novelraw Chapter 515
Chapter 515
The Heavenly Talisman was undeniably powerful. It represented the pinnacle of talisman-based sorcery.
But the Greene family didn’t practice talisman arts.
Even if they acquired it, they wouldn’t be able to use it properly for a very long time. In the short term, it wouldn’t come close to matching the practical value of their two-thousand-year legacy of spatial formations.
At best, it would become an investment in the future. Something to study slowly, generation after generation, until one day the family might finally develop a true talisman lineage of its own.
The True Ember technique, however, was different.
That was the Greene family’s crown jewel. Their most terrifying and most elusive art.
It had gone unmastered for centuries. No one had ever fully awakened it, not even Gregory Greene’s once-in-a-hundred-years genius son, Calvin, despite mastering every other known Greene technique.
If Rowan Mercer truly learned True Ember...
And then taught it to Calvin...
That alone was worth more than the Heavenly Talisman.
Which was why Gregory hadn’t hesitated.
Even without that last condition, the Heavenly Talisman by itself would’ve justified the trade. Trying to squeeze for more would only risk blowing the deal apart.
He understood exactly what kind of man Rowan was.
Someone who disliked haggling.
Someone who walked away when conversations got tedious.
"So that’s the real reason," Rowan thought, watching Gregory accept the deal without bargaining.
For Rowan, the condition was trivial.
Once he mastered True Ember, he could imprint the understanding straight into Calvin’s mind. It would cost him nothing but a few minutes.
A week later, Rowan left the Greene family estate in high spirits and returned to Beijing.
"I seriously underestimated this," he muttered.
He’d assumed the Greene techniques were just refined elemental tricks. After seeing Calvin’s performances at the tournament, he hadn’t thought much of them.
He’d pursued the trade mainly for two reasons.
True Ember.
And laying groundwork for Evan Ward’s forbidden spatial art.
But once he truly studied the Greene system, he realized how wrong he’d been.
The real treasure wasn’t the combat spells.
It was the Divination Matrix.
A mental discipline that allowed the practitioner to enter a private inner realm and draw answers directly from the world’s informational structure.
To Rowan, the logic was beautifully simple.
You temporarily linked your consciousness to the planet’s data layer and asked it questions.
Prediction wasn’t prophecy.
It was calculation.
There were limits, of course.
Your mind had to be strong enough to survive the inner realm.
The more influence a question had on the world, the harder it was to extract an answer.
And once you received the answer, you were forbidden from revealing it plainly.
Doing so invited backlash.
The greater the impact of the revealed information, the harsher the retaliation.
Not just physical harm.
But long-term misfortune.
Bad luck.
Collapsed opportunities.
Sudden enemies.
Unexplained disasters.
Which was why real diviners always spoke in riddles.
Vague phrasing wasn’t theatrics.
It was self-preservation.
Rowan spent most of that week experimenting with the technique.
For him, the limits barely existed.
He could ask nearly anything and receive clean answers. Even when he spoke them aloud, the backlash was negligible.
Because compared to him, this world was fragile.
He wasn’t part of its causal system anymore.
He was the largest variable in it.
If the universe tried to retaliate by arranging his "accidental death," it would still need something capable of killing him.
Good luck with that.
Even if an extinction-level asteroid got redirected into Earth just to take him out, he could punt it back into orbit.
He’d learned divination magic before, in another world.
But it had been slow and clumsy.
This was faster. Cleaner. More precise.
Combined together, the two systems pushed his predictive ability into absurd territory.
He was on his way to becoming the world’s most illegal fortune-teller.
"Let’s see how Evan Ward’s doing."
The Greene techniques had reignited his interest in Evan’s forbidden spatial art.
Rowan closed his eyes.
Divination Matrix.
He stepped into his inner realm and asked a single question.
Where is Evan Ward?
The answer surfaced instantly.
"...So Evan Clarke and Fiona Barlow are there too," Rowan murmured.
"They went through the authorities."
He vanished.
He reappeared just in time to see Evan Ward get absolutely manhandled by what looked like a disposable grunt.
Evan’s time-slow technique didn’t even work.
Which was already insane.
Then Rowan narrowed his eyes.
"That’s not a grunt."
The attacker peeled off a disguise mid-fight, then dissolved into a bee, then a fly, then a mosquito and vanished into the air.
Rowan felt genuine curiosity spark.
"That’s not illusion magic. That’s full biological transformation."
He’d ripped through thousands of minds.
No one in this world had anything remotely like that.
And the strangest part?
They knocked Evan out...
Then just left.
If they were after Evan’s forbidden art, why not capture him?
And Evan losing that easily was deeply wrong.
That opponent wasn’t at Gregory Greene’s level.
But they were comfortably above most top-tier mystics.
Rowan’s smile widened.
"Now that’s interesting."
...
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