The Great Sage Who Did not Remain in Legend - 14.4

“Back in my time, you couldn’t eat monsters without extracting the miasma.”

“Miasma?”

“It’s more like highly concentrated magical particles.”

“What are magical particles?”

“They’re what magic power comes from. They’re in the air. Magical particles are necessary for things with magic power, but if the concentration is too high, it becomes poison. This affects people with low magic power more. Do you know about the magic core, the weakness of monsters?”

“Oh, there’s one for strong monsters.”

“When a monster dies, its magic core becomes a magic crystal.”

“Is that so?”

“Yeah. So, if you crush the magic core and kill the monster, you can’t get the magic crystal, and breaking the magic core releases miasma that becomes poison.”

“I didn’t know that…”

“It’s natural not to know. Back then, monsters stored miasma in their meat, so the magic crystals were purer and bigger.”

“Is it really that different?”

“For example, can you tell what this magic crystal was taken from?”

Mergin took out a magic crystal about the size of a golf ball. It was a red color close to black.

“What’s this color…”

“High-purity magic crystals look like this. As the magic power decreases from here, it turns into a familiar color.”

Mergin gradually drained the magic power from the magic crystal, changing it into a ruby-like red.

“W-what did you do?”

“I drained the magic power from this magic crystal. It’s a magic drain spell. Originally, it’s a magic used to turn monster meat into edible meat.”

“W-what? Where did the drained magic power go?”

“It becomes magical particles in the air.”

“So, you’re saying you discarded the magic power?”

“Well, yeah.”

“You did something wasteful to such a rare magic crystal…”

“I have so many of these it’s dying. Don’t worry about it.”

“Huh?”

“This is a magic wolf’s magic crystal. When I first learned magic, I was so happy to get magic crystals, so I collected them all after defeating magic wolves. I stopped collecting them eventually, since there’s no end to it. I tried to collect bigger ones.”

“There are even bigger ones?”

“Wanna see?”

Mergin took out so many magic crystals from the item box that he couldn’t carry them with both hands.

“Isn’t this amazing? This is a magic crystal from a big lizard in the demon realm. Surrounded by these…”

“W-wait, wait, wait, wait, wait! There was a big lizard like that? No way would I tolerate such a thing.”

“No, there was. It was big and fast, and at first, I defeated them one by one, but when I was surrounded, I went ‘BZZZZ’ with lightning magic. Even then, they didn’t die, so Maverick and Gain couldn’t move, and I slashed the lizards that could not move.”

Mergin talks happily about that time.

“But do you want a lot?”

“No, I don’t need…”

To have so many magic crystals that not even the royal family has is becoming a big deal for Mergin.