Saul had already flown to the position Penny indicated, but there were no visible people in sight.

“They’re hiding.”

Saul landed on the ground.

“You flew over so conspicuously—normal people would first hide and observe, right?” Penny complained from within the diary.

Just as Saul and Penny were bantering, a thin black shadow suddenly rushed toward Saul from a crack in the wall.

“Meow!!!!!!”

“Meow—”

Saul casually waved his hand, sweeping the black shadow back against the wall.

The shadow hit the wall, letting out a shrill cat cry.

“It’s actually a cat?” Herman said incredulously. “A cat dared to attack you?”

“Hehe, has it been driven mad by pollution radiation?”

“Or…” Saul stepped forward and planted his foot on the dirty cat that had slid from the wall to the ground. “Is this exactly what you want me to misunderstand?”

“Ah, it hurts, it hurts! I was wrong, wrong, wrong!”

The little cat spoke, actually uttering human words.

“Eh? Is it actually an intelligent demonic creature?” Penny said in surprise.

She rarely encountered intelligent demonic creatures.

Although Little Algae had intelligence, it wasn’t much.

So seeing this talking cat, Penny was still very curious.

She even wanted to keep the cat as a pet.

“No.” But Saul shattered her dream. “It’s a wizard.”

“Huh?”

Penny knew some wizards could transform into animals, but that was generally short-term transformation or illusion.

But the cat before them had already been beaten to this state by Saul yet still hadn’t changed back to original form—truly amazing!

She became even more interested.

Saul looked down at the orange cat playing dead under his foot. “This is my first time seeing a wizard completely transformed into an animal. I really want to take it back for dissection.”

“No, no, no, no, no!” The cat on the ground was so scared its fur stood on end.

At this time, more footsteps approached, and the second living person who had been hiding nearby finally appeared.

“Sorry, sir. We didn’t intentionally attack you. It’s mainly that dangerous people appear here from time to time, so we need to confirm visitors’ identities and purposes.”

Saul looked up and saw a man with a face full of graying beard walk out from the shadows.

Saul’s gaze swept across the other’s face.

Although this man’s hair and beard were already graying, the skin on his face looked like that of a middle-aged man, without too much sagging or wrinkles.

His gaze then fell on the other’s shoulder, seeing an existence like a slime monster huddled on the man’s shoulder.

The white-bearded man had been watching Saul’s line of sight, and when he noticed him looking at his shoulder, the muscles in his back tensed.

“He can discover my symbiotic sprite?”

Seeing the wariness of the man across from him, Saul seemingly casually looked away.

Then he bent down and picked up the cat under his foot.

“Attack was a test, feigning injury was a test. May I ask if your testing is finished?”

Saul casually tossed the cat away. “A second-rank wizard still disguising as first-rank magical power fluctuations—is this your third test?”

The tossed cat flipped in mid-air and landed steadily on all fours.

But then it slowly straightened its upper body and clasped its hands in front of its chest. “Sorry, this place is really too dangerous. We’re also acting out of self-preservation.”

After this dirty orange cat clapped its hands, the dust on its body was cleaned completely, and a red jacket appeared on it.

“But we can consider this an opportunity to get acquainted. Your strength is formidable, your mental power quite sharp. Among the second-rank wizards I’ve seen, you’re quite powerful. If you don’t mind the little misunderstanding just now, let’s cooperate.”

Saul smiled slightly. “Cooperate on what?”

The cat’s expression froze, and it looked back at the white-bearded man.

White Beard took over, “Since we’ve reached this point, we won’t hide anything. The dean of Bayton Academy has gone mad—this has already spread in small circles. The second-rank wizards who came here are basically all for his door-opening method.”

“Door-opening method?” This was the first time Saul had heard of this.

The orange cat stared with round eyes. “Don’t tell me you’re just simply passing through. It’s spreading among second-rank wizards now that Bayton Academy’s dean went mad because he tried to open doors but failed. We entered the inner city that Caugust sealed off precisely to obtain their dean’s method for pushing open the inner door, right?”

Saul slightly raised his eyebrows, his pupils contracting, showing a look of surprise while trying to restrain that surprise.

“Then why do you two want to cooperate with me? If you can’t give a convincing reason, I can only consider this the fourth test.”

The orange cat seemed not to expect Saul to be so difficult and couldn’t help but “meow” once.

The white beard beside him proactively said, “Actually the reason is simple. You probably haven’t been to the current Bayton Academy yet, right? If you’d been there, you’d know a massive tree with a diameter of over a hundred meters has appeared there.”

Saul’s first reaction upon hearing this was disbelief.

After all, a giant tree with a diameter of over a hundred meters—he would definitely be able to see it from this position. But when he looked toward Bayton Academy now, he could only see the academy’s walls.

Those walls weren’t very tall either, less than three meters—they couldn’t possibly hide a big tree.

The orange cat waved its two paws frantically. “That’s not a big tree, it’s a big tree stump! It only rises two meters above ground level, then it’s like it was cut in half by an even more massive axe.”

The white beard’s mouth hidden under thick whiskers curved upward. “Yes, it’s a broken tree, but what’s truly terrifying are actually its roots. Each of those roots has strength approaching that of a true wizard. Even if they can’t kill us, they can still prevent us from entering Bayton Academy. We two have already tried several times and keep being blocked outside. Now that we’ve finally met someone of considerable strength like yourself, we naturally want to cooperate.”

The orange cat jumped up and down. “If you still don’t believe us, you can go look at Bayton Academy yourself first. But I should warn you—once you cross the wall, you’ll immediately be attacked by tree roots.”

“No need,” Saul said after thinking for a moment. “For something that can be easily verified as true or false, you presumably have no need to lie. So if we cooperate, what do we need to do? And what countermeasures do you have for entering Bayton Academy to find the door-opening method?”

This question directly silenced the two across from him.

Seeing this, he asked incredulously, “You don’t mean to tell me you have no battle plan whatsoever?”

The orange cat jumped up. “It’s really that there are too many of those tree roots. We’ve tried other methods too, but they all failed in the end.”

“That tree stump is very likely a third-rank demonic creature. To enter Bayton Academy, there’s no way to take shortcuts—we can only force our way through. Cat Wizard and I are a bit lacking, but adding you should be enough to get in.”

Perhaps fearing Saul still wouldn’t believe them, the orange cat pulled out a black stone from its jacket pocket.

A recording stone.

“This contains footage we specifically recorded to review our previous battles. You can examine it. Of course, if you could also find a better attack route, that would be even more perfect!”

(End of Chapter)

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