Change is coming

"Flame!"

An apple-sized Fireball arced through the air and landed precisely on a charred tree trunk, then exploded.

Boom!

The already fragile tree trunk was blasted in half, and the remaining part burned fiercely under the high temperature.

"Phew!"

Like sinking a basketball, Caelan excitedly clenched his fist, making a gesture of success.

Then, noticing Tina's questioning gaze turn towards him, he awkwardly coughed twice, pretending as if nothing had happened.

Ever since he summoned the Fire Sprite, Caelan had been like this, casually throwing two Fireballs whenever he had nothing to do; the Kobolds had already gotten used to it.

"But honestly, who wouldn't be tempted to cast spells everywhere after learning magic? And magic... of course, it needs practice."

This is what Caelan told himself.

Three days had passed since he first summoned the Fire Sprite, and he was becoming increasingly proficient at controlling the Fire Sprite to cast spells.

A Summoner cannot directly control Aether to transform into magic; instead, they use the Element Spirit as a medium, entrusting Aether to them, allowing them to cast spells on their behalf.

The advantage is that there's no need to learn all sorts of magic knowledge; one only needs to know how to communicate with Element Spirits.

The disadvantage is that they can only cast spells that Element Spirits are capable of casting, and they cannot learn new spells.

For example, if Fireball is likened to a program, mages write their own code to achieve the "Fireball" result, while Summoners directly use existing Fireball code. This saves a lot of learning time, but they cannot make any variations to it...

Mages can change the nature of a Fireball by modifying the original code, for instance, turning it into a Flame Arrow, a Chain Flame, or a Great Fireball. But if the Fire Sprite doesn't have these codes, the Summoner is helpless.

It has its pros and cons.

In the past few days, he also tried summoning other Element Spirits, and finally found that although common Element Spirits could be summoned, the Fire Sprite and Dark Elf had the strongest adaptability.

For example, to cast the lowest-level attack spell, summoning a Fire Sprite to cast Flame requires about 2 points of magic power, while using a Water Sprite to cast a Water Ball requires 5 points of magic power.

Using a Fire Sprite is clearly a more efficient choice.

Moreover, Caelan wasn't just playing around by blowing up trees here every day.

There were indeed quite a few trees on the original Black Earth, but these trees had been in a half-dead state due to a lack of Aether.

They hadn't come back to life even now, and their branches were as brittle as burnt charcoal. Keeping them would actually hinder the future planting of various other crops.

Their greatest use might only be as firewood.

It's just that the castle's warehouse is almost full of firewood right now, so there's no need for so much. Therefore, it's definitely better to cut down these trees sooner.

Besides here, Caelan also specifically sent out two teams of Kobolds to cut wood from further away.

This wood is used to build fences around the vegetable patches outside, to prevent strange monsters from damaging the crops in the field.

For some reason, the number of monsters nearby seems to have increased in the past few days.

When he lived in the Demon King's City for a few months, only that one group of Kobolds would wander nearby. Now, in just the past two days, Caelan has seen several groups of monsters.

Every day the Kobolds go out, they come back with their bellies full and a pile of meat.

"Could it be that the great magic array was to prevent monsters from approaching?"

Caelan thought about it and felt it was unlikely.

After all, the Demon King's City was originally built for monsters to live in; it would be absurd to set up a magic array specifically to prevent monsters from approaching.

Caelan guessed that the reason no monsters approached before was that there was nothing for them to eat here.

If the food chain couldn't be established, naturally no monsters would come over.

But now... honestly, there are only some weeds on the ground, far from enough to attract monsters to live here.

Caelan had a bad feeling, and his feelings were usually very accurate.

He suddenly thought of a crucial question.

"Right, why did the Kobolds run over here...?"

Kobolds are monsters that get hungry very easily and always run to places with more food.

However, around the Demon King's City, besides the mushrooms Caelan planted, there weren't even insects.

Under normal circumstances, Kobolds shouldn't have run over here.

Moreover, Kobold tribes, which are relatively small, couldn't have formed such a large scale.

Something special must have happened that forced them to migrate collectively on a large scale, and then, due to lack of food, they had to take a gamble at the Demon King's City.

If he thought along these lines, could the monsters that had appeared around the castle recently also be...?

Thinking this, Caelan immediately turned his head and ran down the hillside towards the fields.

In the vegetable patch, the Kobolds had just finished their work for the day and were lying in a haystack sunbathing. Suddenly, they heard a thumping sound of footsteps nearby and quickly got up, fearing they would be seen as slacking off.

Caelan was speechless watching this series of actions.

He shouldn't be some black-hearted capitalist who deserves to be hung from a lamppost, right?

Complaining aside, Caelan didn't forget the real reason he came.

"Why did you come here before?"