Chương 1: Chapter 1: The Barony of Peter
Storm Kingdom, Peter Barony.
Before the dust-covered ancient castle, overgrown with creeping tiger vines, a sharp arrow tore through the air, striking a wolf sprinting at full speed through the forest.
Two hunting dogs, as large as German Shepherds, charged after the wounded wolf at breakneck speed. Relentlessly nipping and clawing at its heels, they drained its energy bit by bit.
About fifteen minutes later, the two dogs returned to Su Nan, dragging the wolf's lifeless body.
Sixteen-year-old Baron Su Nan, clad in leather armor, sat atop a white-fronted warhorse. With a quiver slung across his back, black gloves on his hands, and a sturdy bow in his grip, he had just loosed the arrow that felled the wolf.
Behind him stood six soldiers, wearing nothing more than cloth armor and wielding farm tools repurposed as weapons.
A knightly attendant, about thirty years old, knelt beside the wolf. He drew a finely crafted dagger and slit its throat, collecting the blood into a wooden bucket.
"Master, what do you need wolf blood for?" the attendant, Robert, asked with a puzzled expression. "Will this really cure the old steward?"
"Don't worry. The ingredients for the potion are all here," Su Nan replied succinctly.
With this, all the necessary materials for the potion to counter the werewolf curse had been gathered. Su Nan could only hope that the potion recipe, pieced together by his AI from fragmented records, would prove effective.
He had no choice but to rely on it to save his loyal steward.
Su Nan silently commanded the AI chip fused with his mind to analyze the data before him once more.
[Su Nan]
Age: 16
Strength: 1
Speed: 1
Constitution: 1
Mental Power: 8.5
Note: The average adult male's stats are normalized to 1. Based on 36,110 records related to "magic" and "wizards," the minimum mental power standard for a wizard is inferred to be 10.
Su Nan raised an eyebrow. Five years had passed since he had transmigrated into this world.
At the time of his arrival, he had been an eleven-year-old child. His father, the original Baron Peter, had been conscripted by the Storm Kingdom to fight in a war.
But when his father returned, it was not as a victorious knight but on a stretcher.
Baron Peter hadn't fallen to an enemy's blade. Instead, his body was ravaged by a strange rot. On his deathbed, he spoke deliriously about his unit stumbling into an ancient tomb and warned that anyone who stole from it, along with their descendants, would be cursed and die before adulthood.
Thus, Baron Peter died under these eerie circumstances, leaving behind a crumbling domain.
Originally, the Peter Barony had been a prosperous land with the bustling market town of Mapleleaf, seven villages, a grand estate, and three knightly fiefs under its banner. It was a formidable territory, even by baronial standards.
However, with Baron Peter's death, the eleven-year-old Su Nan inherited a fragmented realm.
The three knightly lords refused to recognize Su Nan as their liege. While they remained nominally part of the barony, they operated independently.
The town council of Mapleleaf also declared independence. Lacking military power to defend the town's wealth, Su Nan had no means to stop them. The town began hiring mercenaries and organizing militias to protect itself, ceasing all tax payments to the barony.
Of the seven villages, the wealthiest six were seized by the knights, leaving only the poorest and most loyal village—Amorold.
Su Nan was left with a dilapidated ancestral manor, a single impoverished village, and debts accrued by his father's ambitious plans to turn Mapleleaf into a thriving commercial hub.
The royal family of the Storm Kingdom had loaned Baron Peter 30,000 gold coins for these endeavors. Though Mapleleaf had effectively seceded, the royal family still considered it part of the Peter Barony on paper. Thus, the debt collectors came knocking on Su Nan's door.
To make matters worse, Su Nan's loyal steward, Warwick, had traveled to Mapleleaf to negotiate with the town council, hoping they would repay the loan. Instead, the council hired thugs to beat him within an inch of his life.
Now, Warwick lay gravely injured in the manor, attended to daily by maids. His condition was dire.
Su Nan had once considered placing his faith in the Storm Kingdom's national religion, the Church of Storms, and pursuing the path of a Storm Knight.
However, as an atheist heavily influenced by his previous life's education, Su Nan could only view the Storm God—if it truly existed—as a higher lifeform rather than a divine father figure.
In this world, the path of knighthood required unwavering faith, years of rigorous training, enhancement through secret potions, and, most importantly, spiritual purification through belief. Only then could one gradually strengthen their body to become an official knight.
According to the AI chip's calculations, an official knight's baseline stats were three times those of an average adult male in strength, speed, and constitution—enough to crush ordinary opponents with ease.
In a world where knights wielded such immense power, feudalism thrived. Here, knights were not merely warriors but superhuman enforcers of the social order.
Yet, Su Nan could not walk the knight's path.
Instead, he turned his attention to the legends of wizards recorded in his father's library.
Unlike knights, wizards in these tales were predominantly atheists, aligning with Su Nan's worldview. Using the AI chip fused with his mind, Su Nan scanned countless books and compiled fragments of wizard lore.
Although he hadn't found a real wizard, the AI managed to reverse-engineer several plausible potion recipes from the scattered records. Over the past five years, Su Nan had experimented with these formulas, using local flora, fauna, and minerals to recreate them.
Reaching into a wooden crate, Su Nan retrieved a glass bottle containing a shimmering blue potion. The liquid sparkled like the night sky, with flecks of light swirling like a miniature galaxy.
This was the first potion he had successfully reverse-engineered—the Mental Power Enhancement Potion.
For the past two years, he had consumed one bottle daily, gradually increasing his mental power to 7.5 times the average person's level.
The AI chip was Su Nan's golden finger, an artifact from his previous life. He had been struck by lightning while playing a grand strategy game during a storm, shortly after unlocking the "Central AI Chip" in the game's technological progression. Somehow, the chip had fused with him during his transmigration.
Though the chip lacked the external interfaces needed to function as a galactic control system, its computational power was more than sufficient for Su Nan's current needs.
"Let's head back to the castle," Su Nan said, turning to Robert. "I won't let the steward's attackers go unpunished. Five years of preparation have given me the strength to protect myself."
He gazed into the distance, his resolve firm. Beyond revenge and reclaiming his fragmented barony, Su Nan yearned to become extraordinary—a wizard capable of defying death and wielding the power to shape life and death itself.
Knighthood, with its finite potential, held no allure for him. Even the greatest knights were bound by mortal limits. Wizards, however, could transcend
them.
Leading his modest entourage through the forest, Su Nan prepared to embrace his destiny.
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