher suddenly thought of a possibility. Could it be that the knowledge recorded in the manual had transformed his magic circuit?

He found it hard to believe, and genuinely couldn’t think of how those elusive concepts and knowledge could alter the reality of his own existence.

The ancient Soul Completion Manual in his hands remained quiet, but it was as if Fisher was recognizing these Completion Manuals for the first time. Fisher had only read two Chapters, yet his soul had already started changing. If he continued reading, what would his soul become?

If the Soul Completion Manual had such a nature, what about the other manuals?

Why didn’t the Demi-human Girls Completion Manual have this nature?

Fisher suddenly realized that the benefits that the Demi-human Girls Completion Manual bestowed upon him were always suddenly granted, and the beneficial knowledge was always summarized by himself. But compared to the forbidden-like knowledge recorded in the Soul Completion Manual, didn’t his manual simply record the physiological and social characteristics of demi-human girls?

Could that also be considered forbidden or advanced knowledge, or was the operation mechanism of the Demi-human Girls Completion Manual inconsistent with other manuals?

Fisher looked at the extensive knowledge about demi-human girls recorded by himself on the Demi-human Girls Completion Manual, and reviewed it carefully, only to find that aside from recalling the appearances of those beautiful demi-human girls, nothing else happened.

And yet, as he spread open the Soul Completion Manual again to read about the knowledge of souls, Fisher once again immersed himself, eagerly wanting to turn to the next Chapter to continue reading the content written by Caleb Wuz. Thankfully, this time he was cautious. Even without a reminder from the Demi-human Girls Completion Manual, he did not turn to the next Chapter.

It now seemed that the content recorded in the Soul Completion Manual indeed had a peculiar way of beguiling him.

If the knowledge about souls had beguiled him, would his publication of the magic power soul source theory as a paper potentially cause changes in the magic circuits of the readers? Now that so many people had read his paper without commenting, it was clear that such a phenomenon had not occurred.

As he read the knowledge on the Soul Completion Manual once again and reviewed Caleb Wuz’s records on the nature of souls, he slowly immersed himself into the world of seeking knowledge, and the situation quickly became just like last time. His mind began to form associations.

What he didn’t notice was that as he read, with the intake of knowledge on the nature of souls, a huge flood of knowledge on the applications and techniques of soul nature surged into Fisher’s mind.

Soul engraving, soul grafting, soul melding, soul demons, the Spirit Realm, World Resonance, Soul Ascension, the God of Souls...

A vast amount of knowledge flooded into his brain in an instant, and Fisher thought it was just his own associations, completely unaware that the text of the Soul Completion Manual seemed to have formed a subtle connection with this world. From nowhere, a vast amount of unclear knowledge was infused into Fisher’s mind, immersing him in this vast ocean.

His magic circuit began to brighten, and with the abundance of associations, it soon started to warp and distort, but in the next second, the Demi-human Girls Completion Manual in Fisher’s arms began to emit a deadly high temperature. A tiny amount of invisible golden light isolated that knowledge from nowhere, and in a second, Fisher awoke from that eerie state.

He looked at his nearly dried-up magic circuit with cold sweat all over his body. This time, his magic circuit had begun to change again.

But Fisher quickly realized something. The knowledge he had just seen was not his natural associations, but rather like knowledge stolen from somewhere else, guiding the thoughts of the knowledge-hungry Fisher.

Fisher broke out in a cold sweat; he turned to look around him. The noon sunlight of Saint Nali was just right, and the world was as calm and beautiful as ever, as if everything that had just happened were just an illusion.