The morning was cold, and the sun, with a helpless sigh, stingily shone the pale golden light on the earth, shining the hoarfrost. A team of twenty men approached Fort Hub from the west, the scent of men and horses forming a steaming white mist in the cold wind. Four wooden carts crunched across the stone-reinforced road.

Siegel blends in with the group, disguised as a mercenary knight. He leaned over and yawned lazily on horseback, no different from those lazy, gambling-addicted mercenaries. From time to time, he picked up the skin in his arms, took two sips, and turned on his spiritual vision to observe the situation around him.

There was nothing unusual in the sky above Fort Hub, there was not a trace of magic fluctuations, only silky snowflakes that slowly fell. From outside the castle, you can already see the erected red magic tower, about a hundred meters from the outer wall of the castle, which is closer to the residential area than the castle.

The guards in front of the gate were also listless, and they didn't even bother to lift the canvas from the carriage. The caravan from the top of Mora was on its way to Brookwood and met Siegel when he drove away the black bear alone, impressing the group, which had naturally been transformed by illusion for this "chance encounter"

His asking price was not high, as long as he had three meals and a silver coin a day, he promised to help in times of danger. After joining the caravan, Siegel also appeared very low-key, never asking or talking, although he looked lazy, but he was very alert.

The caravan even wanted to hire him all the way to Brookwood.

"I'm going to try my luck among the knights. Siegel said this as soon as he entered Fort Hub, and left.

He just wanted to know the structure and purpose of the Red Magic Tower.

The Knox Commons' magic tower is built on a stone slab with a smooth, flat shell. It's like a beetle's shell. It's just that there are no radians. It's all monotonous planes. It uses corners of various sizes to resemble an irregular polyhedral column. The tower has no windows, and it is not known if there are mages in it now. However, Siegel didn't feel the need for a mage, and the tower itself seemed to have eyes on the people who lived in the Hub.

It seems that the tower is not finished yet, as Siegel has found some magic circles around it, and some of the lines are still broken and misaligned, and they still need to be worked. If he hadn't learned the manufacturing process of the magic tower from Mr. Edith, he wouldn't have been able to understand the magic circle on the ground.

Concealment and vigilance. These are all proper barriers, and damage from protective elementals is very common, but why are there so many unfinished Laugh Marks? In Siegel's knowledge, the Laugh Mark is a spell that can cause enemies to fall into irrepressible laughter, thus incapacitating combat. However, compared to the disgusting and disgusting stinky cloud technique, the Laugh Mark is limited by the other party's cultural and linguistic abilities, and is not very universal. Therefore, this spell is mostly aimed at ordinary human civilians, and is basically useless against knights or other mages.

Siegel stood by the window of the inn near the Magic Tower, covering himself with a curtain, and watched secretly. For a whole day, no mage came out to draw the circle. The construction site was deserted.

From time to time, residents pass by the Magic Tower, stop and look up. Some passing merchants also come here. A voice of admiration for the building.

However, no one will enter the range of the magic array.

Siegel is not a ruthless man, and he can't afford to pay someone to spy on danger. So he changed his makeup to cover up his black hair and black eyes, and then cast an invisible spell and walked towards the tower.

He made his way through the crowd, avoiding pedestrians' moving bodies and dangling arms, without drawing the slightest attention to them. With each step, he had to carefully observe the fluctuations of magic around him, ready to use any spell to break away.

When I looked at the magic tower from a distance, I thought it was dark red all over, but when I got closer, I realized that the walls were mixed with many gray dark marks. These gray patterns are not on the surface of the wall, but are embedded in the middle of the wall, which is only visible because of the translucent shell.

Siegel approached the Crimson Spire. Gently touch the shell with your finger and feel the magic fluctuations above. Usually magic towers will cast protective spells on the outside to avoid attacks from crossbows or catapults. However, there were no enchantments of this type on the tower, or more accurately, no protective spells on the surface.

This anomaly aroused Siegel's alarm, and he secretly thought that this tower could not be considered in the usual way of thinking. Remaining hidden, he did not recklessly step into the open gate of the tower, but walked around the tower, and finally found a clue near the base of the tower.

A few hidden lines of the circle were buried in the cracks of the stone slabs, winding towards the corner of the courtyard. What is this for? Siegel followed the lines and found a secret door disguised as a stone slab. The door contains a complex magical enchantment, including protective detection, protective elementals, and counterspells that release fire.

The joints between this secret door and the surrounding stone slabs are only a lot of fine sand, and there are no traces of any plant growth, so they are exposed. Perhaps in the future, the sorcerers will perform illusions here, covering up the truth with the resident apparitions. That's when the secret entrance was completely hidden.

Dismantling spell traps is a dangerous job that can go up in the dark if you're not careful. For Siegel, though, he has two abilities that other mages don't have: the Dwarven Rune and the Gnome Ring Deception. The latter, in particular, has a magical effect when dealing with detectable spells.

If you don't make targeted modifications, many detection enchantments cast on items will fall into a circular conflict: what's there, take a look, it seems that you need to look again, find a detected circle, can detect the unknown, and continue to investigate with the new circle.

Such a cycle will quickly render the detection circle ineffective.

If there is no part for identification, the spells used to alarm and counterattack will not be touched. Siegel used the dwarven runes to make the mechanical part of the secret door work, and then snuck inside.

He found himself entering a stone hall, illuminated by an inextinguishable pale yellow candle flame that reflected on the gray-white stone walls. On one wall is the Knox Guild's proverb: Attitude is everything, and on the other side is the Mage Federation's "Know Yourself."

There was a long carpet on the floor, once gorgeous and glamorous, and the silver filigree decoration on the fabric was faintly visible. But it has recently experienced fires, and large scorched black burn marks are all over it. Siegel squatted down and measured it with his hands, and each burn mark was basically the same size, a radius of a palm's length. It's very similar to throwing a spell with tinder, but it's meant to be used against weak, scattered monsters like spiders, rats, or sporadic kobolds. Could there be such a biological invasion near the entrance?

The tattered carpet absorbed the sound of his footsteps and led him to the hidden wooden door. Siegel heard a noise inside the wall, what appeared to be the small, hectic scraping sound of rats scratching the stone wall with their little paws. Siegel felt that this place was not normal, how could a magic tower inexplicably attract mice?

The sound soon faded, with only a few occasional sounds being heard inadvertently. Siegel stepped through the half-hidden wooden door and entered a room. He was surprised to find that it was actually a bedroom, and it was almost identical to the room in Myr. He blinked, only to feel that the illusion had become more realistic, and that it had become exactly the same as his memory.

A beautiful woman was lying on the bed, and the gauzy quilt barely covered anything. She had the same face as Modesty, but it was more seductive.

Siegel smiled, knowing that he must have triggered some kind of spell that was reading his memories and creating illusions. He blinked and used the power of the dice to transform himself into a skeleton.

The illusion vanished, and the surroundings were still cold gray-white stone and yellowish candlesticks. The half-concealed wooden door didn't exist at all, it was actually the mechanism that triggered the illusion - the weak-hearted thief would always try to reduce the damage to his surroundings, and he would never bother to open the door when he could get through.

He continued to walk, the passage leading underground, and it appeared that he had burrowed deep into the foundation of the Red Magic Tower. The surrounding walls finally turned into a red crust, and a spiraling staircase clinged to one wall, leading to the height of the magic tower.

The gray marks seen from the outside correspond to the location of the staircase on the inside. There are five or six steps each, and on the wall on one side of the staircase hangs a decorative oil painting. The patterns inside vary, but they all share the same theme: laughter.

There are human men laughing, there are human women, there are old men, there are children, there are elves, there are dwarves. Strange smiles were condensed into one picture scroll after another, appearing in the magic tower. A smile can elicit a smile, and even as a skeleton, Siegel can feel the joy that overflows the painting, and he wants to giggle.

But he firmly remembered in his mind that he was now an undead creature and should not be controlled by the outside world. So how did these magical paintings affect him? He thought of the countless unfinished laughing enchantments outside the magic tower, and he guessed the reason for the interruption of the project.

Siegel climbed the stairs and finally met the missing builders. They were concentrated in a room with a fireplace on the second floor, beautifully furnished with long tables and comfortable chairs with soft backs, embroidered with gold filigree and lace trim on the tablecloths and chair wraps. Candlesticks are placed on long tables, and shriveled apples are held on delicate silver plates. It was clearly their lounge, and the three mangled corpses sat crookedly in their chairs, resting forever.

The scene here is chilling, and there is an eerie feeling everywhere. The corpse lay on its back on the back of a chair, in a puddle of congealed blood. They all lost the flesh on their hands and feet, and all that remained were bones with broken flesh hanging from them. All the clotted blood was shed by themselves, and the reason was that they had eaten away their limbs.

A corpse shook and fell out of its chair. He looked at Siegel with empty eyes and a happy smile on his face. If you only look at his face and don't look at his eyes and body, you will think that expression is a happy and contented smile. (To be continued......)