This wizard only wishes to be a teacher

Clack, clack, clack...

The dinner knife, in harmony with the fork, slowly sliced through the unidentified piece of meat in front of him, producing a faint sound.

Lucien silently took his place at one of the dining table seats, feeling both immersed and somehow detached.

His current state felt quite peculiar, as if he were back before his travels, playing a role-playing game. Now, he was like a player controlling a little girl named Lurah, and this girl’s emotions were detached from his own. All he had to do was... play the role.

With this mindset, Lucien’s spiritual power gradually relaxed. He seemed to recapture that feeling of playing a game, and aside from the initial awkwardness of "playing a female character," he quickly adjusted and began to test the "freedom" of this Dream World.

"Oh dear." Soon, under Lucien’s control, the fork in Lurah’s hand dropped onto the floor.

"How can you be so careless?" the gentle voice of Mother Mia chimed in as she ruffled Lurah’s hair.

Of course, from Lucien’s viewpoint, Mother Mia’s arm passed right through his body, and as she performed the hair-ruffling gesture, part of her body "clipped through" his.

"It seems my true body is in a state that’s somewhere between reality and illusion. At least when interacting with my identity in this world, it’s like being in a ’parallel universe.’ I wonder if there will be any changes after nightfall..."

Lucien slowly memorized these details while quickly getting familiar with his identity without arousing suspicion. After almost a morning of exploring, he grasped the advantages and disadvantages of his assumed role.

Firstly, the identity of Lurah belonged to a young daughter of a major family in the Dream World, and she held a not insignificant status.

Although some of the family settings in Lucien’s memories appeared to be deliberately obscured, at the very least, he understood within the Dream World that his makeshift identity’s family wielded substantial influence. The family even had a loyal Knight Order within its ranks, which he might be able to utilize with the right guidance.

The second advantage was the age of his identity.

Perhaps it was because he was a child that his "degree of freedom" was quite high. Other characters basically did not guard against him too closely and even discussed various topics in his vicinity.

Though they believed their whispers were soft enough, to Lucien, a Wizard of the first tier, these murmurs were exceptionally clear. Clearly, he could overhear some covert information by casually "passing by," without worrying about the collapse of his own "character setting."

After all, what cunning plots could a child concoct?

The third advantage came from Lurah’s personal relationships.

As the adored "little princess" within the family, Lurah could, to some extent, ask her "brothers" and "parents" for help. Moreover, she and the owner of the Dream World, Rafael, were good friends. With such a relationship, it would be much easier for Lucien to access key locations later on.

With advantages came disadvantages, and Lurah’s identity had its clear drawbacks.

The biggest of these was the difficulty in taking truly independent action. Even a walk in the family’s garden wasn’t free from supervision, as two Maids would faithfully follow from a distance, fearful of losing sight of her for even a moment.

This was the protection of Lurah’s parents, but for Lucien, this protection more often felt like a constraint—it hampered his ability to act freely, lest his "role-playing" be suspected by others or the "NPCs."

The second drawback was that his current identity easily became involuntarily embroiled in crucial junctures of certain Dream Scripts, relegating him to a peripheral character in the unfolding events.

For instance, because Lurah and the core figure of the Dream World, Rafael, were friends due to their families’ long-standing acquaintance, she was scheduled to visit Rafael’s home with her parents the following day.

Lucien had no power to alter this schedule. In the Dream World, he was playing the role of Lurah. He couldn’t change this long-planned visitation with his own abilities but was forced to accept the reality of imminent contact with the heart of the Dream World. Throughout his future activities in the Dream World, similar events were bound to persist.

Such uncontrollable events would force Lucien to interact with people he might not wish to meet at this stage, as well as inevitably bring him into contact with some "players," adding an element of uncontrollable risk to his activities within the Dream World.

"Sanaxis, what exactly does the information you need to find in the ’Land of Reality’ refer to? And where can I find the Dream Crystal you spoke of before?"

Lucien, while playing the role of the little girl Lurah, was also secretly communicating with Earl Sanaxis through their spiritual link. He felt somewhat relieved that Earl Sanaxis had followed him in; otherwise, immersing himself in this kind of "role-playing" might have been even more awkward.

"I haven’t found it yet, as for the Dream Crystal you spoke of... what you’re holding in your hands right now is it."

Earl Sanaxis replied, though his voice sounded somewhat weary, clearly affected by the internal environment of the Land of Reality. Although he wasn’t completely sealed like Helen Wizard, his spirits were noticeably low, and when Lucien didn’t call out, his consciousness hovered in a state of half-sleep.

"It is?" Lucien was taken aback, and he looked at the glass cup held in Lurah’s hands, blinking involuntarily.

Was this thing the Dream Crystal?

"That thing isn’t considered anything rare inside the Dream World, it’s just... somewhat similar to the high-purity magic stones in your Wizard World."

Earl Sanaxis’s voice was thick with weariness, "But this lord still wants to remind you, don’t immerse yourself too much in the role you’re playing inside this dream, or you will gradually lose yourself. And... pay attention to the special ink..."

"Sanaxis?"

"Earl Sanaxis?"

Lucien was listening carefully, but Earl Sanaxis’s voice abruptly cut off mid-sentence. Despite Lucien’s repeated calling, Earl Sanaxis did not respond again, seemingly fallen asleep due to the suppression of the Land of Reality.

And after losing Earl Sanaxis, the half-baked explainer, Lucien had no choice but to independently contemplate how to crack the mystery of the "Land of Reality" dream.

"If I use the approach of playing games from a previous life to make a comparison, these kinds of role-playing games definitely have some kind of main quest, and the ’ink’ mentioned by Sanaxis should be an item with great importance in this game. What I need to do right now are three things: to understand the main storyline of this ’Dream Script’, to collect the ink, and to figure out the other ’players’, or at least determine their identities."

Inside the study, the petite Lurah was sitting on the floor flipping through a picture book, while Lucien took this opportunity to organize his thoughts.

Suddenly, Lucien felt the threads of spiritual power he dispersed out touch something. He looked up, aware of something, but since he needed to conceal his presence and not be detected by others, he dared not use his spiritual power to probe further, and therefore did not know why his spiritual power had been triggered.

"Someone? But this is the study. In theory, only the master should be able to come in..." Lucien quickly pondered, and soon had a guess, quickly gathering his thoughts again and focusing on the children’s picture book before him.

Creak—

The door to the study was gently pushed open from the outside, followed by a maid holding cleaning tools entering.

Although her expression seemed calm, there was a fleeting hint of surprise in her eyes when she noticed Lucien, the living person, inside the study.

"Little... miss, what are you doing here?" The maid hesitated momentarily, but quickly adjusted and gave Lucien a friendly smile.

"I’m reading, look sister, butterflies..." Lucien, manipulating Lurah, revealed a pure smile, while he quickly assessed her position within the family hierarchy through the maid’s clothes.

A black maid’s outfit, no special emblem on the cuff, she looked more like a common servant maid... According to the rules, she definitely didn’t have the qualifications to enter the study, after all, this was an important area of the family, and even the maids responsible for cleaning would at least be personal maids...

Lucien didn’t observe the maid too much, as too much scrutiny might alert her, but in his mind, he had already labeled her with a special tag. According to his analysis, this "clumsy" maid had all the hallmarks of another "player."

"It seems that even within the family of Lurah, there are already a number of ’players’, but it’s best not to act rashly before I confirm the situation. Perhaps this person is a target deliberately left behind by other ’players’, the aim being to detect whether there are other ’players’ within the family... "

Many thoughts raced through Lucien’s mind, but on the surface, he appeared quite calm, even deliberately moving a bit while the maid was cleaning the study.

"Miss... miss...!" Just then, the call of one of Lurah’s personal maids came from outside the door, and following a series of footsteps, she pushed open the door of the study and, seeing Lurah holding a picture book, she breathed a sigh of relief.

"Phew, miss, you’ve come here by yourself." Mier breathed a sigh of relief, bent slightly to take Lurah’s little hand, but she quickly noticed something and turned her head towards the maid who was pretending to clean the study.

"Who are you, who is the head maid in charge? Who told you to clean the study?"