Anton saw the huge intimidating walls decorated by glowing complex magic runes surrounding the wizard city of Zalnothel. They were truly magnificent and as tall as huge skyscrapers from Earth. The guards on the wall’s parapets looked as tiny as ants and the massive gates were closed. There were smaller gates beside it that allowed merchant caravans to enter the city and an even smaller gate beside that for pedestrians.

Everyone was wearing relieved faces when they saw the walls of the city in the distance since it was a symbol of finally reaching sanctuary from the undead. Anton understood how they felt since even though he had the power to defend himself and his family, there was still a constant stressful alertness that never left him since he knew that anytime, the undead monsters could attack them and it was even possible for the more powerful undead like liches and vampires to arrive and target Anton.

During the last three days of travel, Anton focused on leveling up his Druid character and managed to complete the Normal Difficulty Act I. He was able to reach level fourteen. His spells were level seven Raven, level one Oak Sage, and Level six Spirit Wolf. It was still very slow compared to him using an on-screen option but he needed his body to learn how to wield the powers of the druid and could only do that by experiencing it himself personally. Not only that, he spent several hours a day practicing the spells that he learned from the druid’s skill tree outside the Rogue Encampment.

The practice of manipulating the mana of the druid spells was successful since he could now control the amount of mana and the spell structure so that he could summon as little as one Raven or one Spirit Wolf or summon all of the possible summon at once making the battle with the monsters a little easier. He even used the Player X console command and increased the difficulty to three players.

He was actually having fun playing as a druid summoner since the only thing that he needed to do was summon his creatures and then let his summons kill all the monsters which was way different when he was playing as a sorceress. During the sorceress gameplay, he was very active since he needed to cast the spells all the time to kill the monsters, and his skill points were scattered to different spells making them a bit weak. He missed levitation and teleport though since without those two sorceress spells, he went back to walking and running, and Anton also went back to drinking endless amounts of mana potions to support his spell casting. Once his current mercenary was able to wear the Insight Runeword Weapon, he could stop drinking the mana potions as if he were an alcoholic who couldn’t survive without a drink for a second.

In the real world though, being able to manipulate his mana allowed him to summon a single spirit wolf that would last a long time. Anna used the spirit wolf as a mount so she kept traveling around the caravan and the villagers mounted on top of a huge spirit wolf. She resembled Mononoke in the animated movie Princess Mononoke and this amused Anton.

One funny moment was when Anna suddenly hit her butt on the ground when the spirit wolf disappeared due to its duration lapsing and this kept happening until she successfully taught the summon to howl when it was about to disappear which really impressed Anton since he learned that summons could be taught.

Anton was also interested in Anna’s suggestion of creating an enchanted item that would allow anyone to summon a spirit wolf or a raven but he told his sister that he currently didn’t have time to create an enchanted item since he was focused on meditation which was his code name for leveling up by playing his Diablo II game.

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During those hours of spell practice, Anton was also practicing how to increase the size of the Raven summon so one could ride in it. He was a bit successful since he managed to increase the size of a single raven to triple its original size but it would probably be a while before he could increase it to the size that anyone could ride the summon.

One very successful thing that he was able to learn though was to control a raven and transfer his visual sense to it. It allowed him to use the Raven summon to scout the surrounding area and this one ability allowed him to feel like he was truly a mysterious wizard.

The last night before they arrived in Zalnothel, Anders commanded everyone to clean everything thoroughly and this made Anton busy since he felt that he was the one who handled cleaning the most difficult items. He repaired all the carriages, the clothing, and all the items that his father, Anna, and the others gave him by paying Charsi the blacksmith to do so in the Rogue Encampment and this made everything look brand new. This spell of him repairing everything impressed the vampires so much that the three vampires surprisingly brought out a huge amount of things that they asked Anton to repair.

Anton was impressed at the amount of items that the vampire had taken out since most of them were enchanted items.

“I thought I took all of your enchanted items?” Anton asked the elder vampire.

“A wise vampire never kept all that he has in a single storage item,” Zenoxus replied.

“Aren’t you afraid that I’ll take your things?” Anton asked curiously.

“You already own my life. Everything that I have is yours if you want them,” Zenoxus shrugged.

Anton repaired all the items that the vampires presented him and to the delight of the elder vampire and his two companions, the magic artifact that needed to be recharged was recharged as well.

“You can repair and recharge enchanted artifacts!” Zenoxus exclaimed.

Anton was surprised at the vampire’s exclamation.

“I thought you knew that’s why you gave me all of your things to repair?”

‘I thought you could only repair and clean them.”

“Well, now you know.”

“If you can do something like that, you’ll become extremely wealthy!”

“Where do you think our wealth came from?” Anton said to the vampire while rolling his eyes.

“I know about you repairing broken items and selling them as new but it’s different when it comes to repairing and charging magical artifacts,” Zenoxus said.

“We knew about that but we decided to hold off in advertising that since we don’t want any trouble that will come if we did something like that.”

“Who would anyone try to cause trouble to an archmage?” Zenoxus asked.

“You kept saying that I’m an archmage but I’m not. I have extremely powerful offensive spells but that’s about it. My knowledge isn’t even equal to a novice mage who studied for years.” Anton frankly said to the vampire since they couldn’t do anything about the information since any harm that would befall Anton and his family based on their action would result in their deaths.

“You are an archmage, Sir Anton. The level of power you have been releasing is equal to that. Even your defenses were more powerful than a normal archmage. The death spells that the liches cast on you could kill an archmage and you shrugged off three castings of it making those liches sacrifice half the power and vitality they had accumulated in their phylacteries causing their ranking to go down,” Zenoxus mildly said his two vampires with him were looking at their lord vampire and Anton with horror in their eyes.

“Be that as it may, I may have the power but I still lack the knowledge due to my youth and that could only be resolved by time so I still need to be wary.”

After Anton gave the vampires their newly repaired and recharged magical artifacts, they went back to guarding Anders. This time they stuck close to Anton’s father since they were near Zalnothel and a powerful archmage guardian of the city should be able to detect them.