I thought something like a mage tower would have books everywhere.
But that wasn't the case.
I arrived at what looked like a basement. There were no windows, and only a few lit candles were on the wall, which was the only light source.
There was one staircase to the left and another to the right. I didn't see any stairs leading down.
Which further convinced me that this was probably the basement.
"You can remove the barrier at the top of the tower." She said this while walking to an elevator.
As we entered the elevator, I noticed that it looked exactly like the elevators on modern Earth.
How was this possible?
I guess the author of "Resurrection of the Demon God" wasn't that creative.
Oddly enough, there were only two buttons: one was the floor we were on, '0', and the other was '100'.
She clicked on the top floor.
At the same time, I could hear countless gears starting to spin, and the elevator accelerated with an explosive speed, much faster than the elevator on earth.
Within 20 seconds, we were already at the top floor.
As the doors opened, there was one man in a robe and another in armor.
"Welcome tower master," they saluted, and they stepped aside to let us in.
Tower master? Was this woman the tower master?
I started to connect the dots, and I realized that was probably why she was there in the throne room.
A huge crystal ball, the size of a basketball, occupied the middle of the room.
I noticed there were two glass doors on the left and right sides of the room, which led to a balcony.
Above was a glass dome where sunlight passed through.
We approached the crystal ball, which was shining brightly.
"You can remove the barrier anytime you are ready.".
I already knew how to deactivate the barrier. The way it worked was like an invisible connection to me.
That invisible connection was the one supplying the mana from my body to the barrier outside.
When I removed the connection, the mana would disappear until the remaining mana was used up.
And at some point, the barrier would deactivate on its own.
Since they said they had fixed the crystal, I could just remove the connection.
I closed my eyes, and I tried to sense the flow of mana. It was here that I could feel a faint feeling, as if a string was attached from my heart to the barrier.
I imagined the string breaking, and as I did that, the string broke midway, and the annoying headache that I had felt since I had possessed this body disappeared.
I slowly opened my eyes.
"Finally"
The headache was now gone, and I felt much more refreshed. It was like the world was clearer, and I had a lot more clarity.
As I looked up through the glass dome, I noticed that the barrier was still up.
This was natural since a lot of my mana was still in the barrier.
The tower master bowed.
"Thank you for keeping the barrier up.".
"No problem".
She went to the crystal ball, and she drew a circle with her hands in the air.
I could see a faint mana string, which would have been impossible to see for a normal person.
This string was made of mana, which connected to the crystal ball and the barrier above. She took the other hand and connected another string to the podium it was sitting on.
That string conituned down to the floor below us, where I could feel a huge mana source.
She wiped the sweat off her forehead.
"It's now connected to the mana crystals in the floor under us." She said it with some struggle.
"The barrier can now continue until there is no more mana, at which point we would have to restock the mana crystals again.".
I nodded.
So the mana came from the crystals, which they used to supply the barrier with.
That made sense. But they filled a whole floor with mana crystals just to supply the barrier with mana?
Isn't that a little too much?
And this barrier could be sustained by a single person.
Rylan Ashencroft really was an irregular.
So, is my mission done now?
I walked to one of the glass doors and opened it to go to the balcony.
Immediately, the wind hit my face, and I walked to the edge of the balcony.
"Wow, the view is amazing.".
100 floors was a lot. It felt like I was at least 500 meters up in the air.
Everything from here looked tiny.
I could see the castle where the king resided, and the people on the busy streets looked like small dots.
I noticed on the edge of the city that a lot of fields were there.
It looked like fields where you would grow food.
As I leaned on the railing, the tower master approached me.
"Isn't it amazing that the fields here produce almost 50 percent of all the food in the empire?" She said this as she looked at the fields.
50 percent?
That's a lot.
But there were also a lot of fields.
If I had to give an estimate of how many fields were here, I think that the city only used around 30% of the kingdom's area. while the rest were fields filled with crops.
That didn't mean the kingdom was small. It was very big and was probably around the size of 2–3 major capitals on earth.
And Rylan Ashencroft could sustain that single barrier, which covered the whole kingdom.
As the tower master looked at the city, she spoke again.
"Living without the barrier would have been better, but we can't do that." She paused and continued again.
"The mana crystals could have been used for research; instead, they're used to supply a useless barrier." She said it with a disappointed tone.
A useless barrier?
"What do you mean?" I asked.
She looked at me with a little confusion.
"You didn't know? The barrier is useless because this kingdom is located around the center of the empire.".
What does being around the center of the empire have to do with the barrier being useless?